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CHAPTER I

FROM TOTTEL'S "MISCELLANY" TO SPENSER

In a work like the present, forming part of a larger whole and preceded by
another part, the writer has the advantage of being almost wholly free from
a difficulty which often presses on historians of a limited and definite
period, whether of literary or of any other history. That difficulty lies
in the discussion and decision of the question of origins--in the allotment
of sufficient, and not more than sufficient, space to a preliminary
recapitulation of the causes and circumstances of the actual events to be
related. Here there is no need for any but the very briefest references of
the kind to connect the present volume with its forerunner, or rather to
indicate the connection of the two.

There has been little difference of opinion as to the long dead-season of
English poetry, broken chiefly, if not wholly, by poets Scottish rather
than English, which lasted through almost the whole of the fifteenth and
the first half of the sixteenth centuries. There has also been little
difference in regarding the remarkable work (known as Tottel's
_Miscellany_, but more properly called _Songs and Sonnets, written by the
Right Honourable Lord Henry Howard, late Earl of Surrey, and other_) which
was published by Richard Tottel in 1557, and which went through two
editions in the summer of that year, as marking the dawn of the new
period. The book is, indeed, remarkable in many ways. The first thing,
probably, which strikes the modern reader about it is the fact that great
part of its contents is anonymous and only conjecturally to be attributed,
while as to the part which is more certainly known to be the work of
several authors, most of those authors were either dead or had written long
before. Mr. Arber's remarks in his introduction (which, though I have
rather an objection to putting mere citations before the public, I am glad
here to quote as a testimony in the forefront of this book to the excellent
deserts of one who by himself has done as much as any living man to
facilitate the study of Elizabethan literature) are entirely to the
point--how entirely to the point only students of foreign as well as of
English literature know. "The poets of that age," says Mr. Arber, "wrote
for their own delectation and for that of their friends, and not for the
general public. They generally had the greatest aversion to their w