Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/162

142 not to be felt till much later—everything for the didactic allegory. Fletcher's pastoral openings to each canto are delightful; his style is lucid, nervous, and flowing; the personifications are clever and occasionally effective; but the soul of the reader faints under the strain of such sustained and relentless allegory. There is no escape, as in the Faerie Queene, to realms of pure romance, and it is with a sense of profound relief that one hears King James blow his trumpet and summon Christ to the rescue of the hard-pressed Will.

Giles Fletcher was happier in his choice of subject than his brother, and his temperament was more lyrical and mystical. His Christ's Victorie and Triumph, in Heaven and Earth, over and after Death (1610), an allegoric, narrative, lyrical rhapsody on the Atonement, Temptation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, is an interesting link between Spenser's and Milton's religious poetry. The form and language are Spenserian—allegorical, diffuse, and flamboyant,—but the subject is, like Milton's, theological. The more ethical aspect of Protestantism, presented in Spenser's House of Holiness, yields to the seventeenth-century preoccupation with theology, the divine scheme of salvation wrought out in eternity. Man, with his puny efforts after righteousness, falls into the background.

Poetically, the resemblance of Fletcher's poem to Spenser's is deliberate, and superficial rather than temperamental. There is a vast difference between the flow and shimmer of the older poet's romantic