sound of this personal and subjective note, — Villon, with his excellent differences from the pastoral poets of the day, forty feeding like one, his piercingly individual tone, his reckless egotism. When, however, we ask what Englishman first shows the imperious mood of the artist, we are asking a parlous question indeed. We find the thing, with all its pomp, in Shakspere's sonnets, and even in his plays.[1] We find it, with a dramatic mask thinner than usual, in some verses by Tom Nash,[2] where in startling felicity of phrase, —
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helenas eye;
I am sick, I must die
Lord have mercy on us!—
as well as in appeals to the famous dead, we note a parallel to Villon's best-known ballade.[3] But we find it a century earlier in the verses of William Dunbar, who was the first of our poets to see his own work in that mightiest of aids to subjectivity, printer's ink ; and perhaps we shall not err if we assume that Dunbar forms a parallel to Villon in this as in many other respects,[4]
- ↑ As poetry of the people proper is going out of Europe, the drama comes in ; at first, stiff and impersonal to a fault, it soon follows the new demand for a sentimental note, until in Marlowe and Shakspere we get that intensely personal quality which makes some of their scenes read like a succession of lyrics, and which the late J. A. Symonds has analyzed with such success. It is this " lyric cry " which tells of a new relation between the poet and his public.
- ↑ In his Summer's Last Will and Testament ; a " doleful ditty to the lute." The plague was then raging in London, and the verses have a very personal quality.
- ↑ For the measureless distance which separates verse of this sort from the Ubi sunt strain of medieval poetry, see Sainte-Beuve, Causeries de Lundi, XIV, 297 f.
- ↑ The notes (by Dr. Gregor) in Small's edition of Dunbar, III, 90 ff. point out a likeness in whole and in parts between Dunbar's
