The
classical
lyric, as represented, in particular, by the odes of
Anacreon and the songs of Catullus and Horace, had been regarded
with due respect already in the early days of the renascence.
Anacreon and the songs of Catullus and Horace, had been regarded
with due respect already in the early days of the renascence.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v07
STATE PAPERS AND LETTERS
By A. W. WARD, Litt. D. , F. B. A. , Master of Peterhouse
Rushworth's Collections. Thurloe's State Papers. Letters of Henrietta
Maria and of Oliver Cromwell. Sir Dudley Digges. The Compleat
Ambassador. Sir Henry Wotton. 'Intelligencers. Private
letters. The Earl of Strafford's Letters. The Fairfax Corre-
spondence. The Verney Letters. Correspondence of the Family
of Hatton, James Howell's Epistolae Ho-Elianae. Howell's
other writings
186
## p. viii (#14) ############################################
viii
Contents
CHAPTER IX
HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL WRITINGS
II. HISTORIES AND MEMOIRS
By A. W. WARD, Litt. D. , F. B. A.
PAGE
Bacon's Henry the Seventh. Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Edmund
Bolton. Sir Edward Walker. William Lilly. Peter Heylyn.
Scottish records. Archbishop Spottiswoode. David Calderwood.
Irish history. Spenser's Veue of the Present State of Ireland.
Pacata Hibernia. Other works. Clarendon. The History of the
Rebellion. Clarendon's skill in character drawing. Robert Carey's
Memoirs. Sir Robert Naunton's Fragmata Regalia. John
Manningham's Diary. Sir Kenelm Digby's Private Memoirs.
Nehemiah Wallington. Sir Simonds d'Ewes's Autobiography
and Correspondence. John Rous's Diary. Edmund Ludlow's
Memoirs. The Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson.
The Life of William Cavendish, duke of Newcastle. Bulstrode
Whitelocke. Robert Munro.
202
CHAPTER X
ANTIQUARIES
SiR THOMAS BROWNE THOMAS FULLER Izaak WALTON
Sir THOMAS URQUHART
By GEORGE SAINTSBURY, M. A.
Sir Thomas Browne. Religio Medici. Browne's style and vocabulary.
Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Browne's "scepticism. ' Hydriotaphia.
The Garden of Cyrus. A Letter to a Friend. Christian Morals.
Browne's letters. Thomas Fuller. His wit' and style. Izaak
Walton. The Compleat Angler. Sir Thomas Urquhart.
Summary
232
.
CHAPTER XI
JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE CRITICISM
By J. E. SPINGARN, Professor of Comparative Literature,
Columbia University, New York
Bacon. Ben Jonson. Minor forms of criticism. The new theory of
translation. Reynolds's Mythomystes. Milton. The aesthetics of
Hobbes. D'Avenant and Cowley. The growth of literary charac-
terisation and appreciation. The Elizabethan roll-call. Jonson's
literary portraits. The commendatory verses. The framework of
Boccalini. The final stage in Dryden .
259
## p. ix (#15) ##############################################
Contents
ix
CHAPTER XII
HOBBES AND CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY
PAGE
By W. R. SORLEY, Litt. D. , LL. D. , F. B. A. , Fellow of King's
College, Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy
Logical writings. Religious philosophy. Robert Greville, lord Brooke.
Culverwel. The Casuists. John Selden. Thomas Hobbes. His
life and character. Fundamental conception, system of philosophy
and controversies. Literary style and method of work. Leviathan.
Theory of human nature and of sovereignty. Imaginary common-
wealths: More's Utopia and Harrington's Oceana. Sir Robert
Filmer. The critics of Hobbes. Joseph Glanvill. Richard
Cumberland
276
.
CHAPTER XIII
SCHOLARS AND SCHOLARSHIP, 1600—60
By FOSTER WATSON, M. A. , Professor of Education in the
University College of Wales, Aberystwyth
English scholarship and learning in the seventeenth century. Close
relations between English and continental scholars. Influence of
French and Dutch scholars. Roman Catholic scholarship. Baro-
nius's Annales. Isaac Casaubon. The spread of patristic learning
in England. Latin and Greek scholarship. Hebrew scholarship.
University studies. Biblical culture
304
CHAPTER XIV
ENGLISH GRAMMAR SCHOOLS
By J. BASS MULLINGER, M. A. , formerly librarian of St John's
College
The transition from the scholastic to the humanistic theory of education.
Winchester, Eton. Henry Savile. Sedbergh. The Edwardian
grammar schools. St Paul's school. Westminster. The Merchant
Taylors' school. Harrow. Rugby. Shrewsbury. Christ's Hospital.
Charterhouse. John Harvard. Oakham and Uppingham. Sum-
mary.
325
## p. x (#16) ###############################################
х
Contents
CHAPTER XV
THE BEGINNINGS OF ENGLISH JOURNALISM
PAGE
By J. B. WILLIAMS
Gainsford and the Corantos. Samuel Pecke, patriarch of the press.
Berkenhead, Dillingham, Audley, Nedham, Smith, Rushworth
and Border. Walker, the ironmonger, and his literary frauds.
Martin Parker, Sheppard, Wharton, Hall, Frost, Harris and
Mabbott. John Crouch, Oliver Williams and Canne. Henry
Muddiman and The Gazette. Muddiman's newsletters
>
343
CHAPTER XVI
THE ADVENT OF MODERN THOUGHT IN POPULAR
LITERATURE
The Witch CONTROVERSY PAMPHLETEERS
By HAROLD V. ROUTH, M. A. , Peterhouse, Professor of Latin,
Trinity College, Toronto
Demonology in the Middle Ages. Belief in witchcraft. George Gif-
ford's Dialogues of Witches. King James's Daemonologie.
William Perkins's Art of Witch craft. Witch-hunting. Astro-
logical treatises. Rosicrucianism. The history of the broadside.
The street ballad and other forms of popular literature. Cavalier
and Roundhead satires. Social pamphlets. Coffee-houses. Letter
writing. Romances of chivalry. The essay. Humanists. John
Wagstaffe's Question of Witchcraft
366
.
398
Bibliographies .
Table of Principal Dates
Index of Names
519
.
523
## p. 1 (#17) ###############################################
CHAPTER I
CAVALIER LYRISTS
THE early years of the reign of Charles I are made illustrious
by a great outburst of song, which is very varied in character, and
which suffered no diminution in volume or melody until the sound
of the lute was drowned by that of the drum, and love-lyrics to
Celia or Anthea gave place to the scurrilous abuse of the Rump-
Songs. The true home of this lyric, as of the French Pléiade song
of the preceding generation, was the court, where the pastoral
fancies and gallant inventions of cavalier poets were promptly set
to music by composers in the royal service, and sung before the
monarch at Whitehall. But, in the case of the greatest of these
Caroline lyrists, the inspiration spread from court to country,
and the most memorable of the Hesperides songs are those
which sing of hock-carts, country wakes and Devon maidens going
a-maying.
The Caroline lyric, again, is a portion of the great renascence
lyric which begins with Surrey and Wyatt, includes the great
masters of Elizabethan song and, as Swinburne has finely said,
'grows fuller if not brighter through a whole chain of con-
stellations till it culminates in the crowning star of Herrick. '
Yet, if the unity of English song from Tottels Miscellany to
Hesperides is undeniable, it must be acknowledged that, as we
pass from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, a certain
change of form and temper is apparent. Many of the old
melodies pass away, and are replaced by something new and
different in character. The Petrarchian influence, which made
itself felt, not only in the sonnet sequences, but, also, in the song-
books and miscellany lyrics, of the Elizabethan age, loses much of
its potency after the year 1600 ; its chivalrous and dreamy idealism
ceases to charm, and there is a return to the greater directness and
less ethereal temper of the classical lyric of Anacreon, Catullus
and Horace.
1
E. L. VII.
CH. I.
## p. 2 (#18) ###############################################
2
Cavalier Lyrists
The swift decline of the sonnet after the close of the sixteenth
century is one of the most remarkable events in the history of the
English lyric. The decline was due, in part, to exhaustion ; in
part, too, to the opposition which the sonnet encountered at the
hands of two poetsJonson and Donne—the impress of whose
genius is felt in English poetry far into the seventeenth century.
Donne’s war upon Petrarchianism, and his creation of a love-lyric
which, in its individuality and plangent realism, as well as in the
'metaphysical qualities of its style, was directly opposed to the
visionary romanticism and Italian grace of the sonnet, has been
the theme of a preceding chapter'; but the influence of Donne
upon the secular lyric of the Caroline age, though apparent
enough in Suckling, was less penetrating than that of his con-
temporary, Jonson, who, if he joined with Donne in cursing
Petrarch 'for redacting verses to sonnets,' would fain have sent
the author of Songs and Sonets to Tyburn ‘for not keeping of
accent. ' And, whereas Donne, in the audacity of heady youthful-
ness, was a law unto himself, in all that pertained to lyric art,
Jonson, in poetry as in drama, deliberately set about imitating
the best models of the classical muse. In the field of drama, his
endeavours met with but partial success; but, in poetry, he was
more fortunate, and won for himself, as a reformer of the English
lyric, an influence which may even be compared with that of
Malherbe in the poetry of seventeenth century France.
The classical lyric, as represented, in particular, by the odes of
Anacreon and the songs of Catullus and Horace, had been regarded
with due respect already in the early days of the renascence. The
Anacreontic temper is seen in such a song as Greene’s ‘Cupid
abroad was lated in the night from Orpharion (licensed 1589)
and in Lodge's Barginet of Antimachus from England's Helicon,
while translations or imitations of Anacreon find a place in
Canzonets to foure voyces, set to music and published by Giles
Farnaby in 1598. Spenser introduces into his gorgeous painting
of the Bower of Bliss the theme of Ausonius's famous lyric, Collige,
virgo, rosas; and, among many English renderings of Catullus's
famous song to Lesbia, Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, none
comes so near to the spirit of the original as Campion’s ‘My
sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love. The influence of Catullus
is seen, too, in most of the Elizabethan wedding-odes, while
renderings of the famous Integer vitae ode of Horace are
frequently met with before 1600. But, until the coming of Ben
1 Vol. iv, chap. XI.
## p. 3 (#19) ###############################################
Influence of Jonson
3
Jonson, the influence of the classical lyric on English poetry was
fitful and uncertain. Its supporters, only too often, had followed
wandering fires; and, led astray by metrical heresies, their
classicism had found expression in the attempt to reproduce in
rimeless quantitative verse the sapphic or anacreontic measures of
antiquity.
Jonson's attitude towards the classical lyric differed widely from
that of his predecessors. Caring nothing at all for quantitative
measures, he was conscious, in spite of his Fit of Rhyme against
Rhyme, of the value of rime in English lyric verse; what he
admired most of all in the lyric of Rome or Greece was its sense
of proportion and structural beauty, its restraint, lucidity and
concision of style and its freedom from extravagance and
mannerism. It is well known that several of his most famous
songs are faithful transcripts of classical models; elsewhere-as,
for instance, in the songs from The Masque of Augures or from
Mercury Vindicated—he reproduces much of the atmosphere
of the ancient world. And, even where there is neither direct
imitation nor the reproduction of a classic atmosphere, his lyrics,
in virtue of their style, show a certain classic feeling, which was
immediately recognised by his contemporaries and successors, one
of whom, contributing his meed of praise to the dead laureate
in Jonsonus Virbius, speaks of his lyrics as
Tuned to the highest key of ancient Rome,
Returning all her music with his own.
Jonson was the first, and, in some ways, the greatest of English
literary dictators, and his influence, during the declining years of
his life, upon the circle of poets, dramatists and others who
gathered about him in the Apollo chamber of the Devil tavern,
at Temple Bar, was of the strongest. It is apparent in the
lyrics of the dramas and masques of the Jacobean age. In
Elizabethan days, the dramatic lyric, thanks to the 'wood-notes
wild' of Shakespearean song, had, in the main, resisted the influence
of the Italian art lyric and remained true to the principles of the
old folk-song. But, after the withdrawal of Shakespeare from the
stage, the classical lyric, as attuned by Ben Jonson, becomes
supreme in drama. The later dramatic songs of Heywood and
Fletcher, and those of Ford and Shirley, almost without exception,
have a classical ring in them, which brings them very near
to the manner of Jonson, and removes them far away from the
lyrics of Amiens, Feste, or Ariel. And, when we turn from the
lyrics in the dramas to those which were sung in the banqueting
1-2
## p. 4 (#20) ###############################################
4
Cavalier Lyrists
chamber at Whitehall, the influence of Jonson is again felt. As
we shall see presently, it is everywhere apparent in the lyrics of
Herrick and Carew, and its presence is likewise felt in those of
Cartwright, Randolph and Waller. We recognise it in the orderly
structure and finished grace of their lyrics, and in the substitution
of the language of courtly gallantry, which Jonson had caught
from the masters of Roman lyric, for the language of prostrate
adoration, which dominates the Petrarchian school of poetry.
Yet the Petrarchian influence died hard in England. Habington
still clung to the old ideals, and, in many of his lyrics to Castara,
we hear the accents of the sonneteers. So, too, in the main, did
Thomas Stanley, who, in spite of the fact that he was a good
classical scholar, and translated some of Anacreon's odes into
English verse, shows, in his best work, more of the spirit of
medieval chivalry than of Augustan Rome. And the same may be
said, again, of Richard Lovelace : in virtue of his associations, he
belongs to the school of cavalier lyrists, whose foremost repre-
sentatives are Carew and Suckling ; but his songs to Lucasta owe
little or nothing to Jonson or the lyrists of antiquity. His
affected conceits and his sins against what is now held to be good
taste are, perhaps, those of his own age; but the chivalrous temper
of his songs, and the worship which he pays to her whose beauty
enthralls him, are very like what we meet with in Petrarch and
in the renascence sonneteers who followed Petrarch's example.
Robert Herrick, who belonged to an old Leicestershire family
of Norse extraction, was the son of Nicholas Herrick, a London
goldsmith, and was born in Goldsmiths' row, Cheapside, on
24 August 1591. His father's sudden death, in 1592, led to his
mother's removal to the riverside village of Hampton in Middlesex;
and here, under the shadow of the proud palace which Wolsey had
built, and in which Elizabeth and James held their Christmas
revels, the poet's boyhood seems to have been spent. Nothing is
known of his schoolyears; but, in 1607, at the age of sixteen, he
was apprenticed for a term of ten years to his uncle, Sir William
Herrick, jeweller to the king, whose business house was in Wood
street, Cheapside. One or two of his poems, including the
Horatian A Country Life: to his Brother, Mr. Tho. Herrick, date
from these 'prentice years; and, very probably, it was the con-
sciousness of poetic power which induced him, in 1613, to abandon
the career of a goldsmith, and to enter St John's college, Cambridge,
as a fellow-commoner. Here, or at Trinity hall, the next
>
## p. 5 (#21) ###############################################
Herrick's Early Years
5
four years of his life were spent, and to this period belong the
letters which he wrote to his guardian and uncle, Sir William.
Their persistent ‘playne-songe' is mitte pecuniam; and, except by
informing us that, during his last year at Cambridge, he was
directing his mind to the legal profession, they throw very little light
upon his career as a student.
The ten years which elapse between his graduation at Cam-
bridge, in 1617, and his military chaplaincy under the duke of
Buckingham, in 1627, form a somewhat obscure period in Herrick's
life. They were probably spent chiefly in London, where, as 'the
music of a feast,' he foregathered with Ben Jonson and his disciples
at 'the Sun, the Dog, the Triple Tun,' and wrote some of his most
spirited songs and bacchanalian lyrics. He also numbered among
his acquaintance the leading musicians of the court-William and
Henry Lawes, Ramsay and Laniere-and wrote songs and pastoral
eclogues which were set to music by them; and some of these were
sung in the royal presence at Whitehall. There is no evidence
that he ever received a court appointment, but he secured the
patronage of influential courtiers-Endymion Porter, Mildmay
Fane earl of Westmorland and Philip Herbert earl of Pembroke-
and he confesses that he owed to them the oil of maintenance. '
In or before 1627, he took orders, and, having been appointed
chaplain to the duke of Buckingham, accompanied him on his
disastrous expedition to the isle of Rhé (1627). Two years
later, he received from the king the living of Dean Prior, on the
southern confines of Dartmoor, and exchanged the festivities of
city taverns and the revels of Whitehall for the sober duties of a
parish priest. This revolution in his career inspired one of the
noblest and most sustained of his poems, His Farewell unto
Poetry, in which he reluctantly vows to part company with his
muse :
But unto me be only hoarse, since now
(Heaven and my soul bear record of my vow)
I my desires screw from thee, and direct
Them and my thoughts to that sublim'd respect
And conscience unto priesthood. 'Tis not need,
The scarecrow unto mankind, that doth breed
Wiser conclusions in me, since I know
I've more to bear my charge than way to go;
Or bad I not, I'd stop the spreading itch
Of craving more, so in conceit be rich.
But 'tis the God of Nature who intends
And shapes my function for more glorious ends.
Except for occasional visits to London-one of which took
>
## p. 6 (#22) ###############################################
6
Cavalier Lyrists
place in 1640—Herrick remained at Dean Prior until 1647, when,
having refused to subscribe to the solemn league and covenant, he
was ejected by the Long parliament. The tedium of dull Devon-
shire' oppressed him at times, and then he broke out into bitter
vituperation of the loathed west,' and experienced an exile's
longing for London, 'blest place of my nativity’; but, with an
adaptability to circumstance which is characteristic of him, he
seems to have found much that was congenial in his new sur-
roundings, and took a peculiar pleasure in the mystic rites and
ceremonial rejoicings of village life. The yow to part company
with his muse was, fortunately, not kept, and he confesses that
his country surroundings inspired some of his finest poems.
It is natural to associate most of his courtly lyrics, and such
verses as his Farewell to Sack, with the London period of his
career; but we are probably right in connecting his songs
of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers,
Of April, May, of June and July flowers,'
together with the poems which tell of 'may-poles, hock-carts,
wassails, wakes,' mainly with the Dean Prior years. More-
over, the title of his collection of poems--Hesperides-implies
that the bulk of them were written in the west country. Herrick
never married, and it is probable that the many dainty
mistresses'-stately Julia, smooth Anthea, sweet Electra, Corinna
whom he calls to go a-maying and Perenna whom he asks to
dress his tomb with cypress-twigs and tears--are but creatures of
his imagination. The pictures which he gives us, in such poems as
His Content in the Country and A Thanksgiving to God for his
House, of his life at Dean Prior with his maid, Prudence Baldwin,
are radiantly happy and full of idyllic charm; and, if he sometimes
impaled offending parishioners with an epigram, or flung a Bible
at their heads in church, he won their hearts with the beauty of
his verses, some of which were recited at Dean Prior a century and
a half after they were first written. A keen royalist, he followed
the progress of the civil war in alternating moods of hope and
misgiving. He celebrated the victories of Charles in the western
campaigns of 1643-5, wrote a beautiful dirge on the death of lord
Bernard Stuart, slain at the battle of Rowton heath in 1646, and
still clung to hope when Charles came to reside, a virtual prisoner,
at Hampton court, in 1647.
Eager for fame, Herrick, nevertheless, was in no hurry to
publish his verses. Many of these circulated in manuscript among
his friends and patrons; and the first to appear in print was the
## p. 7 (#23) ###############################################
Publication of Hesperides 7
>
fairy-poem, Oberon's Diet, which, in an imperfect form, and under
the title A Description of his [the king of Faery's] Diet, was
published in a little volume of fairy-poems in 1635. Five years
later, three of his poems saw the light : two of these, ‘Among the
myrtles as I walked,' and the lines on The Primrose Ask me
why I send you here'-were fathered upon Carew, and appeared
in the collected edition of Carew's poems (1640), while the
spirited verses, entitled The Apparition of his Mistress calling
him to Elysium, appeared under the title His Mistris Shade
in a volume, published in 1640, also including poems by
Shakespeare, Jonson and Francis Beaumont. In the third edition
of the famous sixteenth century miscellany Witts Recreations
(1645) occur A Farewell to Sack and The Description of a
Woman; while, in 1648, soon after his ejection from Dean Prior
and return to London, he gave to the press the collection of verses,
beautifully entitled Hesperides, included among which are not
only his ‘unbaptised rhymes,' but, also, the sacred poems, or Noble
Numbers.
In the following year, Herrick joined with Dryden, Marvell and
others in commemorating the untimely death of lord Hastings,
but seems to have published no further poetry during the remaining
years of his life. He probably spent most of the commonwealth
period in London, where he had numerous friends and relations ;
but, shortly after the restoration, he went back to his living at
Dean Prior, where he died in the autumn of 1674.
The twelve hundred short poems which go to form Hesperides
may fitly be regarded as marking the supreme achievement of
renascence song. Herrick is often spoken of as a cavalier lyrist;
but it is well to remember that he is much more than this, and
that his lyre called into being melodies for which the typical
cavalier lyrists—Carew and Suckling-recked little or nothing,
but which would have found attentive ears among the contempo-
raries of Marlowe, Breton and Shakespeare. It is true that he
was no Petrarchian, and held in small esteem that union of
chivalrous sentiment and Platonic idealism which went to the
making of the great English sonnet sequences in the last decade of
the sixteenth century; but, while he followed his master, Ben
Jonson, in drawing his inspiration from the classical lyrists of
Greece and Rome rather than from those of the Italian renascence,
he, nevertheless, entered into that heritage of song which had
come down from the homelier strains of the Elizabethan song-
books and miscellanies, and was ever ready to attune his lyre to
## p. 8 (#24) ###############################################
8
Cavalier Lyrists
the music of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Campion. His fairy-
poems closely resemble those queen Mab dreams
the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy-
with which Mercutio attempts to cure the amorous fancies of
Romeo, and his Mad Maid's Song might very well have fallen
from the lips of Ophelia. His Cherry Ripe is an echo of
Campion's matchless lyric, ‘There is a garden in her face,' and his
Corinna's going a-Maying reads like a re-creation and expansion
of the following little-known song from Thomas Bateson's First
Set of English Madrigals (1604):
Sister, awake! close not your eyes!
The day her light discloses;
And the bright morning doth arise
Out of her bed of roses.
See, the clear sun, the world's bright eye,
In at our window peeping:
Lo! how she blusheth to espy
Us idle wenches sleeping.
Therefore, awake! make haste, I say,
And let us without staying,
All in our gowns of green so gay
Into the park a-maying.
Again, we may trace in Hesperides the influence of Marlowe.
The fame of Marlowe's beautiful lyric, The Passionate Shepherd
to his Love, reached far into the seventeenth century, but, whereas
already in the handling of this theme by 'Ignoto' in The Nymph's
Reply and by Donne in The Bait we may detect the inrush of
disillusionment, or the hardening of pastoral courtship into
gallantry, Herrick's rendering of Marlowe's call to the greenwood
in his lyric To Phyllis to love and live with him has all the
virginal charm and unaffected joyance of the original.
If Herrick enters into the spirit of the idyllic song of
Elizabethan days, he has also an ear for that which was still more
remote from the sophisticated tastes of cavalier lyrists—the folk-
song of the cornfield or the chimney corner. His charms to make
the bread rise, to bring in the witch, or to scare away from the
stables the hag that rides the mare, read like the primitive
charm-songs of old English poetry, while such lyrics as The
May-pole is up and The Tinker's Song have the verve and melody
of the popular song.
But, while there is in Herrick an unmistakable vein of
## p. 9 (#25) ###############################################
Classicism of Herrick
9
romanticism and a kinship with the untutored melodists of folk-
song, it must, at the same time, be remembered that he is one of
the most classical of English lyrists. His classicism derives,
through Ben Jonson, from the great masters of Latin lyric-
Catullus and Horace-as well as from that maenad throng of
Alexandrian singers whose songs of love and mirth and wine have
been fathered upon the Teian poet, Anacreon. On one occasion,
.
too, he gives us, in The Cruel Maid, a free rendering of one of the
idylls of Theocritus. Translations, or imitations, of the so-called
odes of Anacreon are, as we have seen, to be met with here and
there in the later collections of Elizabethan madrigals and
miscellany-lyrics ; but Herrick, when, in the London taverns, he
writes his Canticles to Bacchus, or, garlanded with flowers,
exclaims
This day I'll drown all sorrow;
Who knows to live to-morrow?
is the most Anacreontic of all English poets. He draws in-
spiration from Catullus in his epithalamia, and probably wrote his
elegy Upon the Death of his Sparrow, in imitation of Catullus's
Luctus in morte passeris; moreover, some of his love-lyrics to
Julia and Anthea are reminiscent of the famous songs to Lesbia :
but he lacks the passion and poignancy of the Veronese lyrist,
though he rivals him in the terse precision of his style.
Horace is the inspirer of some of Herrick's most sustained
lyrics; and, the more closely the Hesperides poems are studied, the
more fully do they reveal their author's indebtedness to the odes,
epodes and epistles of the Augustan poet. Horace was his first
love, and the verses entitled A Country Life: to his Brother,
Mr. Tho. Herrick, the first draft of which belongs to his 'prentice
years, are directly modelled, in thought and expression, upon the
famous Beatus ille epode. There is not much of Horace in
Herrick's love-songs; but, in his more sententious poems, and in
those verses in which he promises himself immortality of fame,
Horatian echoes abound, while the spirited and highly imaginative
poem, His Age, which he dedicated to his ' peculiar friend' and old
Cambridge acquaintance, John Weekes, is one of the most Horatian
lyrics in English literature.
But the classicism of Herrick extends far beyond the scope of
direct indebtedness to individual Greek or Roman authors. The
atmosphere of his verses may be that of the London tavern or the
Devonshire village, but, often enough, we find, mingled with all
this, the atmosphere of a remote Roman world, clinging tenaciously
## p. 10 (#26) ##############################################
IO
Cavalier Lyrists
to its faith in faun-habited woods, its genii of field and flood, or its
household Lares and Penates. More than once, too, we are made
to feel that there was more of the Roman flamen than the
Christian priest in Herrick, and, even in his Christian Militant,
we discern more of Roman stoicism than of the sermon on the
mount. Herrick, despite his Noble Numbers, is one of the most
pagan of English poets, and he cannot refrain from introducing
references to Roman priestcraft even where, as in his lines, To the
reverend Shade of his religious Father, his mood is one of
profound seriousness. And, whereas most of the English poets
of the renascence age were content with borrowing ideas or
imagery from the ancient world, jealously preserving, at the same
time, their independence of mind and their status as Tudor or
Stewart Englishmen, Herrick could be satisfied with nothing less
than a full absorption in the festive life of Rome; he assumes the
toga as his daily wear, and lays his offerings of grains of frank-
incense and garlic chives before the image of his peculiar Lar'
with a sincerity which is unmistakable.
His allegiance to the ancient world is likewise manifest in his
poetic art. The Spenserian tradition, with its Italian grace and
slow-moving cadences, made no appeal to him; and, almost alone
of the Caroline lyrists, he refused to bow the knee to the
metaphysic wit and perverse ingenuity of Donne. In all that
pertained to verse and diction, Herrick was the disciple of Jonson,
and, through him, of the great lyrists of antiquity. The sanity of
Jonson's poetic taste, his love of precision, his fastidious regard
for lucidity and ordonnance, are all found again in Herrick,
combined with a delicate charm and spontaneity of utterance
which the elder poet often lacked. Occasionally-as in his
Panegyric to Sir Lewis Pemberton, which is obviously modelled
on Jonson's Penshurst, and in his rapturous Night-Piece to Julia,
which recalls, in idea and verse-structure, the song of the patrico
in the masque Gipsies Metamorphosed—we can trace direct
borrowings from Jonson; but what is of far more importance
is the all-pervading sense of discipleship in everything that
pertains to the canons of poetic art.
Most of Herrick's lyrics, as we have just seen, have an accent
of spontaneity in them, but there is abundant evidence that he
was a careful and deliberate artist who practised with unfailing
assiduity the labour of the file. The lines entitled His Request to
Julia indicate very clearly how fastidious was his artistic con-
sciousness :
## p. 11 (#27) ##############################################
Herrick the Artist
II
Julia, if I chance to die
Ere I print my poetry,
I most humbly thee desire
To commit it to the fire.
Better 'twere my book were dead,
Than to live not perfected.
The existence in manuscript form of a few of his poems
furnishes
us with abundant evidence of the fact that, during the long winter
evenings which he spent at Dean Prior, he was engaged in the
careful revision of his verses. Early versions of A Country Life,
His Age, A Nuptial Song on Sir Clipseby Crew, together with
some of the fairy-poems, are preserved in the Ashmole, Harley,
Egerton and Rawlinson MSS and have been collated with the
Hesperides text by Grosart and Pollard. The collation shows
that, in some instances, whole stanzas have been deleted and harsh
or obscure lines remodelled, that everything has been sacrificed to
lucidity and precision, and to the perfect adjustment of the style
to the theme. In his lighter lyrics, the language is simple and
even homely; but, in his more sustained odes, and in verses like
the following, it acquires imaginative power, and becomes rich in
metaphor :
Alas! for me, that I have lost
E'en all almost;
Sunk is my sight, set is my sun,
And all the loom of life undone:
The staff, the elm, the prop, the sheltering wall
Whereon my vine did crawl,
Now, now blown down; needs must the old stock fall 1.
The above quotation will also serve to illustrate Herrick's
wonderful command of metre. The first half of the seventeenth
century was a time of great metric freedom, when poets wrought
wonderful melodies through their skilful handling of iambic or
trochaic lines of varying length, and through the deft interlacing
of their rimes. And, in all this, Herrick is himself a master-
spirit. He has left us whole poems-for example, His Departure
Hence-in which the verses consist of a single accent, and others
in which a verse of four accents is followed by one of two accents ;
while, in such poems as His Ode for Ben Jonson, or To Primroses
filled with Morning Dew, his craftsmanship in the structure of his
rhythms, the use of enjambment and the spacing of his rimes
calls for the highest praise :
? An Ode to Endymion Porter upon his Brother's Death.
## p. 12 (#28) ##############################################
I 2
Cavalier Lyrists
Why do ye weep, sweet babes ? can tears
Speak grief in yon,
Who were but born
Just as the modest morn
Teem'd her refreshing dew?
Alas! you have not known that shower
That mars a flower,
Nor felt the unkind
Breath of a blasting wind;
Nor are ye worn with years,
Or warp'd as we,
Who think it strange to see
Such pretty flowers, like to orphans young,
To speak by tears before ye have a tonguel.
His finest metrical effects are achieved in his iambic and trochaic
measures ; but, in his more popular songs, he makes skilful use of
trisyllabic feet, employing both the dactyl and the anapaest. In
a few of his poems, he employs the heroic couplet, and a com-
parison of his early poems in this measure with those of a later
period will show that he shared in the movement of the age
towards the Augustan measures of Dryden and Pope.
Herrick's lyric range is very great, and extends from the simple
folk-song to the Horatian ode or the Catullian epithalamy. In
addition, he has left us epistles addressed to friends and patrons,
a large number of epigrams and epitaphs and several pastoral
eclogues in amoebean verse, of which the most beautiful is that in
which Lycidas Herrick reproaches Endymion Porter for seeking
the gilded pleasures of the court and forsaking the Florabell,
dainty Amarillis and handsome-handed Drosomell of the hills and
dales. Descriptive verse was not altogether to his liking, but his
fairy-poems and such verses as those to The Hock-Cart, called
forth by the contemplation of the festive ceremonial of the
country-side, are full of charm and animation. A lover of birds
and flowers, and of all the amenities of country life, Herrick can
scarcely be called a great nature poet. He rarely attempts to
paint a well-ordered landscape, with foreground and background,
but prefers to concentrate his thoughts upon some one object in
the picture to the exclusion of everything else. His most
ambitious attempt at landscape-painting is seen in the poem
entitled A Country Life, addressed to Endymion Porter; in its
representation of a day in rural England from cockcrow and
sunrise to the evening revelry about the maypole or amid the nut-
brown mirth of a Twelfth Night feast, it challenges comparison
with L'Allegro. But Herrick's command over nature is surest
1 To Primroses filled with Morning Dew.
## p. 13 (#29) ##############################################
Herrick's Epigrams
13
where he can blend descriptions of country scenery and paintings
of still life with the outpourings of lyric emotion; or where, as in
the verses To Primroses filled with Morning Dew or To Daffodils,
he can turn from the contemplation of the beauty of flowers to
reflection on the transience of mortal life.
His poetic genius is best displayed in such lyrics as Corinna's
going a-Maying or To Phyllis to love and live with him. In these
poems, a dreamy love-sentiment-which was more to Herrick than
intense passion—is introduced to give tone and warmth to the
idyllic portrayal of nature and country life, after the manner of
the finest lyrics of Spenser's Shepheards Calender. In the one
poem, all is movement and animation, in the other, a halcyon calm
broods over the scene; and, in both, the artistic handling is perfect.
The range of his lyric emotion in his love-songs is considerable.
At times, he offends by his gross sensuousness, but, more often,
his tone is that of dreamy reverie or, in those love-songs which
seem to have been inspired by his associations with the court, that
of refined and graceful gallantry. He far surpasses Carew and
the other cavalier lyrists in the delicate homage which he renders
to those noble ladies who gathered around Henrietta Maria at
Whitehall, and is even happier in the pastoral wooing of Mistress
Elizabeth Wheeler, the Amarillis of Hesperides, who belonged not
to the court but the city. In The Night-Piece to Julia, and in
the famous song To Anthea— Bid me to live'-his lyric emotion
becomes intense and spiritualised; the fire of love touches his
heart, and he rises to the level of Catullus or Burns :
Thou art my life, my love, my heart,
The very eyes of me;
And hast command of every part,
To live and die for thee.
Next in importance to Herrick's lyrical poems are his epigrams.
Included among these, of course, are his scurrilous distichs, which
reflect the nastiness of Martial without his wit, and which were
discharged against hapless parishioners at Dean Prior, or enemies
in town. But his greatness as an epigrammatist consists not in
these, but in those épigrammes à la grecque which bear a striking
likeness to the verses of the Greek anthologists. Some of these
take the form of short complimentary poems to his friends and
kinsmen, to whom he promises the immortality of reflected fame ;
others are epitaphs on matrons, little children and maidens dying
in the first bloom of womanhood. Here belong, too, his gnomic
verses, his quaint dedicatory poems to Juno, Neptune and Vulcan,
## p. 14 (#30) ##############################################
14
Cavalier Lyrists
and to his household gods; and, lastly, his numerous epigrams Upon
Himself and To his Book, in which, in his delightfully frank and
ingenuous manner, he disburdens his soul of its hopes or fears.
The epigram had arisen in England under the influence of the
revival of learning, and, though at first only the satiric epigram
was practised, acquaintance with the Greek epigrams of the
Planudean anthology had gradually led to the study of this earlier
and nobler form of epigrammatic writing. Jonson has left us
several epigrams of this nature, together with others of a satiric
kind, and imitations of the poems in the Greek anthology find a
place in some of the later song-books, and, above all, in
Drummond's collection of Madrigals and Epigrams, first pub-
lished in 1656, but written years before. Herrick surpasses all his
contemporaries as an epigrammatist, both in variety of theme and
delicacy of finish, and is almost as supreme in the epigrammatic art
as in the lyric. In order to compare his workmanship in these two
branches of the poetic art, it may be worth while to bring together
his song, To Daffodils, and his epigram on the same flower. Each,
in its kind, touches perfection, and the idea is the same in both :
Fair daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early rising sun
Has not attained his noon,
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the evensong;
And, having prayed together, we
Will go with you along.
We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
Like to the summer's rain,
Or as the pearls of morning's dew,
Ne'er to be found again,
When a daffodil I see,
Hanging down his head towards me,
Guess I may what I must be:
First, I shall decline my head;
Secondly, I shall be dead;
Lastly, safely buried.
Herrick's sacred verses, or Noble Numbers, enlarge our view of
## p. 15 (#31) ##############################################
Noble Numbers
15
his unique personality, but scarcely add to his fame as a poet. He
followed the example of Donne in dedicating his powers to
religion, when he entered the church; but, unlike Donne, he could
not break with the past or change the temper of his mind. His
materialistic nature and sensuous fancy are as manifest in many of
his religious verses as in his secular, and some of his poetic
addresses to God are incongruously like those to his 'peculiar
Lar. ' Donne's Litany may well have inspired Herrick to write his
Litany to the Holy Spirit; but the character of the two priests, as
revealed in their respective poems, is entirely different. And if
his religious verse is unlike that of Donne, it is still more unlike
that of his immediate contemporaries, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan
or Traherne. The symbolism and soul-scrutiny of Herbert, and
the seraphic exaltation of Crashaw, were altogether foreign to
Herrick, nor could his mundane temperament hold fellowship with
the Celtic mysticism of Vaughan and Traherne. But such poems
as His Creed, His Litany to the Holy Spirit and His Thanks-
giving to God for his House are a pure delight to us, because of
their unaffected naïveté and homely charm, while the practical side
of his religion is pleasingly set forth in the verses, To keep a true
Lent, and his lyric emotion and powers of imagination find full
expression in his beautiful Dirge of Jephthah's Daughter.
The poems of Herrick, in spite of their author's self-assurance
of immortality, seem to have been treated with scanty respect in
the years which followed the publication of Hesperides. Whereas
the lyrics of Carew and Suckling passed through several editions
in the course of the seventeenth century, no such honour was
paid to Hesperides ; moreover, the references to Herrick in the
biographical and critical writings of Anthony à Wood, Phillips and
Winstanley are as meagre as they are misleading. The revival of
his poetry began in the closing years of the eighteenth century,
since which time his fame has grown so steadily that, at last, he
has come to take his place among the greatest of English lyric
poets. He lacks, it is true, the highest gift of all-that of touching
the deepest chords in human nature, and of rousing men to high
purposes and high enthusiasms. But this lack of intensity is
common to him and to the renascence lyrists as a whole. For the
renascence song is that of a nation still in its childhood, un-
conscious, as yet, of conflicting emotions or complexity of thought,
and knowing nothing of the burden of modernity. It is the
holiday lyric of men who were content to fleet the time carelessly,
in a golden world of their own imagination ; whose philosophy was
## p. 16 (#32) ##############################################
16
Cavalier Lyrists
but to seize the day, and gather the rosebuds of life while youth
and summer sunshine were still theirs. This is the temper of the
songs of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Breton, and—though the
horizon of their poetic vision is changed and contracted—of those
of Carew and Suckling. And, among all these singers of a day
when England was a nest of singing-birds, Herrick reigns as king.
Thomas Carew, who came of the Cornish branch of the Carew
family, was the younger son of Sir Matthew Carew, master in
Chancery, and of Alice, daughter of Sir John Rivers, a lord mayor
of London. The date of his birth is uncertain, but 1598 is the
generally accepted year. He was educated at Corpus Christi
college, Oxford, but left the university without a degree, and, in
1614, was reading law in the Middle Temple. A little later, he
became secretary to Sir Dudley Carleton, British ambassador at
Venice. In 1616, Carleton was sent as ambassador to the Hague,
and was accompanied by his secretary ; but, after a few months
service there, Carew, for reasons not fully known, threw up his
post and returned to England. In the October of the same year,
he is described by his father as 'wandering idly about without
employment. ' In 1619, he was with lord Herbert of Cherbury at
the French court, and, soon after the accession of Charles I, he
won the king's favour, who made him his sewer in ordinary, and a
gentleman of his privy chamber; he also bestowed upon him the
royal domain of Sunninghill, near Windsor.
The following years of his life seem to have been spent chiefly
among the courtiers of Whitehall and the wits of the town. He
was of the tribe of Ben,' and numbered Suckling, D'Avenant,
George Sandys and Aurelian Townsend among his friends and
acquaintances. Anthony à Wood bears witness to his 'delicacy
of wit and poetic fancy,' and Clarendon describes him as 'a
person of pleasant and facetious wit'; from Suckling's well-known
reference to him in A Session of the Poets, it would seem as
though he were looked upon as the poet laureate of the court,
though the official laureate at this time was Ben Jonson.
In 1634, he wrote his elaborate masque, Coelum Britannicum;
it was undertaken at the royal command, and was performed at
Whitehall on the Shrove Tuesday of that year.
year. Other
followed, but, in 1638, his life came suddenly to an end. Two
years after his death, his poems were collected and published : in-
sufficient care was taken with this edition; for, while some of Carew's
poems were omitted from it, other poems which were not his-
Other poems
## p. 17 (#33) ##############################################
Thomas Carew
17
a
including Ben Jonson's famous 'Come, my Celia, let us prove,' and
two of Herrick's lyrics?
_found a place in it.
The right of Carew to stand next to Herrick among the
Caroline lyrists can scarcely be questioned, and the two poets have
a good deal in common. Had Herrick not been transported, in
the year 1629, from the gilded chambers of Whitehall to the
thatched cottages of Dean Prior, the resemblance between
them, doubtless, would have been still greater. For, up to that
date, in spite of a certain inequality in age and breeding,
they must have come under very much the same influences, and
moved in the same social circles. They never mention one
another, but they can hardly have failed to meet, if not in the
precincts of the court, then in the society of their tribal lord,
Ben Jonson, whose intellectual sovereignty they alike acknow-
ledge. In both, the artistic sense was strong, and the atmosphere
of Carew's lyrics to Celia is curiously like that of many of Herrick's
to Julia. Finally, both poets render the homage of complimentary
verse to the king, to the duke of Buckingham, to John Crofts, the
king's cup-bearer, and to Lucy Hay, countess of Carlisle, whose
beauty is the theme of many a cavalier lyrist, and who, two
centuries after her death, became the heroine of Browning's
Strafford. But residence in Devonshire widened immeasurably
the horizon of Herrick's poetic vision, and enabled him to find, in
festooned maypoles and primrose glades, new themes for song
of which Carew remained throughout his life wholly ignorant.
Carew resembles Herrick, again, in the fact that his poems
furnish us with an easy transition from the Elizabethan lyric to
that of the seventeenth century; but, whereas Herrick approaches
nearest to the earlier manner in those poems in which he
reproduces the youthfulness and romantic glow of the best mis-
cellany-lyrics-for example, Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd
to his Love-Carew's sympathy is with the more artificial lyricism
of the sonnet. In his Elegy upon the Death of Dr Donne, he
rightly estimates the achievement of the great lyric reformer in
purging the muses' garden of pedantic weeds ' and 'the lazy seeds
of servile imitation’; yet, in such a poem as the following, he keeps
very closely to the Petrarchian manner of the sonneteers, against
which Donne declared open warfare :
I'll gaze no more on her bewitching face,
Since ruin harbours there in every place.
For my enchanted soul alike she drowns
With calms and tempests of her smiles and frowns.
1 See supra, p. 7.
2
E. L.
By A. W. WARD, Litt. D. , F. B. A. , Master of Peterhouse
Rushworth's Collections. Thurloe's State Papers. Letters of Henrietta
Maria and of Oliver Cromwell. Sir Dudley Digges. The Compleat
Ambassador. Sir Henry Wotton. 'Intelligencers. Private
letters. The Earl of Strafford's Letters. The Fairfax Corre-
spondence. The Verney Letters. Correspondence of the Family
of Hatton, James Howell's Epistolae Ho-Elianae. Howell's
other writings
186
## p. viii (#14) ############################################
viii
Contents
CHAPTER IX
HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL WRITINGS
II. HISTORIES AND MEMOIRS
By A. W. WARD, Litt. D. , F. B. A.
PAGE
Bacon's Henry the Seventh. Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Edmund
Bolton. Sir Edward Walker. William Lilly. Peter Heylyn.
Scottish records. Archbishop Spottiswoode. David Calderwood.
Irish history. Spenser's Veue of the Present State of Ireland.
Pacata Hibernia. Other works. Clarendon. The History of the
Rebellion. Clarendon's skill in character drawing. Robert Carey's
Memoirs. Sir Robert Naunton's Fragmata Regalia. John
Manningham's Diary. Sir Kenelm Digby's Private Memoirs.
Nehemiah Wallington. Sir Simonds d'Ewes's Autobiography
and Correspondence. John Rous's Diary. Edmund Ludlow's
Memoirs. The Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson.
The Life of William Cavendish, duke of Newcastle. Bulstrode
Whitelocke. Robert Munro.
202
CHAPTER X
ANTIQUARIES
SiR THOMAS BROWNE THOMAS FULLER Izaak WALTON
Sir THOMAS URQUHART
By GEORGE SAINTSBURY, M. A.
Sir Thomas Browne. Religio Medici. Browne's style and vocabulary.
Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Browne's "scepticism. ' Hydriotaphia.
The Garden of Cyrus. A Letter to a Friend. Christian Morals.
Browne's letters. Thomas Fuller. His wit' and style. Izaak
Walton. The Compleat Angler. Sir Thomas Urquhart.
Summary
232
.
CHAPTER XI
JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE CRITICISM
By J. E. SPINGARN, Professor of Comparative Literature,
Columbia University, New York
Bacon. Ben Jonson. Minor forms of criticism. The new theory of
translation. Reynolds's Mythomystes. Milton. The aesthetics of
Hobbes. D'Avenant and Cowley. The growth of literary charac-
terisation and appreciation. The Elizabethan roll-call. Jonson's
literary portraits. The commendatory verses. The framework of
Boccalini. The final stage in Dryden .
259
## p. ix (#15) ##############################################
Contents
ix
CHAPTER XII
HOBBES AND CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY
PAGE
By W. R. SORLEY, Litt. D. , LL. D. , F. B. A. , Fellow of King's
College, Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy
Logical writings. Religious philosophy. Robert Greville, lord Brooke.
Culverwel. The Casuists. John Selden. Thomas Hobbes. His
life and character. Fundamental conception, system of philosophy
and controversies. Literary style and method of work. Leviathan.
Theory of human nature and of sovereignty. Imaginary common-
wealths: More's Utopia and Harrington's Oceana. Sir Robert
Filmer. The critics of Hobbes. Joseph Glanvill. Richard
Cumberland
276
.
CHAPTER XIII
SCHOLARS AND SCHOLARSHIP, 1600—60
By FOSTER WATSON, M. A. , Professor of Education in the
University College of Wales, Aberystwyth
English scholarship and learning in the seventeenth century. Close
relations between English and continental scholars. Influence of
French and Dutch scholars. Roman Catholic scholarship. Baro-
nius's Annales. Isaac Casaubon. The spread of patristic learning
in England. Latin and Greek scholarship. Hebrew scholarship.
University studies. Biblical culture
304
CHAPTER XIV
ENGLISH GRAMMAR SCHOOLS
By J. BASS MULLINGER, M. A. , formerly librarian of St John's
College
The transition from the scholastic to the humanistic theory of education.
Winchester, Eton. Henry Savile. Sedbergh. The Edwardian
grammar schools. St Paul's school. Westminster. The Merchant
Taylors' school. Harrow. Rugby. Shrewsbury. Christ's Hospital.
Charterhouse. John Harvard. Oakham and Uppingham. Sum-
mary.
325
## p. x (#16) ###############################################
х
Contents
CHAPTER XV
THE BEGINNINGS OF ENGLISH JOURNALISM
PAGE
By J. B. WILLIAMS
Gainsford and the Corantos. Samuel Pecke, patriarch of the press.
Berkenhead, Dillingham, Audley, Nedham, Smith, Rushworth
and Border. Walker, the ironmonger, and his literary frauds.
Martin Parker, Sheppard, Wharton, Hall, Frost, Harris and
Mabbott. John Crouch, Oliver Williams and Canne. Henry
Muddiman and The Gazette. Muddiman's newsletters
>
343
CHAPTER XVI
THE ADVENT OF MODERN THOUGHT IN POPULAR
LITERATURE
The Witch CONTROVERSY PAMPHLETEERS
By HAROLD V. ROUTH, M. A. , Peterhouse, Professor of Latin,
Trinity College, Toronto
Demonology in the Middle Ages. Belief in witchcraft. George Gif-
ford's Dialogues of Witches. King James's Daemonologie.
William Perkins's Art of Witch craft. Witch-hunting. Astro-
logical treatises. Rosicrucianism. The history of the broadside.
The street ballad and other forms of popular literature. Cavalier
and Roundhead satires. Social pamphlets. Coffee-houses. Letter
writing. Romances of chivalry. The essay. Humanists. John
Wagstaffe's Question of Witchcraft
366
.
398
Bibliographies .
Table of Principal Dates
Index of Names
519
.
523
## p. 1 (#17) ###############################################
CHAPTER I
CAVALIER LYRISTS
THE early years of the reign of Charles I are made illustrious
by a great outburst of song, which is very varied in character, and
which suffered no diminution in volume or melody until the sound
of the lute was drowned by that of the drum, and love-lyrics to
Celia or Anthea gave place to the scurrilous abuse of the Rump-
Songs. The true home of this lyric, as of the French Pléiade song
of the preceding generation, was the court, where the pastoral
fancies and gallant inventions of cavalier poets were promptly set
to music by composers in the royal service, and sung before the
monarch at Whitehall. But, in the case of the greatest of these
Caroline lyrists, the inspiration spread from court to country,
and the most memorable of the Hesperides songs are those
which sing of hock-carts, country wakes and Devon maidens going
a-maying.
The Caroline lyric, again, is a portion of the great renascence
lyric which begins with Surrey and Wyatt, includes the great
masters of Elizabethan song and, as Swinburne has finely said,
'grows fuller if not brighter through a whole chain of con-
stellations till it culminates in the crowning star of Herrick. '
Yet, if the unity of English song from Tottels Miscellany to
Hesperides is undeniable, it must be acknowledged that, as we
pass from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, a certain
change of form and temper is apparent. Many of the old
melodies pass away, and are replaced by something new and
different in character. The Petrarchian influence, which made
itself felt, not only in the sonnet sequences, but, also, in the song-
books and miscellany lyrics, of the Elizabethan age, loses much of
its potency after the year 1600 ; its chivalrous and dreamy idealism
ceases to charm, and there is a return to the greater directness and
less ethereal temper of the classical lyric of Anacreon, Catullus
and Horace.
1
E. L. VII.
CH. I.
## p. 2 (#18) ###############################################
2
Cavalier Lyrists
The swift decline of the sonnet after the close of the sixteenth
century is one of the most remarkable events in the history of the
English lyric. The decline was due, in part, to exhaustion ; in
part, too, to the opposition which the sonnet encountered at the
hands of two poetsJonson and Donne—the impress of whose
genius is felt in English poetry far into the seventeenth century.
Donne’s war upon Petrarchianism, and his creation of a love-lyric
which, in its individuality and plangent realism, as well as in the
'metaphysical qualities of its style, was directly opposed to the
visionary romanticism and Italian grace of the sonnet, has been
the theme of a preceding chapter'; but the influence of Donne
upon the secular lyric of the Caroline age, though apparent
enough in Suckling, was less penetrating than that of his con-
temporary, Jonson, who, if he joined with Donne in cursing
Petrarch 'for redacting verses to sonnets,' would fain have sent
the author of Songs and Sonets to Tyburn ‘for not keeping of
accent. ' And, whereas Donne, in the audacity of heady youthful-
ness, was a law unto himself, in all that pertained to lyric art,
Jonson, in poetry as in drama, deliberately set about imitating
the best models of the classical muse. In the field of drama, his
endeavours met with but partial success; but, in poetry, he was
more fortunate, and won for himself, as a reformer of the English
lyric, an influence which may even be compared with that of
Malherbe in the poetry of seventeenth century France.
The classical lyric, as represented, in particular, by the odes of
Anacreon and the songs of Catullus and Horace, had been regarded
with due respect already in the early days of the renascence. The
Anacreontic temper is seen in such a song as Greene’s ‘Cupid
abroad was lated in the night from Orpharion (licensed 1589)
and in Lodge's Barginet of Antimachus from England's Helicon,
while translations or imitations of Anacreon find a place in
Canzonets to foure voyces, set to music and published by Giles
Farnaby in 1598. Spenser introduces into his gorgeous painting
of the Bower of Bliss the theme of Ausonius's famous lyric, Collige,
virgo, rosas; and, among many English renderings of Catullus's
famous song to Lesbia, Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, none
comes so near to the spirit of the original as Campion’s ‘My
sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love. The influence of Catullus
is seen, too, in most of the Elizabethan wedding-odes, while
renderings of the famous Integer vitae ode of Horace are
frequently met with before 1600. But, until the coming of Ben
1 Vol. iv, chap. XI.
## p. 3 (#19) ###############################################
Influence of Jonson
3
Jonson, the influence of the classical lyric on English poetry was
fitful and uncertain. Its supporters, only too often, had followed
wandering fires; and, led astray by metrical heresies, their
classicism had found expression in the attempt to reproduce in
rimeless quantitative verse the sapphic or anacreontic measures of
antiquity.
Jonson's attitude towards the classical lyric differed widely from
that of his predecessors. Caring nothing at all for quantitative
measures, he was conscious, in spite of his Fit of Rhyme against
Rhyme, of the value of rime in English lyric verse; what he
admired most of all in the lyric of Rome or Greece was its sense
of proportion and structural beauty, its restraint, lucidity and
concision of style and its freedom from extravagance and
mannerism. It is well known that several of his most famous
songs are faithful transcripts of classical models; elsewhere-as,
for instance, in the songs from The Masque of Augures or from
Mercury Vindicated—he reproduces much of the atmosphere
of the ancient world. And, even where there is neither direct
imitation nor the reproduction of a classic atmosphere, his lyrics,
in virtue of their style, show a certain classic feeling, which was
immediately recognised by his contemporaries and successors, one
of whom, contributing his meed of praise to the dead laureate
in Jonsonus Virbius, speaks of his lyrics as
Tuned to the highest key of ancient Rome,
Returning all her music with his own.
Jonson was the first, and, in some ways, the greatest of English
literary dictators, and his influence, during the declining years of
his life, upon the circle of poets, dramatists and others who
gathered about him in the Apollo chamber of the Devil tavern,
at Temple Bar, was of the strongest. It is apparent in the
lyrics of the dramas and masques of the Jacobean age. In
Elizabethan days, the dramatic lyric, thanks to the 'wood-notes
wild' of Shakespearean song, had, in the main, resisted the influence
of the Italian art lyric and remained true to the principles of the
old folk-song. But, after the withdrawal of Shakespeare from the
stage, the classical lyric, as attuned by Ben Jonson, becomes
supreme in drama. The later dramatic songs of Heywood and
Fletcher, and those of Ford and Shirley, almost without exception,
have a classical ring in them, which brings them very near
to the manner of Jonson, and removes them far away from the
lyrics of Amiens, Feste, or Ariel. And, when we turn from the
lyrics in the dramas to those which were sung in the banqueting
1-2
## p. 4 (#20) ###############################################
4
Cavalier Lyrists
chamber at Whitehall, the influence of Jonson is again felt. As
we shall see presently, it is everywhere apparent in the lyrics of
Herrick and Carew, and its presence is likewise felt in those of
Cartwright, Randolph and Waller. We recognise it in the orderly
structure and finished grace of their lyrics, and in the substitution
of the language of courtly gallantry, which Jonson had caught
from the masters of Roman lyric, for the language of prostrate
adoration, which dominates the Petrarchian school of poetry.
Yet the Petrarchian influence died hard in England. Habington
still clung to the old ideals, and, in many of his lyrics to Castara,
we hear the accents of the sonneteers. So, too, in the main, did
Thomas Stanley, who, in spite of the fact that he was a good
classical scholar, and translated some of Anacreon's odes into
English verse, shows, in his best work, more of the spirit of
medieval chivalry than of Augustan Rome. And the same may be
said, again, of Richard Lovelace : in virtue of his associations, he
belongs to the school of cavalier lyrists, whose foremost repre-
sentatives are Carew and Suckling ; but his songs to Lucasta owe
little or nothing to Jonson or the lyrists of antiquity. His
affected conceits and his sins against what is now held to be good
taste are, perhaps, those of his own age; but the chivalrous temper
of his songs, and the worship which he pays to her whose beauty
enthralls him, are very like what we meet with in Petrarch and
in the renascence sonneteers who followed Petrarch's example.
Robert Herrick, who belonged to an old Leicestershire family
of Norse extraction, was the son of Nicholas Herrick, a London
goldsmith, and was born in Goldsmiths' row, Cheapside, on
24 August 1591. His father's sudden death, in 1592, led to his
mother's removal to the riverside village of Hampton in Middlesex;
and here, under the shadow of the proud palace which Wolsey had
built, and in which Elizabeth and James held their Christmas
revels, the poet's boyhood seems to have been spent. Nothing is
known of his schoolyears; but, in 1607, at the age of sixteen, he
was apprenticed for a term of ten years to his uncle, Sir William
Herrick, jeweller to the king, whose business house was in Wood
street, Cheapside. One or two of his poems, including the
Horatian A Country Life: to his Brother, Mr. Tho. Herrick, date
from these 'prentice years; and, very probably, it was the con-
sciousness of poetic power which induced him, in 1613, to abandon
the career of a goldsmith, and to enter St John's college, Cambridge,
as a fellow-commoner. Here, or at Trinity hall, the next
>
## p. 5 (#21) ###############################################
Herrick's Early Years
5
four years of his life were spent, and to this period belong the
letters which he wrote to his guardian and uncle, Sir William.
Their persistent ‘playne-songe' is mitte pecuniam; and, except by
informing us that, during his last year at Cambridge, he was
directing his mind to the legal profession, they throw very little light
upon his career as a student.
The ten years which elapse between his graduation at Cam-
bridge, in 1617, and his military chaplaincy under the duke of
Buckingham, in 1627, form a somewhat obscure period in Herrick's
life. They were probably spent chiefly in London, where, as 'the
music of a feast,' he foregathered with Ben Jonson and his disciples
at 'the Sun, the Dog, the Triple Tun,' and wrote some of his most
spirited songs and bacchanalian lyrics. He also numbered among
his acquaintance the leading musicians of the court-William and
Henry Lawes, Ramsay and Laniere-and wrote songs and pastoral
eclogues which were set to music by them; and some of these were
sung in the royal presence at Whitehall. There is no evidence
that he ever received a court appointment, but he secured the
patronage of influential courtiers-Endymion Porter, Mildmay
Fane earl of Westmorland and Philip Herbert earl of Pembroke-
and he confesses that he owed to them the oil of maintenance. '
In or before 1627, he took orders, and, having been appointed
chaplain to the duke of Buckingham, accompanied him on his
disastrous expedition to the isle of Rhé (1627). Two years
later, he received from the king the living of Dean Prior, on the
southern confines of Dartmoor, and exchanged the festivities of
city taverns and the revels of Whitehall for the sober duties of a
parish priest. This revolution in his career inspired one of the
noblest and most sustained of his poems, His Farewell unto
Poetry, in which he reluctantly vows to part company with his
muse :
But unto me be only hoarse, since now
(Heaven and my soul bear record of my vow)
I my desires screw from thee, and direct
Them and my thoughts to that sublim'd respect
And conscience unto priesthood. 'Tis not need,
The scarecrow unto mankind, that doth breed
Wiser conclusions in me, since I know
I've more to bear my charge than way to go;
Or bad I not, I'd stop the spreading itch
Of craving more, so in conceit be rich.
But 'tis the God of Nature who intends
And shapes my function for more glorious ends.
Except for occasional visits to London-one of which took
>
## p. 6 (#22) ###############################################
6
Cavalier Lyrists
place in 1640—Herrick remained at Dean Prior until 1647, when,
having refused to subscribe to the solemn league and covenant, he
was ejected by the Long parliament. The tedium of dull Devon-
shire' oppressed him at times, and then he broke out into bitter
vituperation of the loathed west,' and experienced an exile's
longing for London, 'blest place of my nativity’; but, with an
adaptability to circumstance which is characteristic of him, he
seems to have found much that was congenial in his new sur-
roundings, and took a peculiar pleasure in the mystic rites and
ceremonial rejoicings of village life. The yow to part company
with his muse was, fortunately, not kept, and he confesses that
his country surroundings inspired some of his finest poems.
It is natural to associate most of his courtly lyrics, and such
verses as his Farewell to Sack, with the London period of his
career; but we are probably right in connecting his songs
of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers,
Of April, May, of June and July flowers,'
together with the poems which tell of 'may-poles, hock-carts,
wassails, wakes,' mainly with the Dean Prior years. More-
over, the title of his collection of poems--Hesperides-implies
that the bulk of them were written in the west country. Herrick
never married, and it is probable that the many dainty
mistresses'-stately Julia, smooth Anthea, sweet Electra, Corinna
whom he calls to go a-maying and Perenna whom he asks to
dress his tomb with cypress-twigs and tears--are but creatures of
his imagination. The pictures which he gives us, in such poems as
His Content in the Country and A Thanksgiving to God for his
House, of his life at Dean Prior with his maid, Prudence Baldwin,
are radiantly happy and full of idyllic charm; and, if he sometimes
impaled offending parishioners with an epigram, or flung a Bible
at their heads in church, he won their hearts with the beauty of
his verses, some of which were recited at Dean Prior a century and
a half after they were first written. A keen royalist, he followed
the progress of the civil war in alternating moods of hope and
misgiving. He celebrated the victories of Charles in the western
campaigns of 1643-5, wrote a beautiful dirge on the death of lord
Bernard Stuart, slain at the battle of Rowton heath in 1646, and
still clung to hope when Charles came to reside, a virtual prisoner,
at Hampton court, in 1647.
Eager for fame, Herrick, nevertheless, was in no hurry to
publish his verses. Many of these circulated in manuscript among
his friends and patrons; and the first to appear in print was the
## p. 7 (#23) ###############################################
Publication of Hesperides 7
>
fairy-poem, Oberon's Diet, which, in an imperfect form, and under
the title A Description of his [the king of Faery's] Diet, was
published in a little volume of fairy-poems in 1635. Five years
later, three of his poems saw the light : two of these, ‘Among the
myrtles as I walked,' and the lines on The Primrose Ask me
why I send you here'-were fathered upon Carew, and appeared
in the collected edition of Carew's poems (1640), while the
spirited verses, entitled The Apparition of his Mistress calling
him to Elysium, appeared under the title His Mistris Shade
in a volume, published in 1640, also including poems by
Shakespeare, Jonson and Francis Beaumont. In the third edition
of the famous sixteenth century miscellany Witts Recreations
(1645) occur A Farewell to Sack and The Description of a
Woman; while, in 1648, soon after his ejection from Dean Prior
and return to London, he gave to the press the collection of verses,
beautifully entitled Hesperides, included among which are not
only his ‘unbaptised rhymes,' but, also, the sacred poems, or Noble
Numbers.
In the following year, Herrick joined with Dryden, Marvell and
others in commemorating the untimely death of lord Hastings,
but seems to have published no further poetry during the remaining
years of his life. He probably spent most of the commonwealth
period in London, where he had numerous friends and relations ;
but, shortly after the restoration, he went back to his living at
Dean Prior, where he died in the autumn of 1674.
The twelve hundred short poems which go to form Hesperides
may fitly be regarded as marking the supreme achievement of
renascence song. Herrick is often spoken of as a cavalier lyrist;
but it is well to remember that he is much more than this, and
that his lyre called into being melodies for which the typical
cavalier lyrists—Carew and Suckling-recked little or nothing,
but which would have found attentive ears among the contempo-
raries of Marlowe, Breton and Shakespeare. It is true that he
was no Petrarchian, and held in small esteem that union of
chivalrous sentiment and Platonic idealism which went to the
making of the great English sonnet sequences in the last decade of
the sixteenth century; but, while he followed his master, Ben
Jonson, in drawing his inspiration from the classical lyrists of
Greece and Rome rather than from those of the Italian renascence,
he, nevertheless, entered into that heritage of song which had
come down from the homelier strains of the Elizabethan song-
books and miscellanies, and was ever ready to attune his lyre to
## p. 8 (#24) ###############################################
8
Cavalier Lyrists
the music of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Campion. His fairy-
poems closely resemble those queen Mab dreams
the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy-
with which Mercutio attempts to cure the amorous fancies of
Romeo, and his Mad Maid's Song might very well have fallen
from the lips of Ophelia. His Cherry Ripe is an echo of
Campion's matchless lyric, ‘There is a garden in her face,' and his
Corinna's going a-Maying reads like a re-creation and expansion
of the following little-known song from Thomas Bateson's First
Set of English Madrigals (1604):
Sister, awake! close not your eyes!
The day her light discloses;
And the bright morning doth arise
Out of her bed of roses.
See, the clear sun, the world's bright eye,
In at our window peeping:
Lo! how she blusheth to espy
Us idle wenches sleeping.
Therefore, awake! make haste, I say,
And let us without staying,
All in our gowns of green so gay
Into the park a-maying.
Again, we may trace in Hesperides the influence of Marlowe.
The fame of Marlowe's beautiful lyric, The Passionate Shepherd
to his Love, reached far into the seventeenth century, but, whereas
already in the handling of this theme by 'Ignoto' in The Nymph's
Reply and by Donne in The Bait we may detect the inrush of
disillusionment, or the hardening of pastoral courtship into
gallantry, Herrick's rendering of Marlowe's call to the greenwood
in his lyric To Phyllis to love and live with him has all the
virginal charm and unaffected joyance of the original.
If Herrick enters into the spirit of the idyllic song of
Elizabethan days, he has also an ear for that which was still more
remote from the sophisticated tastes of cavalier lyrists—the folk-
song of the cornfield or the chimney corner. His charms to make
the bread rise, to bring in the witch, or to scare away from the
stables the hag that rides the mare, read like the primitive
charm-songs of old English poetry, while such lyrics as The
May-pole is up and The Tinker's Song have the verve and melody
of the popular song.
But, while there is in Herrick an unmistakable vein of
## p. 9 (#25) ###############################################
Classicism of Herrick
9
romanticism and a kinship with the untutored melodists of folk-
song, it must, at the same time, be remembered that he is one of
the most classical of English lyrists. His classicism derives,
through Ben Jonson, from the great masters of Latin lyric-
Catullus and Horace-as well as from that maenad throng of
Alexandrian singers whose songs of love and mirth and wine have
been fathered upon the Teian poet, Anacreon. On one occasion,
.
too, he gives us, in The Cruel Maid, a free rendering of one of the
idylls of Theocritus. Translations, or imitations, of the so-called
odes of Anacreon are, as we have seen, to be met with here and
there in the later collections of Elizabethan madrigals and
miscellany-lyrics ; but Herrick, when, in the London taverns, he
writes his Canticles to Bacchus, or, garlanded with flowers,
exclaims
This day I'll drown all sorrow;
Who knows to live to-morrow?
is the most Anacreontic of all English poets. He draws in-
spiration from Catullus in his epithalamia, and probably wrote his
elegy Upon the Death of his Sparrow, in imitation of Catullus's
Luctus in morte passeris; moreover, some of his love-lyrics to
Julia and Anthea are reminiscent of the famous songs to Lesbia :
but he lacks the passion and poignancy of the Veronese lyrist,
though he rivals him in the terse precision of his style.
Horace is the inspirer of some of Herrick's most sustained
lyrics; and, the more closely the Hesperides poems are studied, the
more fully do they reveal their author's indebtedness to the odes,
epodes and epistles of the Augustan poet. Horace was his first
love, and the verses entitled A Country Life: to his Brother,
Mr. Tho. Herrick, the first draft of which belongs to his 'prentice
years, are directly modelled, in thought and expression, upon the
famous Beatus ille epode. There is not much of Horace in
Herrick's love-songs; but, in his more sententious poems, and in
those verses in which he promises himself immortality of fame,
Horatian echoes abound, while the spirited and highly imaginative
poem, His Age, which he dedicated to his ' peculiar friend' and old
Cambridge acquaintance, John Weekes, is one of the most Horatian
lyrics in English literature.
But the classicism of Herrick extends far beyond the scope of
direct indebtedness to individual Greek or Roman authors. The
atmosphere of his verses may be that of the London tavern or the
Devonshire village, but, often enough, we find, mingled with all
this, the atmosphere of a remote Roman world, clinging tenaciously
## p. 10 (#26) ##############################################
IO
Cavalier Lyrists
to its faith in faun-habited woods, its genii of field and flood, or its
household Lares and Penates. More than once, too, we are made
to feel that there was more of the Roman flamen than the
Christian priest in Herrick, and, even in his Christian Militant,
we discern more of Roman stoicism than of the sermon on the
mount. Herrick, despite his Noble Numbers, is one of the most
pagan of English poets, and he cannot refrain from introducing
references to Roman priestcraft even where, as in his lines, To the
reverend Shade of his religious Father, his mood is one of
profound seriousness. And, whereas most of the English poets
of the renascence age were content with borrowing ideas or
imagery from the ancient world, jealously preserving, at the same
time, their independence of mind and their status as Tudor or
Stewart Englishmen, Herrick could be satisfied with nothing less
than a full absorption in the festive life of Rome; he assumes the
toga as his daily wear, and lays his offerings of grains of frank-
incense and garlic chives before the image of his peculiar Lar'
with a sincerity which is unmistakable.
His allegiance to the ancient world is likewise manifest in his
poetic art. The Spenserian tradition, with its Italian grace and
slow-moving cadences, made no appeal to him; and, almost alone
of the Caroline lyrists, he refused to bow the knee to the
metaphysic wit and perverse ingenuity of Donne. In all that
pertained to verse and diction, Herrick was the disciple of Jonson,
and, through him, of the great lyrists of antiquity. The sanity of
Jonson's poetic taste, his love of precision, his fastidious regard
for lucidity and ordonnance, are all found again in Herrick,
combined with a delicate charm and spontaneity of utterance
which the elder poet often lacked. Occasionally-as in his
Panegyric to Sir Lewis Pemberton, which is obviously modelled
on Jonson's Penshurst, and in his rapturous Night-Piece to Julia,
which recalls, in idea and verse-structure, the song of the patrico
in the masque Gipsies Metamorphosed—we can trace direct
borrowings from Jonson; but what is of far more importance
is the all-pervading sense of discipleship in everything that
pertains to the canons of poetic art.
Most of Herrick's lyrics, as we have just seen, have an accent
of spontaneity in them, but there is abundant evidence that he
was a careful and deliberate artist who practised with unfailing
assiduity the labour of the file. The lines entitled His Request to
Julia indicate very clearly how fastidious was his artistic con-
sciousness :
## p. 11 (#27) ##############################################
Herrick the Artist
II
Julia, if I chance to die
Ere I print my poetry,
I most humbly thee desire
To commit it to the fire.
Better 'twere my book were dead,
Than to live not perfected.
The existence in manuscript form of a few of his poems
furnishes
us with abundant evidence of the fact that, during the long winter
evenings which he spent at Dean Prior, he was engaged in the
careful revision of his verses. Early versions of A Country Life,
His Age, A Nuptial Song on Sir Clipseby Crew, together with
some of the fairy-poems, are preserved in the Ashmole, Harley,
Egerton and Rawlinson MSS and have been collated with the
Hesperides text by Grosart and Pollard. The collation shows
that, in some instances, whole stanzas have been deleted and harsh
or obscure lines remodelled, that everything has been sacrificed to
lucidity and precision, and to the perfect adjustment of the style
to the theme. In his lighter lyrics, the language is simple and
even homely; but, in his more sustained odes, and in verses like
the following, it acquires imaginative power, and becomes rich in
metaphor :
Alas! for me, that I have lost
E'en all almost;
Sunk is my sight, set is my sun,
And all the loom of life undone:
The staff, the elm, the prop, the sheltering wall
Whereon my vine did crawl,
Now, now blown down; needs must the old stock fall 1.
The above quotation will also serve to illustrate Herrick's
wonderful command of metre. The first half of the seventeenth
century was a time of great metric freedom, when poets wrought
wonderful melodies through their skilful handling of iambic or
trochaic lines of varying length, and through the deft interlacing
of their rimes. And, in all this, Herrick is himself a master-
spirit. He has left us whole poems-for example, His Departure
Hence-in which the verses consist of a single accent, and others
in which a verse of four accents is followed by one of two accents ;
while, in such poems as His Ode for Ben Jonson, or To Primroses
filled with Morning Dew, his craftsmanship in the structure of his
rhythms, the use of enjambment and the spacing of his rimes
calls for the highest praise :
? An Ode to Endymion Porter upon his Brother's Death.
## p. 12 (#28) ##############################################
I 2
Cavalier Lyrists
Why do ye weep, sweet babes ? can tears
Speak grief in yon,
Who were but born
Just as the modest morn
Teem'd her refreshing dew?
Alas! you have not known that shower
That mars a flower,
Nor felt the unkind
Breath of a blasting wind;
Nor are ye worn with years,
Or warp'd as we,
Who think it strange to see
Such pretty flowers, like to orphans young,
To speak by tears before ye have a tonguel.
His finest metrical effects are achieved in his iambic and trochaic
measures ; but, in his more popular songs, he makes skilful use of
trisyllabic feet, employing both the dactyl and the anapaest. In
a few of his poems, he employs the heroic couplet, and a com-
parison of his early poems in this measure with those of a later
period will show that he shared in the movement of the age
towards the Augustan measures of Dryden and Pope.
Herrick's lyric range is very great, and extends from the simple
folk-song to the Horatian ode or the Catullian epithalamy. In
addition, he has left us epistles addressed to friends and patrons,
a large number of epigrams and epitaphs and several pastoral
eclogues in amoebean verse, of which the most beautiful is that in
which Lycidas Herrick reproaches Endymion Porter for seeking
the gilded pleasures of the court and forsaking the Florabell,
dainty Amarillis and handsome-handed Drosomell of the hills and
dales. Descriptive verse was not altogether to his liking, but his
fairy-poems and such verses as those to The Hock-Cart, called
forth by the contemplation of the festive ceremonial of the
country-side, are full of charm and animation. A lover of birds
and flowers, and of all the amenities of country life, Herrick can
scarcely be called a great nature poet. He rarely attempts to
paint a well-ordered landscape, with foreground and background,
but prefers to concentrate his thoughts upon some one object in
the picture to the exclusion of everything else. His most
ambitious attempt at landscape-painting is seen in the poem
entitled A Country Life, addressed to Endymion Porter; in its
representation of a day in rural England from cockcrow and
sunrise to the evening revelry about the maypole or amid the nut-
brown mirth of a Twelfth Night feast, it challenges comparison
with L'Allegro. But Herrick's command over nature is surest
1 To Primroses filled with Morning Dew.
## p. 13 (#29) ##############################################
Herrick's Epigrams
13
where he can blend descriptions of country scenery and paintings
of still life with the outpourings of lyric emotion; or where, as in
the verses To Primroses filled with Morning Dew or To Daffodils,
he can turn from the contemplation of the beauty of flowers to
reflection on the transience of mortal life.
His poetic genius is best displayed in such lyrics as Corinna's
going a-Maying or To Phyllis to love and live with him. In these
poems, a dreamy love-sentiment-which was more to Herrick than
intense passion—is introduced to give tone and warmth to the
idyllic portrayal of nature and country life, after the manner of
the finest lyrics of Spenser's Shepheards Calender. In the one
poem, all is movement and animation, in the other, a halcyon calm
broods over the scene; and, in both, the artistic handling is perfect.
The range of his lyric emotion in his love-songs is considerable.
At times, he offends by his gross sensuousness, but, more often,
his tone is that of dreamy reverie or, in those love-songs which
seem to have been inspired by his associations with the court, that
of refined and graceful gallantry. He far surpasses Carew and
the other cavalier lyrists in the delicate homage which he renders
to those noble ladies who gathered around Henrietta Maria at
Whitehall, and is even happier in the pastoral wooing of Mistress
Elizabeth Wheeler, the Amarillis of Hesperides, who belonged not
to the court but the city. In The Night-Piece to Julia, and in
the famous song To Anthea— Bid me to live'-his lyric emotion
becomes intense and spiritualised; the fire of love touches his
heart, and he rises to the level of Catullus or Burns :
Thou art my life, my love, my heart,
The very eyes of me;
And hast command of every part,
To live and die for thee.
Next in importance to Herrick's lyrical poems are his epigrams.
Included among these, of course, are his scurrilous distichs, which
reflect the nastiness of Martial without his wit, and which were
discharged against hapless parishioners at Dean Prior, or enemies
in town. But his greatness as an epigrammatist consists not in
these, but in those épigrammes à la grecque which bear a striking
likeness to the verses of the Greek anthologists. Some of these
take the form of short complimentary poems to his friends and
kinsmen, to whom he promises the immortality of reflected fame ;
others are epitaphs on matrons, little children and maidens dying
in the first bloom of womanhood. Here belong, too, his gnomic
verses, his quaint dedicatory poems to Juno, Neptune and Vulcan,
## p. 14 (#30) ##############################################
14
Cavalier Lyrists
and to his household gods; and, lastly, his numerous epigrams Upon
Himself and To his Book, in which, in his delightfully frank and
ingenuous manner, he disburdens his soul of its hopes or fears.
The epigram had arisen in England under the influence of the
revival of learning, and, though at first only the satiric epigram
was practised, acquaintance with the Greek epigrams of the
Planudean anthology had gradually led to the study of this earlier
and nobler form of epigrammatic writing. Jonson has left us
several epigrams of this nature, together with others of a satiric
kind, and imitations of the poems in the Greek anthology find a
place in some of the later song-books, and, above all, in
Drummond's collection of Madrigals and Epigrams, first pub-
lished in 1656, but written years before. Herrick surpasses all his
contemporaries as an epigrammatist, both in variety of theme and
delicacy of finish, and is almost as supreme in the epigrammatic art
as in the lyric. In order to compare his workmanship in these two
branches of the poetic art, it may be worth while to bring together
his song, To Daffodils, and his epigram on the same flower. Each,
in its kind, touches perfection, and the idea is the same in both :
Fair daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early rising sun
Has not attained his noon,
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the evensong;
And, having prayed together, we
Will go with you along.
We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
Like to the summer's rain,
Or as the pearls of morning's dew,
Ne'er to be found again,
When a daffodil I see,
Hanging down his head towards me,
Guess I may what I must be:
First, I shall decline my head;
Secondly, I shall be dead;
Lastly, safely buried.
Herrick's sacred verses, or Noble Numbers, enlarge our view of
## p. 15 (#31) ##############################################
Noble Numbers
15
his unique personality, but scarcely add to his fame as a poet. He
followed the example of Donne in dedicating his powers to
religion, when he entered the church; but, unlike Donne, he could
not break with the past or change the temper of his mind. His
materialistic nature and sensuous fancy are as manifest in many of
his religious verses as in his secular, and some of his poetic
addresses to God are incongruously like those to his 'peculiar
Lar. ' Donne's Litany may well have inspired Herrick to write his
Litany to the Holy Spirit; but the character of the two priests, as
revealed in their respective poems, is entirely different. And if
his religious verse is unlike that of Donne, it is still more unlike
that of his immediate contemporaries, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan
or Traherne. The symbolism and soul-scrutiny of Herbert, and
the seraphic exaltation of Crashaw, were altogether foreign to
Herrick, nor could his mundane temperament hold fellowship with
the Celtic mysticism of Vaughan and Traherne. But such poems
as His Creed, His Litany to the Holy Spirit and His Thanks-
giving to God for his House are a pure delight to us, because of
their unaffected naïveté and homely charm, while the practical side
of his religion is pleasingly set forth in the verses, To keep a true
Lent, and his lyric emotion and powers of imagination find full
expression in his beautiful Dirge of Jephthah's Daughter.
The poems of Herrick, in spite of their author's self-assurance
of immortality, seem to have been treated with scanty respect in
the years which followed the publication of Hesperides. Whereas
the lyrics of Carew and Suckling passed through several editions
in the course of the seventeenth century, no such honour was
paid to Hesperides ; moreover, the references to Herrick in the
biographical and critical writings of Anthony à Wood, Phillips and
Winstanley are as meagre as they are misleading. The revival of
his poetry began in the closing years of the eighteenth century,
since which time his fame has grown so steadily that, at last, he
has come to take his place among the greatest of English lyric
poets. He lacks, it is true, the highest gift of all-that of touching
the deepest chords in human nature, and of rousing men to high
purposes and high enthusiasms. But this lack of intensity is
common to him and to the renascence lyrists as a whole. For the
renascence song is that of a nation still in its childhood, un-
conscious, as yet, of conflicting emotions or complexity of thought,
and knowing nothing of the burden of modernity. It is the
holiday lyric of men who were content to fleet the time carelessly,
in a golden world of their own imagination ; whose philosophy was
## p. 16 (#32) ##############################################
16
Cavalier Lyrists
but to seize the day, and gather the rosebuds of life while youth
and summer sunshine were still theirs. This is the temper of the
songs of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Breton, and—though the
horizon of their poetic vision is changed and contracted—of those
of Carew and Suckling. And, among all these singers of a day
when England was a nest of singing-birds, Herrick reigns as king.
Thomas Carew, who came of the Cornish branch of the Carew
family, was the younger son of Sir Matthew Carew, master in
Chancery, and of Alice, daughter of Sir John Rivers, a lord mayor
of London. The date of his birth is uncertain, but 1598 is the
generally accepted year. He was educated at Corpus Christi
college, Oxford, but left the university without a degree, and, in
1614, was reading law in the Middle Temple. A little later, he
became secretary to Sir Dudley Carleton, British ambassador at
Venice. In 1616, Carleton was sent as ambassador to the Hague,
and was accompanied by his secretary ; but, after a few months
service there, Carew, for reasons not fully known, threw up his
post and returned to England. In the October of the same year,
he is described by his father as 'wandering idly about without
employment. ' In 1619, he was with lord Herbert of Cherbury at
the French court, and, soon after the accession of Charles I, he
won the king's favour, who made him his sewer in ordinary, and a
gentleman of his privy chamber; he also bestowed upon him the
royal domain of Sunninghill, near Windsor.
The following years of his life seem to have been spent chiefly
among the courtiers of Whitehall and the wits of the town. He
was of the tribe of Ben,' and numbered Suckling, D'Avenant,
George Sandys and Aurelian Townsend among his friends and
acquaintances. Anthony à Wood bears witness to his 'delicacy
of wit and poetic fancy,' and Clarendon describes him as 'a
person of pleasant and facetious wit'; from Suckling's well-known
reference to him in A Session of the Poets, it would seem as
though he were looked upon as the poet laureate of the court,
though the official laureate at this time was Ben Jonson.
In 1634, he wrote his elaborate masque, Coelum Britannicum;
it was undertaken at the royal command, and was performed at
Whitehall on the Shrove Tuesday of that year.
year. Other
followed, but, in 1638, his life came suddenly to an end. Two
years after his death, his poems were collected and published : in-
sufficient care was taken with this edition; for, while some of Carew's
poems were omitted from it, other poems which were not his-
Other poems
## p. 17 (#33) ##############################################
Thomas Carew
17
a
including Ben Jonson's famous 'Come, my Celia, let us prove,' and
two of Herrick's lyrics?
_found a place in it.
The right of Carew to stand next to Herrick among the
Caroline lyrists can scarcely be questioned, and the two poets have
a good deal in common. Had Herrick not been transported, in
the year 1629, from the gilded chambers of Whitehall to the
thatched cottages of Dean Prior, the resemblance between
them, doubtless, would have been still greater. For, up to that
date, in spite of a certain inequality in age and breeding,
they must have come under very much the same influences, and
moved in the same social circles. They never mention one
another, but they can hardly have failed to meet, if not in the
precincts of the court, then in the society of their tribal lord,
Ben Jonson, whose intellectual sovereignty they alike acknow-
ledge. In both, the artistic sense was strong, and the atmosphere
of Carew's lyrics to Celia is curiously like that of many of Herrick's
to Julia. Finally, both poets render the homage of complimentary
verse to the king, to the duke of Buckingham, to John Crofts, the
king's cup-bearer, and to Lucy Hay, countess of Carlisle, whose
beauty is the theme of many a cavalier lyrist, and who, two
centuries after her death, became the heroine of Browning's
Strafford. But residence in Devonshire widened immeasurably
the horizon of Herrick's poetic vision, and enabled him to find, in
festooned maypoles and primrose glades, new themes for song
of which Carew remained throughout his life wholly ignorant.
Carew resembles Herrick, again, in the fact that his poems
furnish us with an easy transition from the Elizabethan lyric to
that of the seventeenth century; but, whereas Herrick approaches
nearest to the earlier manner in those poems in which he
reproduces the youthfulness and romantic glow of the best mis-
cellany-lyrics-for example, Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd
to his Love-Carew's sympathy is with the more artificial lyricism
of the sonnet. In his Elegy upon the Death of Dr Donne, he
rightly estimates the achievement of the great lyric reformer in
purging the muses' garden of pedantic weeds ' and 'the lazy seeds
of servile imitation’; yet, in such a poem as the following, he keeps
very closely to the Petrarchian manner of the sonneteers, against
which Donne declared open warfare :
I'll gaze no more on her bewitching face,
Since ruin harbours there in every place.
For my enchanted soul alike she drowns
With calms and tempests of her smiles and frowns.
1 See supra, p. 7.
2
E. L.
