have left "Visions" among their works, wonderful dreams, full of help or warning from the other world. Among the prettiest specimens of this sort of literature is a poem called The Pearl (North of England, about 1370). A father has lost his dear and only daughter, but in a dream he sees her in heaven and is comforted. Probably by the same author is a poem founded on the Arthurian legend and called Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight. This teaches in allegorical wise the lesson that manhood must be purified by doubt, temptation, and sorrow successfully combated; the poem may be\ compared with the great German poem of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the Parzival. The finest allegorical poem in our own literature is, of course, The Faery Queene. Other famous poems of the kind are, on one hand, the social allegory, mourning the wrongs of certain classes in society: example, The Vision concerning Piers the Ploughman (Fourteenth Century); or, on the other, the political allegory, aiming at abuses in government or factious opposition: example, Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, where English contemporary characters are introduced under the veil of a story from 'the Bible. Saul is Oliver Cromwell, David is King Charles II., Absalom is the Duke of Monmouth, &c. The same author wrote an allegory of religious faiths, The Hind and the Panther. Dramatic in form (cf. Chap. III. § 5) but full of a fine allegory is Milton's noble Comus.

(b) When the didactic allegory is bounded by very narrow limits, there results the Fable. The Fable is "the feigned history of a particular case, in which we recognize a general truth." The events are mostly

Jacob Grimm, it is true,

taken from the life of beasts, birds, etc. One of the oldest English forms of this sort of allegory is a description of some animal and his habits, with a moral interpretation. A collection of such stories was called a Bestiary or Physiologus. But ordinarily, by fable we understand a short, pithy incident in animal life, intended to convey a moral. thought there had once existed a regular beast-epic, like the human epic of early days, and he referred the later fables to such a source. There was, however, no Germanic beast-epic at all. The stories came from the East, from Byzantium, brought by word of mouth into Italy, and thence into the different nations of Europe. The "morals" were added by the monks. Such collections were very popular. Caxton printed in 1481 a prose history of Reynard the Fox. Gay's Fables in English and Prior's also are specimens of the light vein in French, Marie de France among older writers, and the incomparable La Fontaine, are superior to the English, except that Chaucer's imitation of Marie de France (The Nonne Prestes Tale) far surpasses the original, and is one of the liveliest and most charming tales in our literature.

(c) Miscellaneous.

There are several kindred forms of allegory, such as Poetic Parable, which deals with human beings rather than with beasts. This sort of poetry came also from the East. In modern English we may cite a familiar example in Leigh Hunt's Abou ben Adhem. The Gnomic Dialogue is an old form of verse. Two persons tell in turn anecdotes intended to bring out some truth.

Such were the famous dialogues between the soul and the body, well known to our early literature: further, the dialogue between Solomon and Saturn (!) and others of the same type. This latter poem is related to the popular Riddle Ballads, in which difficult questions are put and answered. (See Child, Eng. and Scot. Pop. Ball., Vol. 1, p. 13, 2d ed.)

(3) REFLECTIVE POETRY.

The desire to draw a moral from the story of events was, we saw, practically unknown to the primitive epic. The later forms, as they grew fond of allegory, allowed the moral element to get the upper hand. At last arose a kind of poetry that is all moral, and not in any way. story, just the opposite extreme from the old epic. What allows us to class such Reflective Poetry in this place, is the fact that the poet bases his moralizing upon experience of life. Now the middle ages had a boundless affection for moralizing; they would have taken the excellent Polonius and his maxims very seriously indeed. Add a touch of melancholy, inherent in the Anglo-Saxon race, and we can readily understand how popular was the Poema Morale (about 1170), a good example of the reflective poem. It is a sermon in verse; perhaps with as much lyric tone as epic, but still well freighted with good advice in addition to the pathos. Much longer, epic in breadth, style, and plan, is Wordsworth's Excursion; shorter, his Lines written above Tintern Abbey. Another example is Cowper's Task. More directly appealing to the intellect is Pope's Essay on Criticism; to the reason, the same author's Essay on Man. With this kind of reflective and philosophical

verse we touch the borders of poetry itself. Poetry purely didactic is not poetry; for poetry must, to a certain extent, exist for its own sake, as a work of art. There is brilliant verse in Pope's Essays above-mentioned; but when we come to the lower forms of socalled didactic poetry, we must deny the substantive. Thus rimed histories, catechisms, mnemonic verses, instructive literature generally, are not poetry. Cf. Furnivall's ed. of the Book of Nurture (E. E. T. Soc. 1868); Tusser's Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry; Armstrong's Art of Preserving Health, and a host of the same kind: all of these could be much more simply and effectively written in prose. In fact, such verse is a survival from the days before prose was established, when poetry was maid-of-all-work to priesthood and the law. Yet we cannot say that all so-called didactic poetry is not poetry; even if we give up Vergil's Georgies, we have the great poem of Lucretius. In the latter case, a system of philosophy is taught in verse; but there is a vast remove from Armstrong's prattle about "The choice of aliment, the choice of air" to the glittering shafts" of Lucretius' cosmic forces. We may say that the De Rerum Natura is poetical in spite of its subject.

(4) DESCRIPTIVE POETRY.

This may be called a Nature-epic. It carries us not from one event to another, but from one object to another. It is generally combined with reflective poetry : cf. Goldsmith's Traveller and Deserted Village, or Thomson's Seasons. There is much descriptive verse in the Excursion, the Task, and like poems; also in the epic

itself. A fine bit of description is the conclusion of M. Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum. In shorter compass, it appears in the famous epic Similes (cf. p. 109), and is familiar to lyric and dramatic verse. The one condition of descriptive poetry is that it shall have distinctively human connections and human interest; else it becomes a catalogue. As a setting for the gem of human interest, it is omnipresent in poetry: the ballads open with a brief descriptive touch of the merry greenwood; the lyric has its moonlight and rustling leaves; the drama is set in actual scenery. It is this human interest combined with vivid description that gives success to Wordsworth's best work; it is the lack of human interest that condemns from the start the effort of the verse-maker, who says (according to Carlyle), "Come, let us make a description!"

It is worth noting that the gorgeous pomp of description so common in the Elizabethan drama, and to modern taste often so superfluous, is due to the miserable scenery of the early stage. To beguile the imagination away from a bare space with a pasteboard tree and a label "Forest of Arden," the playwright had recourse to elaborate and highly colored description. Famous for this characteristic is the description of Dover Cliff/ in Lear.

(5) PASTORAL POETRY.

An odd mixture of narrative and descriptive, with a dramatic element added, is the so-called Pastoral Poetry. It was once believed that poetry originated among shepherds; and in a corrupt or artificial age there is a reaction towards this primitive verse. Dwellers in crowded. cities imagine themselves "silly" shepherds piping by