A History of English Poetry: an Unpublished Continuation.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

sometimes varied according to the caprice or the convenience of the writer. There is a sonnet of the regular construction in the Provincial dialect, written by Guglielmo de gli Amalricchi, on Robert king of Naples who died in 1321.11 But the Italian language affords earlier examples. (The multitude of identical cadences renders it a more easy and proper metre to use in Italian than in English verse.)

      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.

      Henry! I wish that you, and Charles, and I,

      By some sweet spell within a bark were plac'd,

      A gallant bark with magic virtue grac'd,

      Swift at our will with every wind to fly:

      So that no changes of the shifting sky

      No stormy terrors of the watery waste,

      Might bar our course, but heighten still our taste

      Of sprightly joy, and of our social tie:

      Then, that my Lucy, Lucy fair and free,

      With those soft nymphs on whom your souls are bent,

      The kind magician might to us convey,

      To talk of love throughout the livelong day:

      And that each fair might be as well content

      As I in truth believe our hearts would be.12

      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.

      To omit Googe, Tuberville [sic], Gascoigne, and some other petty writers who have interspersed their miscellanies with a few sonnets, and who will be considered under another class, our first professed author in this mode of composition, after Surrey and Wyat, is Samuel Daniel. His Sonnets called Delia, together with his Complaint of Rosamond, were printed for Simon Waterson, in 1591.13 It was hence that the name of Delia, suggested to Daniel by Tibullus, has been perpetuated in the song of the lover as the name of a mistress. These pieces are dedicated to Sir Philip Sydney's sister, the general patroness, Mary countess of Pembroke. But Daniel had been her preceptor.14 It is not said in Daniel's Life, that he travelled. His forty-eighth sonnet is said to have been "made at the authors being in Italie."15 Delia does not appear to have been transcendently cruel, nor were his sufferings attended with any very violent paroxysms of despair. His style and his expressions have a coldness proportioned to his passion. Yet as he does not weep seas of tears, nor utter sighs of fire, he has the merit of avoiding the affected allusions and hyperbolical exaggerations of his brethren. I cannot in the mean time, with all these concessions in his favour, give him the praise of elegant sentiment, true tenderness, and natural pathos. He has, however, a vigour of diction, and a volubility of verse, which cover many defects, and are not often equalled by his contemporaries. I suspect his sonnets were popular. They are commended, by the author of the Return from Parnassus, in a high strain of panegyric.

      1

      Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (London, 1756-1782), I, 270-271.

      2

      Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Writings and Gen

1

Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (London, 1756-1782), I, 270-271.

2

Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (London, 1756-1782), I, 270-271.

3

John Milton, Poems upon Several Occasions (London, 1785), ed. Thomas Warton, p. 331, n.

4

Nineteenth-century editions of the History give the false impression that the eight sheets were prepared from manuscript material left at Thomas Warton's death, but these sheets were certainly printed before Thomas died, and probably in the early 1780's. See John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1812-1816), III, 702-703. They contain no reference postdating that to Isaac Reed's revised edition of Robert Dodsley's Collection of Old Plays, published in 1780.

5

Thomas Warton to Richard Price, 13 October 1781, in Thomas Warton, Poetical Works, ed. Richard Mant (Oxford, 1802), I, lxxviii; Daniel Prince to Richard Gough, 4 August 1783, in Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, III, 702.

6

Thomas Caldecott to Bishop Percy, 21 March 1803, in Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1817-1858), VIII, 372.

7

Joseph Warton to William Hayley, 12 March 1792, in John Wooll, Biographical Memoirs of the late Revd. Joseph Warton (London, 1806), p. 404.

8

[Thomas Warton's original version began "The temporary vogue which …" The final version, here parenthesized in the text, represents, it seems fairly certain, Joseph Warton's expansion. Although this deprecatory comment seems rather abrupt coming after five sections devoted to the Elizabethan satirists, Joseph Warton is not disparaging where his brother praised. Thomas Warton had already (IV, 69) belittled the "innumerable crop of satirists, and of a set of writers differing but little more than in name, and now properly belonging to the same species, Epigrammatists."]

9

[Warton here combined several remarks in Dryden's essay "The Original and Progress of Satire." See John Dryden, Essays, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford, 1900), II, 111-112. There were six, not four editions of Holiday's Persius.]

10

[Warton refers presumably to Isaac Reed's Collection of Old Plays (London, 1780).]

11

[Jehan de] Nostredam [e]. [Les] Vies des […] Poet[es] Provens[aux]. [Lyon, 1575]

11

[Jehan de] Nostredam [e]. [Les] Vies des […] Poet[es] Provens[aux]. [Lyon, 1575] n. 59. pag. 199.

12

[William Hayley. An] Ess[ay] on Epic Poetry. [London, 1782] Notes, Ess. iii. v. 81. p. 171.

13

They are entered to him, feb. 4, under that year [1591/92]. Registr. Station. B. fol. 284. a. In sixteens. I have a copy. Wh[ite] Lett[er i. e., roman]. With vignettes.

14

[Daniel was tutor to her son William Herbert and preceptor to Ann Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, but Sidney's sister seems to have been the patroness rather than the pupil of Daniel.]

15

His sister married John Florio, author of a famous Italian dictionary, and tutor to queen Anne, consort of James the first, in Italian, under whom Daniel was groom of the Privy-Chamber. [Anthoney a] Wood, Ath[enae] Oxon[ienses]. [London, 1691-92.] i. 379. col. 1. [Warton's mention of "Daniel's Life" refers presumably to the brief biography by Wood, here cited.]