HALL'S

CHRONICLE."

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portions from his Latin sources, Fabyan reproduces in English verse, and otherwise also intersperses verse in suitable passages. He shows himself to have been a man of strong ecclesiastical and clerical sentiments and of limited views, and hence is frequently unable to distinguish between what is important and unimportant. Accordingly, he often devotes undue consideration to his native city, and although his account may offer matter of local interest to investigators, still but small value can be attached to his authorities as a whole, and they are mainly confined to the author's own lifetime.

More attractive is the so-called "Chronicle" of Edward Hall, who became a judge in the court of sheriffs. Hall's career falls wholly within the reign of Henry VIII., for his death took place in 1547; he proved himself not only a decided adherent of the Tudors, but also a friend of the Reformation. And with these tendencies of mind he wrote his Chronicle, which extends from the reign of Henry IV. to that of Henry VIII.; its title is "The Unyon of the two noble and yllustrate famelyes of Lancastre and Yorke;" the same tendencies also colour, for instance, his account of the reign of Henry VII., which is based upon the work of Polydore Vergile. Hall's historical account, owing to the limitation of its subject, acquires a kind of dramatic interest, and this is sometimes effectively heightened by his naïve and vivid representation. The historical value of the work consists in its containing various independent communications, and, above all, its full information concerning the state of civilization in the days of Henry VIII. The history of literature, too, is indebted to him for important notices relating to the firstfruits of the secular drama.

Hall's Chronicle was published in 1548 by Richard Grafton, who completed the work from papers left by the author. This same Grafton, a few years previously, had printed the metrical Chronicle of John Hardyng, and published it with a prose supplement from the reign of Edward IV. to that of Henry VIII. Hall's activity as an historiographer subsequently became more independent, and proved rather productive within modest bounds.

All of these ventures in historical writing are not of any

P

actual scientific value. But the epoch we are discussing produced other works which present a more careful examination of the past history of England. These are connected with the name of John Leland, the first English scholar who was aroused by the study of the classics to undertake comprehensive philological work, which was devoted, at first, to existing material, and to national subjects.

Leland was born in London, and educated at St. Paul's School under William Lily. He then attended the University of Cambridge, where he took his degree of B.A., went afterwards to Oxford, and thereupon, for some length of time, continued his studies at Paris. Henry VIII. appointed him his chaplain and keeper of his library, and conferred upon him the rectory of Poppeling, in the marches of Calais. Leland's nature was essentially that of a scholar, eager for research of all kinds, and of great receptivity of mind. He was a distinguished humanist, and wrote very readable Latin verse, was one of the first eminent Greek scholars in England, and, at the same time, made himself acquainted with the more important Romance languages and what was even more remarkable in his day— with Welsh and Anglo-Saxon. King Henry, who gave various proofs of his interest in learning, and who had a correct judgment of personal merit, encouraged Leland's efforts in every way. About the year 1533 he appointed him the King's Antiquary," and granted him a dispensation for non-residence upon his living, and the longed-for permission to make an extensive examination of the historical remains of the country, wherever such might be found. For six years, accordingly-from 1536 to 1542-Leland travelled all over the kingdom, engaged in extensive geographical and topographical inquiries, but pre-eminently in antiquarian research. Towns, villages, castles, cathedrals, and monasteries-their position, style of architecture, their inhabitants. and memorials-all aroused his attention, and accounts of them were added to the material he was collecting. He ransacked libraries for valuable books and records, which he described or quoted, as his purpose might require. Leland's researches were made at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, a period when the most terrible havoc was made among literary treasures that England has

66

ever witnessed; and although unable to check the mischief, Leland, at all events, succeeded in saving a number of valuable manuscripts from destruction.

He gives an account of his work in a Latin Address to the King, dedicated to him as a "Newe Yeere's Gyfte" in 1546. John Bale, the vehement, anti-papal but patriotic pamphleteer, translated it into English, and had it printed in 1549, with renewed lamentations over the havoc made in the libraries of the monasteries, which, however, his own zeal for the Reformation had indirectly encouraged. Both men studied the past history of their nation the more devotedly, as, to a certain extent, the early circumstances of the English Church enabled them to represent the separation from Rome as nothing new, but the original state of affairs. Both men, however, were mainly concerned to prove that their own country possessed a great history and literature in the past, as well as those of the renowned Greeks and Romans. This ambition found expression in Leland's work, De Viris Illustribus, in four Books, which dealt with the learned men and poets of Britain from the time of the Druids up to the end of the reign of Henry VIII., and again in Bale's De Scriptoribus Britannicis in five Books. They are the first noteworthy attempts at giving a review of the writers and literary work produced by England, and, in spite of all their deficiencies, deserve the thanks of the history of literature.

Leland was, unfortunately, not destined to see the fruits of his industry reach their full maturity. After having for long been accustomed to a life of travel, he settled down for five years quietly in his home, in the parish of St. Michael-le-Querne, in the city of London, in order to arrange the enormous mass of material he had accumulated-relating to coins, inscriptions, ancient works of art, private collections, extracts from books, etc., all manner of things connected with what we should nowadays call folklore. Leland's object was, as he had promised in his Introductory Address to the King, to write one Book on ancient British topography, fifty on the history of the more important towns and castles, and finally six on the islands adjoining England. But death intervened, and robbed him of his King, his benefactor, the indisp.nsable patron of the undertaking he

had in hand. Leland had already begun to feel the necessity of looking about him for a "forward young man about the age of xx years, learned in the Latin tongue," and who could "sine cortice nare in Greek." His work, however, became too much for him. While Bale was rising from the position of rector to that of a bishop, Leland, who was ten years his junior, fell into a state of melancholia, and then lost his reason completely, and died after two years of mental darkness. Bale had published his work-which he considered the inferior-in Ipswich, as early as 1548, first in quarto; the edition of 1557 appeared in folio augmented to two volumes. Leland's works remained unpublished. It was a piece of good fortune, and indeed the best acknowledgment his antiquarian work could have received after his death, that Edward VI. handed over his manuscripts to the care of a scholar. Subsequently they were placed among the Bodleiana and the Cottonian Collections, and became a powerful stimulus to the famous antiquarians of the seventeenth century, and also a well-plundered mine for Camden, Drayton, and Dugdale. It was not till the days of Bentley that two Oxford men * had Leland's manuscripts set up in print, and in doing so paid a debt of honour to the father of English antiquarian lore, to a man who, by taking up a province peculiarly his own, led the Renaissance on to national paths.

VI.

During the very period when prose, by the combined efforts of Lord Berners and Sir Thomas Elyot, was endeavouring to assume greater perfection of form, poetry, too, was venturing upon bolder flights. Mental culture had gradually reached an eminence where it could no longer find adequate expression in the faint echo of the earlier school of art, with its prosaic and pedantic style of diction and its rugged form of verse. Skelton alone had been able to make a break in the customary sing-song verse of the

De Scriptoribus Britannicis Commentarii, ed. Ant. Hall, 1709; The Itinerary of John Leland through most parts of England and Wales, ed. Th. Hearne, 1710-1712; and De Rebus Britannicis Collectanea, ed. Th. Hearne, 1715.

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day, by giving it fresher tones. In allegorical poetry he had, upon occasions, attained the completeness of the great era, and had also discovered new domains in the realm of poetry. And yet, precisely in those points where he showed most originality, his manner was much too eccentric for it to be taken as a model in style; his method was too unequal, his versification too playful, partly not sufficiently correct, his language at times too extravagant, at times too coarse; his tendency was too preponderatingly on the side of satire and pasquil in burlesque form. Consequently he exercised only a one-sided influence on the development of poetry. The old Master, Chaucer, in fact remained the only English classic. Yet his language had in many ways become antiquated, his poetry could no longer be read correctly, many of the beauties of his works could no longer be understood. His spirit, however, continued to act with all its old freshness, and all the better writers endeavoured to regulate themselves by him. The time had come for his work to be again taken in hand, to be continued and completed. What Chaucer had accomplished alone in a still immature period, was now, at a more advanced epoch, to be attained in a similar manner by the joint and reciprocal work of a number of men. Herein lay the security for the permanence and continuity of the development about to take a fresh start. The new stimulus was, moreover, derived at first from the same source from which Chaucer had drawn his material.

Learned culture, if it is to exercise a fruitful influence upon national art and poetry, requires transmission through a third element which we may call knowledge of the world and practical culture. This is no more than the infusion of the outward forms of life and the general outlook upon it and its manifestations, with the silently working influences of mental culture. There are epochs when a particular rank of society or a particular people become the bearers. of culture and help to complete for others that essential intermediation. At the period of medieval minne-poetry, this was the part played by the nobility and those living in that atmosphere; and such, too, at the period of the Renaissance, was the mission of Italy. In England, under Henry VIII., both these factors were in operation together.