Born, at Cardington, Beds., 1530 (?). Educated, probably in Westmoreland, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. Took no degree. Entered at Middle Temple, 1547 (?). Student of Gray’s Inn, 1555. M.P. for Bedford, 1557–59. Married Mrs. Elizabeth Breton, 1566 (?). Lived at Walthamstow from about 1566 till death. M.P. for Midhurst, 1572. Unseated on petition. To Holland, March 1572. Served for short time under Prince of Orange. Returned to England, 1575. Devoted himself to literature. Died, at Stamford, Lincolnshire, 7 Oct. 1577. Works: “A Hundred Sundrie Flowres,” unauthorized publication, 1572; authorized version, called “The Posies of George Gascoigne,” 1575; “The Glasse of Government,” 1575; “The Princelye Pleasures at the Courte of Kenelworthe,” 1576; “The Steele Glas,” 1576; “The Droomme of Doomesday,” 1576; “A Delicate Diet,” 1576; “The Spoyle of Antwerp” (anon.; attrib. to Gascoigne), (1577?). He edited: Sir H. Gilbert’s “Discourse of a new Passage, etc.,” 1576; and contrib. commendatory verses to: Holiband’s “French Littleton,” 1566; “The Noble Art of Venerie,” 1575; “Cardanus Comfort,” 1576. Collected Works: ed. by A. Jeffes, 1587; ed. by W. C. Hazlitt (2 vols.), 1868–70.

  Philomele, the Nightingale: whome the Poetes faine once to haue bene a Ladye of great beauty, till ravished by hir sisters husbande, she desired to be turned into a byrde of hir name, whose complaintes be very wel set forth of Ma. George Gaskin, a wittie gentleman, and the verie chefe of our late rymers, who, and if some parts of learning wanted not (albee it is well knowen he altogyther wanted not learning) no doubt would have attayned to the excellencye of those famous Poets. For gifts of wit and naturall promptnesse appeare in hym aboundantly.

  As painefull a Souldier in the affayres of hys Prince and Country, as he was a wytty Poet in his wryting.

  Who euer my priuate opinion condemneth as faultie, Master Gascoigne is not to bee abridged of his deserued esteeme, who first beate the path to that perfection which our best Poets haue aspired too since his departure; whereto he did ascend by comparing the Italian with the English, as Tullie did Græca cum Latinis.

  Gascon for a good meeter and for a plentifull vayne.

  Among the lesser late poets, George Gascoigne’s works may be endured.

  In his smaller poems he is certainly too diffuse, and full of conceit.

  Has much exceeded all the poets of his age, in smoothness and harmony of versification.

  A writer, whose mind, though it exhibits few marks of strength, is not destitute of delicacy; he is smooth, sentimental, and harmonious.

  The works of this early English Poet now sell for a most enormous price. Collectors in general are not aware, that there exists in the British Museum an unpublished Poem by Gascoigne. Great as the research is, and extravagant as the price which is given, for the printed publications of Gascoigne, I question whether it would not be a very hazardous experiment to print this Poem.

  Gascoyne’s long poem, called the “Fruits of War,” is in the doggerel style of his age; and the general commendations of Chalmers on this poet seem rather hyperbolical. But his minor poems, especially one called “The Arraignment of a Lover,” have much spirit and gayety; and we may leave him a respectable place among the Elizabethan versifiers.

  In his writings we do not meet with the chivalric fervour and impassioned sentiment of Surrey and Wyatt, or with the polish and melody of the Spenserian stanza; but Gascoigne, nevertheless, exhibits and represents a large advance both in copiousness and propriety of language, and in his command over, and compliance with, metrical canons, upon those poets who had gone before, excepting, may be, one or two foremost men. Compare him, again, with his contemporaries, with Churchyard, Tubervile, Grimoald, Googe, Whetstone, and observe his unmistakable superiority—his master-hand in what he does. Gascoigne’s works are indisputably valuable, by reason of their personal and autobiographical allusions, their picturesque, vivid and delicate delineations of incidents and feelings, and of their contributions to our philological stores. He stood, as it were, midway between the school of Surrey and the school of Spenser, but nearer to the former; and he deserves to be regarded as one of the earliest of our strictly vernacular writers. He has left to us the second blank-verse Tragedy, the earliest regular Satire, and the earliest dissertation on English rhythms, which our language and literature possess.

  His lyrics are occasionally characterised by a certain lightness and grace, which give and will give them a permanent life. Singing of all a lover’s moods and experiences—how he passions, laments, complains, recants, is refused, is encouraged—he is never a mere mimic of his Italian masters, or, though somewhat monotonous, wanting in vigour and sincerity. His style is clear and unaffected. The crude taste of his age is often enough apparent; and in this respect his “poor rude lines,” if we “compare them with the bettering of the tiems,” may sometimes make but no great show; but here too he rises above his fellows, who are often simply grotesque when they mean to be fervent, and are dull when they are not grotesque. He writes in various metres with various facility and skill. Of blank verse his mastery is imperfect; he is like a child learning to walk, whose progress is from chair to chair; he lacks freedom and fluency.

  With Gascoigne properly closes the discussion not only of the Latin drama, but of the entire genre of theological belles-lettres of which it was the most conspicuous class, and which the Reformation, comparatively barren elsewhere, produced with prolific energy in the country of its birth. Still in the vigour of manhood when Marlowe and Decker were at school, Calvinist “by grace,” but a true “Elizabethan” by nature, Gascoigne is as it were the meeting-point of the literature represented by the “Acolastus” and the “Pammachius,” and that other, not less vast or original, which is represented by “Faustus” and “Fortunatus,” by tales of magicians and witches, of fools and rogues, of Grobians and Owlglasses; a literature not, like the former, essentially composed of Christian materials, and called to life under a Christian inspiration, but a genuine and characteristic creation of the Teutonic genius,—a heap of fantastic and uncouth shapes, permeated and tinged no doubt at every point by Christian emotion, but in fundamental structure disclosing, unalloyed, the very native stuff of genial, lawless, untameable human nature.

  A character of interest inferior only to the men of the very first rank in English letters, as Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare. Gascoigne fitly introduced his great successors of the later Elizabethan period.

  Gascoigne died when he had only reached the age of forty, but he had lived long enough for his fame. He was the strongest of the English poets of his generation, and he did not, like Churchyard, live to see how greater poets rose and his light paled in their brightness,—how little wits grew dainty-mouthed, and lisped and trilled, and smiled at Gascoigne’s plain song as old-fashioned. He was “old Gascoigne” to the generation of men who were boys in 1579.

  The style of Gascoigne whether in verse or prose is singularly direct and free from the involutions and inversions which mark his latinized contemporaries. He is generally clear, and simple, except where intentionally allegorical or “mystical” as he calls it; remarkably consecutive, though easily diverted from his main purpose. His prose often exhibits greater elegance and grace than his verse, from the fact that the latter is apt to ramble and lose the sense of form and proportion in a profusion of detail. Gascoigne’s verse, however, is far from devoid of the quality of music, and displays a general smoothness and evenness of flow from his close regard for the number of syllables, from the correspondence of word and logical or rhetorical accent with the accentual scheme of his verse, from the regularity of his phrasing and from his constant employment of alliteration and its resulting ease of utterance. Gascoigne’s diction often rises to dignity and real eloquence, and his figures are frequently original and well chosen. As is to be expected from the prevailing looseness of his structure of sentence, Gascoigne prefers set and fully expounded simile to the flash and inspiration of metaphor, although it cannot be denied that he is often peculiarly happy in the use of the latter.

  It is no mean feat, indeed, to rank in history as George Gascoigne ranks, with fair documentary evidence to prove his title, as the actual first practitioner in English of comedy in prose, satire in regular verse, short prose tales, translated tragedy, and literary animadversion. But the above-mentioned student of literature as a whole, or as nearly as may be in its wholeness, would be rather surprised if he found a clever, enterprising, industrious innovator of this kind rising at once to mastery in his innovations. The most brilliant pioneers and leaders of cavalry raids are not generally the generals who win epoch-making battles, or hold down the country they have scoured. And in this particular Gascoigne, who is, perhaps, the most notable and characteristic figure of our earlier period, of which his manhood covers the greater part, is no exception…. The blank verse, of which Gascoigne was but the fourth or fifth practitioner in English, is not without merit; his prose is spirited and vigorous, if not elegant; and in his lyrics there is not seldom a touch of that unforced and childlike pathos which is the best point of these earlier Elizabethans, and which, in the later and greater school, is rather hushed by higher notes, except in the case of some of the lesser men, such as Gascoigne’s step-son, Nicholas Breton. On the other hand, his metres are still alternately limp and wooden; his style is still stiffened with the old clumsy alliteration; there is no fire or splendour in his poetry; his prose has neither continuity nor gorgeousness. He is merely a clever man living an active life in times of both material and mental activity, but with nothing very particular to say and no very exquisite manner of saying it.

  Without being a great poet Gascoigne is a representative English writer. He originated no fresh movement in metrical composition, but his active and robust intelligence enabled him to express clearly in verse the thoughts and feelings that were interesting his age. He called himself “Chaucer’s boy and Petrarch’s journeyman,” but he was himself a master of the English language; and his metrical style is singularly free from those learned affectations and conceits to the fascinations of which many of his contemporaries fell easy victims.