Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/105

Rh had been nurtured in an almost superstitious veneration for the ancient classics, the poor playwright or poet in the vernacular tongue was little likely to engage the labours of a learned pen. Those Elizabethan authors whose lives are fairly well known to us were always something other than mere authors men of noble family, it may be, or distinguished in politics and war. We know more of Sir Walter Raleigh’s career than of Shakespeare’s, and more of Essex than of Spenser. On the other hand, while the works of Shakespeare and Spenser have come down to us almost intact, most of the poems of Raleigh and Essex are lost. Men of position held professional authorship in some contempt, and wrote only for the delectation of their private friends. And when Sir Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, wrote a brief life of his friend and ancient schoolfellow, Sir Philip Sidney, it was not the author of the Arcadia or the Sonnets that he desired to celebrate, but rather the statesman of brilliant promise and the soldier whose death had put a nation into mourning. So that this ceremonial little treatise, which is the earliest notable English life of an English poet, is the life of a poet almost by accident.

With the Seventeenth Century, a century rich in all antiquarian and historical learning, literary biography begins. Early in the century, Thomas Heywood, the dramatist, planned a volume to contain ‘the lives of all the poets, foreign and modern, from the first before Homer to the novissimi and last.’ He never carried out his scheme, and so we have lost an invaluable work. But his other prose works and compilations give us reason to fear that his Lives would have been borrowed almost wholly from books and would have