in his later years "confined his pen to none but holy and religious ditties." At this time Milton, a boy of thirteen, was with his parents on the same street. His father and the printer may have been friends. Todd " makes the statement that "Sownes supplied the youth with Spenser and Sylvester's 'Du Bartas.'' At any rate, everyone at St. Paul's was reading the work, and had he never received it at home, it could not have escaped him here. Sylvester and Spenser were read more closely than any other contemporary work of English verse. Men have busied themselves in pointing out the borrowings and imitations of Milton, but the general feeling is that the influence was mainly indirect and the parallelisms occasional and accidental rather than studied and deliberate. It is possible that since Milton studied it as a boy, frequent thoughts and expressions so fascinated him that they became naturalized and were unconsciously transfused into his own writings.

Milton: Why turned Jordan toward his crystal fountains?

Sylvester: And tow'rd the crystal of his double source

Compelled Jordan to retreat his course.

Milton: The horned moon to shine by night.

Sylvester: Night's hornèd queen.

Milton: Her spangled sister's bright.

Sylvester: Those bright spangles that the heavens adorn.

Milton: The ruddy waves he cleft in twain,

Of the Erythroean main.

Sylvester: His dreadful voice, to save his ancient sheep
Did cleave the bottom of th' Erythrean deep.

Milton: But full soon they did devour

The tawney king with all his power.

33 Todd's Milton, 1801, I: vi.

34 Todd (Spenser, 5: 302) says that Spenser was the original of this. See "Faerie Queen," 4: 53: 9: "the horned moon three courses did expire."

Sylvester: But contrary the Red Sea did devour

The barb'rous tyrant with his mighty power.

Milton: Then to come in spite of sorrow

And at my window bid good morrow.

Sylvester: The cheerful birds, chirping him sweet good morrow
With Nature's music do beguile his sorrow.

Milton:

There let Hymen oft appear in saffron robe.

Sylvester: In saffron robes and all his solemn rites,
Thrice sacred Hymen shall with smiling chear
Unite in one two loving turtles dear.

36

Dunster gives hundreds of such similarities, and says it "contains, indeed, more material prima stamina of the "Paradise Lost" than . . any other book. . . . . My hypothesis is, that it positively laid the first stone of that 'monumentum aere perennius.'" Nathan Drake added more, and yet they may not mean much. Lauder " thought Milton indebted for numberless fine thoughts and elegant expressions, such as "palpable darkness," besides his "low trick of playing upon words, and his frequent use of technical terms," while Lodge" insists that he derived a "multiplicity of fine hints"

especially in phil

osophy and theology. Doubtless Milton read" and enjoyed him, but many of these comparisons are so general as to be found in any two liberal poets of the same age. Dryden said:" "I remember when I was a boy, I thought inimitable Spenser a mean poet in comparison of Sylvester's "Du Bartas" and was rapt in ecstasy when I read these lines:

Now when the Winter's keener breath began

To crystallize the Baltic ocean,

35 C. Dunster: "Milton's Early Reading and Prima Stamina of ‘Paradise Lost,"" London, (1800).

36 Library Hours, 1820, 3: 123. An inquiry into the origin of "Paradise Lost."-Todd's Milton, 1801, I: 288-293.

Essay on Misuse and Imitation of the Moderns.

38" Learned Summary of Du Bartas," by Thomas Lodge, London (1621). 39 I Dès lors, il devint le chef d'une école nouvelle, et si ses disciples immédiats lui font peu d'honneur, il eut du moins la gloire d'inspirer Milton."-"La Vie et les ŒŒuvres de Du Bartas," par Georges Pellissier, Paris (1883). "Dedication of the Spanish Friar" (1681), in Essays of Dryden, ed. by W. P. Ker, I: 247.

To glaze the lake, to bridle up the floods,
And periwig with wool the bald pate woods.

I am much deceived now if this be not abominable fustian, that is thoughts and words ill sorted, and without the least relation to each other; yet I dare not answer for an audience, that they would not clap it on the stage; so little value there is to be given to the common cry, that nothing but madness can please madmen, and a poet must be of a piece with the spectators to gain a reputation with them." His sober judgment was" that the connection of epithets or conjunction of two words in one, while frequent and elegant in Greek, was "unluckily attempted in English by Sir P. Sidney and the translator of 'Du Bartas.''' But at this date both Du Bartas and Sylvester had lost their favor. The Germans have been more fond of the former in recent years than either the French" or English. Goethe liked him and thought him a true poet." To-day no reader will deny his constant uncouthness and bad taste, his lack of judgment, genius and scholarly attainments. Yet on general principles, any poet who was so talked of with admiration by so many successors, could not have been entirely worthless. Some epithets were well worthy of Milton, "but by far the greater proportion of his thoughts and expressions have a quaintness and flatness more worthy of Quarles and Wither." To say the least, Joshua Sylvester deserves a judicious reading and an honorable

mention.

43

KATHERINE JACKSON.

Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Mass.

The author's apology for heroic poetry and poetic license, prefixed to "The State of Innocence" in Essays, I: 189.

42 For a full study of Du Bartas and his French imitators, see "La Vie et les Œuvres de Du Bartas," par Georges Pellissier, Paris (1883), who asserts that Taylor, Moore, and Byron were inspired by Du Bartas.

43 Enthusiastic eulogies may be read in Frazer's Magazine for May, 1842, (II: 918), and The Gentleman's Magazine for 1846 (II: 339).

"Goethe's Saemmtliche Werke in Vierzig Baenden, Stuttgart (1877), XXXIII: 175.

45 T. Campbell in "Essay on English Poetry” (1819).

COMPRESSION IN THE FRENCH DRAMA

The most striking characteristic of the French classical drama of the seventeeth century, as of the modern short story, is that of compression. This statement is true both as to its form and its content. The accidental accessories of splendid decorations, magnificent costumes, subsidiary plots, and secondary characters that might detract from the main situation or obscure the general impression, are as far as possible sacrificed to the essential or necessary interests of dramatic art. Improbable and irrational elements are reduced to a minimum. Digressions, episodes, long soliloquies, oratorical tirades, minute descriptions of external nature, and complicated machinery that would encumber the plot or destroy proportion are largely eliminated. The classical dramatist is too sensitive to the beautiful, the sublime, the essential, and the universal to admit into his conception of fine art either moral and physical deformities or the accidental and particular aspects of life. Classical tragedy is, furthermore, narrow in its choice of subject and form, in its number and range of characters, in its representation of material and physical action on the stage, and in its number of events, incidents, and actions. Its subjects and materials are taken almost wholly from ancient classical and Hebrew sources. Mediæval, national, and modern raw material, whether life, history, legend, or literature, is seldom utilized. Its manners and ideas are those of the court and the salons, and its religion is pagan. Its language is general, cold, regular, and conventional, and its versification is confined to rhymed Alexandrine couplets, with the immovable cæsura and little enjambement.

The Frenchman's love of proportion, symmetry, restraint, and logical order led him to the cult of form. In striving after perfection of form, he naturally adopted compression as the best method of expressing this innate artistic reserve. This compactness, and concentration of form, this compressed brevity, which the Frenchman inherited from the Latins, is well illustrated by the following lines from Wordsworth:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower;

Hold infinity in the palm of hand,

And eternity in an hour.

The same idea is expressed less forcefully in Mrs. Dargan's

The moment globes

The year's full character; a whole life's face

Peeps out in smallest deeds.

The study of the Greek drama assisted this inherited sense of form. The logical bent of the French mind was attracted towards the rules of Aristotle, but interpreted in a narrow sense. Choosing a single definite crisis to be represented on the stage, a classical French dramatist limited the place to one locality and the time to one day. In this way the scenery was reduced and the costumes limited. Episodes and digressions were then easily omitted, and plots and sub-plots confined within the nar rowest bounds. Situations became simple and incidents were reduced to the smallest possible number. The seventeenth century stage, modelled on the tennis court, upon which spectators were allowed to sit, increased the tendency towards simplicity of form and exclusion of unnecessary accessories. This restriction of the dimensions of the stage played a part in establishing a unity of construction, in observing an exquisite proportion, and in creating a certainty and symmetry of form, remarkable for its harmony, perfection, and compression. A certain feeling for style, moreover - a a study of perfection of expression is discovered in their use of maxims, and sententious phrases, lines, and couplets; this precision of form encouraging a compressed diction. The closed rhymed couplet, furthermore, is a wonderfully fit vehicle for such gnomic thought. Finally, compression of form is seen in the almost exclusive use of the Alexandrine rhymed couplet, with its alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, it rare use of overflow, and its rigid employment of the binary line with fixed medial and final pauses.

The seventeenth century French sense of form was both an inheritance and an acquirement. The mediæval dramatist lacked the sentiment of form, being insensible to proportion and