No More Learning

3 LI. 177, 178.
* LI. 185, 186.


## p. 61 (#77) ##############################################

Denham's Later Years
61
6
the poem Of Old Age, a paraphrase in verse of Cicero De Senectute,
is said to have been published in 1648Denham himself tells us
that, on behalf of queen Henrietta Maria, he gained admittance to
Charles I in captivity, and that Charles, after referring kindly to
his lines on Sir Richard Fanshawe's translation of Il Pastor Fido,
advised him to write no more, as verses were well enough for idle
young men, but stood in their way when they were thought fit
for more serious employments? ' Denham took the advice, and
devoted himself to the task of transmitting the ciphered corre-
spondence between Charles and his adherents. On its discovery,
he escaped into France, and was employed on various missions by
Charles II and Henrietta Maria. Returning to England in 1652,
he stayed for some time with lord Pembroke at Wilton. The
translation of Vergil which Aubrey says that he made here may
have been a fragment of the fourth book, The Passion of Dido
for Aeneas; but Aubrey, possibly, was thinking merely of The
Destruction of Troy, which was published in 16568. In 1658,
Denham obtained leave to live at Bury St Edmunds. At the
restoration, he came into the office, the reversion of which had been
promised him by Charles I, of surveyor-general of the royal works,
and was made a knight of the Bath at the coronation. His second
marriage was unhappy; and to his wife's faithlessness was attributed
a strange fit of madness which overtook him on a journey, under-
taken in the performance of his duties as supervisor of the king's
buildings, to the Portland stone-quarries. He recovered before his
death: the poems Of Prudence and Of Justice, translated from the
Italian of Mancini, and the octosyllabic couplets On Mr Abraham
Cowley's Death, belong to his latest years. In 1667—8, he pub-
lished bis poems and The Sophy, with a dedication to Charles II.
His version of De Senectute was published by itself in 1669. His
last work was A Version of the Psalms of David. Denham also
wrote a number of verses on current topics in irregular and halting
metres, which may have amused his friends, but have little merit
in them today. Of his shorter couplet pieces, the Elegy on the
Death of Henry Lord Hastings, written in 1650, treats a subject
to which Dryden devoted some of his earliest verse.
Abraham Cowley, whose genius Denham declared to be twin
to that of Vergil, occupies a place somewhat outside the main
channel of the poetry of his day. He was born in Fleet street
in 1618. His essay Of My Self tells us what we know of his
i Johnson, Life of Denham.
? Dedication to Poems, 1667–8.
: Aubrey, op. cit. vol. I, p. 218.
a


## p. 62 (#78) ##############################################

62 Writers of the Couplet
學
​earliest years, and how the early reading of a copy of Spenser,
which lay in his mother's parlour, 'filled' his head first with such
Chimes of Verse, as have never since left ringing there. ' He was
sent to Westminster school, and, in 1633, when only in his fifteenth
year, published a small volume entitled Poeticall Blossomes,
dedicated to bishop Williams, then dean of Westminster. In 1636
appeared Sylva, a collection of occasional verses and odes; and
the composition of the pastoral comedy called Love's Riddle also
belongs to his Westminster days. His two earliest pieces to
which a date can be assigned are the narratives, Pyramus and
Thisbe and Constantia and Philetus, written, on his own showing,
in 1628 and 1630. These are in stanzas of six decasyllabic lines: the
stanza of Pyramus and Thisbe has two rimes, the third and fourth
lines forming a couplet riming with the first line, and the con-
cluding couplet riming with the second line; while that of Con-
stantia and Philetus consists of a quatrain with alternate rimes,
and a final couplet. Spenser's successors, rather than Spenser
himself, appear to have been Cowley's model. The two songs in
Constantia and Philetus, and the epitaph at the end of Pyramus
and Thisbe, in which the metre is varied by changes from iambic
to trochaic lines, and vice versa, show that his ear was naturally
sensitive to prosody. His delight in Latin poetry, and particularly
in Horace, appears in the odes contained in Sylva. Of the last
three verses of The Vote, written when he was thirteen, he was
justly not ashamed at a more mature time of life; and, indeed, he did
not often excel their heart-felt, if not wholly original, prayer for a
moderate estate and a life of quiet study. The opening verses, with
their keen and even humorous observation of typical characters, are
evidence that, if he sat at the feet of Spenser and the Latin poets,
he also bad caught the tricks of Donne; and the 'two or three
sharpe curses' which he flings, in A Poeticall Revenge, at the 'semi-
gentleman of th’ Innes of Court' who struck him in Westminster
hall are a direct reminiscence of Donne in his satiric mood.
In 1637, Cowley entered Trinity college, Cambridge, as a
scholar. He obtained his fellowship in 1640 : ejected in 1644,
he sought refuge at St John's college, Oxford. In his first year
at Cambridge, he wrote a Latin comedy, Naufragium Joculare ;
and, on 12 March 1640/1, his English comedy, The Guardian,
which he brought out in an entirely new form after the restoration
as Cutter of Coleman-Street, was acted at Trinity before prince
Charles. Amid the troubles of the civil war, he acted as secretary
in France to the queen and court in their correspondence with
a


## p. 63 (#79) ##############################################

Abraham Cowley
63
Charles I. The discovery of his cipher led to the flight of Denham,
already recounted. Cowley's fervent loyalty brought him into
a way of life which was little to his taste. For a time, in 1656,
he acted as a royalist spy in England. After detection and a
narrow escape, he sheltered himself under the profession of a
physician, but returned to France before the restoration.
Although his detractors cast doubt on his loyalty to his old
cause, his Discourse by way of Vision concerning the Government
of Oliver Cromwell was the work of one who was heartily relieved
to see the end of the protectorate. After the restoration, he was
refused the mastership of the Savoy, and Cutter of Coleman-Street
was a failure on the stage. He found patrons in the earl of
St Albans and the duke of Buckingham, and retired on a fair
income to Chertsey, where he died in 1667.
The Mistress first appeared in 1647, and was reprinted in 1656 as
part of a four-fold collection of poems. His preface to the collected
edition represents him as about to quit the exercise of poetry,
and desirous to preserve all his writings which were worth pre-
serving. He excluded his juvenile pieces, and all verses written
by him with direct reference to the civil war. Part of a poem on
the war in three books, 'reaching as far as the first Battle of
Newbury,' was printed in 1679. The rest he divided into four
parts, Miscellanies, The Mistress, Pindarique Odes and Davideis,
of each of which he gave some explanation in his preface.
The Miscellanies and The Mistress are composed of lyrics
written in a variety of irregular metres. Of the Miscellanies,
Cowley thought little ; yet among these are most of the poems
indispensable in any representative selection of his work. In his
Anacreontiques, he used couplets in which the iambic line of eight,
and trochaic line of seven, syllables mingle tunefully and naturally.
The Chronicle, a great contrast to the tortuous fancies of his
love-poems, is one of the best examples of English vers de société
in any age. The stanzas On the Death of Mr William Hervey,
though disfigured by at least one frigid hyperbole, contain ad-
mirable lines, and were prompted by genuine affection. The same
may be said of the couplets On the Death of Mr Crashaw.
Sincere feeling pervades Cowley's excuse to his own church for
celebrating a pervert from her doctrines; and, while the conceit
in which Crashaw's muse is likened to Mary is expressed taste-
lessly, nothing could be happier than the wording of the companion
conceit. Angels are said to have carried the house of the Virgin
to Loreto:


## p. 64 (#80) ##############################################

64
Writers of the Couplet
'Tis surer much they brought thee there, and They,
And Thou, their charge, went singing all the way.
In The Mistress, Cowley was writing set verses on conventional
topics, and proved himself capable of endless fluency and ingenuity
of fancy. Donne's superficial influence is obvious in the subject of
such verses as the stanzas Written in Juice of Lemmon, or in
The Prophet, where the man who proposes to teach the poet to
love is given a list of arts and bidden teach them to their chief
professors. From Donne are taken the trick of beginning a poem
impatiently and abruptly, as though in exasperation, and an extra-
vagant outburst like
Love thou'rt a Devil; if I may call thee One,
For sure in Me thy name is Legioni,
Equally characteristic of Donne is Cowley's free use of far-fetched
and unexpected simile. Love exercises an unbounded tyranny
over him, and he calls in the other passions to drive this one out:
so do the Indians seek to free themselves from the Spaniard by
calling in the states of Holland? His love is so violent that,
though his life may be short, he may become “the great Methu-
salem of Love3. ' On parting from his mistress, he recalls the
sorrow with which men in Greenland see the sun sink for half
a year under the horizon". But, amid these vagaries, he does not
give any sign of the capacity for phrases and thoughts of astonishing
brilliance which underlies Donne’s extravagances. His aim is
always to astonish his readers with some new invention of a learned
and elaborate fancy. No genuine follower of Donne ever misused
his cleverness so woefully as Cowley, when, in presenting his book
to the Bodleian library, he called the store of God's wonders 'the
Beatifick Bodley of the Deity. ' True discipleship does not consist
in the imitation of mannerisms; and, in the few poems of The
Mistress in which Cowley chose to be natural, his manner was far
more nearly allied to the level suavity of Waller than to the
rugged and cloudy magnificence of Donne. Such are the stanzas
called The Spring, and the beautiful lines in The Change, which
begin, 'Love in her Sunny Eyes does basking play. '
The Pindarique Odes, prefaced by paraphrases of Pindar's
second Olympian and first Nemean odes, were introduced by
Cowley with a little diffidence. He is afraid that even experienced
readers will not understand them. Their voluble licence of metre
may give the mistaken impression that they are easy to compose.
1 The Inconstant, st. 1.
2 The Passions, st. 4.
3 Love and Life, st. 1.
* The Parting, st. 1.


## p. 65 (#81) ##############################################

Cowley's Pindarique Odes
65
>
6
>
The 'sweetness and numerosity' of the irregular lines may be
overlooked by a disregard of the necessary cadences in pronuncia-
tion. He had little or no insight into Pindar's metrical schemes :
his imitations of the 'stile and manner' of his author follow no
fixed system of prosody. The quality which he sought to
reproduce was the 'Enthusiastical manner' of Pindar, with its
digressions and bold figures, clothed in that kind of Stile
which Dion. Halicarnasseus calls Meryanopvès kaì Ý dù uera
SELVÓTITOs, and which he attributes to Alcacus. ' Cowley describes
the ‘Pindarique Pegasus' on which he is mounted :
'Tis an unruly, and a hard-mouth'd Horse,
Fierce, and unbroken yet,
Impatient of the Spur or Bit,
Now praunces stately, and anon flies oʻre the place,
Disdains the servile Law of any settled pace,
Conscious and proud of his own natural force.
'Twill no unskilful Touch endure,
But flings Writer and Reader too that sits not surel,
Thus he fortifies himself against charges of unskilful horseman-
ship. It is possible that he himself remained firm in the saddle
when he wrote the lines :
Thy task was harder much then his,
For thy learn'd America is
Not onely found out first by Thee2;
but the reader endures a fall before he makes the discovery that
the last syllable of 'America' has to be elided. Again, the line,
Which Father-Sun, Mother-Earth below' may be made into eight
syllables by eliding the last syllable of 'Mother'; but the reader
may be excused another stumble. Cowley's critical notes on the
odes serve unconsciously to set his own faults in relief. For the
metaphor at the beginning of The Muse, he cites the second strophe
of Pindar's sixth Olympian. But Pindar uses the metaphor merely
to introduce what follows, nor does he wear it threadbare. Cowley,
on the other hand, harnesses to the muse's chariot six abstract
qualities and the suggestion of more; Nature becomes its postillion,
Art its coachman, Figures, Conceits and other qualities its running
footmen; and the whole four stanzas, in lines varying from two
to twelve syllables, describe its progress with a prodigal use of
fancies, which are astonishing merely in their extravagance and want
of grace. Amid these things, lines occur in which Cowley's natural
melancholy speaks with a note of music—for example ‘And Life,
?
3
• To Mr Hobs, st. 4.
1 The Resurrection, st. 4.
* To Dr Scarborough, st. 4.
E L. VII. CH. III.
5


## p. 66 (#82) ##############################################

66
Writers of the Couplet
alas, allows but one ill winters Day. But these moments are
few and far between. The poet is bent on being clever at the
expense of all else besides. Conceits in which the years to
come are conceived as eggs within their shell", in which Elijah
becomes
The second Man, who leapt the Ditch where all
The rest of Mankind fall,
And went not downwards to the skies,
are faults of ambition from which Cowley's humour was not
capable of saving him.
The fourth part of the volume was occupied by the four
books of Davideis, a Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David,
in decasyllabic couplets. Cowley's deep conviction of religion,
though tinged with decided fatalism, prompted him to compose
a sacred epic; and David, as the ancestor of Jesus, and as a
hero who attained success through sufferings of an epic cast,
suggested a possibly fertile subject. Vergil was the model of the
poem, which, designed to be in twelve books, like the Aeneid, was
to conclude with the lament of David over Saul and Jonathan.
Whether the subject was suited for epic treatment on this scale
is a purely aesthetic question, which Cowley, at any rate, answered
a
in the affirmative. His handling of it was hampered by a passion
a
for digression, and the determination to crowd all his biblical
learning into the poem. The first book, after the preliminary
invocation, and a description of the opposed councils of hell and
heaven, proceeds with the history of Saul's anger, the preservation
,
of David by Michal, his flight to Ramah and the appearance of
Saul among the prophets. The charm of David's music suggests
a disquisition, containing some staggering analogies on the har-
mony designed by God in creation. David's visit to Ramah calls
for a minute description of the prophets' college, and a less
interesting résumé of their course of instruction. Balaam's pro-
phecy is applied, happily, to Saul's change of heart. In the second
book, a rhapsody on the nature of love introduces us to Jonathan.
The celebration of the feast of the new moon brings us to the
hall of Saul's palace, where we read the story of Abraham por-
trayed in the tapestry hangings. David, absent from the feast, is
regaled by a vision selected by an angel from the miscellaneous
treasury of fancy, and sees the history of his royal house unfolded
before him until, to his waking ears, Gabriel, an elegant figure
clothed in a blue silk mantle cut from the skies, with a scarf
1 The Muse, st. 3.
2 The Extasie, st. 7.
>


## p. 67 (#83) ##############################################

Cowley's Davideis
67
formed of the choicest piece of an undimmed rainbow, prophesies
the birth of the Messiah. The third book brings us into a labyrinth
of retrospect. David escapes to Nob and Gath : his heroes join
him at Adullam, and accompany him to Moab. The king of Moab,
full of epic curiosity to hear a story of adventure, hears from Joab
the tale of David and Goliath and the marriage of David and
Michal. With the next morning, the fourth book begins. The
last three leagues of the way to 'gameful Nebo’ are beguiled
by David with a sketch of the constitution of Israel under the
judges, and a review of the early part of the reign of Saul.
Much still remains to be told after the end of the Philistine
war; but, with the arrival of the hunters at Nebo, the poem
closes.
That Cowley had some narrative art must be admitted : the
poem is not dull, and his consistent cleverness stimulates the
reader's curiosity, if it does not provoke his admiration. In
notes, full of learning, he discusses and defends his embroideries
on the sacred story, and explains what may seem to be the
novelties of his versification. His couplet has in it more of the
weight of Sandys and the older couplet-writers than of the some-
what emasculated melody of Waller or the pointed brevity of
Denham. He occasionally allows himself a triplet. Sandys, how-
ever, in his Ovid, had used triplets, though on a very few occasions,
and had written several of his Psalms in octosyllabic triplets ;
and, at least once, a triplet is to be found in Waller. Twelve-
syllabled lines occur from time to time in Davideis, and, in the
fourth book, the oracle at Shiloh speaks in this measure. In
Davideis, such variations are used to express the sense of the
passage more thoroughly by the sound. The overflowing of a
river, the infinitude of the glory of heaven, the incessant halleluia
of the angels 'Halleluia' was a word which led Cowley into
strange metrical gymnastics—the hugeness of the appearance of
Goliath, the height of Saul, all give occasion to the serviceable
alexandrine; and Cowley feels himself bound to call the reader's
possibly neglectful attention to this. He indeed refined too
greatly on the effect produced by wedding sound to sense. Of
the two examples to which he directs us in the second book, one,
the line describing the meteor worn instead of hair by Gabriel',
is too subtle to make its intended point clear ; while the other,
describing the doom of the Edomites at the hands of Amaziah? ,
defies all scansion in its effort to be graphic. The fact that
1 Book 11, 1. 802.
2 Book 11, 1. 611.
5_2


## p. 68 (#84) ##############################################

68 Writers of the Couplet
Cowley always kept his meaning before him, and sought, with
high ideals, for the most effective way of expressing it, is the
leading virtue of this, his most ambitious work. Valuing every
artifice which may give vivacity to the expression of emotion, he
condemns the 'putid officiousness' of the grammarians who
finished Vergil's incomplete lines? ; and, where words or de-
scription fail him, he himself suppresses the end of his line and
the conclusion of his couplet.
Cowley's work, in the development of the couplet form, was
neither to smooth its roughnesses nor to disencumber it of super-
fluous content. He strove to make it an adequate vehicle for
narrative verse, and to make its movement responsive to the
demands of its subject. His weakness in performance lay in his self-
conscious ambitiousness, and the mannerisms in which his thought
habitually found expression. Without his example, however, the
couplet could hardly have attained that force which, in combina-
tion with flexibility and ease, it acquired in Dryden's hands. In
many respects, the ease and majesty of Dryden's couplets seem
more closely allied to the masculine style of the earlier couplet-
writers than to the artifices and not infrequent tameness of Cowley
and Waller. Yet it is the case that the intermediary work of
each, in its own way, made those qualities in Dryden possible,
and that their efforts helped to give his couplets that polish
and balance and good sense which, in his case, became a second
nature.
After 1656, the poetical work of Cowley was small in volume.
In 1643, he had written a bitter, but able, satire in couplets
on puritanism, called The Puritan and the Papist. His first
published work after the restoration was the attack, already
alluded to, on the memory of Cromwell, which, although in prose,
contains verses, and ends in a set of couplets. The Verses on
Several Occasions, including the long Ode upon His Majesties
Restoration and Return and the lively Ode Sitting and Drinking
in the Chair, made out of the Reliques of Sir Francis Drake's
Ship, appeared in 1663. Another ode in the same collection, To
the Royal Society, recalls the publication, in 1661, of Cowley's
brief prose Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental
Philosophy. The folio edition of his works published in 1668 con-
tained, in addition to the poems of 1656 and 1663, the Discourse
on Cromwell, and the Several Discourses by way of Essays, in
Verse and Prose. These later verses include odes and stanzas
1 Book I, note 14.
>


## p. 69 (#85) ##############################################

Cowley's Influence
69
appropriate to the subjects of the essays, and a number of trans-
lations and imitations, chiefly of Horace. The prose Essays
take their place more fittingly in a discussion of the development
of English prose? : their value in connection with the poetry of
Cowley is that they give us, in language of great refinement
and beauty, the key to his scholarly and sensitive nature. While
thoroughly conscious of his own art, he obtruded himself but
little into the text of his poems. Once, in his later years,
disappointed of his hopes of court favour, he blamed himself,
'the melancholy Cowley,' through the lips of his muse, for his
' unlearn'd Apostacy' from poetry, and the devotion to affairs
which had left him 'gaping . . . upon the naked Beach, upon the
Barren Sand,' while his fellow-voyagers pressed inland to their
reward. He consoled himself by rebuking his mentor, and repre-
senting the favour of the king as still possible? This, however, is
his one strictly autobiographical poem. The true ambition and
devotion of his life was centred in literature. In his own day, his
reputation was very high. The influence of Donne, lord of the
universal monarchy of Wit,' was still powerful: its finer qualities
were hidden by the passion for flights of artificial fancy which it
had provoked, and one who surpassed Donne in outlandish variety
of conceits might well be hailed as his legitimate successor and
even superior. If the reputation of Cowley declined with sur-
prising rapidity, while that of Waller and Denham remained
undiminished”, it was because, instead of pursuing, with them, the
natural direction of poetry, he chose to limit his taste within the
compass of fashions that were outworn, and to exhaust the last
resources with which those fashions could supply their followers.
Yet his influence on the verse of the younger generation of poets
must not be judged entirely by the eclipse which overtook his
fame within half a century of his death. That influence was
summed up by Johnson at the end of the searching criticism of the
fantastic school of poetry, and of Cowley as 'the last of that race,
and undoubtedly the best,' with which he concluded his Life of
Cowley :
It may be afirmed, without any encomiastic fervour, that he brought to
his poetic labours a mind replete with learning, and that his pages are
embellished with all the ornaments which books could supply; that he was
the first who imparted to English numbers the enthusiasm of the greater ode,
and the gaiety of the less; that he was equally qualified for spritely sallies,
1 See volume vm of the present work.
2 The Complaint, stt. 3, 8.
3 Contrast, e. g. Pope, Essay on Criticism, Il. 360, 361, with Imitations of Horace,
cp. 1 1. 75–79.
epil
p. I, %!


## p.
70 (#86) ##############################################

70
Writers of the Couplet
17
and for lofty flights; that he was among those who freed translation from
servility, and, instead of following his author at a distance, walked by his side;
and that, if he left versification yet improveable, he left likewise from time to
time such specimens of excellence, as enabled succeeding poets to improve it.
The general inclination to restrain poetic fluency within definite
bounds, which led to the adoption of the self-contained couplet
as the standard form of verse after the restoration, prompted
Sir William D'Avenant to write his epic poem, Gondibert, in a
series of quatrains with alternate rimes. The first two books of
Gondibert were written at Paris, where D'Avenant was the guest
of lord Jermyn in his rooms at the Louvre. The whole poem was
intended to consist of five books, corresponding to the five acts of
a play, each divided into a number of cantos. D'Avenant, according
to Aubrey, was much in love with his design; and his pre-
occupation with it excited the ridicule of Denham and other
courtiers then at Paris. In 1650, the two finished books were
published, prefaced by a long letter from the author to Hobbes,
who had read the work as it advanced, and by a complimentary
answer from Hobbes himself. Gondibert was never completed.
Early in 1650, Sir William left Paris for Virginia : his voyage was
intercepted by a parliamentary ship, which took him prisoner.
He wrote six cantos of the third book during his imprisonment in
Cowes castle, but, finding that the sorrows of his condition begat
in him 'such a gravity, as diverts the musick of verse,' he aban-
doned the poem, and, during the remaining eighteen years of his
life, added to it but one fragment, which was printed in the
collected edition of his works in 1673. The unfinished poem, with
a postscript dated from Cowes castle, 22 October 1650, was pub-
lished in 1651.
In his epistle to Hobbes, D'Avenant elaborately explained his
theory of poetry, his choice of the epic form, and his conduct of
the various parts of the poem. He was much in earnest in de-
fending the moral value of poetry, and in indicating the salutary
influence which princes and nobles, being reformed and made
angelicall by the heroick' form of verse, may exercise on their
subjects who, by defect of education, are less capable of feeling its
advantages. His aim was to give his readers a perfect picture of
virtue, avoiding the snares into which critics had found that pre-
vious epic poets, from Homer to Spenser and Tasso, had fallen.
His stage was to be filled with characters remarkable for noble
birth or greatness of mind, whose schools of morality were courts
or camps. The 'distempers' chosen as objects of warning were
6


## p. 71 (#87) ##############################################

Sir William D'Avenant
71
not to be vulgar vices, but the higher passions of love and ambition.
As for his 'interwoven stanza of four'
I believed (he says) it would be more pleasant to the reader, in a work of
length, to give this respite or pause, between every stanza (having endeavoured
that each should contain a period) than to run him out of breath with con-
tinued couplets. Nor doth alternate rime by any lowliness of cadence make
the sound less heroick, but rather adapt it to a plain and stately composing
of musick; and the brevity of the stanza renders it less subtle to the composer,
and more easie to the singer, which in stilo recitativo, when the story is long,
is chiefly requisite.
The stanza itself was no novelty : D'Avenant's innovation con-
sisted in his adaptation of it to an epic poem, and in his attempt
to give to each quatrain an individual completeness, to which he
felt the couplet unequal. Gondibert, even had it been finished,
,
would hardly have achieved the place among epics which its author
designed it to fill; and the compliments paid to it by Hobbes, in a
letter which contains much sound criticism, flattered it excessively.
The characters of Gondibert himself and the virtuous and highly
educated Birtha, a Miranda instructed by another Prospero in the
shape of her father Astragon, fail to inspire much interest :
Rhodalind, the rival of Birtha for the love of Gondibert, is a mere
lay figure; and the subtle Hermegild, the haughty Gartha and
the rest, merely threaten complications in the plot, the develop-
ment of which we are spared. The descriptions are long, and the
speeches of the characters are intolerably prolix : Gondibert
declares his love to Birtha in nine stanzas, and explains his inten-
tions to her father in two speeches, extending over thirty stanzas
more. The language, however, is uninvolved, although D'Avenant,
who set much store by wit in poetry, indulges constantly in
images dear to the fantastic poets, such as those drawn from the
mandrake or from the details of alchemy. If he placed too high
a hope in the future of his work, he get strove in it consistently
for directness of expression and succinctness of sense. The virtues
of his quatrain were proved by the admiration of Dryden, who
chose it as the stanza of Annus Mirabilis ; and the practice,
which Dryden, by its use, gained in clear and pointed writing,
gives it a place as a link in the development of the couplet form,
of which he became the most accomplished master.


## p. 72 (#88) ##############################################

1
1
1
0
1
CHAPTER IV
I
을
​LESSER CAROLINE POETS
1
We have to deal in this chapter with a group of poets in
regard to the treatment of whom opposite dangers present
themselves. Most, if not all of them, from a time immediately
succeeding their own, have been very little known, and there
are literary histories of repute which contain none, or hardly
one, of their names. The school to which, almost without
exception, they belong has been constantly attacked and rarely
defended. Some of them came in for early ridicule at the
hands of the two greatest satirists of their own later years
two of the greatest in English literature—Dryden and Butler.
Another generation saw their school as illustrating the 'false wit
of Addison ; and, in yet another, that school provided subjects
for Johnson's dissection of metaphysical' poetry. They received
.
little, though they did receive some, attention from the greater
critics and poets of the romantic revival; and no one has ever
bestowed upon their class—very seldom has any one bestowed
upon an individual member of it-the somewhat whimsical and
excessive, but by no means impotent, and sometimes rather con-
tagious, enthusiasm which, for instance, was bestowed by Charles
Lamb upon Wither. Until very recently, none of the group has
been easily accessible to the general reader—while some have been
absolutely inaccessible, except to those who have time, energy and
opportunity to frequent the largest public libraries, or time and
means to procure them in the second-hand book-market. Indeed,
it is believed that neither the British Museum, nor either of the
libraries of the two great English universities, possesses a complete
collection of the work which forms the subject of this survey.
There is a certain type of critic who is apt to say, in such
circumstances, that neglect proves worthlessness ; but this is
always a begging of the question, and it can be easily shown that,
in the present case, the questions begged are not unimportant.


## p. 73 (#89) ##############################################

Lesser Caroline Poets
73
That the poets here grouped are not worthless can be affirmed
with confidence by one who has impartially examined them;
indeed, the affirmation is made almost unnecessary, or, from
another point of view, is strongly corroborated, by the fact that
all anthologists of competence, from Ellis and Campbell down-
wards, have drawn, to some extent, upon them. That, as a class,
they have numerous faults, may be granted without the slightest
difficulty. But it so happens that their faults as well as their
merits are of the greatest historical value. It may fearlessly be
laid down that, without some study of these poets, neither the
characteristics of the great Elizabethan period which preceded
them and of which, in fact, they were the twelfth hour, nor those
of the reaction which, rising with and against them, overcame and
stifled their kind, can be fully comprehended. The cast of thought
and style and feeling which, when the genius of the man is at its
height and the fostering of the hour at its full, produces Spenser
and Shakespeare, turns out, when the genius is abated and the
hour at its wane, the work of Chamberlayne and Kynaston. The
revulsion (sometimes after actual indulgence in them) from the ex-
travagances of Benlowes and of Cleiveland shapes and confirms the
orderly theory and practice of Dryden and of Pope.
Nor, though this, of itself, would suffice to warrant treatment of
these poets here, is it their only claim thereto. It so happens
that they include authors of almost every example (the chief
exception being D'Avenant's Gondibert) of the English heroic
romance in verse. It is impossible, therefore, without taking them
into account, to appreciate the effect of the very curious, and far
too little studied, heroic influence on our literature. It is further
the case that they contribute very largely to the illustration of one
form of the great decasyllabic couplet—the form which, partly
from its own weakness, but partly, also, from its association with
their extravagances of diction and thought and narrative or-
donnance, succumbed to its rival—the closer knit and robuster
distich of Waller and Dryden. And this leads to yet another point
of historical interest about them—the fact, sometimes denied but
fairly certain for all that, of their having served as models and
teachers to Keats in his revival of their own form. Helots and
caricatures of the great poetry of the sixteenth and early seven-
teenth centuries ; gibbeted warnings, who prescribed to the late
seventeenth and the eighteenth the ways they should not go; ances-
tors of some of the most characteristic, and not the least charming,
features of the poetry of the nineteenth-these curious persons


## p. 74 (#90) ##############################################

74
Lesser Caroline Poets
have woven themselves into the poetic history of the country in
a fashion inseparable though not indistinguishable-a fashion that
may be ignored, but only at the cost of corresponding ignorance.
It will be already evident, perhaps, that, although some of them
possess individual interest, their collective interest, both as a group
and as practitioners of particular styles and kinds, is superior. Con-
sequently, with a very few exceptions, they may be advantageously
treated here in relation to those kinds or styles—romantic narra-
tive, short lyric, overlapping couplet verse, ‘metaphysical' and
'conceited' diction and thought-as well as by a reasoned catalogue
of the poets, and a chronological list, accompanied by criticism, of
the works.
The group of romantic narratives, or heroic poems, is headed
and not inadequately represented by the Pharonnida (1659) of
William Chamberlayne. Little is known of its author except that
he was born, lived (practising as a physician), died and was buried at
Shaftesbury on the Wiltshire and Dorset border; and that he served
with the royalist army, especially at the second battle of Newbury
(1644), when the composition of his poem was interrupted. It did
not appear till fifteen years afterwards. Besides Pharonnida, he
wrote a play, Love's Victory (1658), reprinted as Wits led by the
Nose (1678), and given with the romance by Singer, and a short
poem on the restoration, England's Jubile, which has been almost
unknown until recently. Many years afterwards, and after his death
in 1683, a very brief prose romance, disproportionately abstracted
from Pharonnida, appeared under the title Eromena, but nothing
is known about its authorship or editorship. The play contains
some interesting, and even fine, things, but is chaotic and not
of much value as a whole. Englands Jubile, vigorously enough
written, is chiefly noticeable for the strong opposition of its style
and verse to the verse and style of Pharonnida. To this, there-
fore, we may confine our detailed notice.
When its date, and the circumstances of English and European
literature at the time are duly remembered, Pharonnida presents
itself in a double aspect. On the one hand, it is an evidence of the
somewhat groping quest for the novel, and, also, an instance of a
particular stage of the long poem. The world-wide popularity of
Ariosto and, still more, of Tasso, reinforcing and reinforced by that
of the Amadis adaptations of medieval romance and of trans-
lations of Greek, supplied the principal determinants of this form
both in France and in England; but verse romance preserved
its attraction longer in England than in France. Pharonnida, in
4
a
2
>


## p. 75 (#91) ##############################################

William Chamberlayne
75
fact, may be described as an early attempt at an unhistorical novel,
couched in verse instead of in prose. Although Argalia the hero is, in
essence, a knight errant, he is, perhaps unconsciously, but consider-
ably, modernised-made much nearer to Stukely and Grenville,
Ralegh and Cumberland, than to Lancelot or Gawain, Amadis or
Galaor. Pharonnida the heroine has not much character; but she is
very prominent in the action, and, if not so real as Malory's Guinevere
or the heroine of Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight, is much more
so than Oriana or Polisarda. The adventures, on the whole, are free
from the sameness which is usually, and not always unjustly, charged
against earlier romance; and some of the episodes, especially that
of the frail Janusa's passion for Argalia, are remarkably vivid.
Unfortunately, Chamberlayne, regarding him, for the time, as
a tale-teller merely, has, as teller of a continuous tale, almost
everything to learn. It has been said that the composition of his
poem was, apparently, interrupted ; and this (with, perhaps, an
uncompleted attempt at revision of the earlier part) may, by very
charitable persons, be taken as a possible excuse for the incoherence
of the story, for the bewildering confusion of names in respect to
the same persons and places and for the author's apparent un-
certainty whether his action is going on in the Morea or in Sicily.
Nevertheless, it seems much more probable that he gave himself
no trouble whatever either in original planning or in subsequent
revision, but wrote his fourteen thousand lines 'overthwart and
endlong,' as older romances themselves picture the riding of their
knights, indulging in battles and sieges and imprisonments and
escapes and adventures by land and sea, till, at last, he was tired,
and graciously allowed his hero and heroine to marry and be
happy ever after.
If this were so, his poetical peculiarities, to which we may now
turn, certainly lent themselves—and, indeed, may be said to have
tempted him—both to extravagance and to incoherence. His
poetical vehicle here is the decasyllabic couplet, excessively over-
lapped or enjambed-a form which, found, like its definite opposite,
and almost all varieties between them, in Chaucer, had been taken up
and developed in the generation before Chamberlayne by Browne
and others, and was now provoking reaction in the opposite way.
Chamberlayne sets at defiance the principles already formulated by
Sir John Beaumont, and long afterwards indignantly objected to
in Keats by his Quarterly reviewer. He will run a sentence on for
nearly a page, and that not in the orderly periodic fashion of his
contemporary Milton's verse, but in more than the jointed
-


## p. 76 (#92) ##############################################

76
Lesser Caroline Poets
1
1
>
6
accumulation of Milton's prose, and in a welter of construction
which hopelessly defies analysis. Meanwhile, the rime is, as it were,
left to take care of itself, or, at most, so arranged as to supply a
sort of irregular musical accompaniment to what is, rhetorically
speaking, a vast paragraph of prose arranged with great rhythmi-
cal, and even metrical, beauty, but observing no kind of necessary
correspondence between the rhythm and the sense, and disregarding
altogether the 'punctuating '—the 'warning bell'-office of rime.
It is impossible that such a process as this should not affect-
and that prejudicially—the sense itself. It is not merely that
grammatical analysis of the meticulous kind is impossible—this
often happens, even in the best writers, before the eighteenth
century, and, nearly as often, the sense is not a jot the worse
for it. The construction justifies itself upòs tò on palvójevov, and
there is little or no doubt what that onuarvójevov is. But, in
Chamberlayne, there by no means seldom is doubt. He has
allowed a fresh thought, a fresh image, or even a fresh incident,
to arise in his mind before he has finished dealing with the last,
and he simply does not finish—but drops his old partner's arm and
puts his own round the new partner's waist without ceremony,
and without stopping the dance movement of verse and phrase.
After a time, with tolerable alacrity of mind, some patience and a
little goodwill, it is possible to accommodate oneself in reading
to what, at first, causes mere bewilderment, and, perhaps, in the
majority of readers, mere disgust. That disgust was certainly felt
by younger contemporaries, of whom Dryden was to be the most
distinguished representative. But it had not been felt by their
elders—we have the direct testimony of Izaak Walton as to Chalkhill
(see post), a minor Chamberlayne in almost every way. And those
who, while fully appreciating the faults and their lessons, can
prevent these from blinding them to the accompanying beauties,
will find not a few such beauties in Pharonnida.
However, it is undoubtedly true of Chamberlayne in Pharonnida,
as Shelley remarked of Chamberlayne's great pupil in Endymion,
that the author's intention appears to be that no person shall
possibly get to the end of it. ' The mysterious 'Jo. Chalkhill,'
to whom Walton attributed the poem entitled Thealma and
Clearchus, published by himself in 1683, though, according to
him, written 'long since' by a person who was 'an acquaintant
and friend of Edmund Spenser' (dead eighty years earlier),
adopted still surer measures for this purpose by never coming
to any end at all. Of the author, nothing is positively known,


## p. 77 (#93) ##############################################

Shakerley Marmion
77
and some have thought that he was a mere mask for Walton himself,
which is not at all probable; but there was a John Chalkhill, who was
coroner for Middlesex late in Elizabeth's reign and this, or another,
was grandfather, or, at least, step-grandfather, to Walton's wife.
The poem, though very much shorter, is exactly on the same lines
as Pharonnida-heroic, with a touch of the pastoral ; is couched
in the same sort of verse, though in somewhat lesser blocks ;
passes from adventure to adventure with the same bewildering
insouciance; seems, indeed, to have been written with somewhat
more care as to names and places, so far as the author's intention
goes; but indulges in a complication of disguises, mistakes of
persons and the like, which even Chamberlayne never permitted
himself, and which, probably, had something to do with the re-
linquishment of a recklessly and hopelessly embroiled enterprise.
Even in proportion to its length, it has fewer of those 'gleams of
poetry' which Shelley allowed to be of the highest and finest' in
Keats, and which are not seldom high and fine in Chamberlayne.
But it has some extremely pretty passages ; and its comparative
brevity, helped by Walton's commendations of it and of its author's
other work, has secured it some faint approach to popularity.
Yet another short piece of the same kind, revived, like those
previously mentioned, though in a small edition, rather less than a
century ago by the industry of Singer, is the Cupid and Psyche
(1637) of Shakerley Marmion the dramatist? Marmion possesses
the immense advantage of having the Apuleian narrative to
keep him straight and clear; and, though his poem is not a mere
paraphrase and, still less, a mere translation, he wisely deviates
little from the original in substance or order of telling. This,
with the beauty of the story itself, puts it at no small premium in
comparison with the others. But Marmion has far less power
than Chamberlayne, and not quite so much prettiness as Chalkhill.
Metrically, he is very interesting, because he illustrates not merely
one but both sides of the 'battle of the couplets. He is some-
times inclined to enjambment, but sometimes, also, and, perhaps,
more frequently in a manner which suggests a 'son' of Ben Jonson),
adopts the opposite form. Nor is he unsuccessful with it, though
the looseness of his rimes (which are sometimes mere assonances)
is against him. Moreover, that very clue of a ready made and
distinct story relieves him of the temptation to discursive extrava-
gance in the literal sense, to which Chamberlayne and Chalkhill
succumb. For it is one of the points of interest and importance
i See vol. VI, chap. I.


## p. 78 (#94) ##############################################

78
Lesser Caroline Poets
P
here, that the characteristics of verse and narrative exercise a
constant reflex action on each other. The want of foresight as to
what has to be said loosens the bounds of the measure of saying it;
and the absence of a sharp 'pull-up' in the measure encourages
the tendency to divagate.
Pharonnida, Thealma and Clearchus, Cupid and Psyche, have,
as has been said, for nearly a century been accessible, to some
extent, without recourse to the very rare originals. This has not
been the case, till within the last few years, with a fourth and very
curious example of the heroic poem, the Leoline and Sydanis (1642)
of Sir Francis Kynaston. One or two of Kynaston's lyrics, by
the production of which he is distinguished from his compeers,
had been noted and quoted by anthologists; and a singular ex-
periment of his in the matter of Chaucer had also been chronicled
in the present generation : but his principal poem had been left to
curiosity-hunters. Kynaston was a Shropshire gentleman of family,
and, apparently, of some means; a member, not merely by incorpora-
tion, but by actual residence, of both universities; he was proctor
at Cambridge in 1635, and sat for Shropshire in parliament from
1621 onwards. In 1635, he started in London, not without royal
patronage, a kind of institute or academy entitled Museum
Minervae. His enthusiasm for Chaucer led him to execute (in 1635)
a version of the first two books of Troilus and Criseyde in Latin
rime royal-a thing apparently preposterous, but by no means
actually contemptible; and he adopted the same measure in his
English romance. It holds itself out as embodying some tradition
of his Welsh neighbours, and the adventures pass entirely in Wales
and Ireland, but are not connected with any of the better-known
cycles of either Welsh or Irish literature. They describe the
fortunes or (mainly) misfortunes of a king's son and a duke's
daughter who are separated by the agency of black magic and
reunited by that of white—the heroine, for a time, supporting the
personage of page to her rival. In mere poetical value, Leoline
and Sydanis is the inferior of Thealma and Clearchus, and very
far the inferior of Pharonnida; but, as a story, it is infinitely
superior to both, and it shows an important distinction of kind,
which is not merely heroic but distinctly heroicomic. Ariosto, rather
than Tasso, is the model—if, indeed, Kynaston has not gone beyond
Ariosto to patterns still more distinctly satiric or burlesque. Rime
royal, which, as a metre, has a decidedly serious complexion, does
not lend itself to this use quite so well as the octave. But Kynaston
is by no means wholly unsuccessful—and, with some slips into the


## p. 79 (#95) ##############################################

Kynaston. Hannay
79
6
prosaic (which is the danger of the style and, in this use, of the
metre), presents an early, a fairly original and a very interesting,
anticipation of Whistlecraft' and Don Juan. The Latin Troilus,
though, of course, only a tour de force, is a remarkable counterpart,
in its straightforward utilisation of a classical language for modern
metre, of earlier and later experiments in classical metre with
modern language. And, though the statement may seem rash,
it suggests that the rarer and less popular experiment has in
it less inherent elements of failure. Something more will be
said later of Kynaston's lyrics. But they certainly illustrate
that remarkable diffusion of the lyrical spirit which is one of
the notes of the age ; and, as certainly, they are not the less
interesting from being found in company with a long poem of
considerable individuality and no small merit, and with a curious
experiment of the kind just described—the whole due, not to a pro-
fessional man of letters or a mere recluse student, but to a person of
fortune, of position in politics as well as in academic business and of
evidently active tendencies. Their author is not the best poet of
this chapter, but he is one of its most notable and typical figures.
The remaining heroic romances of this period are inferior to
the four just described in poetical merit; but there are several
of them, they are mostly very rare in original editions and they
contribute to the importance and interest of the class in the history,
both of English poetry and of the English novel. The oldest, the
Sheretine and Mariana of Patrick Hannay, is not strictly Caroline,
as it was published a year or two before Charles came to the
throne ; but it is essentially of the group. This poem, a tragic
legend of love and inconstancy, is based on, or connected with,
Hungarian history after the battle of Mohacz (1526), and is recounted
by the heroine's ghost in two books and more than two hundred
six-lined stanzas of decasyllables. Hannay (of whom next to
nothing is known, but who was certainly of the Galloway Hannays,
and may, later, have been a master of chancery in Ireland) also
wrote a long version of the story of Philomela, in curious lyrical
form, which he seems to have thought might be sung throughout
(he gives the tune), though it extends to nearly 1700 lines; a
poem called The Happy Husband (1619); elegies on Anne of
Denmark; and some smaller pieces. He is no great poet, but
has minor historical interests of varied kinds, including that of
writing in literary English strongly tinged with Scoticisms.
The Chaste and Lost Lovers or Arcadius and Sepha of William
Bosworth or Boxworth is a couplet poem in less than 3000 lines


## p. 80 (#96) ##############################################

80
Lesser Caroline Poets
varied by some other metres, much less enjambed than others of
the period in form, and decidedly less ‘metaphysical' in diction;
but having a double portion of intricacy and unintelligibility of
story. It was published, with some minor poems, a year after its
author's death, in 1651 ; but he seems to have written it consider-
ably earlier-in fact, when he was not twenty, in the first or second
year of Charles. As might be expected, these poems lack precision
no less than compression, and they are rather promise than per-
formance; but their promise is considerable and the circumstances
of their production noteworthy. Bosworth, of whom, again, next
to nothing is known, but who, apparently, was a country gentleman
in Cambridgeshire, is, perhaps, best seen in his shorter piece Hinc
Lachrimae or To Aurora, which is not so much a single poem as
a sequence of disains; but there are many good things in Arcadius
and Sepha itself.
Besides these, we have further, of the same kind, the Albino and
Bellama (1637) of Nathaniel Whiting, a poem of more than four
thousand lines in sixains, with strong inclination to the heroi-
comic, and with something of the greater clearness of tale-telling
which the comic element often brings with it, but with a more
vulgar tone than Kynaston's; the Arnalte and Lucenda (1639) of
Leonard Lawrence, a piece of little merit, and one or two
others not worth mentioning. The last-named poem (which is
worth mentioning if only for this reason) pretends to be adapted
'from the Greek of an unknown author,' and this is an indirect
testimony, much stronger than the direct assertion, to the influence
of the late Greek romances on the whole class.
As will have been seen, they even follow, with the single excep-
tion of Pharonnida, the double title, by hero's and heroine's name,
which is usual in those romances; and they follow them, less
superficially, in the predominance of love-interest as a 'central
motive, and in the working out of the story by an endless series
of mostly episodic adventures. This may appropriately bring us
round to some consideration of the general character of the class
itself. That character may be put afresh as showing vividly the
persistence of the appetite for poetry, the disposition to couch
fiction in verse and the decay of concentrated poetical power in
the average writer, despite a strange general diffusion of some
share of it; with, on the other side, the strong, blind groping after
fiction itself. All these writers want to tell a story ; but, for the
most part, they do not in the very least know how to do it. Even
if they were not perpetually neglecting their main business in


## p. 81 (#97) ##############################################

Sir Francis Kynaston
81
order to scatter poetical flowers, which (except in the case of
Chamberlayne conspicuously and of others more or less) they,
again, do not know how to produce of the true colour and sweet-
ness, their mere notion of novel arrangement is (except, perhaps,
with Kynaston) hopelessly inadequate. Their confusion in this way
infects, and, in its turn, is aggravated by, the disorder of their
grammar, their style and their versification. It is true that, in
almost all of them—as, for instance, in such an utterly forgotten
person as Bosworth-there is a something, a suggestion, a remi-
niscence, of a kind of poetry not to be met again for a hundred
and fifty years. But it rarely comes—save in Chamberlayne—to
much more than a suggestion of poetry; and, everywhere, there
is much more than a suggestion of the imperative necessity of an
interval of 'prose and sense. '
Some, however, of these poets also devoted themselves, and
a larger number of others devoted themselves more or less,
to kinds of poetry which, though certainly not less exacting in
respect of purely poetical characteristics, are much less so in
respect of the characteristics which poetry shares with prose.
In the first chapter of this volume, something has been said con-
cerning the differences derived from, or first exemplified by,
Jonson and Donne, of later, as compared with earlier, lyric. But
these differences, though exhibited on a larger scale, in greater
variety and with more sustained perfection, by Herrick, Carew and
others already mentioned, are nowhere more characteristically
shown than by some of the lesser people who provide the subject
of this chapter. Chalkhill's verse, in this kind—more generally
known than anything else here owing to its inclusion by Walton in
The Compleat Angler-is good; but by far the best lyrist of the
poets already mentioned is Kynaston, whose Cynthiades or
Amorous Sonnets (1642) long ago furnished anthologists of taste
with one or two specimens, and might have been much more
largely drawn upon. The pieces which begin ‘Look not upon me
with those lovely eyes'; 'Do not conceal those radiant eyes';
When I behold the heaven of thy face'; 'Dear Cynthia, though
thou bear'st the name' and 'April is past : then do not shed'
display, in all but the highest degree, though with some inequality,
the impassioned quaintness of thought and expression, with the
mellifluous variety of accompanying sound, which form the com-
bined charm of this department of verse.
Of lyrists proper, the one writer of whose work at least one
piece is almost universally known, is Henry King, bishop of
6
E. L. VII.
CH. IV.


## p. 82 (#98) ##############################################

82
Lesser Caroline Poets
a
Chichester. King—who was a Westminster boy and Christ Church
man, and who successively held all the lesser dignities of the
Anglican church as prebendary of St Paul's, archdeacon of
Colchester, canon of Christ Church and dean of Rochester, before
his elevation to the bench-was a friend of Donne, Jonson and
Walton, and was acquainted with many other men of letters.
But his own literary fortunes have been rather unlucky. For,
when, nearly seventy years ago, Hannah undertook the re-
publication of King's Poems (1657 and later), he at first limited
his design to religious pieces, then intended to do the whole, but,
finding his biographical and bibliographical material too great for
that whole in one volume, promised a second, which he never found
time to publish. It therefore happens, by a most singular chance,
that the only poem by King which everyone knows will be looked
for in vain in the only extant edition, properly so called, of his
works. This piece, "Tell me no more how fair she is,' cannot,
indeed, claim to be of the most absolutely exquisite among the
many exquisite lyrics of this period. But there are few pieces
which unite a sufficient dose of this peculiar exquisiteness with so
complete an absence of all the faultier characteristics obscurity,
preciousness, conceit, excessive sensuousness,“metaphysical' diction,
metrical inequality; and, consequently, there is hardly one which
can be more fitly put before the average reader as a sample of
the style. His other pieces are inferior relatively, but do not
deserve the positive sense which is sometimes given to the word.
His elegies are sometimes fine; and The Legacy, The Exequy,
Silence, The Dirge, have caught almost more of the quieter spirit
and manner of Donne than has the work of any other poet, though
they have not Donne's intensity, or his magic.
There is, however, yet another piece attributed to King which
has considerable interest both in itself and as illustrating a
peculiarity of the time. There was still, on the one hand, a
certain shyness in regard to the formal publication of poetry, and,
on the other, the inveterate habit of handing about MS copies of
verses, with the result that ill-informed persons entered them in
their albums, and piratical, or, at least, enterprising, publishers
issued them in collections, under different names. The instance at
present referred to is the curious batch of similes for the short-
ness and instability of life sometimes entitled Sic Vita and, in its
best form, beginning
Like to the falling of a star.
They are, in the same form, attributed, also, to Francis Beaumont;


## p. 83 (#99) ##############################################

Thomas Stanley
83
and they either served as models to, or were continued by, some
half-score similar pieces—some of them attributed to well-known
persons like Browne and Quarles, some anonymous or belonging to a
schoolmaster named Simon Wastell. There can be no doubt that
King was quite equal to composing the best of them ; but his
authorship is a question of less interest than the way in which the
circumstances illustrate the manners and tastes of the time.
Much more various and extensive, and of more diffused ex-
cellence, though no one piece of it may be so generally known as
'Tell me no more,' is the work of Thomas Stanley, who, again, is a
typical figure of the time. His great grandfather was a natural son
of the third earl of Derby ; but his descendants had maintained
position and wealth. Stanley's father was a knight, and his mother
Mary was one of the Kentish Hammonds whom we shall meet
again in this chapter, and who were to be of continued literary
distinction. The poet first had, as private tutor, a son of Fairfax,
translator of Tasso, and then went to Pembroke college, Cambridge,
which he left for the grand tour. Coming home just at the
beginning of the civil war, he did not take any active part in
politics or fighting, but settled himself in the Temple, married
soon, used his not inconsiderable wealth for the benefit of numerous
literary friends and died in 1678. He holds no small place in
English literary history on more grounds than one, as editor of
Aeschylus, as author of the first serious English History of
Philosophy, which was long a standard, and (our present con-
cern) as a poet both original and in translation as well as a
copious translator in prose. His original poetical work is mainly
comprised in two volumes, issued, respectively, in 1647 and 1651 ;
but, five years later than the last date, he allowed a musician, John
Gamble, to 'set' a large number of his poems and gave him some
not yet printed. The two volumes also contain numerous transla-
tions from poets ancient and modern, while Stanley also Englished
the whole or part of prose and poetical work by Theocritus,
Ausonius, the pseudo-Anacreon, Bion, Moschus, Johannes Secundus,
Preti, Marino, Boscan, Gongora, Montalvan and others.
The mere list of Stanley's works may suggest an industrious
pedant, curiously combined with a butterfly poet. But his work
actually possesses very considerable charm. It is possible to lay
too much stress on his selection of classical poets for translation,
as indicating a decadent character ; but, undoubtedly, the favour
and the prettiness' of such things as Cupido Cruci Affixus, and
Basia, the rather uncanny grace of Pervigilium, were much akin
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84
Lesser Caroline Poets
.
h
to the general tendency of Caroline poetry. He has transferred
them all well, though not, perhaps, with sufficient discrimination
of the original styles; and he has certainly succeeded in main-
taining throughout his original verse a very high level of favour
and of prettiness themselves. Anthony à Wood called him ‘smooth
and genteel’; but, if one compares his work with that of smooth
and genteel poets in the eighteenth century or with the Jerning-
hams and Spencers and Haynes Baylys of the early nineteenth,
there will be found a notable, though, perhaps, not easily definable,
difference. Such lines as these, taken at an absolutely haphazard
first opening:
Chide, chide no more away
The fleeting daughters of the day-
Nor with impatient thoughts outrun
The lazy sun
have an aura of poetry about them which is something more than
smooth and genteel; and this will be found pretty evenly suffused.
And, when Sir Egerton Brydges, who (among other good deeds to
this group) reprinted Stanley nearly a hundred years ago, com-
mended one of his songs as 'very elegant' with all the harmony
of modern rhythm,' he might have told us where modern rhythm
had attained the peculiar harmony of this time, which Stanley
attains throughout. Excluding translations and mere commenda-
tory epistles, there are, perhaps, fifty or sixty pieces with the
characteristic titles of the time—The Blush, The Kiss, To Clarissa,
To Celia and so on. . The subjects or objects matter little ; but
the poetry deals with them (to exaggerate a little) in the way
described by Orsino in the opening lines of Twelfth Night, as
'breath stealing and giving odour. ' In fact, these Caroline poets
are as the bank of violets spoken of by the duke, and Stanley is
not the least sweet patch of it.
Perhaps, however, a still more typical example of these curious
writers is to be found in one who dedicated his poems, enthusias-
tically, to Stanley himself, a year before Stanley published his own.
John Hall, born at Durham in 1627, and educated at the grammar
school there, entered St John's college, Cambridge, in February
1645/6, and, in little more than a twelvemonth, had published a
volume of prose essays, Horae Vacivae (1646) and one of poems
in two books, profane and divine (1647). Both received ex-
traordinary praise, among the praisers being Hobbes, Howell and,
for the verse, Henry More and Stanley himself. These four names
would indicate that, at the time, Hall, if not a definite royalist,
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John Hall
85
was, at any rate, persona grata to the royalist party. In 1648, he
issued a Satire against the Presbyterians.