Essays and Marginalia (Volume 2) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1851. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... Essays and marginalia Hartley Coleridge The following notes are taken, for the most part, from Anderson's Collection of British Poets, in thirteen volumes, --the same in the blank pages of which the rhymed sketches, published among the Poems, were originally written. The remarks on Pope are taken from one of the Author's numerous common-place books, and those on Burns from the margins of Allan Cunningham's edition in eight volumes. NOTES ON BEITISH POETS. DRAYTON. "He wanted neither fire nor imagination, and possessed great command of his abilities. He has written no masques; his personifications of the passions are few; and that allegorical vein which the popularity of Spenser's works may fairly be supposed to have rendered fashionable, but seldom occurs in him."--Headley, quoted in the Life of Drayton. What is the Polyolbion but an allegory? and as for personification, I should think the Passions were as capable of it as the Counties. Why it should have been a peculiar commendation to have written no masques, I cannot perceive. Would Milton have been greater had he not written Comus? Are not Ben Jonson's and Daniel's masques replete with lovely poetry? And does not the masque in general bear the same relationship to the Faery Queen as the Greek Tragedies to the Iliad and the Odyssey? Neither Mr. Headley nor Dr. Anderson seem to have been aware that Drayton was a dramatic writer, which it is evident from Collier's Annals of the Stage that he was. Besides the Merry Devil of Edmonton. which Charles Lamb would fain believe his, he is entered in Henslowe's Diary as the author of two plays, neither of which have been discovered; Mother Redcap, in which he assisted Antony Munday, 1577, acted by the Lord Admiral's ...