Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth. Lucy Aikin
am I, in endless torments pained
Among the furies in th' infernal lake:"
from these dismal regions she is come, she says, to bemoan the luckless lot of those
"Whom Fortune in this maze of misery,
Of wretched chance most woful Mirrors chose:"
and she ends by inviting him to accompany her in her return:
"Come, come, quoth she, and see what I shall show,
Come hear the plaining and the bitter bale
Of worthy men by Fortune's overthrow:
Come thou and see them ruing all in row.
They were but shades that erst in mind thou rolled,
Come, come with me, thine eyes shall then behold."
He accepts the invitation, having first done homage to Sorrow as to a goddess, since she had been able to read his thought. The scenery and personages are now chiefly copied from the sixth book of the Æneid; but with the addition of many highly picturesque and original touches.
The companions enter, hand in hand, a gloomy wood, through which Sorrow only could have found the way.
"But lo, while thus amid the desert dark
We passed on with steps and pace unmeet,
A rumbling roar, confused with howl and bark
Of dogs, shook all the ground beneath our feet,
And struck the din within our ears so deep,
As half distraught unto the ground I fell;
Besought return, and not to visit hell."
His guide however encourages him, and they proceed by the "lothly lake" Avernus,
"In dreadful fear amid the dreadful place."
"And first within the porch and jaws of hell
Sat deep Remorse of Conscience, all besprent
With tears; and to herself oft would she tell
Her wretchedness, and cursing never stent
To sob and sigh: but ever thus lament
With thoughtful care, as she that all in vain
Should wear and waste continually in pain.
Her eyes, unsteadfast rolling here and there,
Whirled on each place as place that vengeance brought,
So was her mind continually in fear,
Tossed and tormented with tedious thought
Of those detested crimes that she had wrought:
With dreadful cheer and looks thrown to the sky,
Longing for death, and yet she could not die.
Next saw we Dread, all trembling how he shook
With foot uncertain proffered here and there,
Benumbed of speech, and with a ghastly look
Searched every place, all pale and dead with fear,
His cap borne up with staring of his hair." &c.
All the other allegorical personages named, and only named, by Virgil, as well as a few additional ones, are pourtrayed in succession, and with the same strength and fullness of delineation; but with the exception of War, who appears in the attributes of Mars, they are represented simply as examples of Old age, Malady, &c., not as the agents by whom these evils are inflicted upon others. Cerberus and Charon occur in their appropriate offices, but the monstrous forms Gorgon, Chimæra, &c., are judiciously suppressed; and the poet is speedily conducted to the banks of that "main broad flood"
"Which parts the gladsome fields from place of woe."
"With Sorrow for my guide, as there I stood,
A troop of men the most in arms bedight,
In tumult clustered 'bout both sides the flood:
'Mongst whom, who were ordained t' eternal night,
Or who to blissful peace and sweet delight,
I wot not well, it seemed that they were all
Such as by death's untimely stroke did fall."
Sorrow acquaints him that these are all illustrious examples of the reverses which he was lately deploring, who will themselves relate to him their misfortunes; and that he must afterwards
"Recount the same to Kesar, king and peer."
The first whom he sees advancing towards him from the throng of ghosts is Henry duke of Buckingham, put to death under Richard III.: and his "Legend," or story, is unfortunately the only one which its author ever found leisure to complete; the favor of his illustrious kinswoman on her accession causing him to sink the poet in the courtier, the ambassador, and finally the minister of state. But he had already done enough to earn himself a lasting name amongst the improvers of poetry in England. In tragedy he gave the first regular model; in personification he advanced far beyond all his predecessors, and furnished a prototype to that master of allegory, Spenser. A greater than Spenser has also been indebted to him; as will be evident, I think, to all who compare the description of the figures on the shield of war in his Induction, and especially those of them which relate to the siege of Troy, with the exquisitely rich and vivid description of a picture on that subject in Shakespeare's early poem on Tarquin and Lucretia.
The legend of the duke of Buckingham is composed in a style rich, free and forcible; the examples brought from ancient history, of the suspicion and inward wretchedness to which tyrants have ever been a prey, and afterwards, of the instability of popular favor, might in this age be accounted tedious and pedantic; they are however pertinent, well recited, and doubtless possessed the charm of novelty with respect to the majority of contemporary readers. The curses which the unhappy duke pours forth against the dependent who had betrayed him, may almost compare, in the energy and inventiveness of malice, with those of Shakespeare's queen Margaret; but they lose their effect by being thrown into the form of monologue and ascribed to a departed spirit, whose agonies of grief and rage in reciting his own death have something in them bordering on the burlesque.
The mind of Sackville was deeply fraught, as we have seen, with classic stores; and at a time when England possessed as yet no complete translation of Virgil, he might justly regard it as a considerable service to the cause of national taste to transplant into our vernacular poetry some scattered flowers from his rich garden of poetic sweets. Thus he has embellished his legend with an imitation or rather paraphrase of the celebrated description of night in the fourth book of the Æneid. The lines well merit transcription.
"Midnight was come, when ev'ry vital thing
With sweet sound sleep their weary limbs did rest;
The beasts were still, the little birds that sing
Now sweetly slept besides their mother's breast,
The old and all were shrowded in their nest;
The waters calm, the cruel seas did cease;
The woods, the fields, and all things held their peace.
The golden stars were whirled amid their race,
And on the earth did laugh with twinkling light,
When each thing nestled in his resting place
Forgat day's pain with pleasure of the night:
The hare had not the greedy hounds in sight;
The fearful deer had not the dogs in doubt,
The partridge dreamt not of the falcon's foot.
The ugly bear now minded not the stake,
Nor how the cruel mastives do him tear;
The stag lay