ent (to quote Dr Courthope) 'seems no better
founded than many others advanced by that patriotic but not very
scrupulous author.' It is more to the point that he went travelling, and
brought home from France, Italy, afterwards Spain--always from Latin
altars--the flame of lyrical poetry to England; the flame of the
Petrarchists, caught from the Troubadours, clarified (so to speak) by the
salt of humane letters. On what our Elizabethan literature owes to the
Classical revival hundreds of volumes have been written and hundreds more
will be written; I will but remind you of what Spencer talked about with
Gabriel Harvey, what Daniel disputed with Campion; that Marlowe tried to
re-incarnate Machiavelli, that Jonson was a sworn Latinist and the 'tribe
of Ben' a classical tribe; while, as for Shakespeare, go and reckon the
proportion of Italian and Roman names in his _dramatis personae_. Of
Donne's debt to France, Italy, Rome, Greece, you may read much in
Professor Grierson's great edition, and I daresay Professor Grierson
would be the first to allow that all has not yet been computed. You know
how Milton prepared himself to be a poet. Have you realised that, in
those somewhat strangely constructed sonnets of his, Milton was
deliberately modelling upon the "Horatian Ode," as his confrere, Andrew
Marvell, was avowedly attempting the like in his famous Horation Ode on
Cromwell's Return from Ireland; so that if Cromwell had returned (like Mr
Quilp), walked in and caught his pair of Latin Secretaries scribbling
verse, one at either end of the office table, both might colourably have
pleaded that they were, after all, writing Latin. Waller's task in poetry
was to labour true classical polish where Cowley laboured sham-classical
form. Put together Dryden's various Prefaces and you will find them one
solid monument to his classical faith. Of Pope, Gray, Collins, you will
not ask me to speak. What is salt in Cowper you can taste only when you
have detected that by a stroke of madness he missed, or barely missed,
being our true English Horace, that almost more nearly than the rest he
hit what the rest had been seeking. Then, of the 'romantic revival'--
enemy of false classicism, not of classicism--bethink you what, in his
few great years, Wordsworth owed directly to France of the early
Revolution; what Keats drew forth out of Lempriere: and again bethink you
how Tennyson wrought upon Theocritus, Virgil, Catullus; upon what Arnold
constan