existence of Laura as anything but an Apollonic laurel, or poetical abstraction of glory, almost too subtle for analysis by metaphysics. We have no such doubt of her materiality; for, over and above all other evidence, there are many passages in those songs and sonnets, that tell of a love, in the poet at least, which, though ever refined, was not all spiritual. In the same way, Dante's Beatrice has been pronounced an incorporeal creation, a vision of theology, though in his Vila Nuova he expressly declares who she was, where and when she was born, her age and his own, when he first met her, and the year and the day, and the very hour, when she died. Milton read them both truly, and recognised in their writings the language of the human heart, and the truth of human passion undebased by a particle of grossness. Speaking of the laureate fraternity of poets, and of his own early partiality for the elegiac writers, he nobly says: "Above them all, I preferred the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never write but in honour of them to whom they devote their verse, displaying sublime and pure thoughts without transgression." After that lofty encomium from such authority, may we venture to observe that among the laureates of Italy there is one still greater poet than the Recluse of Avignon? We do not say a greater man, for the popular reputation of Petrarch, resting as it does on his accomplishment of verse, is not perhaps founded on the strongest of his claims to admiration. But Tasso, too, was a formally laureated bard. And his chaplet was unwithered in the dungeon, to which the cruellest Turk among the desecrators of Jerusalem would hardly have condemned him, for merely presumptuous aspirations after a bright ornament of his harem. Tasso's eulogium, in his grand epic, of the Christian prince who afterwards became his jailor, is an immortal reprobation of the unfeeling tyrant. The wrongs of genius are avenged even by its praise, which, when thus proved to have been undeserved, is satire undisguised, Petrarch and Tasso appear to be the only distinguished laureates of Italy, The rest were mere versifiers, for the most part fluent and insipid. But some Italian poets were complimented with the laurel in Germany, where the poetical college, founded at Vienna by Maximilian I., produced few native laureates worthy of the honour. Yet "the Emperors of Germany," says D'Israeli, who condemned the Abbé Resnel's memoir on the subject, 66 retained the laureateship in all its splendour. The selected bard was called Il Poeta Cesareo. Apostolo Zeno, as celebrated for his erudition as for his poetic powers, was succeeded by that most enchanting poet Metastasio,"of whom, by-the-by, Sir James Mackintosh has also written in enthusiastic commendation; not, however, for his felicity as a poet, but for the deep and well-digested critical learning displayed in his prose treatise on Aristotle's Art of Poetry. "The French," continues Mr. D'Israeli,—and we quote what he borrows from Resnel, because, though they do not tell us much, scarcely any other persons have hitherto told us anything to the purpose on this matter," the French never had a poet laureate, though they had royal poets, for none were ever solemnly crowned. The Spanish nation, always desirous of titles of honour, seems to have known that of the laureate; but little information concerning it can be gathered from their authors." We fear there must have been something suggestive of the hard, dry, see-saw of the turpis asella in the tone of the Spanish laureates; for Sancho Panza, in his tender consolation to his ass, Dapple, when they had both tumbled into the quarry, says, "Yo prometo de ponerte una corona de laurel en la cabeza que no parezcas sino un laureado poeta, y de darte los piensos dobados." "I promise to give thee double feeds, and to place a crown of laurel on thy head, that thou mayest look like a poet-laureate." But our main business is with the laureates of England; and the origin of their office is sufficiently obscure, and not the less worthy of consideration for the antiquity that such obscurity implies. It has certainly been associated with our monarchical institutions from very early times; and, for that reason alone, if for no other, we should be disposed, in this antimonarchical fever of the day, to re spect the loyalty of the office, however little respect may have been due to some who have held it, and however higher than the office is every true poet, "whose mind to him a kingdom is," and who possesses a royalty of his own, wider than that of Charlemagne. We do not know that the poets cited in the Saxon Chronicle were rhymers more inspired by the mead of the court than of the cloister; but the supposition is not improbable, --for we do know the fondness of Alfred for the gleeman's craft, and that he, "lord of the harp and liberating spear," was himself a gleeman; nor are we unmindful that King Canute honoured verse-men, and that he could even improvise an accordant rhyme, still extant, to the holy chant of the monks of Ely, as his bargemen rowed him down the Ouse, under the chapel wall. It is not apparent that trouvères followed William of Normandy to Sussex officially, or celebrated his triumph over Harold, for the story of Taliefer is hardly a case in point, and we do not hear much about the northern trouvères till somewhat later, though some writers will have it that they are of older standing than the troubadours of the south of France. We do not imagine that William Rufus patronised harmony more intellectual than the blast of the hunting horn But so early at least as the twelfth century, in the reign of Richard, "the heart of courage leonine," as Wordsworth calls him, we have a king's versifier in the person of Gulielmus, of whom little is known, except that he produced a poem on the crusade of this romantic, poetical, bones-breaking Richard, a prince whose Gothic blood (for it must be remembered that he was of the restored Saxon line) might seem to have been tinged with orientalism by some unaccountable process; for, even before his embarkation on his adventure with his red-cross knights, his character exhibited a strange combination of the stout and somewhat obtuse doggedness of the bandog, and the lordliness of the lion-a mixture of Saxon homeliness and Saracenic magnificence. The strength of thews and sinews, and the prowess of mere animal courage (vulgar glories, for the most part, looked at with civilized eyes), were an aspect of redeeming gene rosity in Richard, that still recommends him to us as a hero of romance, worthy of minstrel praise, in spite of his ferocious temper, his demerits as a son, and his indomitable wrongheadedness as a prince. The poem of Gulielmus is not extant, but it must have been interesting if he possessed any genius. Richard's rough warfare with the Soldan, his marriage with Berengaria, and his delivery from the dungeon of the base Duke of Austria, were subjects as pregnant as any of the adventures of Hercules, an idol of hero-worship whom he in some respects resembles. In King John's reign, the poets seem to have been against the king, and in favour of the opposing barons. Whether he consoled himself with the stipendiary services of a court poet, we do not discover. Throughout his long and troubled reign he seems to have been pelted with lampoons. In the year 251, reign of Henry III., the King's versifier was requited by an annual pension of 100 shillings -not such a very niggardly stipend as it now sounds, if we compare the value of money in those times with the price of commodities. In the two following reigns we find a poetroyal of some repute in Robert Baston. He Was a Carmelite monk, and attained the dignity of prior of the convent of that order at Scarborough. Bishop Bale (in his Illust ùm Majoris Britanniæ Scriptorum Summarium) says that Baston was a laureated poet and public orator at Oxford, which Wood denies. But Bale might have had access to information which could no longer be authenticated in Anthony's time; for Bale, though he lived to be Edward the Sixth's Bishop of Assory, and a prebendary of the Cathedral of Canterbury, where he died and was buried, had himself been a Carmelite friar. "Great confusion," observes Warton, "has entered into the subject of the institution of poetslaureate, on account of the degrees in grammar, which included rhetoric and versification, anciently taken in our universities, particularly at Oxford, on which occasion a wreath of laurel was presented to the new graduate, who was afterwards usually styled Poeta Laureatus. These scholastic laureations, however, seem to have given rise to the appellation in ques-membering, too, that we have two good tion. With regard to the poet-laureate of the Kings of England, he is undoubtedly the same that is styled the king's versifier in the thirteenth century. But when or how that title commenced, and whether this officer was ever formally crowned with laurel at his first investiture, I will not pretend to determine, after the researches of the learned Selden have proved unsuccessful. It seems probable that at length those only were in general invited to this appointment who had received academical sanction, and had merited a crown of laurel in the universities for their abilities in Latin composition, particularly Latin versification. Thus the king's laureate was nothing more than a graduated rhetorician, employed in the king's service." Warton adds an opinion, which seems well founded, "that it was not customary for the royal laureate to write in English till the Reformation had begun to diminish the veneration for the Latin tongue, or rather till the love of novelty, and a better sense of things, had banished the pedantry of monastic erudition, and taught us to cultivate our native language." It is true, that neither before nor after the Conquest was there any lack of rhymers in the vulgar tongue, whether Saxon, or Norman, or mixed; and they would be the popular poets, but not exactly the poets in fashion at court. At all events, the fashion of writing court poems in low Latin began early and continued long; and we suspect that the Anglo-Saxon gleemen, whom the monkish historians call joculatores regis, were for the most part mere merrymen, as their monkish sobriquet implies-jugglers, dancers, fiddlers, tumblers. Berdic, the king's fool, is styled Joculator Regis in Doomsday Book. Some of these retainers, no doubt, could both compose ballads and sing them, suiting the action to the word, and they might occasionally amuse the court with their songs; but the authentic poet for state occasions was the Latin verse-maker. We say this with all due love and regard for our balladsingers, old and modern, from King Alfred to Alfred Tennyson; and re set-offs against Harry Hotspur's sneer at "metre ballad-mongers,"--one in Sir Philip Sidney's declaration that the ballad of the Percy hunt in Cheviotdale stirred his heart like the sound of a trumpet; and another, in the fact that one of the most illustrious of modern Percys, the Bishop of Dromore, owes his well-deserved popular reputation to nothing else than his industry, talent, and good taste, in editing the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and Old Heroic Ballads. Robert Baston, from whom we have digressed, was not a balladmonger, but a Latin versifier ex officio. Edward I., in his expedition to Seotland in 1304, took Baston with him, that he might be an eye-witness of his triumph over this country, and celebrate it in Latin verse. Hollinshed comments on this fact as a strong proof of Edward's presumption and overweening confidence in himself; but the censure is not strikingly pertinent, for at this period a poet was a stated officer in the royal retinue, when the monarch went to war. The haughty old king's discomfiture, after all his successes in this favourite enterprise, was as mortifying, but not so comical as the disastrous issue of the campaign to his poet. The jolly prior had not done chanting one of his heroics in honour of Edward's siege of Stirling, when he was pounced on by a foray of Scots, and carried away into durance; nor was this the worst of the misadventure, for, with a shrewdly balancing humour, they obliged him to pay his ransom in verse, and only released him when he had recorded the praises of his captors and their cause. He does not appear to have been much inspired by the subject; for Hector Boece says that he made 66 rusty verses" in praise of the Scots; and rusty enough they were, if they all resembled the initial line as it is quoted "De planta cado metrum cum carmine nudo.” The poem must have stood in more awkward antagonism with "De Strivilniensi Obsidione," which is extant in Fordun, than Waller's panegyric on Cromwell does face to face with his eulogium on Charles II. We 66 doubt whether the monk had so witty an apology for his double tongue as the courtier; but he had a better excuse, for he said, "Actus me invito, factus, non est meus actus." There is both rhyme and reason in that. The stubbornness of the Scots, which was at last a choke-pear to Edward, seems to have stimulated the poet almost as much as it exasperated the king. For, besides the siege of Stirling, we find on the list of Baston's productions one entitled "De Altero Scotorum Bello," and another " De Scotia guerris variis." Baston survived his master, the broken Malleus Scotorum, only three years. It is uncertain whether he retained his office after the accession of Edward the Second; but if so, death had released him from duty before that prince's invasion of this country in 1314. Otherwise he would probably have had to pay another visit to the ominous neighbourhood of Stirling Castle; at a risk, if he escaped a deadlier chance, of being captured by the Bruce himself, and of having a caged poet's leisure to meditate a threnodia for Bannockburn. Boece, in Bellenden's version, asserts that this was actually the case,-that it was "Edward the Second, who, by vain arrogance, as if the Scotch had been sicker in his hands, brought with him ane Carmelite monk to put his victory in versis; that the poet was taken in this field of Bannockburn, and commandit by King Robert the Bruce to write as he saw, in sithement of his ransom." There is also among the political songs published by the Camden Society, a wretched transcript (from the Cotton MSS.) of a wretched piece of raving on this very battle, also attributed to Baston,-(and, announced, we suppose by an error of the press, as written in the reign of Edward the Third.) But we are inclined to believe that Baston died about four years before that great day for Scotland. We do not, however, undertake to settle the point. We have no certain accounts of Baston's suc cessor. It is asserted by writers not incautious, that Gower and Chaucer were laureates; and we are unwilling to doubt it, though the authority is far from conclusive. Chaucer, born about 1328, the second year of Edward the Third's reign, died in 1400. It is certain that he was liberally patronized, and gratified with lucrative appointments by Edward. It is recorded, too, that he was employed on foreign missions of trust; that on one occasion he was an envoy to Genoa, and that he then visited Petrarch at Padua; and as the arguments for and against the probability of this interview are pretty nearly balanced, we are not bound to deny ourselves the pleasure of believing it. Froissart, as well as Hollinshed and Barnes, bears testimony to Chaucer's having been one of a mission to the court of France, in the last year of Edward's reign; but it is not clear, nor even at all deducible from the nature of the public employments, and the character of Edward, that it was his poetical merit which promoted him to the royal confidence in matters of business. Gower, born, it is supposed, somewhat earlier than Chaucer, died two years later, in 1402, and had been blind for the last two or three years of his life. Bale makes Gower equitem auratum et poetam laureatum: but Winstanley says he was neither laureated nor hederated, but only rosated, having a chaplet of four roses about his head on his monumental stone in St. Mary Overy's Church, Southwark. His "Confessio Amantis" is said to have been prompted by the command of Richard the Second, who, chancing to meet him on the Thames, invited him into his gilded barge,— Youth at the prow, and pleasure at the helm," "While proudly riding o'er the azure realm, enjoined him to "book something new." In the three next reigns of the line of Lancaster, Henry the Fourth, Henry the Fifth, and Henry the Sixth, a period of sixty-two years, we hardly know what became of the court poets, or whether there were any. Musicians were liberally privileged as palace servants by Henry the Fourth,but his reign was unfavourable to the minstrel art. Henry the Fifth was partial to minstrelsy, and rewarded it generously; but we find no report of a laureat poet. In Henry the Sixth's time, boys were pressed into the minstrel service of the court; but it is not recorded that any one was made a poet by virtue of royal kidnapping. They were instructed in music for the solace of his majesty. To Edward the Fourth, the first king of the line of York, John Kay, as "his Majesty's humble Laureate," dedicated a History of Rhodes. The wars of the Roses seem almost to have silenced the nightingales. But no sooner was contention terminated by the union of Henry of Lancaster with the heiress of York, than a rivalry sprang up for the office of king's poet. In the year 1486, the next after the coronation of Henry the Seventh, and shortly after his marriage, that king, by an instrument Pro Poeta Laureato, of which a copy is preserved in Rymer's Fœdera, granted to Andrew Bernard, poetlaureate, a salary of fifteen marks, until he should obtain some equivalent appointment. This was no very munificent grant. But Henry the Seventh was not addicted to liberality out of his own exchequer. He afterwards found means to reward him with ecclesiastical preferments; and his prodigal, but still more selfish successor, gratified him in the same way. Bernard, who was a native of Toulouse, and an Augustine monk, obtained many preferments in England; and was besides not only poet-laureate, but historiographer to the king, and preceptor in grammar to Prince Arthur. The preceptorship, however honourable, was perhaps not worth much on the score of emolument. All the pieces now to be found in his character of laureate are in Latin. Among these are, "An Address to Henry the Eighth, for the most Auspicious Beginning of the Tenth Year of his Reign;" "A New-Year's Offering for the Year 1515;" and "Verses wishing Prosperity to his Majesty's Thirteenth Year, 1522." He left many prose pieces, written in his quality of historiographer to both monarchs, particularly a Chronicle of the Life and Achievements of Henry the Seventh to the taking of Perkin Warbeck. And here occurs a little difficulty in the reconcilement of dates, when we are told that Skelton also was poet-laureate to Henry the Seventh and his son; for it has been shown that Bernard was alive in 1522, if not later. Skelton was laureated at Oxford about 1489, three years after the date of the recorded grant to the poet laureate, Andrew Bernard. We more than half suspect that Skelton, though a graduated university laureate, was never poet-laureate to either king at all, except as a sort of volunteer, licensed by his own saucy consent. Puttenham expressly says, that "Skelton usurped the name of poet-laureate, being indeed but a rude railing rimer, and all his doings ridiculous." It is stated that Skelton, having, a few years subsequent to his laureation at Oxford, been permitted to wear his laurel publicly at Cambridge also, was further privileged by Henry the Seventh to wear some particular dress, or additional ornament to his dress. Henry the Seventh was not much given to jesting, or we should infer that it was a badge appropriate to the king's fool; for Skelton, though an able man, was, like Leo the Tenth's archpoet Querno, who was crowned laureate for the joke's sake, ambitious of the fool's honours. He was a buffoon even in the pulpit. Skelton directed his ribaldry especially against the mendicant friars and the formidable Wolsey. We can easily imagine how these audacities were not intolerable to the " Defender of the Faith," even in the plenitude of the cardinal's power; and how he might have tolerated his assumption of the character of court-poet, so long as the spurious laureate's sallies did not trench on the sovereign's personal dignity. Skelton, like his quondam royal pupil, was already a reformer in his way; and not long before his death, which occurred June 21, 1529, just before the downfall of Wolsey, he used a strange argument against the celibacy of the priesthood; he excused himself for having openly lived with a concubine, because he considered her as his wife! Erasmus, the caustic censor of the vices of the clergy, praised Skelton's learning and wit, probably from sympathy with his application of them, bolder, though far less dignified than his own, to the same objects of satire; but "the glory of the priesthood and the shame," could hardly have admitted the valid |