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That volume was published when he was universally admitted to be the chief of living English poets. It contains about twelve thousand lines. The versification is admirable, the narratives and descriptions full of life. To this day Palamon and Arcite, Cymon and Iphigenia, Theodore and Honoria, are the delight both of critics and of schoolboys.
Palamon in his dungeon is happier than I. He can see Emily and be gladdened by her beauty! 'Woe is me! said Palamon; 'here must I remain in durance. Arcite is abroad; he may make sharp war on the Athenian border, and win Emily by the sword. When Arcite returned to his native city he became so thin and pale with sorrow that his friends scarcely knew him.
I must be, Till thou art worthy, Arcite; it concerns me! And, in this madness, if I hazard thee And take thy life, I deal but truly. Arc. Fie, Sir! Two Noble Kimmen. We quitted Paris two days after; and a journey of three days, through an uninteresting country, brought us to the little town of Granville, on the sea-coast, in the channel.
My noble friend would give more than sixty years of copyright to Dryden's worst works; to the encomiastic verses on Oliver Cromwell, to the Wild Gallant, to the Rival Ladies, to other wretched pieces as bad as anything written by Flecknoe or Settle: but for Theodore and Honoria, for Tancred and Sigismunda, for Cimon and Iphigenia, for Palamon and Arcite, for Alexander's Feast, my noble friend thinks a copyright of twenty-eight years sufficient.
So stands the Thracian herdsman with his spear Full in the gap, and hopes the hunted bear; And hears him in the rustling wood, and sees His course at distance by the bending trees, And thinks Here comes my mortal enemy, And either he must fall in fight, or I. Palamon and Arcite. I took the route towards the college, as recommended by Mr.
Let the reader weigh them both, and if he thinks me partial to Chaucer, it is in him to right Boccace. I prefer in our countryman, far above all his other stories, the noble poem of Palamon and Arcite, which is of the Epic kind, and perhaps not much inferior to the Ilias or the Aeneis.
Therefore I appoint a tournament in this place a year hence. Come here then, ye Princes of Thebes, each of you, with a hundred knights of the bravest, and that one of you, who shall slay or capture the other, he shall wed Emelia." Whose face could be brighter than was Palamon's when he heard those words, and who could step more lightly than did Arcite?
At this the challenger with fierce defy His trumpet sounds; the challenged makes reply: With clangour rings the field, resounds the vaulted sky. Their visors closed, their lances in the rest, Or at the helmet pointed or the crest, They vanish from the barrier, speed the race, And spurring see decrease the middle space. Palamon and Arcite
At first Theseus was too angry to listen to them, but soon he thought that he would have done as the princes had done, if he had been in their place, so he said, "Arcite and Palamon, ye could both have lived in peace and safety in Thebes, yet love has brought you here to Athens into my power, who am your deadly foe.
We must not judge, as I have said, either by poems of much earlier date, like the Nibelungen and the Carolingian chansons de geste, which merely received a new form in the early Middle Ages; still less from the prose romances of Mélusine, Milles et Amys, Palemon and Arcite, and a host of others which were elaborated only later and under the influence of the quite unfeudal habits of the great cities; and least of all from that strange late southern cycle of the Amadises, from which, odd as it seems, many of our notions of chivalric love have, through our ancestors, through the satirists or burlesque poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, been inherited.
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