The first duty of the Muse is to be delightful,
and it is an injury done to all of us when we are put in the wrong by a
kind of statutory affirmation on the part of the critics of something to
which our judgment will not consent, and from which our taste revolts. A
collection of poets is commonly made up, nine parts in ten, of this
perfunctory verse-making, and I never look at one without regretting that
we have lost that excellent Latin phrase, _Corpus poetarum_. In fancy I
always read it on the backs of the volumes,--a _body_ of poets, indeed,
with scarce one soul to a hundred of them.
One genuine English poet illustrated the early years of the sixteenth
century,--John Skelton. He had vivacity, fancy, humor, and originality.
Gleams of the truest poetical sensibility alternate in him with an almost
brutal coarseness. He was truly Rabelaisian before Rabelais. But there is
a freedom and hilarity in much of his writing that gives it a singular
attraction. A breath of cheerfulness runs along the slender stream of his
verse, under which it seems to ripple and crinkle, catching and casting
back the sunshine like a stream blown on by clear western winds.
But Skelton was an exceptional blossom of autumn. A long and dreary
winter follows. Surrey, who brought back with him from Italy the
blank-verse not long before introduced by Trissino, is to some extent
another exception.
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