A History of English Poetry: an Unpublished Continuation

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Thomas Warton. A History of English Poetry: an Unpublished Continuation

INTRODUCTION

A HISTORY OF ENGLISH POETRY: AN UNPUBLISHED CONTINUATION

NOTES TO THE TEXT

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(In enumerating so many of these petty Epigrammatists, I may have been perhaps too prolix,—but I did it to shew the taste & turn of writing at this time; & now proceed to observe, that, in the year, 1614,)8 the vogue which satire had acquired from Hall and Marston, probably encouraged Barten Holiday of Christ-Church in Oxford, to translate Persius, when he was scarcely twenty years of age. The first edition is dated 1616. This version had four editions from its publication to the year 1673 inclusive, notwithstanding the versification is uncommonly scabrous. The success of his Persius induced Holiday to translate Juvenal, a clearer & more translatable satirist. But both versions, as Dryden has justly observed,9 were written for scholars, and not for the world: and by treading on the heels of his originals, he seems to have hurt them by too near an approach. He seized the meaning but not the spirit of his authors. Holiday, however, who was afterwards graduated in divinity and promoted to an archdeaconry, wrote a comedy called the Marriage of the Arts, acted before the court at Woodstock-palace, which was even too grave and scholastic for king James the first.

I close my prolix review of these pieces by remarking, that as our old plays have been assembled and exhibited to the public in one uniform view,10 so a collection of our old satires and epigrams would be a curious and useful publication. Even the dull and inelegant productions, of a remote period which have real Life for their theme, become valuable and important by preserving authentic pictures of antient popular manners: by delineating the gradations of vice and folly, they furnish new speculation to the moral historian, and at least contribute to the illustration of writers of greater consequence.

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No species of verse appears to have been more eagerly and universally cultivated by the Italian poets, from the fourteenth century to the present times. Even the gravest of their epic and tragic writers have occasionally sported In these lighter bays. (A long list of them is given in the beginning of the fourth Volume of Quadrios History of Italian Poetry.) But perhaps the most elegant Italian sonnets are yet to be found in Dante. Petrarch's sonnets are too learned (metaphysical) and refined. Of Dante's compositions in this style I cannot give a better idea, than in (the ingenious) Mr. Hayley's happy translation of Dante's beautiful sonnet to his friend Guido Calvacanti [sic], written in his youth, and probably before the year 1300.

We have before seen, that the Sonnet was imported from Italy into English poetry, by lord Surrey and Wyat, about the middle of the sixteenth century. But it does not seem to have flourished in its legitimate form, till towards the close of the reign of queen Elisabeth. What I call the legitimate form, in which it now appeared, was not always free from licentious innovations in the rythmical arrangement.

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