No More Learning

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
>


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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


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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 :


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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,


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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. VII.
CH. I.


## p. 18 (#34) ##############################################

18
Cavalier Lyrists
1
2
I'll love no more those cruel eyes of hers
Which, pleas'd or angerd, still are murderers.
For if she dart, like lightning, through the air
Her beams of wrath, she kills me with despair.
If she beholds me with a pleasing eye,
I surfeit with excess of joy and diel,
In the main, however, and for evil as well as for good, Carew
belongs to the classical school of seventeenth century lyrists who
followed in the steps of Jonson. His indebtedness to Anacreon and
the masters of Roman lyric, apparently, was far less profound than
that of Jonson or Herrick, and his classicism, therefore, is almost
entirely confined to those qualities of style-structural proportion,
smoothness and lucidity of diction and the avoidance of fantastic
conceit—which the author of The Forest and Underwoods had
striven, and striven successfully, to introduce into English lyric
poetry. Carew's love-poems are not always free from that
hyperbole which was then the fashion ; and, in his Elegy upon the
Death of Dr Donne, admiration for his hero leads him to imitate
the discordia concors of that masterful genius. But sanity of
taste is strong in Carew, and it keeps him free from those aberra-
tions and excesses which have left their impress upon much of the
lyric poetry, both secular and religious, of his day. Above all, he
has a fine sense of structure in poetry, and this gives to his verses
a
both shapeliness in the parts and unity in the whole. This
structural beauty is attained by methods which are as simple as
they are successful. Thus, he is the master of the lyric of two
stanzas in which the second stanza is nicely balanced with the
first, in much the same way that octave and sestet balance one
another in the Petrarchian sonnet:
Mark how the bashful morn, in vain,
Courts the amorous marigold
With sighing blasts and weeping rain;
Yet she refuses to unfold.
But when the planet of the day
Approacheth, with his powerful ray,
Then she spreads, then she receives
His warmer beams into her virgin leaves.
So shalt thou thrive in love, fond boy!
If thy tears and sighs discover
Thy grief, thou never shalt enjoy
The just reward of a bold lover.
But when, with moving accents, thou
Shalt constant faith and service vow,
Thy Celia shall receive those charms
With open ears, and with unfolded armsa.
1 Murdering Beauty.
3 Boldness in Love.


## p. 19 (#35) ##############################################

Carew's Love-poems
19
9
But if Carew's workmanship is almost always successful, it is very
seldom triumphant. In it, as in everything else, he lacks boldness.
He never attempts the daring intricacies of rime in which Herrick
delights, nor have any of his songs the rhythmic beauty attained,
with such apparent ease, by Ben Jonson in his ‘Slow, slow, fresh
fount, keep time with my salt tears,' from Cynthia's Revels. And
this lack of boldness, this unwillingness to reach beyond his grasp,
is characteristic of Carew's work throughout. It is true that he
has left us at least a dozen songs such as 'Ask me no more where
Jove bestows,' 'Sweetly breathing vernal air,' 'He that loves a
rosy lip,' 'Fair copy of my Celia's face' and so forth—which are
wellnigh perfect in their kind; but, when the contents of his
volume of verses are judged as a whole, it must be confessed that,
in thought and in feeling, they are somewhat commonplace and
conventional. His imaginative power is weak, and he has very
little intensity of emotion. There is not much intensity, perhaps,
in Hesperides; but Herrick possesses a quality which goes far to
compensate for its absence—the charm of personality and self-
revelation. This, however, is almost entirely absent from the
poems of Carew. That decorous and well-disciplined courtier
keeps himself, for the most part, under perfect control, and is
only too ready to barter away sincerity of expression for the mask
of gallantry and conventional compliment. On one occasion,
however, he dares to be himself; and the result is The Rapture, a
poem of audacious sensuality, but more fraught with passion and
imaginative vision than anything else he has left us. Elsewhere,
the tone of his poetry is studiously moral, and, in his masque,
Coelum Britannicum, he is almost puritanical in his austerity.
Here, Mercury banishes Pleasure from the court, and sets in her
place Truth, Wisdom and Religion. Pleasure is denounced as a
'bewitching siren, gilded rottenness,' that has
With cunning artifice display'd
Th’ enamelld outside and the honied verge
Of the fair cup where deadly poison lurks.
In The Rapture, all this is changed.
Decorum is swept aside, and
Carew, letting his imagination work its will with him, gives himself
up to that orgy of the senses which we meet with also in some of
the elegies of Donne.
Carew has been described as the founder of the school of
courtly amorous poetry; but it seems probable that, if we could
place the Hesperides poems in their due chronological order, the
prestige of priority would rightly belong to Herrick. Yet it seems
2-2


## p. 20 (#36) ##############################################

20
Cavalier Lyrists
natural to regard Carew as the leader of that school, because, unlike
Herrick, he is, from first to last, a cavalier, and rarely strays far from
the precincts of Whitehall. Once or twice, it is true, we find him
removed from court, and engaged in praising, after the manner of
Jonson's Penshurst, and Martial's verses To Bassus, on the
Country-House of Faustinus', the lavish hospitality practised by
Stewart courtiers while residing at their country-seats ; and, on
one occasion, too, we find him singing the glories of an English
spring. The verses entitled The Spring are graceful and harmoni-
ous; but the extent of his acquaintance with the ways of nature
may be judged by the fact that he represents the 'drowsy cuckoo'
hibernating, along with the humble-bee, in some hollow tree !
Carew's true place of abode is the city and the court, where,
polishing and re-polishing his elegant verses, he renders homage
to his royal master, pays amorous suit to his Celia, celebrates with
wedding-song or epitaph the marriage or decease of noble lords
and ladies and wins from his contemporaries the fitting title of the
laureate of the court. Invited by his friend, Aurelian Townsend,
to commemorate in verse the death of the great Gustavus
Adolphus, he finds his laureate muse unfit for the heroic strain
which the occasion demanded, and, declaring that he must leave
the hero of Leipzig, Wurtzburg and the Rhine to some prose
chronicler, he bids his friend join with him in extolling the joys of
tourneys, masques and theatres :
What though the German drum
Bellow for freedom and revenge, the noise
Concerns not us, nor should divert our joys.
Nor ought the thunder of their carabines
Drown the sweet airs of our tuned violins 2.
6
'Easy, natural Suckling' has won for himself, since the days of
the restoration and Congreve's Millamant, an assured place in the
bead-roll of English poets as the typical cavalier lyrist, the arch-
representative of Pope's ‘mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease'
light-hearted songs of courtly gallantry. Considerable in bulk
and varied in character as is his literary work, it can only be
regarded as the product of certain hours of leisure, snatched from
a life of tempestuous mirth, or from the nobler activities of a
soldier's career. Suckling, sometimes, has been regarded as a
mere reveller of the court, who made war upon all that was
noblest in love, and substituted songs licentious in spirit and
in metric structure for the chaste raptures of Elizabethan love-
* Epigrammata, III, 58.
Upon the Death of the King of Sweden.
2


## p. 21 (#37) ##############################################

Sir John Suckling
21
lyrists. But such an estimate of the man is one-sided and even
false. For, while it is true that some of his poems are sensuous
and even obscene, there are others which are lofty in thought and
full of spiritual exaltation. If he could write the poem : ''Tis now
since I sat down before that foolish fort, a heart,' in which he vilifies
woman's honour, he was also the author of stanzas such as these :
0, that I were all soul, that I might prove
For you as fit a love
As you are for an angel, for, I know,
None but pure spirits are fit loves for you.
You are all ethereal, there's in you no dross,
Nor any part that's gross.
Your coarsest part is like a curious lawn,
The vestal relics for a covering drawn.
Your other parts, part of the purest fire
That e'er Heaven did inspire,
Makes every thought that is refined by it
A quintessence of goodness and of wit1.
Moreover, though Suckling's best-known works are those audacious
songs which he tossed off in the interval between an afternoon
game of bowls and an evening at cribbage, it is well to remember
that he was the author of the statesmanlike Letter to Mr Henry
Jermyn and the scholarly An Account of Religion by Reason
in which he makes war upon Socinian heresies. His plays,
too, whatever may be their dramatic value, display & vein of
generous romanticism and chivalrous feeling which enable us to
understand how it was that the notorious gamester and spendthrift
courtier was, at the same time, the close friend of the philosophic
Falkland and the ever memorable’ John Hales.
He was born, in the year 1609, at Twickenham, the son of Sir
John Suckling, who, belonging to an old Norfolk family, had risen
to eminence among the court officials of James I, and, in the last
years of his life, was a secretary of state and comptroller of the royal
household. Nothing certain is known of the poet's school, but, in
1623, he entered Trinity college, Cambridge, and, four years later,
passed to Gray's inn. The death of his father, in 1627, left him an
orphan, and the inheritor of great wealth. The idea of studying
law was now abandoned, and, in his twenty-first year, Suckling
entered upon
his adventurous career as a traveller and soldier of
fortune. He visited France and Italy, returned to England to be
knighted, and, in 1631, joined with Charles, marquis of Hamilton,
in the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus. He is said to have been
present at the battle which ended in the defeat of Tilly at Leipzig on
i Song.


## p. 22 (#38) ##############################################

22
Cavalier Lyrists
17 September 1631, and at the sieges of Crossen, Guben, Glogau
and Magdeburg ; he returned to England in 1632.
The years that followed were spent at court, where his great
wealth, his ready wit and command of repartee—to which seven-
teenth century writers bear abundant witness—and, lastly, the
versatility of his literary powers, won him fame and admiration.
He gave magnificent entertainments, wrote plays which he
furnished at his own expense with magnificent dresses and
gorgeous scenery and, with characteristic ardour, threw himself
into all the pleasures of a pleasure-loving court. In 1637
appeared the string of witty, but carelessly written, verses, entitled
A Session of the Poets; and the following year saw the performance
of his plays, Aglaura and The Goblins. To these years, in all
probability, also belong many of his lyrics and occasional verses.
Then, on the outbreak of the Scottish campaign of 1639, Suckling,
abandoning poetry and a courtier's life for service in the field,
equipped at his own expense a troop of a hundred horse, marched
towards the Scottish border and, like his king, suffered defeat at
the hands of Leslie. The Scottish campaign also inspired him to
write his tragedy, The Discontented Colonell, which was republished
in 1646, under the title, Brennoralt.
When the Long parliament was summoned in November 1640,
Suckling sat as member for Bramber (Sussex), and, in the following
year, he joined with Henry Jermyn, colonel Goring and others
in what was known as the first army plot,' the purpose of which
was to win for the king the command of the army. The plot was
discovered, and Suckling and Jermyn fled to France. Here, at
Rouen or Paris, he spent some months in obscurity and deep
dejection, and, according to Aubrey, ended his life by suicide in
the year 1642. Four years later, his works were collected and
published under the title, Fragmenta Aurea, and passed through
several editions before the end of the century. In addition to his
poems, the volume contained the three plays Aglaura, The
Goblins and Brennoralt, together with his letters and his Account
of Religion by Reason. In the year 1659 appeared, also, his un-
finished tragedy, The Sad One'.
Suckling's literary fame is now chiefly bound up with his lyrics,
some of the most delightful of which first found a place in his
dramas. For the most part, they are song-lyrics, and were set to
music by Henry Lawes. As a lyric poet, he stands somewhat
apart from Herrick and Carew in the fact that he owed little to
1 As to Suckling's plays, see ante, vol. vi, chap. IX.


## p. 23 (#39) ##############################################

Suckling's Lyrics
23
6
Ben Jonson: the restraint, classical colour and fastidious work-
manship of Jonson made little appeal to Suckling, who censured
Carew for 'the trouble and pain’expended on his verses, and
declared that 'a laureate muse should be easy and free. ' On the
other hand, he bows the knee to Donne, whom he acclaims as the
great lord of wit. The influence of Donne is most marked in
those lyrics which he misnames sonnets, the last of which, 'O, for
some honest lover's ghost,' echoes the famous "I love to talk with
some old lover's ghost' of the earlier lyrist. He has little of
Donne's intellectuality, but he follows him in the war which he
waged upon the unreality and lovelorn fancies of the Petrarchian
school of lyrists; while the audacious bravura of such songs as
Out upon it! I have loved' or 'Why so pale and wan, fair lover,' in
which he derides constancy in love and boastfully displays an
unpledged heart, is directly caught from Donne's 'Go and catch a
falling star' and 'Now thou hast loved me one whole day. And it
is this audacious wit, combined with a debonair gaiety of heart,
which furnishes the secret of his charm as a song-writer. To these
high qualities must, also, be added the impetuous movement of his
verse; extraordinarily careless as his poems sometimes are, his
best songs have the rare seventeenth century quality of tuneful-
ness and the perfect accord of theme and rhythm.
But the finest and most characteristic product of Suckling's
genius, after all, lies not in lyric poetry but in narrative. The
epithalamium was one of the accepted forms of Elizabethan art-
lyric which was handed down to the later age, and Donne, heretic
and iconoclast as he was in most that pertained to Elizabethan
lyricism, had kept closely to the conventional form of wedding-ode.
But when, in 1641, Roger Boyle, lord Broghill, married lady
Margaret Howard, Suckling, with daring independence of mind,
broke through all conventions, and, instead of a formal epi-
thalamium, wrote his famous Ballad of a Wedding. Here we
again meet with the directness, light-hearted buoyancy and
impetuous movement which characterise his songs; but with these
there are associated, what is elsewhere rare in Suckling, the
delicate touch and caressing fancy of Herrick.
Our knowledge of Richard Lovelace's career is mainly derived
from the account which Anthony à Wood has given of him in his
Athenae Oxonienses. He belonged to an influential Kentish
family, and was the eldest son of Sir William Lovelace, of
Woolwich, where he was born in 1618. He was educated at the


## p. 24 (#40) ##############################################

24
Cavalier Lyrists
Charterhouse and at Gloucester hall, Oxford. While at the
university, he wrote his lost comedy, The Scholar, and, after only
two years' residence, he was admitted to the degree of master of
arts at the solicitation of a court lady upon whom his ‘most
amiable and beautiful person, innate modesty, virtue and courtly
deportment' had made a deep impression. The following years
were spent in London, or at his Kentish residence, or as a soldier
in the Scottish campaigns of 1639 and 1640. About 1640, he
wrote his tragedy The Soldier, which seems never to have been
acted or published, and which has shared the same fate as his
comedy The Scholar. In 1642, he was chosen by the cavalier
party in Kent to present to the House of Commons the so-called
Kentish petition, which asked for 'a restoration of the bishops,
liturgy and common prayer'; the petition was burnt by the
common hangman and, for some seven weeks, Lovelace was a
prisoner in the Gatehouse, Westminster. His imprisonment
inspired the famous song, To Althea from Prison. A promise
made to the Long parliament not to leave London without the
permission of the Speaker prevented him from taking a very
active part in the civil war, but he contributed horses and arms to
the royalist cause, and, after the surrender of Oxford, in 1646, he
offered his sword to the French king, Louis XIV, and was wounded
at Dunkirk. On his return to England, in 1648, he was imprisoned
in Petre house, Aldersgate, where he prepared for the press his
volume of poems, entitled Lucasta: Epodes, Odes, Sonnets, Songs,
etc. , which was published in 1649. Set at liberty after the
execution of Charles, he seems to have remained in London, and
Anthony à Wood gives us a gloomy picture of his last years :
Having by that time consumed all his estate, he grew very melancholy,. . .
became very poor in body and purse, was the object of charity, went in ragged
clothes (whereas when he was in his glory he wore cloth of gold and silver)
and mostly lodged in obscure and dirty places, more befitting the worst of
beggars and poorest of servants.
From the same account, we gather that he died amid miserable
surroundings in Gunpowder alley, London, in 1658. In the
following year, his brother, Dudley Posthumus Lovelace, published
his remaining verses under the title, Lucasta: Posthume Poems.
The Lucasta who, after the manner of the heroines of Elizabethan
sonnet-sequences, lends her name to his two volumes of poetry, is
said to have been Lucy Sacheverell.
Lovelace's standing among English poets is peculiar. He has
left us two or three songs which are included in almost every


## p. 25 (#41) ##############################################

Richard Lovelace
25
anthology of English verse, and which deserve enduring fame; in
addition to these, he wrote a considerable number of lyric,
descriptive and complimentary poems, of which it may, without
rancour, be said that it would have been better if they had
remained in manuscript and perished with his two plays. For, in
them, he exhibits most, if not all, of the faults of taste found in
Elizabethan sonneteers, together with the fantastic extravagances
of the seventeenth century school of lyrists. His love-lyrics to
Lucasta are as frigidly rhetorical as the worst poems in Cowley's
Mistress, while his Pastoral: to Amarantha abounds in the otiose
conceits of what Ruskin has taught us to call 'the pathetic fallacy.
To what excesses a labouring fancy, unrestrained by good taste,
may run is well illustrated by such poems as Ellinda's Glove or
Lucasta's Muff, by the verses entitled A Loose Saraband, in which
he declares that love has made a whipping-top of his bleeding
heart, or by the opening stanza of the song, Lricasta Weeping:
Lucasta wept, and still the bright
Enamoured god of day,
With his soft handkerchief of light,
Kissed the wet pearls away.
Judged by the bulk of his poems, Lovelace has more in common
with Habington than with the typical cavalier lyrists, Suckling and
Carew; and, although his addresses entitled The Grasshopper and
The Snail faintly recall the Anacreontic Ode to the Cicada, he
cannot well be called a neo-classic or a follower of Jonson.
When compared with his other poems, Lovelace's two songs
To Althea from Prison and Going to the Wars seem nothing
less than miracles of art. In them, there is no trace of the
pedantry or prolixity, the frigid conceit and the tortured phrase,
of his other poems ; in their simplicity, their chivalrous feeling and
their nobility of thought, they touch perfection. And scarcely
inferior to them, though not so well known, is his song, To Lucasta
going beyond the Seas, the third stanza of which deserves to
rank with the most memorable things in English lyric poetry :
Though seas and land betwixt us both,
Our faith and troth,
Like separated souls,
All time and space controls:
Above the highest sphere we meet,
Unseen, unknown, and greet as angels greet.
Had Lovelace always written like this, the comparison which the
seventeenth century biographer, William Winstanley, drew between
him and Sir Philip Sidney might win our glad approval.


## p. 26 (#42) ##############################################

CHAPTER II
THE SACRED POETS
In the history of English sacred verse, there has not been any
group of poets like those who wrote in the second quarter of
the seventeenth century. Herbert, Crashaw and Vaughan form,
not, indeed, a school of poetry, but a group with definite links con-
necting them. Unlike the Fletchers and Habington, who looked
back to 'Spenser's art and Sydney's wit,' they come under the
influence both of the newer literary fashions of Jonson and Donne,
and of the revived spirit of cultured devotion in the Anglican
church. The welcome given to The Temple showed that an age
more serious than the Elizabethan was interested in the intimate
expression of personal religion. Herbert points the way; but each
writer has an individual note and an intensity of feeling which
ensure his survival for his own sake. In their development of
the religious lyric, which was admirably adapted to the portrayal
of subtle emotions, they achieved a modest success, while greater
poets triumphed in the ampler fields of allegory and epic.
The fascination of George Herbert is due as much to his
character as to his writings. It is true that the reputation of
The Temple was assured, and nine editions called for, before Izaak
Walton's Life made Herbert one of the most familiar figures of
the century. But The Temple, and its prose companion, The A
Priest to the Temple (1652), had already revealed the presence of
conflicting traits in their author's character, as, with a rare and
almost morbid sensitiveness, he watched his own growth and
scrutinised his moods. His personal history, therefore, is of
more than ordinary moment for understanding his poems.
The famous Border family of the Herberts had furnished a
long line of soldiers, courtiers, judges and men of affairsman
ancestry such as lord Herbert of Cherbury delighted to tell of
with a pleasing vanity. The persuasion to a more peaceful
calling reached George Herbert, not through his father's line, but


## p. 27 (#43) ##############################################

George Herbert
27
a
through his mother, Magdalen, daughter of Sir Richard Newport
of High Ercall, Shropshire. Her husband died in 1596, leaving her
with a family of seven sons and three daughters, 'Job's number
and Job's distribution as she herself would very often remember. '
George, the fifth son, was born at Montgomery on 3 April 1593, in
the same year as Walton his biographer, and Nicholas Ferrar
who stood sponsor to The Temple. Magdalen Herbert had all her
sons brought up in learning,' but most of them chose the life of
the court or the camp. It was natural to a Herbert to 'chase
brave employments with a naked sword throughout the world,' and
not even George escaped the passion and choler' of his race.
At Westminster school, under Richard Ireland, he laid the
foundation of his scholarship. His boyish performance in answer
to the veteran Andrew Melville's Anti-Tami-Cami-Categoria may
be lightly dismissed as deserving neither praise nor blame; an
injudicious admirer printed it thirty years after Herbert's death.
Of greater importance are the two sonnets which he sent to his
mother as a New Year's gift, soon after his becoming a scholar of
Trinity college, Cambridge. “Doth poetry wear Venus' livery, only
serve her turn? ' he asks,
Cannot Thy love
Heighten & spirit to sound out Thy praise
As well as any she?
In this sixteen-year-old challenge to the love poetry of the day, he
probably reveals the influence of John Donne, who was already
his mother's friend, and had written many of his Divine Poems,
though they first appeared in print in the same year as The
Temple. If Herbert's early ambition to become a sacred poet never
faded from his mind, it hardly held its own during the next fifteen
years with academic ambitions of scholarship, and civic ambitions
of state employment. Even on the death of his mother in 1627,
Parentalia, the filial odes which he appended to Donne's funeral
sermon, did not include any English poems, and deserved Barnabas
Oley's comment, 'he made his ink with water of Helicon. ' His
rapid success in the university raised higher hopes. Fellow of
Trinity in 1616, and praelector of rhetoric in 1618, he aspired to
the office of public orator, 'the finest place in the University,'
as he called it, especially because it brought the orator into
relations with the court. The retiring orator, Sir Francis
Nethersole, and his predecessor, Sir Robert Naunton, held im-
portant political offices. Herbert's high connections, courtly
address and knowledge of languages were likely to win him similar


## p. 28 (#44) ##############################################

28
The Sacred Poets
promotion. He had made no secret of his intention ultimately to
seek the priesthood, and now brushed aside Nethersole's warning
that the orator's office might divert him too much from divinity.
He canvassed friends and kinsfolk for their support, and sought
to 'work the Heads to my purpose. He was installed orator on
18 January 1619, and held the post till his mother's death. As
the official mouth-piece of the university, he was expected to use
the language of flattery in addressing those whom Cambridge
delighted to honour, and he was well qualified to 'trade in cour-
tesies and wit’; but, even in an age of adulation, his hyperboles
are conspicuous. It is impossible to acquit him of self-seeking in
his use of the orator's opportunities. As Walton honestly says,
'he enjoyed his gentile humour for cloaths, and courtlike company,
and seldom look'd towards Cambridge, unless the King were there,
and then he never failed. ' According to the same witness, 'all
Mr Herbert's Court hopes' died with the death in rapid succession
of his two most influential friends, and of the king himself in 1625.
It is difficult to believe that his chances were all gone for a man
of his parts, but the sudden check served to bring once more to
the fore that alternative career which he had never put wholly
from him. Retiring 'to a friend in Kent, where he lived very
privately,' he debated with himself whether he should return to
'the painted pleasures of a Court life,' or take orders. Some part
of his hesitancy must have been overcome very soon, for he was
already a deacon", when he was instituted by proxy, on 5 July
1626, to the prebend of Leighton Ecclesia in Lincoln cathedral.
How far his entering the diaconate committed him to clerical life
cannot easily be gauged. It was one thing to qualify for honorary
preferments, it was another to throw in his lot unreservedly with
'a despised order' and its professional duties. The parallel case
of his friend Ferrar, ordained deacon in this same summer, may
throw some light upon the contemporary opinion of the diaconate.
Highly as Ferrar regarded it, he protested that 'he durst not
advance one step higher,' and clearly shared that growing
regard for the priesthood which the school of Andrewes had
encouraged. The point is important, because it indicates that
the period of conflict for Herbert was not over, and its long
continuance wrung from him poems which bear the marks of
mental suffering. The poems of this period have also many refer-
ences to his agues and failing health. Life was slipping from
? This fact has been generally overlooked or denied, but the evidence of the Lincoln
chapter acts is cited in Daniell's Life, p. 103.


## p. 29 (#45) ##############################################

The Temple
29
him, with nothing achieved, when his marriage to Jane Danvers,
in 1629, brought a happier state of mind and greater willingness
to adopt clerical life. In 1630, Philip, earl of Pembroke, asked
king Charles, in whose gift the living was for that turn, to give
Bemerton to his kinsman, and, on 26 April, Herbert was instituted
to the rectory of Fulston St Peter's with Bemerton, Wiltshire;
on 19 September he was ordained priest. The three years at
Bemerton, ending with his burial ‘in his own church under the
altar' on 3 March 1633, form that part of Walton's Life, and of
the common tradition about Herbert, which needs least correction.
‘Holy Mr Herbert' is no idealised picture of a biographer who
saw him but once; it is the estimate of his contemporaries, of
Ferrar and Oley, and of lord Herbert, who wrote that his life was
most holy and exemplary; in so much that about Salisbury, where
he lived, beneficed for many years, he was little less than sainted. '
The intensity of the long struggle with himself, which had its
echoes even in Bemerton days, saves his life and writings from
anything like tameness, though there was peace at the last. The
personal note in The Temple is an unfailing interest. Herbert himself
gave the best description of his unpublished book, when, from his
deathbed, he sent it to his 'dear brother Ferrar,' with the message
that he would 'find in it a picture of the many spiritual conflicts
that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject
mine to the will of Jesus my Master; in whose service I have now
found perfect freedom. ' It is this history of a soul which gives
unity to The Temple, and makes it a book, in a sense in which
Steps to the Temple is only a collection,
Herbert was a conscientious worker, continually polishing
and resetting his poems. This fact has become clearer since
Grosart brought to notice the manuscript, including not quite
half of The Temple, which had lain, unused by previous editors, in
the Williams library. The extensive differences between the
Williams MS and the 1633 edition show that, in revision, Herbert
struck out too fantastic conceits, smoothed away roughnesses
and replaced unsatisfactory poems by others on the same themes.
It remained for a later editor, George Herbert Palmer of Harvard,
to turn the Williams MS to yet greater profit, by using it as
a basis for distinguishing between Herbert's earlier and later
work. Palmer's order, at some points, is arbitrary and uncon-
vincing ; but no greater service has been done towards under-
standing Herbert than by this attempt to arrange his poems
chronologically. Herbert's growth in artistic mastery, as well


## p. 30 (#46) ##############################################

30
The Sacred Poets
as in depth of character, is made abundantly clear by this
treatment
In metre, Herbert never goes far afield. He makes no
experiments with lines of three-syllabled feet, and even the
trochaic measure is seldom used instead of iambic. But, in
minor arrangements, as to the length of the lines, the incidence
of the rimes and the number of lines to the stanza, Herbert is
always looking out to find what will suit each particular poem.
Palmer reckons that, of the 169 poems which comprise The
Temple, ‘116 are written in metres which are not repeated. '
The variations run within a narrow circle, but, at least, they
show the poet's interest in experiments of form. In Aaron, the
same sequence of five rimes throughout the five verses is used
with consummate success, giving the effect of 'one set slow bell. '
The whole framework, in all its parts, is fashioned exactly to
fit the thought of the poem; it is artifice throughout, and yet,
within its limits, a masterpiece of art. His constructive ability
is one of his best artistic gifts. The Quip is a poem of perfect
length, its parts are well knit with a refrain and other correspond-
ences of phrase and it works to a well-turned close. The same
neatness of construction marks a dozen other short poems, like
The Pulley, Justice, Decay and the two poems oddly called
Jordan. He has an instinct for a good ending; not infrequently
there is a surprise in store, as in The Collar, where the re-
bellious mood collapses at the Master's voice, or in the first
sonnet on Prayer, where a string of definitions, both felicitous
and preposterous, leads up to the simplest possible description of
prayer as 'something understood. ' He has also a pretty turn for
personification, which puts life into reflective poems like The
Quip, Avarice and The Collar. To see how it gives animation
to his work, one has only to compare Herbert's Decay with
Vaughan's imitation, Corruption.
Herbert's ingenuity, at times, misleads him into what can only
be called tricks, like the representation of the echo in Heaven, or
the intentional failure of the rime at the close of Home. The
verses shaped like an altar and the Easter wings came under
Addison's condemnation as 'false wit. ' They would find no
parallel to-day except in Alice in Wonderland, but many of
Herbert's fellow poets—Drummond and Wither and Quarles-
took pleasure in such devices, as well as in anagrams and acrostics.
The number of Herbert's poems affected by this fashion is very
small; but it has most unjustly told against him with his critics.


## p. 31 (#47) ##############################################

Herbert's Conceits
31
6
A more serious defect of taste he shares with the poets whom
Johnson styled 'metaphysical. ' The fantastic conceits which fashion
approved in secular poetry are drawn into the service of Christian
piety; as Chudleigh wrote of Donne's use of wit in his Divine
Poems:
He did not banish, but transplanted it.
There is more regard for the quaintness and unexpectedness of a
simile than for its beauty or fitness. Johnson's criticism is at least
sometimes justified in Herbert's case, that “the most heterogeneous
ideas are yoked by violence together. ' Things great and small are
grouped in incongruous, and even unpleasant, association. It was
an article of Herbert's creed that nothing can be so mean' but
that it can be ennobled to bright and clean uses, and he was
justified in his use of illustrations from common life, folk-lore and
the medicinal and chemical knowledge which had great fascination
for seventeenth century writers. The candle's snuff, the bias
of the bowls, the tuning of an instrument, a blunted knife and cold
hands that are angrie with the fire,' are successful and popular
elucidations of his thought. But the perils of falling into prosiness
or bathos beset his path. The fine theme in Providence that man
is the world's high priest' cannot recover its dignity after such a
playful extravagance as this:
Most things move th' underjaw; the Crocodile not.
Most things sleep lying; th' Elephant loans or stands.
The Psalmist is responsible for the saying, 'put Thou my tears
into Thy bottle,' but Herbert must add, 'As we have boxes for
the poor. ' Far worse than mere absurdity or prosiness is the
intolerable conceit which ends The Dawning, where the 'sad
heart' is bidden to dry his tears in Christ's burial-linen. Such
instances, though they are rare in Herbert, compare with Crashaw's
excesses in The Weeper. Both poets, too, draw from the senses of
smell and taste images which make a modern reader, rightly or
wrongly, ill at ease. "This broth of smells, that feeds and fats my
minde,' in The Odour, is nearly as unpleasing as Crashaw's 'brisk
cherub,' that sips of the Magdalene's tears, till
9
>
>
his song
Tasts of this Breakfast all day long.
But, despite these temptations to over-daring and tasteless conceits,
Herbert got more good than harm from the metaphysical fashion.
His interest in thought and in recondite illustration saves him from
being thin or facile. He far more often errs by trying to pack too
much into small compass, or by being too ingenious, than by working


## p. 32 (#48) ##############################################

32
The Sacred Poets
a single thought threadbare, as his successors and imitators often do.
A fine instance of his power of concentrated thought is his poem
Man. And if he is sometimes too artificial, there is no lack of
emotional quality in Herbert at his best. There are poems in
many different keys like Throw away thy rod, Antiphon and The
Collar, which are all tremulous with feeling.
It remains to notice The Church Porch, in which Herbert
meets the young gallant on his own ground, and avoids the higher
arguments that belong to The Church. The well-bred, well-in-
formed man of the world, who knows the ways of learning,
honour, pleasure,' gives his good-tempered counsels with many
a shrewd hit, but without malice. The collector of Outlandish
Proverbs is the right man to coin these terse maxims of mother-
wit. There is no English book of wisdom which holds its own so
well; it is kept from cynicism by its humour, and from going out
of date by its writer's knowledge of the world.
The anonymous preface to Crashaw's Steps to the Temple
(1646) introduces the author with the words, 'Here's Herbert's
second, but equall. ' In the same volume, Crashaw pays a tribute
to his predecessor in the lines which he sent to a gentlewoman
with a copy of The Temple :
Know you faire on what you look;
Divinest love lyes in this booke.
But there is hardly a poem by Crashaw which recalls Herbert,
and the two men are widely different in temperament and
genius.