thrum of coloured silks among its lumber a flat space of roof, railed round, gave a view of the neighbouring steeples; for the house, as I said, stood near a great city, which sent up heavenwards over the twisting weather-vanes not seldom its beds of rolling cloud and smoke, touched with storm or sunshine.

So, the child of whom I am writing lived on there quietly; things without thus ministering to him, as he sat daily at the window with the bird-cage hanging below it, and his mother taught him to read, wondering at the ease with which he learned, and at the quickness. of his memory. The perfume of the little flowers of the lime-tree fell through the air upon them like rain; while time seemed to move ever more slowly to the murmur of bees in it, till it almost stood still on June afternoons.

This needs no commendation to anyone who has loved home. It is, however, mainly a description of the house; another of Pater's sketches deals with gardens, in which some other children passed their time in the sweet homeland of Sussex:

How they shook their musk from them !-those gardens, among which the youngest son, but not the youngest child grew up. The rippling note of the birds he distinguished so acutely seemed a part of this treeless place, open freely to sun and air, such as rose and carnation loved, in the midst of the old disafforested chase. Brothers and sisters, all alike were gardeners, methodically intimate with their flowers. You need words compact rather of perfume than of colour to describe them, in nice annual order; terms for perfume as immediate and definite as red, purple and yellow. Flowers there were which seemed to yield their sweetest in the faint sea-salt, when the loosening wind was strong from the south-west; some which found their way slowly towards the neighbourhood of the old oaks and beech-trees. Others consorted most freely with the wall-fruit, or seemed made for pot-pourri to sweeten the old black_mahogany furniture. The sweat-pea stacks loved the broad path through the kitchen-garden; the old-fashioned garden azalea was the making of a nosegay, with its honey which clung to one's fingers. There were flowers all the sweeter for a battle with the rain; a flower like aromatic medicine; another like summer lingering into winter; it ripened as fruit does; and another was like August, his own birthday time, dropped into March.

The very mould here, rich old black gardener's earth, was flower seed; and beyond, the fields, one after another, through the white gates breaking the well-grown hedge-rows, were hardly less gardenlike; little, velvety fields, little with the true sweet English littleness of our little island, our land of vignettes.

It is a long way from the beginnings of our prose far back in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to this vivid, suggestive style of the nineteenth century. We pass from the very plain, unadorned origins, through the equally simple yet far more expressive and delicately cadenced prose of Rolle and his contemporaries-though none quite equalled him in style and force—on through the Romances and Chronicles, to the early Elizabethans, and then, in James's reign to that rendering of the Scriptures whose literary beauty a few faults of translation can nowise impair. We pass thence, through the majestic, poignant or witty prose of the greater seventeenth-century writers, and on to the satires and philosophy of the eighteenth, till finally, in the century we have just left, the volume of English prose swells into a great river, fed at countless points by inflowing streams. It is, to vary the image, like a vast treasurehouse, left to us by our forbears. We may ransack its many chambers with whatever energy we have, but we cannot possibly exhaust its riches.

Perhaps this comparatively tiny gleaning from its passing centuries may show some of us that while it is idle to dispute as to whether poetry or prose is the greater each having its own place and uses-it is more than foolish not to search our great writers till we find something, which is a consolation in drab days, and adds light to sunshine hours. We may not care for the same things as our neighbours; there is no particular reason why we should. But we must be fastidious indeed, or dull beyond belief, if in these wide pastures we can find no little pleasant patch for our own self.

O

CHAPTER VII

SONNETS

F all forms of poetry, the lyric is perhaps the most natural and instinctive: it is easy to the majority of people to sing somehow. From that, the step to singing in measured language seems to some short one.

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As a nation grows in culture, the "natural" lyric becomes more elaborate, and rules for its structure begin to be made; finally, lyrics split up into classes, those of sonnets and odes, for example. In the first chapter a lyric was described as a poem about a single thought, feeling or experience, as a song which comes from the heart, and which, while expressing the meaning of one person, appeals to many others.

Of all forms of lyric, the sonnet is the most carefully ordered; it is bound by definite, they might be called rigid, rules; it deals very briefly with one main thought. The lyric proper had flourished in England for many generations before the sonnet was introduced. The sonnet's origin and birthplace is not precisely known. Provence and Sicily have been suggested; the latter is generally thought to have begun the use of Italian, as distinguished from Latin, for literary purposes. The Emperor Frederick II ruled the two Sicilies, and tried, being himself a scholar, to propagate learning in the southern part of Italy. Besides the classics, he cared for the vernacular Italian and French which were beginning to replace Latin as the speech of everyday life. In his Sicilian Court, he gathered round him all the scholars and writers whom he could attract; and it

seems to have been there that poetical forms and metres, proper to Italian thought and speech, were worked out.

If the beginnings of Italian poetry belong to the Sicilies, it was brought to perfection in Tuscany, and there, in the fourteenth century, the sonnet was developed. When Literature moved from Palermo to Florence, it gave up not only the House of Suabia for true Italians, but it changed Court life for that of " the People." Poetry was no longer the recreation of princes and courtiers who wrote poetry for each other, but it became the possession of the populace, who listened to and enjoyed the poetry which had sprung from their own midst.

During the thirteenth century, one or two individuals worked at the sonnet forms. Fra Guittone d'Arezzo (1230-1294) seems to have been the first to seize on and partially perfect the sonnet, which he used, as it should be, for the setting forth of a single thought or feeling. Dante, however, speaks of him as one of the poets whom other men praised without sufficient reason:

To rumour rather than to truth they turn their faces, and then do fix their opinions ere art or reason is listened to by them. So did many of our fathers with Guittone, shouting in turn and praising him alone.

It was Petrarca (1304-1374) who fixed the form of the typical Italian sonnet. Like Fra Guittone, he belonged to Arezzo in Tuscany. The main features of the sonnet, as he regulated it, are the fixed number of lines, fourteen; the "balance" of the poem, and the rime arrangement. The fourteen lines, of ten syllables each, are divided into the Octave, containing the first eight, and the Sestet, containing the last six. The octave should pause slightly at the end of the first quatrain, and more definitely at the close of the second. The Italian form only admitted two rime sounds in the octave; the first, fourth, fifth and eighth lines ended with one of these, the second, third, sixth and seventh with the other.

As the octave was equally divided into two quatrains, so was the sestet into two tercets. More license in riming is now allowed in the sestet; sometimes two, sometimes three rime sounds are permitted, and they are not always arranged in the same order. The typical Petrarcan sonnet allowed three sounds, riming the first and fourth lines, the second and fifth, the third and sixth.

During the fifteenth century, a few Englishmen travelled in Italy, the main attraction being the Revival of Learning, owing to the rediscovery of the classics. The revival began in Italy; Petrarca gave it a great impetus, and it was fostered by intellectually, if not always morally, enlightened princes, in the small Italian Courts, by the Republic of Florence, by scholars who escaped from Constantinople, and by great Italian scholars, like John of Ravenna, Peter Paul Vergerius, Luigi Marsigli, Gasparino da Barzizza, Poggio Bracciolini, Filelfo, Vittorino da Feltre, Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini (afterwards Pope Pius II) and others.

Among the first, if not the first Englishman to become aware of the New Learning in Italy was Richard de Bury, tutor of Edward III when the latter was Prince of Wales. De Bury was twice sent as English Ambassador to Pope John XXII; on his way he met Petrarca at Avignon. In 1345, he finished his Philobiblion (The Love of Books) in Latin. This was printed at Cologne in 1485. From the first sentence of his opening chapter we may learn an English scholar's view of wisdom:

The desirable treasure of wisdom and science, which all men desire by an instinct of nature, infinitely surpasses all the riches of the world; in respect of which precious stones are worthless; in comparison with which silver is as clay and pure gold is as a little sand; at whose splendour the sun and moon are dark to look upon; compared with whose marvellous sweetness honey and manna are bitter to the taste. . . . Where dost thou chiefly lie hidden, O most elect treasure! and where shall thirsting souls discover thee ? Certes thou hast placed thy tabernacle in books.

De Bury is something of an optimist in supposing that all men desire wisdom by an instinct of nature.

It seems