He had the sentiment of nature and unhackneyed
feeling, but he has no mastery of verse, nor any elegance of diction. We
have Gascoyne, Surrey, Wyatt, stiff, pedantic, artificial, systematic as
a country cemetery, and, worst of all, the whole time desperately in
love. Every verse is as flat, thin, and regular as a lath, and their
poems are nothing more than bundles of such tied trimly together. They
are said to have refined our language. Let us devoutly hope they did, for
it would be pleasant to be grateful to them for something. But I fear it
was not so, for only genius can do that; and Sternhold and Hopkins are
inspired men in comparison with them. For Sternhold was at least the
author of two noble stanzas:--
"The Lord descended from above
And bowed the heavens high,
And underneath his feet he cast
The darkness of the sky;
On cherubs and on cherubims
Full royally he rode,
And on the wings of all the winds
Came flying all abroad."
But Gascoyne and the rest did nothing more than put the worst school of
Italian love poetry into an awkward English dress. The Italian proverb
says, "Inglese italianizzato, Diavolo incarnato," that an Englishman
Italianized is the very devil incarnate, and one feels the truth of it
here. The very titles of their poems set one yawning, and their wit is
the cause of the dulness that is in other men.
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