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Download ebook pdf of Курс Физики Том 3 6Th Edition И В Савельев full chapter
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One would not, however, in any case have expected from James
Webbe’s evidence of the root of the matter in poetry. There is
Discourse. more of this root, though less scholarship and also
more “craze,” in the obscure William Webbe, of whom we know
practically nothing except that he was a Cambridge man, a friend of
Robert Wilmot (the author of Tancred and Gismund) and private tutor
to the sons of Edward Sulyard of Flemyngs, an Essex squire. The
young Sulyards must have received some rather dubious instruction
in the classics, for Webbe, in his inevitable classical exordium, thinks
that Pindar was older than Homer, and that Horace came after—
apparently a good while after—Ovid, and about the same time as
Juvenal and Persius. He was, however, really and deeply interested
in English verse; and his enthusiasm for Spenser—“the new poet,”
“our late famous poet,” “the mightiest English poet that ever lived,” is,
if not in every case quite according to knowledge, absolutely right on
the whole, and very pleasant and refreshing to read. It is, indeed, the
first thing of the kind that we meet with in English; for the frequent
earlier praises of Chaucer are almost always long after date, always
uncritical, and for the most part[251] much rather expressions of a
conventional tradition than of the writer’s deliberate preference.
It was Webbe’s misfortune, rather than his fault, that, like his idol
(but without that idol’s resipiscence), and, like most loyal Cambridge
men, with the examples of Watson, Ascham, and Drant before them,
Slight in he was bitten with “the new versifying.” It was rather
knowledge, his fault than his misfortune that he seems to have
taken very little pains to acquaint himself with the actual performance
of English poetry. Even of Gower he speaks as though he only knew
him through the references of Chaucer and others: though three
editions of the Confessio—Caxton’s one and Berthelette’s two—
were in print in his time. His notice of Chaucer himself is curiously
vague, and almost limited to his powers as a satirist, while he has,
what must seem to most judges,[252] the astonishing idea of
discovering “good proportion of verse and meetly current style” in
Lydgate, though he reproves him for dealing with “superstitious and
odd matters.” That he thinks Piers Plowman later than Lydgate is
unlucky, but not quite criminal. He had evidently read it—indeed the
book, from its kinship in parts to the Protestant, not to say the
Puritan, spirit, appealed to Elizabethan tastes, and Crowley had
already printed two editions of it, Rogers a third. But he makes upon
it the extraordinary remark, “The first I have seen that observed the
quantity of our verse without the curiosity of rhyme.” What Webbe
here means by “quantity,” or whether he had any clear deliberate
meaning at all, it is impossible to see: it is needless to say that
Langland is absolutely non-quantitative in the ordinary sense, that if
“quantity” means number of syllables he observes none, and that he
can be scanned only on the alliterative-accentual system. For
Gascoigne Webbe relies on “E. K.”; brackets “the divers works of the
old Earl of Surrey” with a dozen others; is copious on Phaer,
Golding, &c., and mentions George Whetstone and Anthony Munday
in words which would be adequate for Sackville (who is not named),
and hardly too low for Spenser; while Gabriel Harvey is deliberately
ranked with Spenser himself. Yet these things, rightly valued, are not
great shame to Webbe. If he borrows from “E. K.” some scorn of the
“ragged rout of rakehell rhymers,” and adds more of his own, he
specifies nobody; and his depreciation is only the defect which
almost necessarily accompanies the quality of his enthusiasm.
His piece, though not long, is longer than those of Gascoigne,
but Sidney, and King James. After a dedication (not
enthusiastic, more than excusably laudatory) to his patron
Sulyard, there is a curious preface to “The Noble Poets of England,”
who, if they had been inclined to be censorious, might have replied
that Master Webbe, while complimenting them, went about to show
that the objects of his compliment did not exist. “It is,” he says, “to be
wondered of all, and is lamented of many, that, while all other studies
are used eagerly, only Poetry has found fewest friends to amend it.”
We have “as sharp and quick wits” in England as ever were Greeks
and Romans: our tongue is neither coarse nor harsh, as she has
already shown. All that is wanted is “some perfect platform or
Prosodia of versifying”: either in imitation of Greeks and Latins, or
with necessary alterations. So, if the Noble Poets would “look so low
from their divine cogitations”, and “run over the simple censure” of
Master Webbe’s “weak brain,” something might, perhaps, be done.
if uncritical, The treatise itself begins with the usual
etymological definition of poetry, as “making,” and
the usual comments on the word “Vates”; but almost immediately
digresses into praise of our late famous English poet who wrote the
Shepherd’s Calendar and a wish to see his “English Poet”
(mentioned by E. K.), which, alas! none of us have ever seen. This is
succeeded, first by the classical and then by the English historical
sketches, which have been commented upon. It ends with fresh
laudation of Spenser.
Webbe then turns to the general consideration of poetry
(especially from the allegoric-didactic point of view), subject, kinds,
&c.; and it is to be observed that, though he several times cites
Aristotle, he leans much more on Horace, and on Elyot’s translations
from him and other Latins. He then proceeds to a rather
unnecessarily elaborate study of the Æneid, with large citations both
from the original and from Phaer’s translation, after which he returns
once more to Spenser, and holds him up as at least the equal of
Virgil and Theocritus. Indeed the Calendar is practically his theme all
through, though he diverges from and embroiders upon it. Then,
after glancing amiably enough at Tusser, and mentioning a
translation of his own of the Georgics, which has got into the hands
of some piratical publisher, he attacks the great rhyme-question, to
which he has, from the Preface onwards, more than once alluded.
Much of what he says is borrowed, or a little advanced, from
Ascham; but Webbe is less certain about the matter than his master,
and again diverges into a consideration of divers English metres,
always illustrated, where possible, from the Calendar. Still harking
back again, he decides that “the true kind of versifying” might have
been effected in English: though (as Campion, with better wits, did
after him) he questions whether some alteration of the actual Greek
and Latin forms is not required. He gives a list of classical feet (fairly
correct, except that he makes the odd confusion of a trochee and a
tribrach), and discusses the liberties which must be taken with
English to adjust it to some of them. Elegiacs, he thinks, will not do:
Hexameters and Sapphics go best. And, to prove this, he is rash
enough to give versions of his own, in the former metre, of Virgil’s
first and second eclogues, in the latter of Spenser’s beautiful
The fact that we find no less than four titles for the book—Timber,
Explorata, Discoveries, and Sylva—with others of its peculiarities, is
explained by the second fact that Jonson never published it. It never
The appeared in print till the folio of 1641, years after its
Discoveries. author’s death. The Discoveries are described as
being made “upon men and matter as they have flowed out of his
daily reading, or had their reflux to his peculiar notions of the times.”
They are, in fact, notes unnumbered and unclassified (though
batches of more or fewer sometimes run on the same subject), each
with its Latin heading, and varying in length from a few lines to that
of his friend (and partly master) Bacon’s shorter Essays. The
influence of those “silver” Latins whom he loved so much is
prominent: large passages are simply translated from Quintilian, and
for some time[272] the tenor is ethical rather than literary. A note on
Perspicuitas—elegantia (p. 7) breaks these, but has nothing
noteworthy about it, and Bellum scribentium (p. 10) is only a satiric
exclamation on the folly of “writers committed together by the ears
for ceremonies, syllables, points,” &c. The longer Nil gratius protervo
libro (pp. 11, 12) seems a retort for some personal injury, combined
with the old complaint of the decadence and degradation of poetry.
[273]
There is just but rather general stricture in Eloquentia (p. 16) on
the difference between the arguments of the study and of the world.
“I would no more choose a rhetorician for reigning in a school,” says
Ben, “than I would choose a pilot for rowing in a pond.”[274] Memoria
(p. 18) includes a gird at Euphuism. At last we come to business.
Censura de poetis (p. 21), introduced by a fresh fling at Euphuism, in
De vere argutis, opens with a tolerably confident note, “Nothing in
our age is more preposterous than the running judgments upon
poetry and poets,” with much more to the same effect, the whole
being pointed by the fling, “If it were a question of the water-
rhymer’s[275] works against Spenser’s, I doubt not but they would find
more suffrages.” The famous passage on Shakespeare follows: and
the development of Ben’s view, “would he had blotted a thousand,”