MEN OF LETTERS.*
FAME is well known as a fickle wench. She is like a lime- light operator with the ague, and there is no knowing whom that dazzling shaft will next pick out. Ten years ago it seemed tolerably certain that Gay was safely packed away ; Dr. Johnson's remark that people do not nowadays read Cowley is equally inappropriate to the year in which Gay's two pieces are drawing full houses ; Vanbrugh is always sure of his select congregation.
Who would prophesy a Gower revival and popular editions of the Confessio Amantis? But Gower had the mediaeval mind, and the little of him that was human and universal does not lift him to the knees of his great contemporary. Chaucer addressed him as "moral Gower," an epithet which Mr. Colvile justifies in his pretty well conclusive essay. It is not quite so easy to be sure about Lyly. Mr. Colvile blames the tendency to confine our attention to the author of Euphues, the curiosity among stylists, and too frequently to ignore the plays. He defends Lyly's prose against the excessive condemnation of the academic critics. Indeed, if one goes to it with a mind not intimidated by literary judgments, it will be found often over-sweet but not essen- tially vicious. It is lack of matter which nearly destroys Lyly, and when Mr. Colvile convinces us that the plays are charmingly, even in parts poetically, written, we are still as far as ever from seriously thinking of Lyly as a dramatist. Yet all the same, if we were given the opportunity, we would willingly sit through a performance of Campaspe.
North is unfortunate enough to have been absorbed by his original, and in the distant future professors will recognize North-Plutarch as a single person. But the future will not have much time to spare for John Barclay, a typical Re- naissance combination of scholar and man of affairs, nor for Lancelot Andrewes, though he was that rarity, a school- master of genius. George Macdonald, the latest born, seems farthest of any from our time, and Mr. Colvile does not animate him half so convincingly as he does North or Cowley.
Previous page
