No More Learning

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
6—2


## p. 84 (#100) #############################################

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,
3
1
ly


## p. 85 (#101) #############################################

John Hall
85
was, at any rate, persona grata to the royalist party. In 1648, he
issued a Satire against the Presbyterians. But this, in the
changed circumstances of Cambridge and of the country, was not
incompatible with his being an adherent of Cromwell, on whose
side he wrote pamphlets, besides translating variously. His version
of Longinus—The Height of Eloquence—has, at any rate, no bad
title. But he did not follow up his promise of original work, he
lived hard and he died before he was thirty, in 1656.
Hall's poems exhibit the minor verse of the period, if not in
a complete, at any rate in a new and peculiar, microcosm. Un-
like Kynaston, he has no long poem ; and, though a professional
translator, he does not, like Stanley, mix translations of short
poems freely with his originals. But, unlike both of them, he is a
'divine' poet; and, unlike Stanley, he has a large portion of light
and trivial pieces tending towards the epigram-in fact, he ap-
proximates to Cleiveland in this respect, and there is a considerable
tangle of attributions between the two as to some pieces. In such
verse, however, he has no poetical interest : though a crowd of
allusions to persons and things will reward the hunter after game
of this nature. His gift in the poetical direction lies wholly in pure
lyric, and especially in the employment for it of the abruptly broken
metres, with constant very short lines alternated with long, that
had come into favour, of strongly 'metaphysical' diction and of no
small portion of the undefinable atmosphere of poetic suggestion
referred to above. The process results in not a very few poems of
remarkable beauty : The Call, The Lure, The Morning Star,
Julia Weeping, The Crystal, An Epicurean Ode, Of Beauty,
The Epilogue and the curious Ode from an undergraduate to his
tutor’ Pawson, among the profane poems ; A Dithyramb, the Ode
‘Descend O Lord,' Self and the other Ode 'Lord send Thine hand,'
among the divine. It is, no doubt, easy to say that, but for Donne
and Jonson, these things had never been ; yet, after all, we cannot
deny to the actual author the credit of the fact that these things
are; Jonson and Donne eminently, with others beside them,
provided, no doubt, the examples of form; the dying renascence
gave its colours of mixed enjoyment and regret; the rich tradition
of two full generations in England supplied word and phrase and
conceit. Still, in the case of the particular things, ‘John Hall
fecit.
On the other side of politics from that which Hall finally
adopted, resembling him in precocity and early death and the praise
of great men (here, once more, including Hobbes but, also, Clarendon,


## p. 86 (#102) #############################################

86
Lesser Caroline Poets
who is not likely to have thought much of Hall), was Sidney
Godolphin. He was a son of Sir William Godolphin of Godolphin
in Cornwall, and of Thomasine Sidney ; he was born in January
1610, went to Exeter college, Oxford in 1624, became member for
Helston when only eighteen, joined Hopton at once when the war
broke out and was shot at Chagford on 10 February 1643. But
Godolphin, though always regarded with interest by the few who
mentioned him, and, though holding the exceptional position of
having perished in actual fight at the opening of the rebellion, was,
in the stormy times of his death, neglected so far as publica-
tion of his poems was concerned. A few pieces-a commendatory
poem to Sandys on the latter's Paraphrases, one or two others in
other books and the beginning of a translation of the fourth book of
the Aeneid, continued by Waller, and published in the fourth volume
of Dryden's Miscellany-did, indeed, appear in or near his time.
Ellis gave one of his most charming things 'Or love me less or
love me more’ in his Specimens ; and Scott another in the so-
called Tixall Poetry. But the first attempt to collect his work
from these sources and from the two MSS, no. 39 of Malone's in
the Bodleian and Harl. 1917 in the British Museum, was made by
the present writer three or four years ago. The Vergilian piece
is an early and interesting document of the heroic couplet on its
regular side ; but the lyrics are his real title to fame.
e
These lyrics, few as they are, have the strongly miscellaneous
and occasional character which belongs to almost the entire group
—there are paraphrases of the Psalms, hymns, epistles (with some
curious and, as yet, unexplained sporting references) and so forth.
But, as usual, the charm lies in the love-lyrics : that given by
Ellis and referred to above; the perhaps even better 'No more
unto my thoughts appear,' which is in common measure of the
special Caroline stamp, while the other is in long; some fine
pieces—a Chorus, a Meditation/in octosyllabic couplets, some
lighter attempts, as the song "'Tis Affection but dissembled'; one
very curious compound, perhaps intended to be detached, of
common and long measure; and so forth. Once, in some triplets,
he has a piece where almost the whole appeal lies in ‘metaphysical?
thought and word-play on the difficulty of knowing his mistress
from Virtue herself-
Conceits of one must into the other flow . . .
You are in it, as it is all in you-
and such like puerilities, unsublimated by the strangeness of
touch which Donne would have given them, and emphasised by
-


## p. 87 (#103) #############################################

Sir Edward Sherborne
87
a
the stopped antithetic couplet. But this is almost Godolphin's
only slip into the pitfalls of the period. Of its graces and merits,
he has much; and it is difficult not to think that, in a different
station and circumstances, he would have had much more.
There are few more curious instances of the chances of books and
authors than the fact that, while Godolphin remained in MS, while
Kynaston was never reprinted till recently, nor Hall and Stanley
till nearly a century and a half after their dates, and then in small
editions only, the poems of Sir Edward Sherborne, Stanley's
cousin, found their way into the standard collections of English
poetry and, therefore, have long been easily accessible. Sherborne
lived a rather more public life than his relative, though, as a
Roman Catholic, he was debarred from public education. Born in
1618, he obtained the post of clerk of the ordnance, earlier held by
his father; but in an evil hour (1642), just at the opening of the
civil war. He was not only deprived but imprisoned for a time,
after which he joined the king's forces, was appointed commissary
general of artillery and made Oxford his head-quarters till its
surrender in 1646. After this, he suffered severely from confisca-
tion, but was helped by Stanley, and employed by the Savile and
Coventry families. He recovered his post in the ordnance at the
restoration, and was unscathed by the popish plot; but he became
a non-juror at the revolution and again fell into indigence. He
died at a great age in 1702, the last of his poetic tribe. But, not
at any time had he been of their strongest. Like Stanley, he has
left a few original pieces and a great many translations ; but
Stanley's unfailing elegance is wanting. Most of his translations
from a miscellaneous set of authors, Coluthus and Preti, Theocritus
and Casimir, are in undistinguished couplets ; his original pieces are
more lyrical and better; the best being religious. The love-poems
are more like those of an inferior Carew than those of Stanley,
Godolphin, Kynaston or Hall. But Chloris ! on thine eyes I gaze,'
The Vow, ‘Love once love ever' and one or two others are not
unworthy of a place in a full anthology of the kind at the time.
We have not as yet mentioned a poetess in this chapter, yet
there is one belonging to it; one of the first women, indeed, to
obtain the position in modern English literature. Very popular
and highly esteemed in her own day, complimentarily referred to
by Dryden and others and not seldom reprinted for a generation
or so later, the matchless Orinda,' as she was called in the coterie
language of the time, has, perhaps, been better known to most readers
by her nickname than by her works for nearly two centuries past.


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88
Lesser Caroline Poets
>
Her real maiden name was Katherine Fowler; she was born in
London on New Year's day, 1631 ; married at sixteen a Welshman
a
named Philips and began to be known as a writer of verse about
1651; but, though a pirated edition of her poems appeared in 1664,
shortly before her death, the first authorised one was published
posthumously in 1667. She translated Corneille's Pompée, and part
of his Horace. But her poetical interest lies in a considerable
number of miscellaneous poems, the best of which are in the un-
mistakable style of the group and mainly addressed to her women
friends of the coterie— 'Rosania' (Mary Aubrey), 'Lucasia,''Regina'
(this, apparently, a real name) and the rest. There is no very
great power in any of them, but the curious ‘magic music' of
sound and echo and atmosphere survives in the pieces beginning
‘Come my Lucasia, let us see,' 'I did not love until this time,' 'As
men that are with visions graced,' 'I have examined and do find’;
nor, perhaps, in these only.
Others of the lyrists must be more cursorily despatched.
Patrick Cary, brother of the famous lord Falkland, and author
(about 1651) of a pleasant volume of Trivial Poems and Triolets,
which Scott printed in 1819; William Hammond, again a relation
of Stanley and already referred to, a mild but not ungraceful
amorist; Robert Heath, author of Clarastella (1650), a sort of
average representative of style and time who, sometimes, a little
transcends the mediocre; Thomas Beedome a friend of the
dramatist Glapthorne and author of some pretty things ; the too-
celebrated Richard Flecknoe, in whose work it is but too easy to
discover general, if not particular, justification for Dryden's post-
humous maltreatment of him ; Henry Hawkins, a Jesuit, whose
Parthenia Sacra contains verse-pieces of merit; and, towards
the end of the period, the poet-painter Thomas Flatman, whose
unlucky name by no means expresses his poetic quality, and Philip
Ayres, a copious translator, emblem-writer and so forth, in whom
the peculiarities of the first Caroline school are prolonged into the
time of the second. Diligent and conscientious students may push
their researches further still, and by no means without profit of
this or that kind, among the work, sometimes a satura of verse
and prose, of Robert Baron (who seems to have paid distinct
attention to Milton's 1645 volume), Patheryke or Patrick Jenkyns,
Robert Gomersal, Henry Bold, John Collop. But there are two
.
writers who must have more particular treatment—Edward
Benlowes and John Cleiveland".
1 Birth and death dates, where known, are given in the index, but both the birth


## p. 89 (#105) #############################################

Edward Benlowes
89
In different ways, though with a certain overlapping of
community, these two poets are characteristic examples of the
defects of the group. One of the two never enjoyed anything but
a costly, personal, very limited and fleeting popularity; and,
despite (rather than in consequence of) the flouts of certain
persons of distinction, despite the additional fact that his principal
book has attractions dear to bibliographers and collectors, he
has been, until recently, quite forgotten. The other, a man of
varied and practical, as well as poetical, genius, immensely
popular for not so very short a time, dropped almost wholly out of
general knowledge, and, by most of those who have known him at
all, has been known either because he made some figure politically,
or as the victim of a passing gibe of Dryden and as furnishing
Johnson with typical extracts for his important life of Cowley,
with its criticism of the metaphysical poets. Benlowes, the
elder and by much the longer lived, was born c. 1603, probably
at the paternal seat of Brent hall, Essex, which he inherited.
He entered St John's college, Cambridge, in 1620, afterwards
making the grand tour. At one time of his life, he was a Roman
Catholic, but died an English churchman : and it is not certain
whether his Romanism was merely an episode or not. So, also, we
have only Butler's indirect testimony to the fact of Benlowes
having actually served in the civil war: but he was certainly a
strong royalist. It is also certain that he lost his fortune, the
main cause assigned being overlavishness to friends and flatterers.
Latterly, he lived at Oxford and died there (it is said from priva-
tion) in 1676. Butler had already selected him as the subject
for his character A Small poet, which is full of the bitterest
ridicule. Long afterwards, Pope wrote, but did not finally print,
in the prologue to his Satires, the couplet
How pleased I see some patron to each scrub
Quarles had his Benlowes, Tibbald has his Bubb,
with the note ‘A gentleman of Oxford who patronised all bad poets
of that reign. ' He left these lines out, but, in the Dunciad (III, 21),
he returned to the subject in the line
Benlowes, propitious still to blockheads, bows,
with an enlarged note on Benlowes's own bad poetry which War-
burton amplified with ridicule of his titles.
and death dates and the life circumstances of most of the poets mentioned in this
paragraph are quite unknown; and even their floruit is usually determined only by
the dates of the rare volumes of their work.


## p. 90 (#106) #############################################

90
Lesser Caroline Poets
Some ten or a dozen different publications are attributed to
Benlowes—the use of initials instead of the full name causing
doubt—but all of them, except one, are short, most are unim-
portant and several are in Latin. His title to fame—if any—and
the head and front of his offending, lie in a long and singular poem
entitled Theophila or Love's Sacrifice, published in 1652 in a
folio volume of 268 pages, illustrated rather lavishly, but with
such differences in different copies as to make the book something
of a bibliographical crux. This, however, matters little to us.
The title, to those acquainted with the literature of the time and
group, but not with the book itself, might naturally suggest a
romance of the kind discussed in the beginning of this chapter.
It is, however, nothing of the kind. Theophila is merely a name
for the soul : and the titles of the several cantos—Praelibation,'
'Inamoration,' 'Disincantation,' and so on, will at once suggest the
vein of theological mysticism which is worked here, though there are
large digressions of various kinds, especially in satiric denunciation
of fleshly vices. Had there not been a bee in Benlowes's bonnet, the
poem might have ranked as a third to those of More and Beaumont-
not, perhaps, much more read than it has been, but respected. Un-
fortunately, that bonnet was a mere hive. In the first place, he
selected for his main (not quite his exclusive)medium the exceedingly
peculiar stanza of which an example is given below, a triplet of ten,
eight and twelve syllables. This combination, which, at the end
of others, and so concluding a longer stave, is sometimes successful
enough, is, by itself, when constantly repeated, curiously ugly. In
the second, the lack of clear arrangement which, as we have seen, is
common to almost all the group, becomes more intolerable than
ever in a half psychological, half theological disquisition. But
his sins become more flagrant still in respect of composition of
phrase as distinguished from arrangement of matter; and they
rise to their very highest in the selection and construction of
phrase itself.
It would sometimes appear as if his sole concern was to be
wilfully and preposterously odd. He wishes to denounce drunken-
ness :
Cheeks dyed in claret seem o' the quorum
When our nose-carbuncles like link-boys blaze before 'em.
a
He has a mind to hit at the inconsistency of the extreme reformed
sects, so he calls them 'Proteustants. ' Butler was particularly
wroth with the extraordinary coinage hypocondruncicus. In


## p. 91 (#107) #############################################

John Cleiveland
91
a long description of a bedizened courtezan, there occurs this
wonderful stanza :
She 'd coach affection on her cheek: but why?
Would Cupids horses climb so high
Over her alpine nose t' o'erthrow it in her eye?
In short, there is no extravagance of conceit or word-play at which
he blenches.
And yet, Benlowes is not a mere madman or a mere mounte-
bank. He has occasionally, and not very seldom, beautiful poetic
phrase; and he manages to suffuse long passages, if not whole
cantos, with a glow of devotional atmosphere and imagery which
is not very far inferior to Crashaw's. He seems, sometimes, to
have a dim and confused notion of the mixture and contrast of
passion and humour which makes the triumph of Carlyle and
Browning ; but he never can bring it off, for want, no doubt, of
absolutely transcendent genius, but still more, for want of
moderate and moderating self-criticism. He only partially knows
what to attempt; and he does not in the least know what not to
attempt.
In many ways (even beyond those already mentioned), John
Cleiveland was a striking contrast to Benlowes. Born in 1613 at
Loughborough, where his father was a curate, Cleiveland was
entered at Christ's college, Cambridge (where Milton was still in
residence), in 1627, and became fellow of St John's in 1634. He
took a strong line as a royalist, was expelled from his fellowship
in 1645, was made judge advocate at Newark in the same year,
is said to have been in some danger at the surrender of the
place, but passes out of knowledge for nearly ten years till, in
1655, we find him imprisoned as a royalist at Yarmouth. He
addressed a dignified petition to Cromwell, who released him ; but
his health seems to have been broken, and he died in London on
29 April 1658.
Yet, though we have but little detail of his life, he was almost
a celebrated person, and quite a celebrated poet. Even Cowley
was hardly so popular, and the welter of confusion which besets
his bibliography is due mainly to this popularity—the booksellers
sharking up' every scrap that could with any plausibility, and a
great deal that could not with any, be attributed to him. He had
published as early as 1640; and, for thirty years after his death
his poems continued to be reprinted, till, in 1687, what is sometimes
called the most complete edition appeared. Winstanley described
him in that year as 'an eminent poet, and the wit of our age. '
>


## p. 92 (#108) #############################################

92
Lesser Caroline Poets
a
Winstanley was no critic and the age was the age of Butler and
Dryden ; but he is all the more valuable as witness to the opinion
of the average man.
If confirmation be wanted, it is hardly
necessary to go further than the fact that, of the half-score or dozen
editions which had appeared in the forty years or so before this
date, hardly one failed to be reprinted or revised, and some were
reissued many times over.
The work by which this reputation was obtained, even when
bolstered out with spurious additions, is not large; the certainly, or
probably, genuine part of it does not extend to more than two or
three thousand lines. But Cleiveland had a double, in fact a treble,
appeal. In the first place, a large proportion of his work was
'straight-from-the-shoulder' political satire, sure to be received
rapturously by those who agreed with it, and perforce interesting,
though unpleasantly interesting, to its victims.
In the second, it was
couched in the very extravagance of the metaphysical fashion, yet
with an avoidance of the intolerable prolixity and promiscuousness,
or the sometimes merely foolish quaintness, of men like Benlowes.
In the third (though this is not likely to have been consciously
noticed), Cleiveland, evidently, is feeling for new melodies in verse;
he is not merely a master of the stopped antithetic couplet, but is
one of the earliest writers who shake off the literary timidity of
the Elizabethans and Jacobeans as to trisyllabic measures, and
boldly attempt anapaestic swing.
To appreciate Cleiveland's political pieces, it must be remem-
bered that, as has been pointed out elsewhere, there was not only
a deep though half unconscious thirst for the novel, but, also, a
similar nisus towards the newspaper. When, quite early in the
conflict, he lampooned the puritan objection to'&c,' in the oath of
1640, and when, shortly afterwards, he poured contempt on
Smectymnuus, he was simply a journalist of the acutest type in
verse-a poetical leader-writer. These things should be compared
with the prose writings, on the other side, of his senior at Christ's.
There is nothing to choose in bitterness; Cleiveland has the
advantage in point. But the shorter compass and less serious
form carry with them a danger which has weighed on all journalism
since. The packed allusion, and the rapid searching comment,
become almost unintelligible to any but contemporaries. Even
Cleiveland's most famous, and, on the whole, most successful, piece,
The Rebel Scot, requires more minute acquaintance with detail
than can be readily expected or found. The Mixed Assembly, a
piece of less than a hundred verses, would scarcely be overcom-
>


## p. 93 (#109) #############################################

Summary
93
mented on the margins of a hundred pages with a verse of text to
each. The force and fire are still admirable when realised; but
the smoke of the explosion has solidified itself, as it were, and
obscures both.
So, again, in non-political pieces, the same accretion of
allusive conceit besets the poetry. Men rejoiced, then, frankly and
sincerely, in such an image as this, that, when a bee crawls over
Fuscara's hand,
He tipples palmistry, and dines
On all her fortune-telling lines.
It can be rejoiced in still, but not by everybody. Yet it should
be impossible for anyone with some native alacrity of mind,
some literary sympathy and some acquired knowledge, not to
derive frequent enjoyment from Cleiveland, even in his altitudes
of conceit; and his verse is a real point de repère. In 1643, at
latest, we get from him such a couplet as this, which Dryden could
hardly have beaten forty years later still:
Such was the painters brief for Venus' face-
Item, an eye from Jane, a lip from Grace.
And, perhaps earlier, certainly not much later, in the semi-
serious Mark Antony and the avowed burlesque on this his own
piece, he attempts, and nearly achieves, anapaestic measure of a
kind hardly yet tried. A most imperfect poet he must be called ;
a poet of extraordinary gifts he should be allowed to be.
Sufficient stress has been laid on beauties, throughout this
chapter, to make it, though with some general reiteration, fair to
draw attention chiefly, in conclusion, to the warning which the
whole group more or less, and these last two members of it
especially, supply, and which makes the study of it almost indis-
pensable in order to a thorough comprehension of English litera-
ture. There are beauties in almost all these writers; charming
aud poignant beauty in some parts of some of them; and specially
characteristic beauty-beauty that you do not find in other periods ;
nor can it be denied that both their merits and their faults arose
from a striving after that daring and headstrong vein which had
made the fortune of the great Elizabethans. But there is one
power to whom, almost without exception, they neglected to pay
attention : and she avenges herself with prompt severity. Now
this power was criticism.
In some respects, they were very excusable. They could hardly
yet know that prose was a far more suitable medium for novel and


## p. 94 (#110) #############################################

94
Lesser Caroline Poets
romance writing than verse; the discovery was not fully made till
nearly a century after their time. But most of them, from
Chamberlayne downwards, might surely have known that, whether
you tell a story in verse or prose, you should tell it intelligibly and
clearly; with, at any rate, distinct sequence, if not with elaborate
plot; and in language arranged so as to convey thought, not to
conceal it. They were not to blame for adopting the overlapped
form of couplet : they were to blame for letting reasonable and
musical variety overflow into loquacious disorder. Although there
may be more difference of opinion here, they were not to blame
for adopting the ‘metaphysical' style, inasmuch as that style lends
itself to the sublimest poetic beauty ; but they were to blame for
neglecting to observe that, when it is not sublime, it is nearly
certain to be ridiculous. So, again, their practice of fantastically
cut and broken lyric, and their fingering of the common and
long measures, were wholly admirable things in themselves; but,
at the same time, they were apt to make their verse ‘not in-
evitable enough'-to multiply its examples in a mote-like and
unimportant fashion. To take the two capital examples just dwelt
upon : in another age, Benlowes would probably either not have
written at all or have been a religious and satiric poet of real im-
portance; while it may be taken as certain that Cleiveland's satiric, if
not his lyrical, powers would have been developed far more perfectly
if he had been born a generation or two generations later. And
those later generations, though they lost something that both
Benlowes and Cleiveland had fitfully, and that shows far better in
Chamberlayne and Stanley and Hall, benefited, both consciously
and unconsciously, by the faults of the school we have been
studying


## p. 95 (#111) #############################################

CHAPTER V
MILTON
>
THE ‘overdated ceremony,' as Milton himself might have called
it, of protesting that the best record of a great writer's life is in his
works can, at least, plead this in its favour, that it applies to hardly
any two persons in quite the same way. In Milton's case, especially,
its application has a peculiarity partaking of that strong separation
from ordinary folk which is one of the great Miltonic notes. We are
not, in his case, without a fairly large amount of positive biographical
information; and that information was worked up and supple-
mented by David Masson with heroic diligence, with lavish provision
of commentary and without that undue expatiation into ‘may-have-
beens' and 'probablys' and 'perhapses' which, despite the tempta-
tion to it which exists in some cases, is irritating to the critically
minded and dangerously misleading to the uncritical. But, in order
to understand the external information, we need unusually constant
and careful recurrence to the internal, and, on the other hand, we
are likely to misread not a little of the work if we do not know
the life. Nor is this double process one requiring mere care. The
ordinary conception of Milton, among people more than fairly
educated, may be fairly uniform and reasonably clear; but it does
not follow that it is either correct or complete. He may not so
absolutely 'evade our question' as does Shakespeare. The con-
tradictions or inconsistencies in him may not be trivial and exoteric
as in Bacon. But, like Dante, whom, of all other writers of the
highest class, he most resembles, Milton gives us his life and his
work, to explain each other, it may be, but offering not a few puzzles
and pitfalls in the course of the explanation. Although, therefore,
the immense mass of detail which has been accumulated about
Milton defies distillation and condensation in such a chapter as this,
it has been thought important to give all the principal points, while
excluding those proper to a full ‘life,' or a critical edition of the
works' in eactenso.


## p. 96 (#112) #############################################

96
Milton
The life itself was not extraordinarily eventful, but it was
unusually so when compared with the average lives of men of
letters; and, though the unusualness was partly due to the
times, it was largely increased by Milton's own attitude towards
those times, during the last forty years of his life. In the
circumstances of his birth and origin, he reflected the peculiar
ecclesiastical—which meant, also, the political-history of England
for the past three generations. He was born on 9 December 1608,
in the city of London, at The Spread Eagle, Bread street, Cheap-
side, where his father (and namesake) carried on the business of a
scrivener—that is to say, a lawyer of the inferior branch, who had
specially to do with the raising, lending and repayment of money
on landed or other security. The sign of the office or shop was
the crest of the family—an Oxfordshire one of the upper yeomanry;
and the reason of the elder John's taking to business was that
he had been disinherited by his father for abandoning Roman
Catholicism and conforming to the church of England. The poet's
younger brother Christopher reversed the process, became a judge
and a knight under James II and (probably on that account, for we
know very little else about him) has been generally spoken of in
a depreciatory manner by biographers and historians. But the
brothers seem always to have been on good terms. There was
also an elder sister, Anne, who married and became the mother
of John and Edward Phillips, both men of letters, in their way,
the latter our chief original source of information about his
uncle. Of the poet's mother, we hear but little, and it is by
inference rather than on direct evidence that her name is supposed
to have been Sarah Jeffrey or Jeffreys.
Milton's father, however, was not only a prosperous man of
business, but one of rather unusual culture. His son derived from
him his interest in music; and that the father was not indifferent
to poetry—perhaps not to romance—is evident from his connection
with a contemporary version of Guy of Warwick, which exists in
MS and to which he contributed a sonnet. He sent his son to
St Paul's school, giving him, also, a private tutor, Thomas Young,
who was a good scholar but an acrid presbyterian and, later, the
'ty' of Smectymnuus. And Milton seems to have had no objection
to being 'brought on' in the Blimberian sense—working by himself
when a boy of twelve, till the small hours. Although it is impossible
to deny the indebtedness of some of the good qualities of his work
to this 'overpressure, it must have had bad results in various
directions, moral and physical. And, though his blindness cannot


## p. 97 (#113) #############################################

Life at Cambridge
97
have been actually caused by this over-exertion of his eyes, it was
,
certainly not staved off by the process. For the time, however, all
went well. Alexander Gill, high master of St Paul's, was an excellent
teacher, and his son continued to be a great friend of Milton when
Gill went to Oxford and Milton to Cambridge. There, he was ad-
mitted at Christ's on 12 February 1625, when he had just entered
his seventeenth year; and he began to keep terms at Easter. His
college sojourn begins the Milton legend and controversy—tedious
and idle like all controversial legends and to be kept down as much
as possible. He certainly did not get on with his tutor Chappell,
and was sent away from college; though not technically 'sent
down' or rusticated, inasmuch as he did not lose a term. And his
transference to another tutor has been held (though the fact is
not quite conclusive) as proof that there were faults on both sides.
He himself admits 'indocility' and grumbles that he was not
allowed to choose his own studies. That he was unpopular with
his fellow undergraduates is not certain, though it is not im-
probable. The celebrated nickname "the lady of Christ's' admits
of—and has been fitted with—both interpretations—that of a
compliment to his beauty and that of a sneer at him as a
milksop. He certainly must have been as different as possible
from the 'Square-Cap' of his contemporary Cleiveland's lively
glorification of the graduates and undergraduates of Cambridge.
But he protested, later, that the Fellows treated him with more
than ordinary respect' and wished him to stay up at the end of his
seven years, when, in 1632, he took the M. A. degree. The upshot
of the whole seems to be that he was studious, reserved and not
quite like other people-once, at least, and, probably, more than
once, becoming definitely “refractory. ' He was always to be
studious, reserved and not like other people; and, in his nearly
seventy years, the times of truce were not very common and the
times of war very frequent.
It is impossible to say what he would have done if his father
had not been unusually, though by no means unwisely, indulgent,
and of means sufficient to exercise indulgence. That Milton could
work hard at mere routine when it suited him, the disastrous
secretaryship afterwards showed; but it is impossible to imagine
him in any ordinary profession. He had been destined of a child'
to the church. But, though there is no positive evidence of anti-
Anglican feeling in his work before Lycidas, and, though Lycidas
itself might have been written, in a quite possible construction, by
an orthodox and even high Anglican who was an ardent church
E. L. VII.
7
6
6
CH. V,


## p. 98 (#114) #############################################

98
Milton
reformer, Milton's discipleship to Young and the Gills, his
difficulties with Chappell, who was a Laudian, and his whole sub-
sequent conduct and utterance, explain his abandonment of orders.
No (or only the slightest) obstacles were put in his way, and
no force was used to urge him out of it. His father had given up
business, and settled at Horton in the south of Bucks, less than
twenty miles from London, on the river Colne, within sight of
Windsor, and in a pretty, though not wildly romantic, neighbour-
hood. Here Milton lived, and read, and thought, and annotated,
and wrote, for five years, directing his attention chiefly to linguistic,
literary and historical study, but, at last, setting seriously to work
at poetry itself. Besides smaller pieces, Comus (1634) and Lycidas
(1637) certainly date from this time ; and the ingenious attempts
of Mrs Byse? can hardly be allowed to carry L'Allegro and Il
Penseroso on to the period that followed. In 1635, he was admitted
ad eundem as M. A. at Oxford.
Milton had thus twelve years-counting together his Cambridge
and his Horton sojourn-of literary concentration ; in the first
seven, he was somewhat, but probably not much, interfered with : in
the second five, he was completely undisturbed. It is quite clear
from various passages of his works and letters, earlier and later, that
these years were definitely and deliberately employed on 'getting his
wedding garment ready'-on preparing himself for the great career
in poetry upon which he actually entered in the last of these years,
but which was subsequently interrupted. In a sense, nothing could
be more fortunate. Solitude, and the power of working as one
pleases and when one pleases only, are among the greatest of intel-
lectual luxuries; they are, perhaps, more than luxuries-positive
necessities—to exceptional poetic temperaments. The moral effect
of both may be more disputable. It certainly did not, in Milton's
case, lead to dissipation, in any sense, even to that respectable but
deplorable and not uncommon form of literary dissipation which
consists in always beginning and never finishing. In such a tem-
perament as his, it may have fostered the peculiar arrogance—too
dignified and too well suited to the performance to offend, but only
not to be regretted by idle partisans—the morose determination to
be different, the singular want of adaptability in politics and social
matters generally, which has been admitted even by sympathisers
with his political and religious views.
But the elder John was for Thorough’in regard to his son's
education. He had given him the best English training of public
i See bibliograpby.
6


## p. 99 (#115) #############################################

Foreign Tour
99
school and university. He had allowed him a full lustrum of
private study to‘ripen the wine. ' He now completed the pro-
cess, at what must have been a very considerable expense, by
sending him to the continent-the recognised finishing of the time,
but usually open only to men of considerable station and means
like Evelyn, to those who had special professional training to
acquire like Browne, or to travellers on definite business like
Howell The father was not left alone : for, though his wife
died in April 1637, and his daughter had long been married,
Christopher and his wife established themselves at Horton.
Milton left home just a twelvemonth after his mother's death,
with good letters of introduction, including one from Sir Henry
Wotton. He travelled by Paris (where he met Grotius), Nice
and Genoa to Florence, where he spent August and September
1638, frequented the Florentine academies, and enjoyed, with what,
no doubt, was a perfectly genuine enjoyment, the curious manège
of learned and literary compliment and exercise which formed the
routine of those societies. We shall not understand Milton if we
do not realise his intense appreciation of form—an appreciation
which, in all non-ecclesiastical matters, was probably intensified
further by his violent rejection of ceremonial in religion. He
next spent another two months at Rome, made various friends,
heard and admired the famous singer Leonora Baroni, celebrated
another lady, who may have been real or not, aired his protestantism
with impunity and then went on to Naples. Here (through an
'eremite friar,' whose good offices, on this occasion, might have
saved a future association with “trumpery'), he made the ac-
quaintance of a very old and very distinguished nobleman of
letters, the marquis of Villa, Giovanni Baptista Manso. He did
not go further than Naples, though he had thought not only of
Sicily but of Greece. The reason he gave for relinquishing this
scheme was the threatening state of home politics and the im-
propriety of enjoying himself abroad while his countrymen were
striking for freedom.
It was inevitable that this deliverance, after Milton had
exhausted the vocabulary of personal vituperation and sarcasm
against his own antagonists, should be turned against himself.
The phrase 'what you say will be used against you ’ is not only a
decent police warning but a universal-and universally useless-
phylactery of life. But there was no hypocrisy in him; and
the saying is as illuminative as his appreciation of the Florentine
1 P. L. II, 474, 475.
7-2


## p. 100 (#116) ############################################

Іоо
Milton
academies. He did not hurry home, but repeated his two months'
sojourns at Rome and at Florence, meeting Galileo (with memorable
poetical results) at the latter place, and then travelling by Ferrara
and Venice to Geneva. Here, he was at home in faith, if an exile
in taste; here, he seems to have heard of the death of his friend
Charles Diodati, whose uncle was a minister there; here, he left one
of the most personal touches we have of him'; and here, or on the
way home, or after reaching it, he wrote Epitaphium Damonis.
He reached England in August 1639, being then in his thirty-first
year; and, at this point, the first period in his life and work closed.
The curtain, in fact, fell on more than an act: it practically closes
the first play of a trilogy, the second of which had hardly anything
to do with the first, though the third was to resume and com-
plete it.
The next twenty years saw the practical fulfilment of Milton's
unluckily worded resolve to break off his continental tour. He
was still not in a hurry, establishing himself first in lodgings, then
in a “pretty garden house' outside Aldersgate, with books to which
he had added largely in Italy. Here he took as pupils first his two
nephews, and then others. To his adoption of this occupation was,
in part, due the famous little letter or tractate Of Education : to
Master Samuel Hartlib. Another result seems to have been the
exercise of that 'overpressure' on his pupils which, in his own case,
had been largely voluntary. 'Can't you let him alone ? ' was a
counsel of perfection in this matter which Milton, like others,
never realised.
It is less inconceivable than it may seem to some that, circum-
stances aiding, Milton might have taken to teaching as a regular pro-
fession. For he liked domineering, and he was passionately fond of
study in almost any form. But deities other than Pallas found other
things for him to do. He struck, not as a soldier, but as a con-
troversialist, into the combat for which he had long been preparing,
with the treatise Of Reformation touching Church-Discipline in
England, before much more than a year had passed since his return,
in 1641. It was in less than a year after the actual opening of the
struggle that he married. Of the series of pamphlets dealing with
matters ecclesiastical, political and conjugal which now began, notice
will be taken in the proper place : the marriage must come here.
In what has usually been written of this thrice unfortunate
6
1 His autograph in the album of a Neapolitan named Camillo Cerdogni—a refugee
in religion—with the addition of the last two lines of Comus and the Coelum non
animum of Horace.


## p. 101 (#117) ############################################

The First Marriage
IOI
adventure-tragical in all its aspects if tragicomical in some
there has, perhaps, been a little unfairness to Milton : there has
certainly been much to his wife. The main lines of fact are re-
morselessly clear: the necessary elucidations of detail are almost
wholly wanting. In June 1643, John Milton married Mary Powell,
the eldest daughter of an Oxfordshire gentleman, whose family
were neighbours to the Miltons and who had had with them both
friendship and business relations. She was seventeen. He brought
her home in June; she went back, at her family's request, but with
his consent, in July, and refused to come to him at Michaelmas as
had been arranged. For two years, he saw nothing of her. These
are the bare facts, and almost all the facts certainly known, though
there are a few slight, and, in some cases, doubtful, addenda.
On such a brief, an advocate may say almost what he pleases.
What may fairly be said for and against Milton will come presently:
what has been said against his wife may almost rouse indignation
and certainly justify contempt. We have been told that she was
a 'dull and common girl,' of which there is just as much and just
as little evidence as that she was as wise as Diotima and as
queenly as Helen; that she had flirted with royalist officers from
Oxford (no evidence again); finally, that there is no evidence that
she was handsome. ' As for this last, from passage after passage in
the poems it is almost inconceivable that Milton should have been
attracted by any one who was not good-looking.
Whether, however, she was pretty, or whether she was plain, the
reasons of her leaving her husband are not hard to guess. For the
fact is that Milton's attitude to women is peculiar and not wholly
pleasant. It is not merely, as is often said, that he disdained them
and held the doctrine of their subjection—there's example for 't;'
as Malvolio says of the same subject in another connection. It is
not merely that he was unreasonable in his expectations of them
there's much more example for that. It is that, as was often the
case with him, he was utterly unpractical, and his theoretical
notions were a conglomerate and not a happy one. Mark
Pattison-an interesting witness, some of whose other expressions
have just been cited-chose Adam's ecstatic description of Eve to
Raphael as Milton's real mind on the subject. He forgot that we
must take with it the angel's prompt, severe and (if one may say
such things of angels) hopelessly coarse snub and rebuke. The
fact seems to be that Milton-as elsewhere, sharply opposed to
Shakespeare, and here almost as sharply opposed to Dante-blended
an excessive and eclectic draft on books and on fancy with an
.


## p. 102 (#118) ############################################

I02
Milton
insufficient experience of life. He accepted the common disdainful
estimate of the ancients; the very peculiar, but by no means
wholly disdainful, estimate of the Hebrews; and he tried to blend
both with something of the sensuous passion of the Middle Ages
and the renascence, stripping from this the transcendental element
which had been infused in the Middle Ages by Mariolatry and
chivalry, in the renascence by a sort of poetical convention.
An Aspasia-Hypatia-Lucretia-Griselda, with any naughtiness in
the first left out and certain points in Solomon's pattern woman
added, might have met Milton's views. But this blend has not
been commonly quoted in the marriage market. His friend
Marvell, in a passage of rare poetic beauty, described his love
as begotten by Despair upon Impossibility. Milton's seems to
have been begotten upon another kind of Impossibility by Un-
reasonable Expectation. The exact circumstances of his first
marriage we shall never know; those of his second take it out
of argument; his third seems to have been simply the investing
of a gouvernante with permanent rank extraordinary and pleni-
potentiary. But passage after passage in his works remains to
speak; and the terrible anecdote of his obliging his daughters,
and elaborately teaching them, to read to him languages which
they did not understand, remains for comment. The taste of the
seventeenth century in torture was not only, as was said of the
knowledge of Sam Weller in another matter, 'extensive and
peculiar,' but, as was said of the emperor Frederick II in the
same, 'humorous and lingering. ' But it rarely can have gone
further than this.
Once more, the remarkable blends of Milton's character which
are important to the comprehension of his work require notice.
His immediate conduct seems to have been perfectly correct-he
repeatedly solicited her to return, until (according to a perhaps not
quite trustworthy account) his requests were not only disregarded
but rejected with contempt! But, thenceforward, he allowed his
self-centredness, his curious anarchism and his entirely unpractical
temper to carry him off in a quite different direction. Indis-
solubility of marriage, except for positive unfaithfulness, was
inconvenient to John Milton; John Milton was not a person
? It may be observed that these overtures, if made, dispose almost finally of what
has been called by an advocate of Milton the horrible' suggestion, based on a written
date, that the first divorce pamphlet was actually composed before Mary left him. In
that case, he would have been an utter hypocrite in his requests to her to come
back; and it has been said that hypocrisy and Milton are simply two 'incompossible'
ideas, to use Sir W. Hamilton's useful word.
6


## p. 103 (#119) ############################################

The Divorce Tracts
103
to console himself illicitly; therefore, indissolubility of marriage
;
must go. The series of divorce pamphlets, accordingly, followed;
and, having proved to his own satisfaction that he was entitled
to marry again, he sought the hand of a certain Miss Davis,
whom some have identified (quite gratuitously) with the 'virtuous
young lady' of Sonnet IX. She, at any rate, had virtue and com-
mon sense enough to decline an arrangement of elective affinity.
In any one else than Milton, the proposal would have argued
little virtue; in any virtuous person, it could but argue no
common sense. And, indeed, the absence of that contemned
property is conspicuous everywhere in these unfortunate trans-
actions. Milton was not only in the straight vernacular) making
an utter fool of himself-aggravating the ridicule of a situation
the distress of which arises in part from the very fact that it
is ridiculous—but, just after he had come forward as a public
man, he was playing into the hands of his enemies, and
scandalising his friends. There was no point on which the
more moderate and clear-sighted of the puritan party can have
been more sensitive than this. The very word 'divorce'-thanks
to Henry VIII and some of the German reforming princes—made
the ears of better protestants burn; and, from the days of
the lampoons on Luther's marriage to those of the Family of
Love, licensed libertinage had been one of the reproaches most
constantly cast in the teeth of 'hot gospellers. ' Next to nothing
seems to be known of Miss Davis except that she had good looks
(as we could guess) and good wits (which is evident). But it was
certainly thanks to her, and to time's revenges, that the situation
(after Milton had made himself at once a stumbling-block and a
laughing-stock for two years) was at last saved, before anything
irreparable had happened. The ruin of the royal cause carried
the Powell family with it; and, with more common sense than
magnanimity, they resolved to throw themselves on Milton's mercy,
A sort of ambush was laid--and reason coincides with romance in
suggesting that the famous forgiveness scene of Paradise Lost had
been actually rehearsed on this occasion. At any rate, Milton
who, on his side, had very much more magnanimity than common
sense-took his wife back in the summer of 1645; and, when Oxford
fell, a year later, received her whole family into his new house in
Barbican. Of the rest, we know nothing except the birth of three
children-daughters—who appear later. At the birth of a fourth,
1 Miltonist' was actually used in print as a synonym for an opponent of the
sacredness of marriage.


## p. 104 (#120) ############################################

104
Milton
in 1652, Mary died, not yet twenty-seven. Otherwise, there is no
record of her married life. Milton is not in the least likely to
have visited her early fractiousness by any petty persecution : he
is as little likely to have ‘killed her with kindness. ' The whole
thing was a mistake--a common one, no doubt; but, somehow,
the pity of it remains rather specially.
What Milton thought or felt on the death of his first wife we
have no means of knowing. He did not write a sonnet on it, as
he did on that of his second ; and, so far as memory serves, there
is not any passage in his entire work which can be taken as even
glancing at it. But the year in which it occurred was a black
one for him in another way. He had now, for a full decade,
occupied himself in violent and constant pamphleteering, writing
nothing else but a few sonnets and some psalm-paraphrases. He
had, indeed, published his early Poems in 1645, but he had added
nothing to them; and, in 1649, he had undertaken the duties of
Latin secretary to the new parliamentary committee for foreign
affairs with a salary of £288. 138. 6d. , worth between three and
four times the amount today.