380 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 



as a totality composed of many parts, progressing through 

 several stages of development. In this respect, again, it 

 obeys the intellectual conditions of the century. Its inner 

 unity will eventually be found, not in the powerful projection 

 of a nation's soul, but in the careful analysis and subtle 

 delineation of thoughts and feelings which agitated society 

 during one of the most highly self-conscious and specu- 

 lative periods which the world has passed through. The 

 genius of the age is scientific, not artistic. In such an age 

 poetry must perforce be auxiliary to science, showing how 

 individual minds have been touched to fine issues of rhythmic 

 utterance by the revolutions in thpught which history, philo- 

 sophy, and criticism are effecting. 



Passing from these general reflections to points of com- 

 parison in detail, we must remember that Victorian poetry 

 started with a return to Elizabethan, and that this motive 

 impulse has never wholly been lost sight of. The two periods 

 may be fitly compared in that which both possess in common, 

 a copious and splendid lyric. Our means of studying Eliza- 

 bethan lyric poetry have been largely increased in the past 

 years by the labours of Mr. Thomas Oliphant, Professor 

 Arber, Mr. W. J. Linton, and Mr. A. H. Bullen. To the last- 

 named of these gentlemen we owe three volumes of lyrics 

 culled from Elizabethan song-books, which are a perfect mine 

 of hitherto neglected treasures. 1 Taken in connection with 

 the songs from the dramatists and the collected lyrics 

 of men like Sidney, Raleigh, Spenser, Herrick, these books 

 furnish us with a tolerably complete body of poems in this 

 species. 



What strikes us in the whole of this great mass of lyric 

 poetry, is its perfect adaptation to music, its limpidity and 



1 They are published by Mr. J. C. Nimmo, the last of them, called 

 ' Love Poems from the Song-Books of the Seventeenth Century,' being 

 privately printed. 



