BY REV. A. E. WINSHIP.

CHAPTER I.

For three centuries England has luxuriated in a succession of regal poets, wearing, not hereditary crowns, but laurel wreaths bestowed by royal hands in virtue of the loyalty rather than the melody of their stanzas. Two centuries earlier Edward III. indulged Chaucer, the “Father of English Poetry,” in his harmless aspiration to enjoy the title of laureate, and the honor skipped along with irregular movement until Queen Elizabeth wreathed the brow of Spenser in laurel, giving the position such dignity that succeeding monarchs considered it an indispensable luxury to have a rhymer in the royal household to honor the birthday of king and queen, princes and princesses with an ode, graceful, polished, fervent.

The idea of poet laureate is not of English birth, but comes with other literary sentiments from Grecian days, the custom being to enliven the great musical contests by publicly crowning the successful poet. Rome in the days of the empire adopted the custom, adding to the formality and grace of the occasion. Germany revived the long neglected courtesy in the twelfth century, and was the first to christen the crowned bard “Laureate.”

The French had special poets for the rhythmic praises of the imperial household, but from prejudice or neglect did not adopt the German title, while the Spaniards had both the poets and the title, but lacked the favor of the goddess of song. The Saxons, from their earliest days, were lovers of music, though content with a low order of song. For centuries the minstrels were the favorites with the unalloyed Saxon race. Not until the eleventh century, when William the Conqueror grafted the Norman blood into the sturdy Saxon veins, was there call for a higher order of song than the minstrel furnished. As the two nations intermingled their habits and social customs, as the languages blended the strength of the one with the grace of the other for three centuries, the people were prepared in mind and heart, in thought and sentiment, to appreciate a national poet, and after nine centuries without a poet or a language out of which poetry could be woven, they found themselves suddenly possessed with a poet of highest order and a language melodious in its every accent.

The splendor of chivalry had reached its height, and the magnificent court of Edward III. brought to a climax the progressive spirit of the Plantagenets, and the series of victories that initiated his reign exalted the pride of the nation and brought it to a degree of patriotic order that must voice itself in a national poet. For such an hour was Geoffrey Chaucer sent, a poetic genius, whose birth and associations calculated to make the art in his hands chivalric.

His name—Chaussier—of Norman birth, anglicised itself gracefully into Chaucer, indicative of the ease with which, reciprocally, he translated the legends of Saxon life in a new language, the poetic.

Born in London, possibly educated at Cambridge, probably a child of wealth, a page in the service of a noble lady, a soldier of the king, a prisoner in French hands, and ransomed by his king, all before he was twenty, it is easy to see that he ingratiated himself early into a variety of experiences from which a poet can profitably draw. In his young manhood, following the adventures of youth, he was in the service of the king as valet of the chamber. He served as comptroller of customs, and negotiated delicate personal matters for the king at home and in foreign courts, was employed on important embassies open and secret, even negotiating for the marriage of the Prince of Wales in France.

Upon one of these foreign missions he witnessed tourneys, grand receptions and magnificent displays, of such a character that he was possessed with a desire to see his own country follow suit, and as an initiative step aspired at being himself crowned poet laureate to the king, in which he was humored by Edward III., who allowed him also £100 as an annual allowance. The succeeding king, Richard II., the last of the Plantagenets, confirmed him in the position and secured to him its financial reward.

This first laureate purples the horizon of English literature, but so faint is the flush of dawn that it is impossible to fix the year of his birth, which may have been as early as 1328, and may have been as late as 1345. To understand the circumstances under which he wrote we must consider the England in which he lived, and for which he wrote. It was no more thickly settled than the state of Vermont, the entire population being only about the same as that of Missouri. The city of London then had no more than Lynn, Portland, Omaha, or Somerville—35,000. It had been larger, but had suffered from the great plagues. But this must not mislead us, for, notwithstanding her diminutive size, England was the most powerful nation of western Europe, and three nations of historic prominence were suppliants for her favor. The nation was wealthy, and the middle classes appreciated and demanded increased financial, political and social privileges. It was this first hope and purpose of the people that ripened the nation for its poet.

CÆsar set foot on British soil fourteen centuries earlier; the Saxons made permanent abode nine centuries before his day; Alfred the Great glorified the Saxon Heptarchy five centuries before the poet sang; and what wonder that he who created the very language that could be poetic should aspire for the first laurel wreath?

For nearly a thousand years there had been no poetry in the Saxon life, there had never been on British soil. Beauty and harmony were missing in their speech and deeds. The history they had made was devoid of sentiment, hence the almost universal disinclination to read the history of those years. As soon as there was sentiment in their life it was poetized.

Chaucer was merely a beautifier of thought. He originated little, he glorified whatever he voiced. He breathed life into the thought and language of the people, making them living souls, the Adam and Eve of English life. It is too much to ask that the primal poet who has to create language, create thought also. He did for the language of England what no other man was ever privileged to do for any nation. He took the chaotic speech and gave it beauty and rhythmic symmetry. He took foreign thought and made a home dress in which to clothe it. He took a language that foreigners despised, and of which the countrymen were ashamed, and christened it into the triune of strength, beauty and melody, so that it promises to be the universal tongue. He made a language that has the elements of perpetual youth, such as is possessed by no words but the Saxon’s.

In speaking of Chaucer as the initial laureate, it is with full knowledge that a century earlier, before there was a poet worthy the name, Henry III., of Magna Charta fame, had a “Versificator Regis,” whom he allowed £100 per year, but since it is impossible to find his name, or a line he ever wrote, it has not seemed wise to discount the honor so justly due him who wrote the first classic English verse.

After Chaucer there was no inheritor of his wreath for nearly a century, when, in the reign of Edward IV., who died 1485, John Kay was laureate, but he left no verse to show whether or not he adorned his position.

The growth of the custom into dignity and permanence was through the universities. Each of the large classic institutions had the established degree of poet laureate bestowed upon those who graduated with honors from the courses in grammar, rhetoric and versification. It was a requisite for all graduates who presented themselves for this honorable degree, to write a hundred creditable Latin verses on the glory of the university—though sometimes another subject was assigned. Upon graduation, and the acceptance of the Latin verses, he was publicly crowned with a wreath of laurel, and styled “poeta laureatus.” If he was ever selected by the king to rhyme his praise he might style himself the “king’s humble poet laureate.”

John Skelton is the first whom we know to have taken all these honors. He was a graduate of Cambridge in 1484, and nine years later was wreathed poet laureate of Oxford, and soon after of Lauvain, and in 1504, twenty years from graduation, Cambridge gave him the same honorary title and wreath. He also won the regal versifier’s crown, writing a poem when Henry VII.’s eldest son, Prince Arthur, was created Prince of Wales, and Latin verses when the infant Prince Henry (VIII.) was created Duke of York in 1494. Skelton is spoken of by his contemporaries as a special light and ornament to British literature.

Bernard AndrÉ, of whom nothing is known except that he was a tutor of Prince Arthur, was poet laureate.

It was left to popular Queen Bess, among the many good things of her fickle reign, to establish the rank of regal laureate by conferring the laurel upon Edmund Spenser, since whom there has been no vacancy except when Cromwell took the poetry out of high life in England. Her reign is justly famed for its abundance of literary, poetic and dramatic talent. It was then that for the first time “Men of Letters” were a prominent feature in national life, and in that galaxy of artists the most brilliant star was her poet laureate.

Edmund Spenser was a charity boy, struggling for all his opportunities, supported at school by a benevolent Londoner, Robert Newell, but despite circumstances he was head boy. While a grammar school boy his benefactor died, and in the list of funeral expenses, still extant, is an item of two yards of cloth given Edmund Spenser to make a gown, that he might attend the funeral. This was the boyhood of the author of the “Faerie Queen.” There were multitudes in England whose parents, rolling in wealth, urged their children to study, but it was left for a charity student to lead his age and rank as one of the five great poets of the English tongue.

Pope Pius V. attempted to bring recreant England under the sway of the Church of Rome, and issued a bull of deposition against Elizabeth, attempting to enforce it by rebellion in the counties of the north. But he underestimated the grit and popularity of the queen, in whose interest the nation rose as one man. It was in the fervor of this patriotic ardor that Spenser published his first poems, awaking a sense of expectancy in the public mind, which he gratified later with his matchless glorification of Queen Bess in the “Faerie Queen.”

In the Elizabethan days even a poet of Spenser’s genius, whom the nation ardently admired, could not hope to live by poetic writing. In our own day Longfellow received from a weekly paper $4,000, or $20 a line, for his “Hanging of the Crane,” but Spenser’s pen could not have produced poems fast enough to have guaranteed him a living. Substantial favors from the royal court were indispensable unless he turned his mind and hand to other employments. Queen Elizabeth made it her established policy to encourage literature by special bequests, and Sir Philip Sidney, her confidential counselor, proposed an award to Spenser’s loyalty and genius, and she instructed Lord Cecil of the treasury to give him £100, but he remonstrated that it was too much for such indulgence as poetry, whereupon she permitted him to give what was reasonable, and consequently he gave nothing which measured his value of verse. Spenser’s need was so great that he was forced to remind the queen of her neglect, which he did in these lines:

This spicy reminder brought him his £100, and Lord Cecil a sharp expression of her dissatisfaction. He was eventually given an estate—Kilcolman Castle—of three thousand acres, in Ireland. He was also laureated, with a pension of £50. When circumstances at last favored his enjoyment of peace, that had been denied him from childhood, he fell on evil times. Tyrone, a bold and crafty Irish chieftain, rose in rebellion, attacking Kilcolman Castle so unexpectedly that the poet and his wife barely escaped with their lives, after their infant child had perished in the cruel flames. He was now forty-six years of age, and a grief-stricken, broken-hearted mourner for his castle, library and babe, he went to London in poverty, and before his friends realized that he was in the metropolis, this great bard, Queen Bess’s laureate, died of starvation, in a rude, comfortless room, on a cold day, without a friend to minister to his necessities. After death, honors innumerable were paid to his memory.

Thus lived and died the first who wore the laurel in the royal household of that long line that has graced the court circle for three hundred years. Of the poets who have worn the wreath in sunshine and shadow under the Tudors, Stuarts and Brunswicks, a second article will treat.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]