English Satires | Page 7

love-sick swain, and runs as follows:--
"For when my ears received a fearful sound That he was sick, I went, and there I found, Him laid of love and newly brought to bed Of monstrous folly, and a franticke head: His chamber hanged about with elegies, With sad complaints of his love's miseries, His windows strow'd with sonnets and the glasse Drawn full of love-knots. I approach'd the asse, And straight he weepes, and sighes some Sonnet out To his fair love! and then he goes about, For to perfume her rare perfection, With some sweet smelling pink epitheton. Then with a melting looke he writhes his head, And straight in passion, riseth in his bed, And having kist his hand, strok'd up his haire, Made a French cong��, cryes 'O cruall Faire!' To th' antique bed-post."[10]
Marston manifests more vigour and nervous force in his satires than Hall, but exhibits less elegance and ease in versification. In Charles Fitz-geoffrey's Affani?, a set of Latin epigrams, printed at Oxford in 1601, Marston is complimented as the "Second English Satirist", or rather as dividing the palm of priority and excellence in English satire with Hall. The individual characteristics of the various leading Elizabethan satirists,--the vitriolic bitterness of Nash, the sententious profundity of Donne, the happy-go-lucky "slogging" of genial Dekker, the sledge-hammer blows of Jonson, the turgid malevolence of Chapman, and the stiletto-like thrusts of George Buchanan are worthy of closer and more detailed study than can be devoted to them in a sketch such as this. I regret that Nicolas Breton's Pasquil's Madcappe proved too long for quotation in its entirety,[11] but the man who could pen such lines as these was, of a truth, a satirist of a high order:--
But what availes unto the world to talke? Wealth is a witch that hath a wicked charme, That in the minds of wicked men doth walke, Unto the heart and Soule's eternal harme, Which is not kept by the Almighty arme: O,'tis the strongest instrument of ill That ere was known to work the devill's will.
An honest man is held a good poore soule, And kindnesse counted but a weake conceite, And love writte up but in the woodcocke's soule, While thriving Wat doth but on Wealth await: He is a fore horse that goes ever streight: And he but held a foole for all his Wit, That guides his braines but with a golden bit.
A virgin is a vertuous kind of creature, But doth not coin command Virginitie? And beautie hath a strange bewitching feature, But gold reads so much world's divinitie, As with the Heavens hath no affinitie: So that where Beauty doth with vertue dwell, If it want money, yet it will not sell.
Of the satiric forms peculiar to the Elizabethan epoch there is no great variety. The Characters of Theophrastus supplied a model to some of the writers. The close adherence also which the majority of them manifest to the broadly marked types of "Horatian" and "Juvenalian" satire, both in matter and manner, is not a little remarkable. The genius for selecting from the classics those forms both of composition and metre best suited to become vehicles for satire, and adapting them thereto, did not begin to manifest itself in so pronounced a manner until after the Restoration. The Elizabethan mind--using the phrase of course in its broad sense as inclusive of the Jacobean and the early Caroline epochs--was more engrossed with the matter than the manner of satire. Perhaps the finest satire which distinguished this wonderful era was the Argenis of John Barclay, a politico-satiric romance, or, in other words, the adaptation of the "Milesian tale" of Petronius to state affairs.
During the Parliamentary War, satire was the only species of composition which did not suffer more or less eclipse, but its character underwent change. It became to a large extent a medium for sectarian bitterness. It lost its catholicity, and degenerated in great measure into the instrument of partisan antagonism, and a means of impaling the folly or fanaticism, real or imagined, of special individuals among the Cavaliers and Roundheads.[12] Of such a character was the bulk of the satires produced at that time. In a few instances, however, a higher note was struck, as, for example, when "dignified political satire", in the hands of Andrew Marvell, was utilized to fight the battle of freedom of conscience in the matter of the observances of external religion. _The Rehearsal Transposed, Mr. Smirke, or the Divine in Mode, and his Political Satires_ are masterpieces of lofty indignation mingled with grave and ironical banter. Among many others Edmund Waller showed himself an apt disciple of Horace, and produced charming social satires marked by delicate wit and raillery in the true Horatian mode; while the Duke of Buckingham, in the Rehearsal, utilized