fully treated, I have thought it worth while to compare the essay and the poem in detail. In the summary of King James will be found nearly all of his advice on versification that could have been understood and applied by English readers. From Sir John I have taken only the passages in which he seems to be restating or paraphrasing the King's opinions. In other portions of the poem he adds a good deal of his own theory, which was on the whole very sensible and practical:

Reules and Cauteles. Rule I. "That ye keep just colouris;" i. e., avoid rhyming with the same word, rhyme on the accented syllable and from there to the end, and avoid rhymes of three or even two syllables, the last of which are "eaten up in the pronouncing."

Beaumont repeats this idea, but appears to be uncertain about the meaning of the word "colouris:"

To teach

Your English poets to direct their lines

To mix their colors and express their signs.—(ll. 4-6).

These must not be with disproportion lame,

Nor should an echo still repeat the same.-(II. 39-44).

Rule II. "That ye keep the flowing;" i. e., avoid variant feet and other irregularities. This must have suggested:

When verses like a milky torrent flow,

They equal temper in the poet show.—(ll. 13-14).

On halting feet the ragged poem goes,

With accents neither fitting verse nor prose.— (II. 23-24).

Rule III. Avoid padding, and "frame your wordis according to the matter." A passage of similar import may be added from the advice to his son Henry in "The Basilikon Doron" (first edition, 1599). He warns him against "book-language, and pen and ink-horn termis, and least of all mignard and effeminate termis." Further: "If ye would write worthily choose subjects worthy of you, that be not full of vanity but of virtue, eschewing obscurity, and delighting ever to be plain and sensible. And

if ye writis in Verse, remember that it is not the principal part of a poem to rime right and flow well with many pretty wordis: but the chief commendation of a poem is, that when the verse shall be shaken sundrie in prose, it shall be found so rich in quick inventions, in poetic flowers, and in faire and pertinent comparisons, as it shall retain the lustre of a poem, although in prose.'

Compare with this the following lines from Beaumont:

Pure phrase, fit epithets, a sober care

Of metaphors, descriptions cleare, yet rare.
Similitudes contracted smooth and round,

Not vext by learning, but with nature crowned.— (II. 51-54).

To easie use of that peculiar gift,

Which poets in their raptures find most deare,

When actions by their lively sound appear.- (II. 60-62).

For though in darksome words their skill they close,
They yet have perfect sense more pure and cleare,
Than envious Muses which sad garlands weare

Of dusky clouds, their strange conceits to hide.—(11. 29-32).

Rule IV.

Rule V.

Concerning figures, that they should be fitting.
Avoid triteness.

Rule VII. Here follows in the "Reules and Cauteles" a final parargaph, "tuiching the kyndis of verses"— clearly a study of Scotch metres, as will be seen by the attention given to bobwheel stanzas and other intricate verse forms at that time in use in Scotch but not in English poetry. Scant justice is given to the iambic pentameter couplet, "rhymis whilk servis for lang histories, and yet are nocht verse." A nine-line stanza (aabaab-bab), one of Dunbar's, is called verse "Heroicall."8

Beaumont naturally differs from James on this point:

The relish of the Muse consists in rhyme,
One verse must meet another like a chime.

It has been thought that these rules are based largely on French treatises and Gascoigne's "Art of Poesie." Undoubtedly the young student was familiar with these sources. But the very simplicity and whimsicality of the "Reules and Cauteles" and their peculiar application to Scotch poetry show that they were largely a product of James's own shrewd consideration, under the guidance of his tutor Buchanan, of the poetry he had read.

In many changes these may be exprest:

But those that joynne most simply run the best:

Their form surpassing far the fetter'd staves,

Vain care, and needless repetition saves.— (ll. 37-49) .

It will be seen that scattered about in the sixty-six lines of his poem, Sir John has repeated most of the points made by the King. This and the peculiar use of the words "flowing" and "colouris" (surely metre and rhyme were the ordinary English terms at this time) indicate that he had read the royal critic pretty carefully. It is equally clear, however, that his own theoories of versification, while similar to the King's, were not derived from them. As early as 1602, in his "Metamorphosis of Tobacco," he had written couplets of remarkable polish. "No one, indeed," says Mr. Gosse," "was in 1602 writing the heroic couplet as 'correctly' as the author of the 'Metamorphosis.' At any rate we have in both cases an unusually classical body of doctrine. And as will appear later, Beaumont takes the utmost pains to carry out his theory in practice.

10

At this point it will be worth while to consider for a moment the influence of the King on the whole movement toward regularity. Of course this movement, this tendency to subordinate everything to exact rules and to avoid the extreme and fantastical, was by no means confined to literature, but corresponded, as Brunetière points out to have been the case in French literature, to a similar movement in education, in social life, and even in politics. But the influence we are thinking of here is something much more personal and definite. Here we have a King who pretended to be both poet and critic, and who at least was deeply interested in literature. That he was vain of his accomplishments in this direction we have plenty of evidence. Sir William Alexander, who was assisting the King in a metrical paraphrase of the Psalms, writes to Drummond as follows: "I

9" The Jacobean Poets" (p. 107).

10 L'ordre et la discipline, l'exacte probité que le roi s'efforçait d'introduire dans les affaires et dans les mœurs, Malherbe eut comme la mission de les faire, lui, introduire pour le premier fois dans' l'empire du caprice même, et de la fantasie.-La Reforme de Malherbe, Revue des Deux Mondes (December 1, 1892).

received.... the psalm you sent, which I think very well done. I had done the same myself long before it came; but He [the King] prefers his own to all else, though perchance when you see it, you will think it the worst of the three." May we not suppose that with his characteristic vanity and stubbornness he clung to the pedantic ideas on versification which he had learned and expounded as a youth, moulded thus to a certain extent the taste of the court, and forced the court poets of the time to form their verse according to his standards? Much of the verse of this time, moreover, may be termed courtly. At least half of Sir John Beaumont's poems, for example, fall in that class; most of Drummond's verse was written on occasions of royal deaths, visits, or anniversaries; and Ben Jonson, we know, had to earn with his pen his pension and yearly tun of port. Is it not fair to presume that these poets would take more pains to polish their verses when they knew that by this means they would please the royal taste? As Beaumont writes,"

He leads the lawless poets of our times,

To smoother cadence, to exacter rhymes.

Whether to please the King or not, the poet just quoted wrote scarcely a line, after "The Metamorphosis," to which the most precise of critics might object in point of smoothness. He offended, like all the poets of his time, in overworked conceits, but his lines are always orderly. Weak and feminine endings, variant feet, unexpected cæsuras, extravagant or obscure phrasingin fact everything condemned in the "Lines on the True Form"-are assiduously avoided. Note the absence of irregular elements indicated by the following table:

11" To the Glorious Memory . . of King James"-Grosart (p. 126).

.

Drummond, 300 lines.. 12

been studying is William Drummond of Hawthornden. Concerning him there is not a great deal to be said, for in many ways. he is rather a late Elizabethan like Michael Drayton than a sympathetic member of the Jacobean group of poets who were feeling their way toward new standards of poetry. This fact is largely due to his provincial birth and his isolation during the latter part of his life at Hawthornden, removed from the influences. which affected the poets of the metropolis. His very isolation, however, affected him in another way. It not only freed him from the influences to which the poets of his time were subject, but also caused him to be influenced more strongly by his reading in foreign literatures. The importance of Drummond, therefore, as a possible medium for the transmission of Continental tendencies needs to be pointed out.

Here our work is facilitated by the fact that we have a good deal of accurate information in regard to the poet's life and reading. His education, we learn, did not stop with the usual course at the University of Edinburgh. In his twenty-first year (1506) he passed through London to begin the study of law on the Continent. There he remained two or three years, part of the time at the University of Bruges and part of the time in Paris or travelling about in France. It is probable that his studies in law were not pursued very steadily and that he took plenty of time for reading and other diversions. It will be remembered that at this time François Malherbe, already over fifty years old, had begun that series of carefully polished odes by means of which he gradually created a revolution in poetic style. The Ode sur l'attentat de Jacques des Isles (1606) and the Ode sur le voyage de Sedan (1607) appeared during our poet's stay in France, and it is altogether likely that he read them and knew of the change they were creating — or better, felt the same influences which caused them and of which they in turn became the cause.

On his father's death in 1610, Drummond returned to Scotland and spent the remainder of his life on his quiet estate some ten miles out of Edinburgh. On his reading between 1606-14 we have a definite record. In French he had read Du Bartas and Rabelais complete, and of Ronsard La Frauciade,