George Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres. Edited, with an introduction and notes, by C. T. Prouty (review)

114 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Canadian-American relations. Coming as it did after a long period during which the United States, for all its loud professions of goodwill, would have found it hard to point to a single positive contribution to the cause of international amity, it marked the real beginning of a conscious effort at 'good neighbourhood whose fruits are so strikingly evident in our own day. SHORTER NOTICES George Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres. Edited, with al;1 introduction and notes, by C. T . PROUTY. The University of Missouri Studies, voL XVII, no. 2.) Columbia: University of Missouri. 1942. Pp. 305. ($2.50) NOT many of the poems in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573) have-found their way into our modern collections, and yet it is without question one of the most extraordinary of Elizabethan anthologies. 'Gascoigne, the generally accepted author, showed real distinction in comedy~ lyric and satire, and was at least better than mediocre even in his court love poetry_ But he has been eclipsed by more distinguished examples of that Tudor _ specialty, the courtier-soldier-poet; before him were ,Wyatt and Surrey, after him, Sidney an d Raleigh. Published anonymously, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres was punningly advertised on the original title page as tea Poesy" gathered "partly (by translation) in the fyne outlandish Gardins of. Euripides, Ovid, Petrarke, Ariosto, and others: and partly by invention, out of our owne fruitefull Orchardes in Englande!' Here is the typical Elizabethan attitude toward what we call plagiarism) and Gascoigne's frankness calls for appreciation of -the gardener's own originality. It is to be found in an occasionally arresting effect of extravagant humour or semi-proverbial pithiness. Otherwise the collection is apt to seem illustrative rather than distinguished: everywhere we see the literary and social qualities of the amateur aristocratic romancing and versifying of the day. In his recent book on Gascoigne, Professor Prouty attempted to portray the man and comment on his work. Here his aim is to provide a good critical text and settle the matter of Gascoigne's authorship, not questioned by his contemporaries, but denied by B. M. Ward, in his (1929) edition of the Flowres, on the basis of two sentences in which a possibly imaginary , "editor" of the originai text speaks of-the poems as by "sundrie gentlemen" , and "Master F. J. and divers others." If Ward's ascriptions of authorship to the Earl of Derby, Sir Christopher Hatton and others are very tenuous or erratic, it must be admitted that Professor Prouty's examples of literary practice are a little general for his purposes, and that in addition he leaves himself open to obvious objection for the way in which his own speculations are on later pages advanced as proven conclusions. On the whole, however, the arguments jn [aVOllf of Gascoigne's sole p.llthorship are plausible, and \ REVIEWS 115 the text seems to have been carefully collated. A number of e.xamples among the textual variants disp'rove Ward's statement that the only errors in the original text are in 'punctuation, and that in comparison the later, ,text of the collected Posies is corrupt. N. J. E. Understanding New Zealand. By FREDERICK L. W. WOOD. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc. [Toronto: Longmans, Green and Company]. 1944. Pp. x, 267.. ($4.50) New Zealand: A Working Democracy. By 'WALTER NASH. New York: World Book Company [Toro~to: Collins]. 1943. Pp. x, 335. ($3.75)_ NEW ZEALAND has been singularly fortunate in many of the 'analysts who' have describeq. its life.. Forty years ago Andre Siegfried) after visiting the country, wrote his earliest and perhaps his best study of an Anglo-Saxon state, translated into English as Democracy in New Zealand. Siegfried's work remains to the present a classic essay of its kind, with its comprehensive ,sweep and its shrewd social psychology in the tradition of French political science from de Tocqueville; In the same period William Pember Reeves, born in the South Island and prominent in its political affairs, wrote his fascinating volume, The Long White Cloud, wherein he described with genuine literary distinction not merely the history and politics but even the flora and...