FROM SHAKESPEARE 
 TO POPE
 
 ISAAC FOOT 
 LIBRARY 
 
 iLon&on: C. J. CLAY AND SON, 
 
 I AMI'.RIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE, 
 
 AVE MARIA LANE. 
 
 vCambtiUgt: DEIGHTON, BELL AND CO. 
 ILeipjig: F. A. BROCKHAUS.
 
 FROM SHAKESPEARE 
 TO POPE 
 
 AN INQUIRY INTO 
 
 THE CAUSES AND PHENOMENA OF THE RISE 
 
 OF CLASSICAL POETRY IN ENGLAND 
 
 EDMUND GOSSE, M.A. 
 
 CLARK LECTURER IN ENGLISH LITERATURE AT 
 TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 1885 
 
 [All rights reserved.]
 
 Catttbrfogr: 
 
 PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SON, 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS*
 
 at? URRARY 
 
 r J} UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 5H~I SAINTA DAKRAKA 
 
 G-y 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 The following chapters were written in the 
 form of lectures, and were first delivered to 
 members of the University of Cambridge, in 
 the Hall of Trinity College, during Michael- 
 mas Term last year. They formed my in- 
 augural course as Clark Lecturer. In the 
 month of December I read them at the 
 Lowell Institute in Boston, and during the 
 same winter, in whole, or in part, before 
 other academic audiences in America, before 
 the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, 
 in New York, before Yale College, Connec- 
 ticut, and elsewhere. 
 
 It has been no small advantage to me 
 
 that among the distinguished listeners to 
 g. b
 
 vi Preface. 
 
 whom 1 have had the honour of reading 
 these pages there have been more than a few 
 whose special studies have rendered them 
 particularly acute in criticising the links of 
 my argument. In consequence of such criti- 
 cism, I have been able profitably to revise 
 the work, to add evidence where it seemed 
 wanting, to remove rash statements and to 
 remould ambiguous sentences. Above all, I 
 have given a great deal of care to the accu- 
 mulation, in the form of notes and appendices, 
 of historical and critical data of a kind too 
 particular for the purposes of a lecture, but 
 not, I hope, without genuine importance to 
 the student of the history of literature. In 
 an enquiry of this nature, exact evidence, 
 even of a minute kind, outweighs in import- 
 ance any expression of mere critical opinion. 
 The friendly criticism of which I have spoken 
 has not, however, shaken me in the slightest 
 degree with regard to my central idea. On 
 the contrary, the effect of minute controversy
 
 Preface. vii 
 
 has merely been to strengthen on every side 
 my conviction that the theory which I have 
 here laid down for the first time is substan- 
 tially the true one, and that the opinion 
 hitherto received regarding the sources of the 
 classical school in our poetry is erroneous. 
 I think I may at least claim, from the critic 
 who is inclined to reject my views, a careful 
 consideration of the arguments and evidence 
 upon which they are founded. 
 
 It would be impossible for me to speak 
 too warmly of the kindness which my friend 
 Professor Samuel R. Gardiner has shown me 
 in allowing me to see and use the unfinished 
 MS. of the forthcoming volume of his History, 
 and in leading me to MS. sources of seven- 
 teenth-century information. It is wholly owing 
 to his generosity that I have been enabled, 
 in the second chapter of this volume, to give 
 an account of Waller's Plot which is much 
 more complete and accurate than any hitherto 
 published. Prof. Gardiner's volume, for which
 
 viii Preface. 
 
 students of the Caroline period can hardly 
 command their impatience, will not, I am 
 sorry to say, be in our possession for some 
 years. 
 
 Tkin. Coll., Cambridge. 
 May, 1S85.
 
 TO W. D. HOWELLS. 
 
 The humming-bird in June 
 Sits, like a jewel, on your taut clothes-line, 
 And greets Charles River broad and opaline, 
 Till wanes September's honeysuckle moon 
 Too soon; 
 
 And then — away he goes, 
 
 A flash of ruby on the southward dir, 
 
 And comes no more, though still the straits are fair. 
 
 Where misty Cambridge from the Beacon shows 
 
 Pale rose; 
 
 But leaves a plume behind, — 
 
 A little plume you fold into a book, 
 
 On which one day if you should chance to look, 
 
 Your tiny friend would rise, thro' storm and wind, 
 
 To mind. 
 
 The fluted conchs that came 
 Long since in Salem merchant-ships to town, 
 With polished porcelain lips and ridges brown, 
 Faint perfumed from the isles of eastern name 
 A-flame, —
 
 To //'. A llowclh. 
 
 These Stilly if shaken, give 
 From their deep hearts a murmur of the dome 
 If 'here once their soft inhabitants could roam, — 
 Sonorous seas where Indian monsters thrive 
 And strive; 
 
 Their owners all are dead; 
 
 The mighty ships that brought them rot on shore ; 
 
 Yet still that murmur lingers at their core, 
 
 And fancy's light across their tropic bed 
 
 Is shed. 
 
 I, less than bird or shell, 
 More volatile, more fragile far than these, 
 Lighting an hour by t/iese New England seas, 
 Leave here my plume, my echo, — where it fell 
 To dwell j 
 
 You shook it from my wing! 
 Yojt dived to lift it from my glirmnering deeps ! 
 Now, wakened by your voice no more, it sleeps 
 And grows less mine than yours/ here let it cli?ig 
 And sing ; 
 
 Then, when at dusk you spy 
 The noiseless phantom-schooners warping down 
 To load in mouldering wharves of Boston town, 
 Turn sometimes to your lamp-lit shelves, where I 
 Shall lie. 
 
 302 Beacon Street, Boston. 
 Dec. 1884.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE V 
 
 DEDICATION ix 
 
 POETRY AT THE DEATH OF SHAKESPEARE . . . ' . 3 
 
 WALLER AND SACHARISSA 45 
 
 THE EXILES 95 
 
 DAVENANT AND COWLEY 1 37 
 
 THE REACTION l8l 
 
 THE RESTORATION 225 
 
 APPENDICES 
 
 I. Sidney Godolphin and Sandys 269 
 
 II. Denham's Essay on Translated Verse . . .272 
 
 III. Waller's Address to the Queen .... 275 
 
 IV. The Preface to Waller's Posthumous Poems, 1690 . 278 
 index 285
 
 ERRATUM. 
 p. 173. 2 lines from bottom. For "Cowley" read "Crashaw'
 
 POETRY AT THE DEATH OF 
 SHAKESPEARE.
 
 POETRY AT THE DEATH OF 
 SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 The time seems to have arrived at last, when 
 we may contemplate without passion that precise, 
 mundane, and rhetorical order of poetry which is 
 mainly identified in our minds with the names and 
 practice of Dryden, of Pope, and of Johnson. The 
 school of writers who cultivated this order — and 
 those who emphasise their faults admit that they 
 did institute a school — have commonly been de- 
 scribed as the classical, because their early leaders 
 claimed to emulate and restore the grace and pre- 
 cision of the poets of antiquity, to write in English 
 as Horace and Ovid were then supposed to have 
 written in Latin, — that is to say, with a polished 
 and eclectic elegance 1 . The prestige of these 
 
 1 Horace will our superfluous Branches prune, 
 Give us new rules, and set our Harp in tune, 
 Direct us how to back the winged Horse, 
 Favour his flight and moderate his force. 
 
 Waller to Roscommon, 1684. 
 I — 2
 
 4 Poetry at the 
 
 classic. il versemen was first attacked, in the middle 
 of the eighteenth century, by Gray and Chatterton ; 
 and their influence received blow upon blow until 
 the close oi the century, when the efflorescence of 
 the naturalistic poets, first from within, as in Crabbe, 
 and then much more decisively from without, as in 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge, destroyed it altogether. 
 To the first and second generation after this 
 revolution in taste, the classical species of poetry 
 seemed no poetry at all. Dryden and Pope, who 
 had been enthroned so long in secure promise of 
 immortality, felt their shrines shaken as by an 
 earthquake. It became the fashion to say that 
 these men were no poets at all, and Keats, in a 
 curious passage of his youth, made himself the 
 daring spokesman of this heresy. 
 
 " Yes, a schism 
 Nurtured by foppery and barbarism 
 Made great Apollo blush for this his land. 
 Men were thought wise who could not understand 
 His glories; with a puling infant's force 
 They sway'd about upon a rocking-horse, 
 And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-soul'd ! 
 The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd 
 Its gathering waves — ye felt it not. The blue 
 Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew 
 Of summer night collected still to make 
 The morning precious : Beauty was awake !
 
 Death of Shakespeare. 
 
 Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead 
 To things ye knew not of, — were closely wed 
 To musty laws lined out with wretched rule 
 And compass vile ; so that ye taught a school 
 Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit, 
 Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit, 
 Their verses tallied. Easy was the task: 
 A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask 
 Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race ! 
 That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face, 
 And did not know it, — no, they went about, 
 Holding a poor, decrepit standard out, 
 Mark'd with most flimsy mottoes, and in large 
 The name of one Boileau 1 !" 
 
 In these lines Keats has so admirably summed up 
 the convictions of the first half of the present cen- 
 tury with regard to the classical poetry, that I need 
 make little comment upon them, further than to 
 point out that with the tact of a great writer he has 
 contrived to condemn the practice he is attacking, 
 no less by the form in which he clothes his ideas, 
 than by the ideas themselves. The passage I have 
 just quoted does not merely satirize the poetry 
 which is presently coming under our consideration, 
 but it is written in extreme formal opposition to 
 it:— 
 
 1 From Sleep and Poetry, 11. 181 — 206, published in the Poems 
 of 1817.
 
 6 Poetry at the 
 
 "The blue 
 Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew 
 Of summer night collected still to make 
 The morning precious:" 
 
 That sentence is a cluster of what the French call 
 enjambments, stridings-over ; although we have so 
 much of the thing in our literature, we have no 
 word for it in English. It has been proposed to 
 pronounce the French word as though it were 
 English, enjambments, but this is hideous. My 
 friend, Mr Austin Dobson, has proposed to me 
 the term overflow 1 for these verses in which the 
 sense is not concluded at the end of one line or of 
 one couplet, but straggles on, at its own free will, 
 until it naturally closes; and I propose to adopt it 
 throughout this inquiry, as equivalent to the vers 
 enjambe of the French. In its simplest definition, 
 then, the formular difference between the two 
 classes or orders of English poetry is, that the 
 romantic class is of a loose and elastic kind, full 
 of these successive overflows, while the classical 
 is closely confined to the use of distich, that is to 
 say, of regular couplets, within the bounds of each 
 of which the sense is rigidly confined. 
 
 1 Milton describes the same peculiarity in The Verse {Paradise 
 Lost, fifth title-page) as "the sense variously drawn out from one 
 verse into another."
 
 Death of Shakespeare. 
 
 It will now be well to show the distinction 
 between these two orders by examples. The pas- 
 sage just quoted from Keats will serve us very well 
 as a specimen of the romantic order. While the 
 wayward music of it is still in our ears, I will con- 
 trast it with a few lines from Dryden: — 
 
 " All human things are subject to decay, 
 And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey. 
 This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young 
 Was called to empire, and had governed long, 
 In prose and verse was owned, without dispute, 
 Through all the realms of Nonsense, absolute. 
 This aged prince, now flourishing in peace 
 And blest with issue of a large increase, 
 Worn out with business, did at length debate 
 To settle the succession of the state; 
 And, pondering which of all his sons was fit 
 To reign and wage immortal war with wit, 
 Cried, ' 'Tis resolved, for Nature pleads that he 
 Should only rule who most resembles me 1 .' " 
 
 The temper in which these two writers, Dryden 
 and Keats, are here displayed, is almost identical. 
 I have selected the second piece, because, like the 
 first, it breathes indignation against the medio- 
 crity of poetasters. Our ears none the less instruct 
 us in a moment that here we have two brilliant 
 artists whose methods, whose ambitions, whose 
 
 1 Mac - Flecknoe {id^),\\. r— 14.
 
 8 Poetry at the 
 
 whole conception of style, arc at the poles of con- 
 trast. Briefly, then, it may be said that each of 
 the manners thus exemplified has been twice in the 
 ascendant in English poetry. The classical, or 
 precise, when poetry first began to be written in 
 modern English ; the romantic, when poetry re- 
 vived under the Tudor monarchs; the classical 
 again from the English Commonwealth to the 
 French Revolution ; the romantic again ever since. 
 The subject of our present investigation is con- 
 fined to the phenomena and history of the second 
 of these changes, that which succeeded the career 
 of Shakespeare, and led to a new fashion which 
 culminated in the art of Pope. That this change 
 occurred is obvious to everybody, but the causes 
 that led to it are so obscure, and even the history 
 of it has hitherto been so little studied, that the 
 inquiry we are about to pursue may be said to be 
 practically a novel one. In undertaking it we 
 are confronted by the difficulty which a traveller 
 encounters in attempting minutely to survey a pas- 
 sage of country, part of which is flat and part is 
 hilly. From a distance nothing seems easier than 
 to distinguish between plain and acclivity, but when 
 we are on the spot we find ourselves baffled, for these 
 melt into one. It is because we have again retired 
 to a distance from the scene of our survey that the
 
 Death of Shakespeare. g 
 
 time seems to me to have arrived for a just con- 
 sideration of the classical school. We can now 
 contemplate in a calm perspective what was too 
 near for the generation of Keats to observe without 
 the injustice of foreshortening. 
 
 I have hitherto spoken only of the formal cha- 
 racter of the change which took place in English 
 poetry towards the middle of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, and not of its ethical or essential character; 
 because poetry is an art, and must be regarded 
 primarily from an artistic and not from a philo- 
 sophical point of view. To fail to acknowledge 
 this to be a postulate, is to fall into an error such 
 as a critic of music would make, although a less 
 serious one, if he gave attention to the emotional 
 sentiments awakened in the hearer by a perform- 
 ance, in priority to the science of the harmonical 
 and melodious sounds of which that performance 
 was the executive production. I must therefore 
 dwell a moment longer on the formal character of 
 the change, and beg my readers to consider the 
 marvel of a nation that was free to use in any com- 
 bination all the endless varieties of iambic and tro- 
 chaic movement (for the dactylic and anapaestic 1 
 
 1 I purposely take no note here of the experiments in tumbling 
 timeless measure made by certain Elizabethans. These were purely
 
 io Poetry at the 
 
 movement was, curiously enough, entirely unknown 
 to the Elizabethans) trammelling themselves by a 
 scries of pedantic and artificial rules, the function 
 of which was to reduce to a minimum the effects 
 possible to poetic art. 
 
 But this change of form was accompanied by 
 an equally extraordinary change of subject and of 
 treatment. Here, again, where all had been liberty, 
 where no bounds of space or time, no regulations 
 of any kind, had curbed the erratic inclinations of 
 the poets, they suddenly and wilfully shut them- 
 selves up between walls of rule, and abandoned the 
 wild woods for stately and mechanical circuits 
 around the box-walks of a labyrinth. For the 
 direct appeal to Nature, and the naming of specific 
 objects, they substituted generalities and second- 
 hand allusions. They no longer mentioned the 
 gilly-flower and the daffodil, but permitted them- 
 selves a general reference to Flora's vernal wreath. 
 It was vulgar to say that the moon was rising, the 
 gentlemanly expression was, "Cynthia is lifting her 
 silver horn." Women became "nymphs" in this 
 new phraseology, fruits became "the treasures of 
 
 exotic, and, even in the hands of Campion himself, neither natural 
 nor successful. I would at the same time guard myself from being 
 supposed to think, though for convenience sake I speak of iambics 
 and dactyls, that we possess real metrical quantity in English.
 
 Death of Shakespeare. 1 1 
 
 Pomona," a horse became "the impatient courser 1 ." 
 The result of coining these conventional counters 
 for groups of ideas was that the personal, the exact, 
 was lost in literature. Apples were the treasures 
 of Pomona, but so were cherries too, and if one 
 wished to allude to peaches, they also were the 
 treasures of Pomona. 
 
 This decline from particular to general language 
 was regarded as a great gain in elegance. It was 
 supposed that to use one of these genteel tokens 
 which passed for coin of poetic language brought 
 the speaker closer to the grace of Latinity. It was 
 thought that the old direct manner of speaking 
 was crude and futile ; that a romantic poet who 
 wished to allude to caterpillars could do so without 
 any exercise of his ingenuity by simply introducing 
 the word "caterpillars," whereas the classical poet 
 had to prove that he was a scholar and a gentle- 
 man by inventing some circumlocution such as 
 " the crawling scourge that smites the leafy plain." 
 
 1 It may be noticed that it is in the Cyder of John Philips (writ- 
 ten in 1699) that this pompous and allusive language is first used 
 without stint or shame. Philips united two strains of influence, that 
 of Waller and that of Paradise Lost, and introduced into Augustan 
 poetry the sub-Miltonic phraseology which took so fast a hold of the 
 eighteenth century. He had not learned, however, to avoid the 
 exact expression, and names his peaches and walnuts like a market- 
 srardener.
 
 1 2 Poetry at the 
 
 Shaftesbury introduced this exaggerated elegance 
 of diction into the field of prose, and his success 
 increased the foppishness of the poets. It made 
 their vices inveterate, and in course of time the 
 desire politely to avoid saying what was meant 
 reached a height that was quite ridiculous. In the 
 generation that succeeded Pope really clever writers 
 spoke of a " gelid cistern " when they meant a cold 
 bath, and " the loud hunter-crew " when they meant 
 a pack of fox-hounds, and then at last the public 
 began to crave a more direct form of utterance. 
 
 To detect and to ridicule, — sometimes most 
 unfairly, — these peculiarities of the classical school, 
 has, however, become a commonplace in the 
 present generation. We know perfectly well, there 
 is not a text-book that fails to instruct us, that the 
 guarded generalities of eighteenth century poetry 
 were bald and insipid. But we must be careful to 
 discriminate. This indirectness, these strange, un- 
 natural forms of circumlocution, were not in them- 
 selves characteristic of the classical school alone ; 
 all poetry, the most romantic poetry that ever was 
 written, has hated to be forced to call a spade a 
 spade. Shakespeare is quite as far removed at 
 times from straightforward reference to his subject 
 as Armstrong or Darwin, but the difference lies 
 in the presence or absence of liberty of action.
 
 Death of Shakespeare. 1 3 
 
 Shakespeare says " sore labour's bath," but he likes 
 also to say " sleep," simply, if he chooses ; and 
 he likes to feel free to say " balm of hurt minds " 
 as well. The 'classical poet, on the other hand, 
 must not only avoid the direct word, he must 
 select one circumlocution and keep to it. His 
 principle is restriction, ingenuity, a strait-laced 
 elegance ; the romantic poet's principle is liberty 
 even though it lead to licence. 
 
 The secret of the enigma that a whole gene- 
 ration meekly and even eagerly consented to clip 
 its own wings and subside into servitude, is pri- 
 marily to be found in the word we have just used, 
 licence. The people of the seventeenth century 
 were weary of liberty, weary of the unmitigated 
 rage of the dramatists, cloyed with the 'roses and 
 the spices and the kisses of the lyrists, tired of 
 being carried over the universe and up and down 
 the avenues of history at the freak of every irre- 
 sponsible rhymester. Literature had been set open 
 to all the breezes of heaven by the blustering and 
 glittering Elizabethans, and in the hands of their 
 less gifted successors it was fast declining into a 
 mere cave of the Winds. The last efflorescence of 
 the spirit of humanism had taken that strange form 
 which it found in the hands of Lyly, Marini, and 
 Gongora, and the brief vogue of this wonderful
 
 14 Poetry at the 
 
 heresy, with its extravagance, affectation, and 
 preciosity, had but hastened on the certain and 
 necessary reaction. When the leaders of literature 
 began to write as Donne and Crashaw 1 did, it was 
 absolutely inevitable that other leaders should 
 soon begin to write like Waller and Dryden. 
 
 But there was more in the change to a classical 
 taste than can be understood merely by a reference 
 to our local schools of poetry in England. When 
 Waller purified his verse of ornament and arranged 
 it in distichs, he was unconsciously doing what was 
 simultaneously being done in the other leading 
 nations of Europe. It will perhaps help us to 
 understand the change in England, if we glance 
 briefly, in the first place, at some of her neighbours. 
 
 If a change was needed anywhere, it was in 
 Italy, where the emptiness of the later Petrarchists, 
 the insipidity of the pastoral poets, the monstrous 
 
 1 One example will serve as well as a dozen, and the reader may 
 amuse himself by turning to Crashaw, who writes a poem of thirty- 
 one stanzas on the Weeping of the Magdalen, in which he calls her 
 eyes "parents of silver-footed rills," "heavens of ever-falling stars," 
 " Heaven's spangles," " nests of milky doves," " two walking baths," 
 " portable and compendious oceans," "wells into which the Lamb 
 dips his white foot," and " Time's hour-glasses ;" while the tears 
 themselves are "rivers of cream," "a brisk cherub's breakfast," 
 " richest pearls," "thawing crystal," "sorrow's best jewels," " sim- 
 pering sons of those fair eyes, your fertile mothers," and as many 
 more unlikely things as the reader's curiosity can wish for.
 
 Death of Shakespeare. 15 
 
 extravagances of Marini, had reduced imaginative 
 literature to the lowest ineptitude. But the soil of 
 Italy was too thoroughly exhausted to produce a 
 Dryden or a Pope, and the real reaction there was 
 one against poetry altogether. A sort of classical 
 revival, however, was attempted at the close of the 
 sixteenth century by Chiabrera, who in disdaining 
 the folly of the Marinists, and in trying to recall 
 his countrymen to a Greek simplicity, attained a 
 position somewhat analogous to that of Cowley. 
 But he stood alone until Filicaja came, and Italy 
 presents us with the spectacle of a literature too 
 effete and nerveless to undergo the process of even 
 a classical change. When at last the precise 
 manner of that school was introduced, it was 
 Parini, who, fresh from the study of Pope, at- 
 tempted to graft an English bud on to the worn 
 Italian stock. It is plain, therefore, that for the 
 first time since English poetry had begun to exist, 
 Italy had no help to give her in her literary 
 revolution. 
 
 We turn to the Teutonic nations. In Germany, 
 in Denmark, in Sweden, there could at least be no 
 exhaustion of the soil, for here modern poetry had 
 not begun to exist. Here we might expect a 
 young literature, fresh in all the colours of the 
 morning, to arise with healing in its wings. But,
 
 1 6 Poetry at the 
 
 as though, on the eve of the horrors of the Thirty 
 Years' War, Protestant Europe refused to be glad, 
 nothing more cold or dull or decorous can be 
 imagined than that First Silesian School with 
 which modern German poetry begins. The very 
 year before the great war broke out in Bohemia. 
 Martin Opitz sounded the first note in his treatise 
 De Contempt u Linguae Teutonicae, in which he 
 entreated his countrymen to revert to the German 
 tongue for poetry. He briskly supported his 
 preaching by practice, and inflicted on the taste of 
 his time reams of deadly couplets, strictly classical 
 in taste, alexandrines with alternate male and 
 female rhymes, all about nymphs and satyrs and 
 the didactic Muse 1 . He took his cue directly from 
 Holland and France, while Sweden and Denmark 
 took their cue from him. The three first modern 
 poets of the three countries, Opitz (1597 — 1639), 
 Stjernhjelm (1598 — 1672), Arrebo (1587— 1637), 
 are as rigidly classical, didactic, and anti-romantic 
 as it is possible to be, and they all belong to the 
 
 1 The close of his flat and vapid romance, Zlatna, 1624, is almost 
 pathetic in its aspiration : 
 
 So wiird ich meine Vers' auch wol nicht lassen liegen, 
 
 Gar bald mit Mantua biss an die Wolken fliegen, 
 
 Bald mit dem Pindarus; Nasonis Elegie, 
 
 Doch zuvoraus genant als meine Poesie. 
 Here is a great flutter of singing-robes, but the hoof peeps out.
 
 Death of Shakespeare. 1 7 
 
 generation of Waller. So much we may note in 
 passing. 
 
 Holland was the sole Teutonic country that 
 already possessed a modern literature, a literature 
 springing from the Renaissance. And here we 
 seem nearer to England, for during the first half of 
 the seventeenth century several literary courtesies 
 passed, in a variety of ways, between Starter and 
 Dekker, between Huyghens and Donne, between 
 Vondel and Milton. The robust poetry of Holland 
 underwent no sudden change or development, for 
 two reasons. In the first place, humanism had 
 originally and universally lost more of its bloom 
 and grace in coming to Holland than in coming to 
 any other country ; secondly, the temper of the 
 Dutch, except for one very brief and dubious 
 moment at the end of the sixteenth century, was 
 never romantic at all, but didactic or else farcical 
 and melodramatic 1 . The Dutch had works answer- 
 ing more or less to those of Marlowe and of Ben 
 Jonson, but nothing that recalls Spenser or Shake- 
 speare. Their principal work therefore was, not to 
 
 1 The Dutch have this year (March 16, 1885) celebrated the ter- 
 centenary of their greatest dramatist, Bredero. The English play 
 which approaches nearest to the works of this man is Jonson's Bar- 
 tholomew Fair ; the humour of Bredero is the humour of Ostade, or 
 of Terence read through the eyes of Ostade. 
 
 G. 2
 
 [8 Poetry at the 
 
 eliminate fantastic beauty, but to polish the execu- 
 tion of their verses, and this Vondel did slowly, 
 through an interminable life of labour, all down 
 the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century. 
 At the close of his career, a classicism exactly 
 answering to ours had invaded all Dutch literature, 
 but it had come unobserved, and had been out- 
 stripped by the like tendency in England. 
 
 Something might be said of Spain, whose drama 
 continued to affect our own. But we pass on to 
 France, which is here mentioned last, because it 
 has been customary to take for granted that the 
 change in English poetry was entirely caused by 
 the influence of France. I have quoted the other 
 countries of Europe to show that there is no need 
 to look for so strong an operation of the French 
 mind in England, since every other country was, 
 in one form or another, depressed, subdued, ex- 
 hausted by rules and colourless ambitions at that 
 very same time. England and France have occu- 
 pied more attention than any other countries, but 
 mainly because of their superior vitality, and the 
 splendour of their production. It is, indeed, a 
 strange thing that at the moment when England, 
 under the cloud of her civil war, retired from the 
 notice of Europe, she should be drawn into a 
 species of literary alliance with the nations of the
 
 Death of Shakespeare. 19 
 
 Continent. But so it was, and in the singular 
 unison of the aim which actuated Malherbe (1555 — 
 1628), Waller, and Opitz, we see the action of an 
 intellectual force far deeper than the rage of 
 leaguers or the ambition of a Gustavus Adolphus. 
 And our reply to the question why this movement 
 began first in France would be that at the final 
 decline of the Renaissance it was France that stood 
 at the intellectual head of Europe. 
 
 To admit this it is plainly necessary to admit 
 that this change from the romantic to the classic 
 was a step forwards, a necessary element in the 
 progress of the human mind. The critic who 
 should make this admission must be prepared to 
 find himself in opposition to all the accepted 
 canons of the last seventy years. He must be 
 ready to be charged with paradox, the love of 
 enunciating what is manifestly absurd, with ap- 
 plauding a change that gave us Cowley in exchange 
 for Spenser. I hope that before this inquiry is 
 concluded I may bring forward reasons for a view 
 that at first sight appears so ridiculous. In the 
 meantime we are occupied with France. I do not 
 myself believe, or see any reason for suspecting, 
 that the change to classicism in England was 
 originally started by direct influence from France, 
 any more than from Germany or from Holland or
 
 20 Poetry at the 
 
 from Spain. It should be stated that the date of 
 the beginning- of that change must now be placed 
 much earlier than it has hitherto been the custom 
 to place it. In my next chapter, I shall show, by 
 irrefragable proof, that Waller was writing didactic 
 occasional poems in distichs which were often as 
 good as Dryden's ever became, at least as early 
 as 1623. Now Malherbe, with whom by universal 
 consent the fashion for correct versifying and the 
 exclusion of ornament set in, was not at this time 
 a poet known even to the French public. A few 
 of his pieces had come to light, but he had published 
 no book : he was simply a fructifying centre of 
 influence, just as Rossetti lately was in London for 
 twenty years before he printed a book. 
 
 Malherbe's poems did not appear in Paris till 
 1630, two years after his death, and at least nine 
 years after Waller, in his mother's country-house 
 in Buckinghamshire, had discovered almost all that 
 was to be learned about the fabrication of smooth 
 and balanced couplets. Moreover, when Malherbe 
 is spoken of as a polisher of the couplet, it leads us 
 to suspect that his works have been more read 
 about than read. It is, in fact, a very curious cir- 
 cumstance, which I do not recollect to have seen 
 noted by any critic, that this great leader of the 
 precise style in poetry, this harbinger of Boileau and
 
 Death of Shakespeare. 21 
 
 Racine, wrote less in alexandrines than any other 
 French poet on record. Except one solitary frag- 
 ment 1 , of no importance, I do not think a single 
 copy of verses in the conventional French distich 
 has been attributed to Malherbe. Of the possible 
 influence of St Amant on Waller, some ten years 
 afterwards, something may presently be said, and 
 there is no question at all that when the Revolution 
 drove the Royalist English poets to Paris and 
 Rouen, they eagerly studied their French contem- 
 poraries and predecessors ; but then they had 
 already formed their own style. I do not believe 
 that Waller and Sidney Godolphin and Denham 
 were in the very smallest degree affected by the 
 French revolt against the poetry of the Renaissance 
 when they opened their campaign against the 
 romantic school at home. I am persuaded that it 
 was the result of one of those atmospheric in- 
 fluences which disturb the tradition of literature 
 simultaneously in all the countries of Europe alike, 
 and that it was a much more blind and unconscious 
 movement than that which towards the close of 
 the eighteenth century impelled all the literatures 
 of Europe to throw off the chains which they had 
 adopted one hundred and fifty years before. 
 
 1 The lines, addressed to Mme de Rambouillet, which were 
 inserted in the letter from Malherbe, published in Le Recneil de 
 Lettres nouvelles by Faret in 1627.
 
 Poetry at the 
 
 We return, then, to England, and to our date 
 1623, the year of the publication of the first folio 
 Shakespeare, and of the composition of Waller's 
 earliest couplets. An examination of the records 
 of the Stationers' Company will help us nothing in 
 forming a notion of the state of English poetry 
 at that date. For some reason or other the publi- 
 cation of verse in the third decade of the seven- 
 teenth century was extremely slack, though pre- 
 ceded and followed by periods of great publishing 
 activity. The new king, Charles I., was averse to 
 the writing of poems ; he would stroll up to young 
 bards in the gardens of Oxford, and would say to 
 them, " I saw thy copy of verses on her ladyship's 
 eyebrow. They were good, vastly good ! See to 
 it that thou write no more." Such compliments 
 were not encouraging to unfledged versemen, and 
 whether from this or some other reason, the imprint 
 162 — is rare on books of poetry, even of dramatic 
 poetry. With one accord the poets of the Marini 
 and Gongora school, who were then in the ascen- 
 dant, desisted from publication till long after this. 
 Phineas Fletcher, Carew, Herbert, Habington, and 
 Suckling, all of whom claim to be leading writers 
 of the second and third decades of the century, 
 made no public appearance until the fourth, while 
 Herrick waited until late in the fifth, as did Waller
 
 Death of Shakespeare. 23 
 
 himself. From a purely bibliographical point of 
 view, therefore, the title-pages of the poets are 
 sadly misleading, and 1623 seems really to belong 
 rather to the old generation of Shakespeare than 
 to that of the so-called metaphysical school. 
 
 It was, in fact, a moment of exhaustion and 
 transition in the book-trade. The day of the 
 romance-writers and pamphlet-mongers was over; 
 sixpenny plays and novels and verse-romances 
 were no more sold over the counter. The gentle- 
 men that had asked for " all Greene's works, ay ! 
 and all Nash's too " were dead, or old and gone 
 away into the country. Even Shakespeare's Venus 
 and Adonis and Lodge's Rosalind were beginning 
 to lose their vogue. Books were more expensive, 
 more cumbrous in form ; education was spreading, 
 the taste for knowledge was taking the place of 
 that innocent curiosity and romantic simplicity 
 which had made the fortune of the Elizabethan 
 booksellers. Already the shadow of the great 
 political crisis was beginning to darken the horizon, 
 and men were troubled in their minds, seeking for 
 exact information, interested in travels, in philo- 
 sophy, above all, in theology. The great vogue of 
 the Puritan divines was beginning, and almost the 
 only verse which succeeded was put into the form 
 of plays, cheaply printed, and hawked about in
 
 24 Poetry at the 
 
 little dingy quartos, with a rough paper cover 
 stitched round them, at the doors of the theatres. 
 
 There were interesting people enough to be 
 met with, but there were no Boswells. Literary- 
 curiosity was a thing forgotten, although the pre- 
 ceding generation had to some degree possessed 
 it. Sir Aston Cockaine, that egotistical poetaster, 
 mentions that he knew all the men of that time, 
 and could have written their lives had it been 
 worth his while. The exasperating creature wrote 
 bad epigrams and dreary tragi-comedies instead of 
 doing this. In country places one or two of the 
 generation that had seen Spenser and Shakespeare 
 arise were still alive — Gabriel Harvey, Lodge, 
 Barnfield, old men who were to give no further 
 sign of life. The dramatists showed more vitality, 
 though most of them held back their plays from 
 publication until the thirties. Yet Webster's 
 glorious Dutchess of Malfy belongs to our year 
 1623, and Jonson, Middleton, Chapman, and Hey- 
 wood were still at work. Massinger was just 
 emerging, and Ford was about to emerge. A 
 whole troop or phalanx of tragic and comic play- 
 wrights was preparing to add its quota to the verse 
 of the Donne and Marini school. 
 
 Meanwhile, though so little was published, a 
 great deal was read. Each University, but Cam-
 
 Death of Shakespeare. 25 
 
 bridge in particular, was a hotbed of poetry. The 
 exciting, fantastical, hysterical canzonets of the 
 great Dean of St Paul's were eagerly passed from 
 hand to hand 1 , and were as seed that sprung up in 
 the breasts of dozens of ardent young writers. 
 Poetry was no longer a profession, it was a cultus. 
 A certain order of conceits was a shibboleth, which 
 the public not only did not understand, but was 
 not expected to understand 2 . Poetry began to be 
 written for poets, for the elect, for a circle ; and 
 this was one of the deadly effects of that curious 
 embargo upon publication of which I have spoken. 
 Utter disregard was paid to unity, to proportion, 
 to extent. In the great generation there had been 
 too little regard for these qualities. Without 
 profanity be it spoken, Sidney's Arcadia is dread- 
 fully amorphous and invertebrate, and Macaulay's 
 
 1 There was no edition of Donne's Poems printed earlier than 
 1633, but their impress on the poetry of the preceding generation is 
 strongly marked. 
 
 2 Henry More, in 1642, ushers in his Cambridge epic, the 
 Psychozoia, with the usual defiance of the vulgar reader : — 
 
 I strike my silver-sounded lyre, — 
 First struck myself by some strong fire, — 
 And all the while her warning ray 
 (Reflect from fluid glass) doth play 
 On the white banks. But all are deaf 
 Unto my Muse, that is most lief [clear] 
 To mine own self.
 
 26 Poetry at the 
 
 difficulty of being in at the death of the Blatant 
 Beast would never have been propounded if the 
 Faery Queen had not been so long that it is really 
 excusable not to be aware that the Blatant Beast 
 does not die. But if the Arcadia is shapeless, 
 what are we to say of Oceana ? and let not him 
 call the Faery Queen tedious or dull who has never 
 grappled with Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island. 
 This masterpiece, with the charming mysterious 
 name, is an allegory in twelve cantos, describing 
 the body and functions of man : — 
 
 " His lungs are like the bellows, that respire 
 In every office, quickening every fire ; 
 His nose the chimney is, whereby are vented 
 Such fumes as with the bellows are augmented." 
 
 So Quarles prattles away in a foolish poem of 
 congratulation- to Fletcher, but the author of the 
 Purple Island himself strikes a much more lofty 
 note, and for page upon pompous page describes, 
 to a group of nymphs and shepherd-boys, who sit 
 around him on a little hill of daisies, the tedious 
 and inaccurate geography of this Isle of Man, with 
 all its ridiculous and unseemly towns and lakes and 
 rivers. 
 
 We know the poets of this early Caroline period 
 almost entirely by extracts, and their ardour,
 
 Death of Shakespeare. 2 7 
 
 quaintness, and sudden flashes of inspiration give 
 them a singular advantage in this form. The 
 sustained elevation which had characterized Shake- 
 speare and Spenser, and even in some degree 
 several of the chief of their contemporaries, had 
 passed away, but still the poets were most brilliant, 
 most delectable in their purple patches. That 
 same much over-estimated Phineas Fletcher rises 
 in his more natural and more felicitous moments 
 to a rare echo of the luxurious Spenserian sweet- 
 ness. This was strikingly the case with the lyrists. 
 Carew, Lovelace, and half-a-dozen more are known 
 to all lovers of poetry, not by their books, which 
 are in the hands of but few persons, but by those 
 matchless exceptions which criticism has lifted 
 from their grotesque miscellanies, and has preserved 
 in anthologies. It is quite right that they should 
 live by those pieces, and I should be the last to 
 wish to break one leaf away from their never-too- 
 ample bays. But it seems to me mere pedantry, 
 and pedantry of a particularly unwholesome kind, 
 to pretend that the works of all the Marinist or so- 
 called metaphysical poets of the reign of Charles I. 
 are not excessively unequal in merit, and constantly 
 ready to sink into unpardonable bathos or swell 
 into equally unpardonable bombast. And this 
 inequality goes so far, and pervades the literature
 
 28 Poetry at the 
 
 of the period so completely, that even the verse- 
 writers who have never taken any rank, in their 
 own clay or since, have their flashes of intense 
 romantic beauty. I stretch my hand to my book- 
 shelves, and I take down the first Caroline volume 
 that I touch. It happens to be John Mason's 
 tragedy of Muleasses the Turk, a mere bibliophile's 
 curiosity. Nobody, so far as I know, from the 
 date of its production to the present hour, has ever 
 commended a word of it. I feel as though John 
 Mason's ghost, after a silence of two hundred and 
 fifty years, might be breathing hard by my side at 
 the excitement of resuscitation. I glance along 
 the pages and I read 
 
 " Our life is but a sailing to our death 
 Through the world's ocean ; it makes no matter then 
 Whether we put into the world's vast deep 
 Shipped in a pinnace or an argosy." 
 
 That is very fine, surely ! But is Muleasses, there- 
 fore, a good play ? We look a little further and 
 we find one of the personages, under the pressure 
 of a certain annoyance, giving the following direc- 
 tions to his confidant : — 
 
 " Thy fears keep in 
 My trembling soul ; it does not leave my breast. 
 Mount to the flaming girdle of the world,
 
 Death of Shakespeare. 29 
 
 And fetch me lightning, I will swallow it ! 
 Snatch from the Cyclops balls of Etnean fire 
 And I will eat them ! Steal thunder from the clouds 
 And dart it at me ! Quaff Stygian Nonocris, 
 And I will pledge thee." 
 
 It was this want of sobriety, of propriety, of 
 common sense, which prepared the way for a 
 prosaic reaction. The dramatists were primarily 
 to blame for this, and especially the tragic 
 dramatists ; and early in the reign of Charles I. 
 almost everybody essayed to be a tragic dramatist. 
 The playwrights of the great generation had 
 pitched their note high ; no one can deny that 
 Shakespeare himself is often only saved from the 
 charge of extravagance by the rush of his intellect, 
 by his unparalleled tact and persuasiveness of style, 
 and by his fortunate genius. He says things which 
 might be monstrous, if the human race did not 
 immediately consent to break records, as athletic 
 people say, and to begin experience again from 
 Shakespeare's point of view. But if the greatest 
 of the poets of the world ran a risk from the 
 turbulent instincts of the age he lived in, the 
 lesser men, the immeasurably lesser men, that 
 followed him, had no chance of keeping their heels 
 on solid £round.
 
 30 Poetry at the 
 
 In estimating this quality of sobriety, of common 
 sense, in poetry, we are somewhat at a discount in 
 this age, and a critic who holds it healthy to be 
 calm and discreet in poetic writing may still find 
 himself brought face to face with a fiery indigna- 
 tion. The reaction against the bondage of the 
 eighteenth century still gives us a tender partiality 
 towards what is exaggerated, violent, and bom- 
 bastic. Still, even in this matter, I think our 
 general taste is progressing in a salutary direction. 
 Fifteen years ago it used to be all the fashion 
 among young men of poetic aspirations to affect 
 the tragedies of Cyril Tourneur. The name was 
 an agreeable one, the plays were very rare and 
 difficult to meet with, and accordingly Cyril 
 Tourneur became a kind of watchword of the 
 higher culture, like Botticelli. Now Cyril Tourneur 
 has been reprinted, with admirable care, by a very 
 distinguished scholar, and I notice that his name 
 becomes rarer and rarer on the lips and pens of 
 the enthusiastic. 
 
 Without expressing the least disrespect towards 
 a writer in whom a variety of critics have found 
 much to praise, I am bound to say that the 
 existence of Cyril Tourneur appears to me to be 
 one little reason more, by the way, why the classical
 
 Death of Shakespeare. 31 
 
 reaction should be regarded as absolutely inevi- 
 table. Cyril Tourneur is a regular raw-head and 
 bloody-bones, a vampire of literature, a purveyor 
 of yells and dead- men's bodies and churchyard 
 curses. The passages which attracted the admira- 
 tion of Charles Lamb are sudden felicities, such as 
 I have just said can be discovered, though, I allow, 
 in fewer numbers and in less sustained brilliance, 
 in a vast number of examples. But the general 
 tenour of his writings is so monstrous, so con- 
 fused, so obscure, that there are whole pages 
 which might have been written by a Dyak of 
 Borneo who had strayed into the school of Lyco- 
 phron. 
 
 I would desire to recommend to anyone who 
 holds that English poetry at the beginning of the 
 seventeenth century was in a quiet, healthy con- 
 dition, and needed merely to be allowed to go on 
 its course, a chef-d 'ceuvre of Cyril Tourneur's called 
 The Transformed Metamorphosis. I remember the 
 shouts of joy among the elect when this master- 
 piece was first discovered in a unique copy some 
 twelve years ago. Well, the editor and fondest 
 admirer of Cyril Tourneur admits that the exces- 
 sive obscurity of The Transformed Metamorphosis 
 " arises as much from the abnormal and grotesque 
 mould in which the whole poem is cast as from the
 
 32 Poetry at the 
 
 hideous jargon in which it is written 1 ." These are 
 the words of a leading admirer of the school of 
 James and Charles, and I seize them as a text for 
 my parable. I am asked why the literature of the 
 seventeenth century shut itself up in bondage, why 
 it subjected itself to stiff and artificial rules, why it 
 confined itself to dry and obvious themes ; my 
 answer is, because of the abnormal and grotesque 
 mould in which all but the best passages of poetry 
 had come to be cast, and because of the hideous 
 jargon in which verse was written 2 . 
 
 1 Here is a stanza : 
 
 "From out the lake a bridge ascends thereto, 
 Whereon in female shape a serpent stands, 
 
 Who eyes her eye, or views her blue-veined brow, 
 With sense-bereaving gloses she enchants, 
 And when she sees a worldling blind that haunts 
 
 The pleasure that doth seem there to be found, 
 
 She soothes with leucrocutanized sound." 
 Leucrocutanized is good ; but what does it all mean ? 
 
 2 The early critics of the Restoration saw this very clearly, and 
 it made them blind to the beauties of their predecessors. Knightly 
 Chetwood (1682) remarks that what English poetry has need of is 
 
 " one who license can restrain, 
 Make civil laws o'er barbarous usage reign, 
 One worthy in Apollo's chair to sit, 
 And hold the scales, and give the stamp of wit, 
 In whom ripe judgment and young fancy meet 
 And force the poets' rage to be discreet, 
 Who grows not nauseous while he strives to please, 
 But marks the shelves in our poetic seas."
 
 Death of S/iakespeare. 
 
 But it was not merely the want of proportion 
 and sustained style, it was not merely the in- 
 temperance and unwholesomeness of the poets, 
 which called for drastic reform, it was also their 
 want of sympathy with the ruling tastes of the 
 people. The growth of an instinct for liberty, the 
 rapid increase of political curiosity, which marked 
 the decade before the Civil War, and which 
 Charles, by his unimaginative obstinacy, fostered 
 as studiously as if he had been a paid agent of 
 revolt, this widening of the intellectual conscience 
 gave Englishmen quite a new interest in what was 
 actual and vital to themselves. In the great gene- 
 ration of Elizabeth there had been diffused over 
 the people something of the temper and curiosity 
 of a very brilliant child. In the search for romantic 
 excitement Verona had been as interesting to them 
 as London, or more interesting. The novels that 
 pleased best were those in which the scenes re- 
 vealed some forest of palm-trees dividing the 
 Empire of Russia from the Kingdom of Peru, 
 some wild strand where the waves cast pearls and 
 ambergris on the stormy sea-board of Bohemia. 
 Probability, what we call actuality, went for 
 nothing ; like children, the Elizabethans demanded 
 an illusion, but were quite indifferent as to the 
 sober basis of that illusion. Perhaps the only sign 
 G. 3
 
 34 Poetry at the 
 
 which their imaginative literature gave of any 
 germ of realism, in the modern sense, was afforded 
 by the domestic tragedies, on crimes of passing 
 interest, which were now and then played, with 
 startling crudities of effect, in the smaller theatres. 
 But in the next generation a complete change 
 came over the national mind. In the great period, 
 a friend of Shakespeare, Michael Drayton, had 
 written a serene and lovely poem, in his leisurely 
 way, on a period of English history. If I mention 
 The Barons' Wars here, it is not with any notion 
 of comparing it with the crude epics of the next 
 generation, with the Purple Island and the Levites 
 Revenge, but merely to show how totally distinct 
 the notion which so elegant and accomplished a 
 poet as Drayton had of the function of history was 
 from what appealed to the conscience of the men 
 who fought against ship-money. To do so, I will 
 quote one stanza out of The Barons' 1 Wars, a 
 stanza taken almost at random, a brick out of that 
 stately building. The Earl of March is dying and 
 he writes a letter to the Queen : — 
 
 " Most mighty Empress, sdaign not to peruse 
 The swan-like dirges of a dying man, 
 
 Unlike those raptures of the fluent Muse 
 In that sweet season when our joys began,
 
 Death of Shakespeare. 
 
 That did my youth with glorious fire infuse, 
 When for thy glove at tilt I proudly ran ; 
 Whereas my startling courser strongly set 
 Made fire to fly from Hartford's burgonet." 
 
 This is the first of seven stanzas, all in the 
 same style, of which the letter is composed. We 
 are given ten more, in which the agitation of the 
 Queen on receiving it is described. It is all 
 charming poetry, full of lovely and chivalrous 
 images, and a passionate music runs through it. 
 But the reader observes that it is not history, that 
 it would be equally interesting as a letter of any 
 dying soldier to any lady he had loved, and that it 
 is obviously written to please readers who took 
 a great deal more interest in hearing about a 
 handsome earl who died for love of a fair queen, 
 than in the effect that earl's insurrection may have 
 had in improving the condition of the House of 
 Commons, or than in the political results of that 
 Queen's partiality for her fatherland. In point of 
 fact, Drayton's poem would have been almost as 
 charming and almost as popular if Mortimer had 
 been named Amandus and the Queen Amanda. 
 
 To comprehend the mental condition which 
 made the classical reaction possible, we must 
 endeavour to realize this complete alteration in 
 the temper of the readers of poetry. And one 
 
 3—2
 
 36 Poetry at the 
 
 great feature of this change we have not yet in- 
 dicated. With this desire for more exact know- 
 ledge, with this widening of the political sympathies, 
 with this craving for more simplicity and more 
 regularity in literature, there came in another 
 sentiment which was not so interesting or pretty. 
 This was the decline of the spirit of adventure. 
 The poetry of the Elizabethans had been very 
 largely animated by this spirit. It had been 
 written by men of adventure, by soldiers such 
 as Sidney, by buccaneers such as Lodge and 
 Raleigh. Now all that was over ; the poets would 
 go no more a-roving, and if they were to be 
 soldiers in the future, it was in a grievous and un- 
 romantic fight with their own flesh and blood, in 
 fields that their fathers had tilled in friendship 
 side by side. The brief period of splendid lawless- 
 ness on the high seas in the days of Elizabeth had 
 told on the literature of this country, as the 
 adventures of the Greeks told on the tragedies 
 of ^Eschylus, or as the deeds of Icelanders who 
 went a-viking told on their drapas and their sagas. 
 But to this brief period of intoxication, a time 
 of depression and collapse was bound to follow. 
 
 Without, then, too ingeniously building up 
 what should be, from a knowledge of what was, we 
 can on the whole put ourselves pretty distinctly
 
 Death of Shakespeare. 3p 
 
 into the place of a young man who, about 1623: 
 
 should find himself moved to head a reaction 
 
 against the ruling taste of the day in verse. Ir, 
 
 much of what has been already said, of coursd 
 
 the view of the supposititious young man, rathei 
 
 than my own view, has been dwelt upon. Wcr 
 
 can imagine such a young fellow, in some Camr 
 
 bridge College, returning from the company o 
 
 1 circle of friends who had been passing MS^ 
 
 >oems of Dean Donne from hand to hand in ar •, 
 
 ^stasy, — we can imagine him saying to himselfi 
 
 Vre they mad to praise this coarse and obscured 
 
 vgress of the Soul? Are we doomed for evert 
 
 have to endure such verse as this, — c t 
 
 'Virtue is soul, always in all deeds, all'?' 1- 
 
 lis craze for calling heaven and earth tdf 
 
 Iss the ingenuity of a conceit to spread like ;n 
 
 vr through every member of our literature ? U 
 
 fcmld question thus, and we must not blamcl 
 
 {, in his anger, and in his craving after stykis 
 
 sproportion, he should neglect those eminent 
 
 tes which we can perceive readily enough, anif 
 
 I have made us of late too tender to the faultje 
 
 s early portion of the seventeenth century, r. 
 
 a it were my duty here to call attention t<jf 
 
 tis good in those interesting writers of the agzh 
 
 iiarles, the task would be an easy and gj 
 
 I 
 
 P 
 
 1
 
 1? 
 
 ?3$ Poetry at the 
 
 gratifying one. But I desire to keep close to the 
 cquestion which is before us, the causes which led 
 l<:o the classical reaction. I cannot blind myself to 
 vthe fact that one of the principal of these causes 
 rwas what I have indicated, the inequality and 
 salembicated character of the poetry in vogue. 
 iThe young man I have imagined would turn to 
 Ihis Ars Poetica, and would smile to think that the 
 'Very monsters which Horace painted by the light 
 W)f prophecy were come to the birth at last. The 
 a.ovely woman ending in a fish, what simile could 
 ^better describe the beautiful moral monstrosity 
 gof Fletcher's FaitJiful Shepherdess? Where does 
 s<;he dolphin gallop through the woods and the 
 rcvild boar breast the waves, if not in the cantos of 
 fi:he Purple Island? Who so ingenious as Herbert 
 sbr Carew in painting the cypress when it was a 
 nthipwreck they were commissioned to paint ? All 
 tche commonplaces of that wonderful prelude of 
 ac-Iorace would come back to the young man as 
 ofingularly, as pitifully, characteristic of his own 
 w'ge, and he would have little inclination to praise 
 Bhe technical beauty in the purple patch itself, be 
 o t cypress or dolphin or woman. He would rather 
 ie inclined to dream of a straightforward prosaic 
 wioetry, closely bound down by the unities, by the 
 cajles of composition such as Aristotle and Horace
 
 Death of Shakespeare. 
 
 have given them ; and would reply to the ancient 
 question, Is it Nature, is it Art, that leads to a 
 praiseworthy poem ? by asking another question, 
 " What do my contemporaries answer ? '' And 
 when they had all vociferated " Nature," he would 
 draw his toga around him, with as Roman an air 
 as he could affect, and would quietly decide for 
 " Art." 
 
 The young man to whom I have been alluding 
 has not been a mere figure of rhetoric ; he existed, 
 and his name was Edmund Waller. To him and 
 to his peculiar qualities of mind and character 
 happens to be due the first initiation into that 
 great change, that turning topsy-turvy of all poetic 
 literature, which was henceforth to be the main in 
 tellectual labour of the seventeenth century. Wallei 
 was not a great, or attractive, or inspiring man 
 although of course he must have had exceptiona' 
 powers and singular opportunities to have effectec 
 what he did effect. But he is the hero of thi 
 whole volume. My readers will be forced, if the] 
 pay me the compliment of listening to me, to hea 
 a very great deal about him, and to becom 
 tolerably intimate with his talents and his charactei 
 I need not here, at the close of a chapter, saj 
 anything more about him, but the last minute; 
 which we spend together now may be devotee
 
 40 Poetry at the 
 
 ( to the speculation, Why was it not John Milton, 
 , instead of Edmund Waller, to whom it was o-iven 
 l to revolutionize poetry in England ? 
 . Here, again, as everywhere where we look 
 j closely into the historic development of literature, 
 c we see the value of dates, and the paramount 
 'importance of a clear chronological sequence. 
 ' Broadly speaking, it was because Milton was born 
 • three years later than Waller, and did not so 
 x rapidly come to maturity, that we did not receive 
 ,from him a classical bias which would have been 
 
 c 
 
 isomething very different from Waller's. The time 
 was ripe, and when, in 1623, these first experiments 
 in distich were made, the public taste was like 
 touchwood, and caught the fire to let it steadily 
 
 rsmoulder. In 1623 Milton was a schoolboy still ; 
 six years passed before the Nativity Ode was 
 
 -written, and there he displayed himself simply 
 
 t as the most brilliant of the Marinists. 
 
 At Horton, in his famous five years' retirement, 
 ie afterwards withdrew from this erroneous school 
 
 vv >f conceits, and wrote the lovely polished poems 
 
 •gvhich we know. But he was out of the world, 
 
 Q vhile the leaders of the new school were in it, and 
 :hey with their facile prosaic manner gave the 
 public something much more popular, though far 
 
 _.ess noble, than Milton's withdrawn and solemn
 
 Death of Shakespeare. 41 
 
 organ-music. The side which the more eminent 
 poet took in politics separated him still more from 
 those who, in the far greater majority, were the 
 supporters of literature, and when he began, in his 
 own words, at the summons of God's secretary, 
 Conscience, to " embark in a troubled sea of noises 
 and hoarse disputes," he was himself taken away 
 from the sphere of poetical composition for eighteen 
 laborious years. So that Milton's noble figure will 
 accompany us all down the course of our inquiry, 
 but at a distance, neither approving nor dis- 
 approving, — the restless and irritable temper of 
 the age through which he lived being, as little 
 as that of the age into which he was born, sympa- 
 thetic to his peculiar serenity of mind, the mind 
 that would not condescend to little things.
 
 WALLER AND SACHARISSA.
 
 WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 
 
 In that treasury of obsolete opinion and in- 
 dispensable data, the Biographia Britannica, as 
 published in the year 1766, we find the following 
 startling sentence :— " Edmund Waller, the most 
 celebrated Lyric Poet that England ever produced." 
 If we remark that this confident judgment was 
 expressed in so authoritative a quarter more than 
 a century and a half after the birth of the poet for 
 whom such supremacy was claimed, and that the 
 readers of this phrase were divided from Waller as 
 far as we ourselves are from such old-fashioned 
 poets as Akenside and Falconer, we may well be 
 disposed to marvel at the duration of a fame that 
 has been thoroughly eclipsed at last. Nay more, 
 Ave may surely feel a curiosity to discover what 
 it was about this half-forgotten poet which can 
 have impressed the public for more than a hundred
 
 46 Waller and Sacharissa. 
 
 years with a sense of his magnitude and importance. 
 And, indeed, the inquiry which we arc now en- 
 gaged in making into the phenomena which at- 
 tended the great change from romantic to classical 
 poetry in England can only be carried out by 
 giving due and careful attention to the career and 
 character of a lyric poet who reigned supreme 
 until the classical taste declined, and who has 
 been discarded ever since the romantic taste re- 
 vived. 
 
 In our last chapter we saw what elements were 
 collected to form the body of English poetry in 
 the decline of such phases of the Renaissance as 
 had reached our shores. In the general disorgani- 
 zation and solution of the old forms of romantic 
 poetry, there was needed an astringent which 
 should brace the textures and condense the solids 
 of literature. In the great romance of Rabelais, 
 we find Ponocrates purging Gargantua with the 
 hellebore of Anticyra to make him forget all that 
 his other masters had taught him 1 . This harsh 
 restorative, this herbal secret of forgetfulness, was 
 presented to English poetry in the nick of time by 
 what we must be allowed to call, for want of a 
 
 1 " Lequel le purgea canonicquement auec elebore de Anticyre, 
 et, par ce medicament, luy neltoya toute l'alteration et peruerse 
 habitude de cerveau." — Gargantua i. 23.
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 47 
 
 better term, the genius of Waller. While the 
 function of most leaders of literature is to refresh 
 and extend the mind, to explore new fields of 
 beauty, to throw the windows of the soul wide 
 open to fresh airs from the world of nature, it was 
 Waller's duty to capture and imprison the imagina- 
 tion, to seize English poetry by the wings, and 
 to shut it up in a cage for a hundred and fifty 
 years, to win a position as the leader of imaginative 
 literature by narrowing its scope and rigidly re- 
 ducing its resources. 
 
 Of late years, ever since the beginning of the 
 present century, indeed, it has been customary to 
 disregard entirely the position claimed and won by 
 this remarkable man. It may easily be conceded 
 that his is not a sympathetic figure ; but the time 
 has surely passed when we can reject writers from 
 their stations in the evolution of literature because 
 their writings or their characters are unalluring 
 to ourselves. Here is a man of whom, after the 
 lapse of a century and a half, it still seemed a 
 commonplace to say that he was the most cele- 
 brated lyric poet that England ever produced ; we 
 may reject him as we will, we cannot allow our- 
 selves to deny that his historic position is of the 
 very highest interest. We must examine his 
 career with attention, that we may discover what
 
 4S Waller and Sacliarissa. 
 
 there was about the man himself which could sub- 
 jugate his own contemporaries with so strong a 
 spell, and his writings, that we may find out what 
 it was in them that appealed to generation after 
 generation as something more elegant and cap- 
 tivating than the poetry of Shakespeare, of Spenser, 
 and of Milton 1 . 
 
 Edmund Waller was singularly fortunate in his 
 birth and extraction. In the reign of James I., 
 among so many upstart dukes and earls, he pos- 
 sessed the dignity of a wealthy country gentleman 
 ennobled by a long line of honourable landed 
 ancestors. The family tree of the Wallers was 
 a flourishing and stately vegetable at least as far 
 back as the reign of Henry VI. A very distant 
 progenitor, a Mr Richard Waller of Spendhurst, 
 had enjoyed the charge of that noble prisoner, 
 Charles of Orleans, after the battle of Agincourt, 
 and some vestige of the influence of the inde- 
 fatigable and indolent maker of rondeaux may 
 have descended from father to son. At that time, 
 and long afterwards, the family estates were in 
 Kent, but towards the close of the reign of 
 Elizabeth we find them situated in the heart of 
 
 1 "Inter poetas sui temporis facile princeps," says the in- 
 scription at Beaconsfield, though Herrick, Milton and Dryden were 
 "sui temporis."
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 49 
 
 Buckinghamshire. Mr Robert Waller lived at 
 Amersham, or, as it was then spelt, Agmondesham, 
 a borough, even then decayed, seated upon Milton's 
 little classic river Missbourn. 
 
 When he wished to marry, Mr Waller went 
 a few miles westward to the village of Hampden, 
 near Princes Risborough, where Mr John Hampden, 
 of that ilk, enjoyed a position very similar to 
 his own, and where he received the hand of his 
 daughter. Mr Hampden possessed a young son, 
 who then, and for a long time afterwards, was 
 conspicuous only for his "jolly conversation " and 
 for his warm pursuit of field-sports, but who is now 
 known to all the world as the famous patriot 
 John Hampden. By the means of this marriage, it 
 will be observed, the Wallers became connected 
 with the family of Cromwell, and thus even be- 
 fore his birth those social complications began 
 which were so to vex the trimming spirit of the 
 poet. 
 
 As the nephew of John Hampden and the 
 cousin of Oliver Cromwell, then, Edmund Waller 
 was born into the world on the 3rd of March, 1605, 
 at a country-house belonging to his father, and 
 called Coleshill, which was then in a fragment 
 of Herts, but is now absorbed again into Bucking- 
 hamshire. As he grew up at this house, the child 
 G. 4
 
 5<d Waller and Sacharissa. 
 
 was within an easy walking distance of all the 
 little boroughs which were to be identified with 
 him in mature life : Amcrsham, which he was to 
 represent in parliament ; Wycombe, where he was 
 to live and dispense hospitality ; Reaconsfield, 
 where he was to die and to be buried. A pastoral 
 and woodland country, watered by little rivers 
 flowing southward to the Thames, and hallowed to 
 us all by more sentimental association with the 
 greater names of Milton and Gray, yet not so 
 characteristic of the writings of those high-flying 
 spirits as of the graceful, precise, and mundane 
 poetry of Waller. 
 
 The poet's father made thrifty use of the large 
 fortune which descended to him, and when he 
 died, which was during Edmund Waller's infancy, 
 he left his only son an income of £3,500 a year, a 
 property which was nursed by his careful mother 
 all through his childhood and youth. The con- 
 sequence was, that when Waller came of age he 
 was in possession of one of the most splendid 
 private fortunes in the country, nor until the end 
 of his long life did all his crosses and vicissitudes 
 prevent the money from gathering under his feet 
 wherever his fate pursued him. There never was a 
 child so plainly born with the traditional silver- 
 spoon in his mouth as Waller, and since the world
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 51 
 
 began there have been very few poets indeed that 
 have been half so rich as he. His mother, whose 
 Christian name is lost, sent him to Eton at an 
 early age, and transferred him thence, probably 
 about 1618, to Cambridge; he was entered a 
 scholar at King's College, where there is now no 
 record of his entrance. Tradition informed the 
 author of his Life that he was extraordinarily 
 proficient in all his studies while at the University, 
 which he left early that he might take part at once 
 in public life. 
 
 We are, however, met here by a serious dif- 
 ficulty. The accepted story is that Waller entered 
 parliament, as member for Amersham, at the age 
 of sixteen, — that is to say, in 1621. According to 
 this legend, the young poet was one of those 
 summoned on the 16th of January in that year 
 to consult with James I. on the crisis in Bohemia 
 and the general distracted state of Christendom. 
 There is no prima facie absurdity in this, for babes 
 and sucklings found their way into the House 
 of Commons in those days, and no questions 
 asked. But the poet's tomb in Beaconsfield Church- 
 yard, the inscription on which was carefully com- 
 piled by Rymer the historiographer from docu- 
 ments placed in his hands by the family, states 
 that Waller entered parliament, as member for 
 
 4—2
 
 52 Waller and Sacliarissa. 
 
 Amersham, when he was not yet eighteen 1 . This 
 would point to the beginning of 1623, by which 
 time, as we shall presently see, he was already 
 deeply interested in affairs. But unhappily for 
 these stories, cold fact steps in and mentions that 
 Amersham had ceased to return members in the 
 reign of Edward II., and that its burgesses did not 
 resume the right of election until 1624, when 
 Hakeville and Crewe represented it at Westminster 
 during James's fourth and last parliament. There 
 are two ways out of the difficulty : the one that 
 Waller attended the third parliament sub silejitio, 
 which his prudent mother might think a wise 
 mode of securing a political education ; the other, 
 that he was duly returned, but for some other 
 borough than Amersham. 
 
 But whatever were the youth's exact relations 
 to the court and the houses of parliament, we know 
 that they were of such a nature as could only 
 be attained by a personage who united precocious 
 talents to unusual social advantages. On the 
 30th of December, 1621, before he had completed 
 his seventeenth year, Waller was witness to a 
 
 1 The phrase of Rymer is precise, " Nondum octodecenalis inter 
 ardua regni tractantes sedem habuit, a burgo de Agmondesham 
 missus." This inscription was made in 1700, at the expense of 
 Mary, the poet's second wife, and Edmund his son.
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 
 
 strange scene which imprinted itself deeply upon 
 his memory, and which he vividly described long 
 afterwards to Dr Birch. It was the day upon 
 which James I. had gone to Whitehall, and had 
 practically dissolved his third parliament by tearing 
 the protestation of the Commons out of the 
 journals of the House. He said that he hoped he 
 might hear no more about liberty of speech. 
 
 At dinner-time Edmund Waller, coming into 
 court, found the King seated at table, with the 
 Bishops of Winchester and Durham standing be- 
 hind his chair. Still out of temper with the 
 obstinacy of the Commons, the King growled out 
 to the two prelates, " My Lords, cannot I take my 
 subjects' money when I want it, without all this 
 formality in Parliament?" Neale, Bishop of 
 Durham, hastened to reply, " God forbid, sire, but 
 you should ; you are the breath of our nostrils." 
 Whereupon King James turned and said to the 
 venerable and stately Lancelot Andrewes, " Well, 
 my Lord of Winchester, what say you ? " " Sire," 
 was the answer, " I have no skill to judge of 
 parliamentary cases." The King persisted, "No 
 put-off, my Lord ; answer me presently." " Then, 
 Sire, I think it is lawful for you to take my 
 brother Neale's money, for he offers it." Waller 
 tells us that the company was pleased with this
 
 54 Waller and Sacharissa. 
 
 politic reply, but the King was in no temper 
 for wit. He brooded over it, and some time after- 
 wards he allowed himself, with that coarseness 
 which was native to him, to crack a vulgar jest 
 at the expense of Bishop Andrewes' smartness. 
 
 This anecdote and a single copy of verses are 
 all that are left to us of this earliest period of 
 Waller's career. The copy of verses is so poor and 
 tiresome that I should despair of interesting my 
 readers in it, if it were not understood that in the 
 course of our present inquiry we are not mainly on 
 the outlook for what is beautiful or witty in itself. 
 These verses, which Waller published as his earliest 
 and which may be attributed to the year 1621. have 
 a structural peculiarity which is of the most curious 
 importance. In his Epistle to the Earl of Orrery, 
 prefixed in 1664 to the anonymous edition of the 
 Rival Ladies, Dryden drew attention for the first 
 time, but in language Avhich our later knowledge 
 can scarcely improve, to the main peculiarity of 
 Waller's poetical style. " Rime," he said, " has all 
 the advantages of prose, besides its own. But the 
 excellence and dignity of it were never fully known 
 till Mr Waller taught it : he first made writing 
 easily an art ; first showed us how to conclude the 
 sense, most commonly in distichs, which, in the 
 verse of those before him, runs on for so many
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 55 
 
 lines together, that the reader is out of breath to 
 overtake it." 
 
 Dryden here notes the fact to which I called 
 attention in my last chapter, and which I am 
 afraid I must insist upon at the risk of being 
 tedious — the principle of the structure of the 
 romantic poetry was overflow, that of the classical 
 poetry was distich. It is therefore of extraordinary 
 interest to find Edmund Waller, as early as 162 1 — 
 that is to say, nearly a quarter of a century before 
 anyone else in England did so — writing his copy of 
 verses " To the King on his Navy," in distichs as 
 correct and monotonous as any that he composed 
 to the day of his death ; in thirty-two lines we find 
 but one overflow 1 . 
 
 1 "Where e'er thy Navy spreads her canvas wings 
 Homage to thee, and peace to all she brings ; 
 The French and Spaniard, when thy flags appear, 
 Forget their hatred and consent to fear. 
 So Jove from Ida did both hosts survey, 
 And when he pleas'd to thunder part the fray ; 
 Ships heretofore in seas like fishes sped, 
 The mightiest still upon the smallest fed," etc. 
 
 Written in 162 1, these lines might have been signed in 1721 by 
 some versifier of the school of Addison. But I confess that I 
 cannot persuade myself to receive them as an untouched product of 
 the reign of James I. The line about the French and Spaniard 
 points to Charles I. and to 1634. There is nothing difficult of 
 acceptation in the idea that Waller revised an old poem to suit a 
 new occasion.
 
 56 Waller and Sackarissa. 
 
 The next poem of Waller's to which we can 
 supply a date, and in this case the application is 
 certain, forms even a more curious and valuable 
 text for criticism. I believe that the main reason 
 of Waller's popularity and influence was the prosaic, 
 the anti-imaginative, function which he conceived 
 for poetry. It appeared to him that verse, and 
 verse of a more precise kind than had hitherto been 
 written in England, was a proper vehicle for the 
 celebration of facts, public or private, of passing 
 interest. This no one before his time had per- 
 ceived, except a few Jacobean scribblers, devoid of 
 art, like Taylor the Water poet, whose influence 
 had been nil. It was distinctly an inspiration for a 
 lad of eighteen, in the winter of 1623, when Ben 
 Jonson and Chapman and Drayton were the poets 
 most in vogue, resolutely to sit down without a 
 model to write a long poem on the exciting incident 
 of the moment, the danger Prince Charles had just 
 escaped on his return voyage from Spain. 
 
 The occurrence is well remembered : Charles 
 was rowing back by night from Santander to his 
 own vessel, the " Prince," when the wind suddenly 
 rose and very nearly swept the barge out to sea. 
 Sir Sackville Trevor, on board the " Defiance," 
 fortunately became aware of what was happening, 
 and threw out ropes with lanterns attached to them,
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 57 
 
 one of which was caught by a rower on Charles's 
 barge, and the " heroick Prince," as Waller calls 
 him, was saved. It is very interesting to compare 
 the poem with the published account of the incident ; 
 we see that the verses possessed, and were intended 
 to possess, the lively actuality of a newsletter. 
 The whole political situation is lightly touched, 
 phase by phase; the Prince's gallant object in 
 Spain, the diplomacy of Olivares, the dubious and 
 coy position of the Infanta, the attitude of France, 
 all are discussed in language which may seem florid 
 to us, but which had the charm of novelty and reality 
 to the gentlemen and ladies of James's court, among 
 whom the verses were circulated in manuscript. I 
 must be allowed to quote a few lines, as a specimen 
 of the style of this interesting and vivacious poem. 
 It is supposed that, during the peaceful moments 
 that preceded the storm, while Charles was still 
 riding through the streets of Santander amid the 
 noise of bells and cannon, the sea-god Arion 
 occupied himself in soliloquizing as follows regard- 
 ing the ancestors of the god-like Prince : — 
 
 "While to his harp divine Arion sings 
 The loves and conquests of our Albion kings, 
 Of the fourth Edward was his noble song, 
 Fierce, goodly, valiant, beautiful and young,
 
 58 Waller and Sacharissa. 
 
 He rent the crown from vanquished Henry's head, 
 Raised the white rose and trampled on the red, 
 Till Love, triumphing o'er the Victor's pride, 
 Brought Mars and Venus to the conquered side." 
 
 The prosody of such lines as these is quite 
 undistinguishable from that of the classic school 
 from 1660 to the close of the seventeenth century. 
 Dryden proceeded no further than this in the mere 
 execution of the distich, and it was only in the 
 hands of Pope that it received a further polish and 
 rapidity. We find Waller here not merely turning 
 off his serried couplets with complete ease and 
 indifference, but surpassing in his earliest efforts 
 what was done all through their lives by his more 
 immediate pupils. Such writing as this, which 
 Waller was master of in 1623, was not imitated by 
 a single poet for nearly twenty years ; yet he 
 persisted in it, and lived to see the entire English 
 Parnassus absorbed by it. We must admit that 
 the man who could effect such a revolution, and 
 show from youth to age so intrepid a consistency 
 of manner, deserves the closest attention from the 
 student of style. 
 
 It was consistent also with his isolated habit of 
 mind that Waller does not seem to have consorted 
 with any of the poets of his own youth. A rhetorical 
 address to Ben Jonson goes far to prove that he
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 59 
 
 was not acquainted with the only writer who is 
 mentioned in the poems of his youth and middle 
 life. It has been assumed, on slender evidence, 
 that Sir John Suckling translated into Latin one 
 of the Sacharissa poems, the version being printed 
 by Waller as his own. Less proof of Waller's 
 association with his poetical peers could hardly be 
 adduced, and Suckling was, after all, a golden 
 swashbuckler of the gardens of Whitehall more 
 than a person of letters. The truth seems to be 
 that Waller held himself resolutely aloof from the 
 contemporary literature of the age, and cultivated 
 those dry distichs of his by some curious un- 
 sympathetic inspiration, the exact nature of which 
 we shall never know. 
 
 His thoughts during these boyish days seem to 
 have been politically ambitious. His great wealth 
 drew him naturally to court, and in August, 1625. 
 he sat in the House of Commons for another of the 
 local Buckinghamshire boroughs, for Chipping 
 Wycombe. Parliament met its new King on this 
 first occasion at Oxford, and the boyish Waller, 
 not yet of age, was a sharer, no doubt, in the panic 
 regarding the plague and the grumbling about the 
 noisome lodgings which occupied the short course 
 of a session that must have seemed to him like a 
 summer holiday. He little realized, we may be
 
 6o Waller and Sacharissa. 
 
 sure, that he was witnessing the first throes of that 
 mighty struggle in which the constitution of 
 England was presently to be rent into shreds. 
 Next February he represented Wycombe at West- 
 minster, in Charles's second parliament, and the 
 following year Amersham in the third. 
 
 In 1627 he came before the public in a very 
 strange way. Ann, the daughter and sole heiress 
 of a wealthy citizen of London of the name of 
 Banks, appears to have attracted general attention 
 by the combined charms of her appearance and her 
 fortune. The Court itself took this interesting 
 young person under its patronage, and deigned to 
 discover a husband for an heiress so distinguished. 
 This candidate for Miss Banks's hand was a courtier 
 of the name of Crofts, whose suit was considered 
 to be gained, when Waller, then aged two-and- 
 twenty, coolly stepped in, and married the fair 
 lady in the teeth of Whitehall. The Earl of 
 Clarendon tells us that this incident caused Mr 
 Waller to be famous to a degree which he had not 
 attained by his wit, nor his fine parts, nor his 
 poetry. 
 
 It is probable that it also caused him to be 
 looked upon at Court with some degree of ill-will, 
 for we learn that in 1628 he retired with his young 
 wife into Buckinghamshire, to his house at Beacons-
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 61 
 
 field, and gave himself up to study. In the winter 
 of that year he wrote another of his gazetteer poems, 
 the piece On his Majesty's receiving the news of the 
 Duke of Buckingham's death. In the choice of his 
 subject Waller once more showed a tact which 
 served him well with his own immediate public, 
 but which has lost its charm for posterity. Bucking- 
 ham, it will be remembered, had just breakfasted 
 at Portsmouth, when Felton met him in the passage 
 and stabbed him to the heart. Charles I. was only 
 five miles off, at Southwick, and when Sir John 
 Hippesley brought the news, he was still at morning 
 prayer. The story current at the time, which 
 Clarendon repeats and Waller versifies, is that the 
 King, when the news was whispered to him, re- 
 mained kneeling without change of countenance 
 until the function was over. 
 
 " The sacred Wrestler till a blessing given 
 Quits not his hold, but halting conquers Heaven," 
 
 says Waller, and deftly compliments the monarch 
 at once upon his presence of mind and his tender- 
 ness. 
 
 " Such huge extremes inhabit thy great mind, 
 God-like unmoved and yet like Woman kind." 
 
 Contarini, as quoted by Mr Gardiner, says that 
 Charles did in fact show panic on his countenance,
 
 62 Waller and SacJiarissa. 
 
 but it seems certain that he did not stir till prayers 
 were ended, when he rushed to his bedroom, flung 
 himself on the bed, and gave way to a torrent of 
 lamentations. 
 
 Waller's retirement into the country was identi- 
 fied with his sudden friendship for a remarkable 
 man, George Morley, long afterwards Bishop of 
 Worcester and then of Winchester. Waller had 
 lately been admitted into that society of learned 
 and wealthy persons which was known as Lord 
 Falkland's club. At one of the meetings of this 
 body a noise was heard in the street, and looking 
 out of window 7 the members saw a young man 
 being arrested by bailiffs. They were told it was 
 "a son of Ben Jonson," this being the name given 
 to themselves by a group of young University wits 
 who affected to be the poetical offspring of the 
 author of Volpone. The debtor was brought in to 
 the club, and proved to be a relation of Waller's 
 own, George Morley, a penniless student of Christ- 
 church, Oxford, as learned, witty, and needy as a 
 man could be. Waller was charmed with his 
 acquaintance, and the end of the meeting was 
 that the poet persuaded the student to come down 
 to Beaconsfield and share his retirement. This 
 Morley did, and for ten years spent his life in 
 the enjoyment of hospitality alternately with the
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 63 
 
 Wallers and with the Earl and Countess of Car- 
 narvon. He lived to be a very old man, and 
 under the Restoration rose in the Church to those 
 episcopal dignities by which he is best known. 
 But in these early days he was secular and human- 
 istic in his proclivities, and it is said, and this is 
 strongly confirmed by Lord Clarendon, that it was 
 mainly due to him that Waller seriously undertook 
 to cultivate poetry. It is certain that the ten 
 years he spent with Waller were those in which 
 the great bulk of that writer's verses were composed, 
 and it may further be noticed, as a link in the 
 chain of events, that Morley was the first cousin of 
 Sir John Denham, who was to be Waller's earliest 
 pupil in poetry. 
 
 Waller, on retiring from public life, left his 
 mother in the family mansion in the town of 
 Beaconsfield, and built for himself another, a quarter 
 of a mile away, at Hallbarn. Here his wife died 
 at the birth of their first child, and left him a 
 widower at twenty-four. Morley was now his 
 constant and chief companion, and with him he 
 drowned grief and ambition for a year or two in a 
 profound study of the writers of antiquity. He 
 was first drawn out of his retirement by his public 
 passion, if I may be allowed to use such a term, 
 for the lady he addressed as Sacharissa, and whom
 
 64 Waller and Sacharissa. 
 
 he believed that he had made as famous as Petrarch 
 made his Laura 1 . 
 
 Sacharissa was an after-thought for Dorothea, 
 the name under which Waller originally celebrated 
 the charms of Lady Dorothy Sidney, the eldest 
 daughter of the Earl of Leicester. She was the 
 grand-niece of that romantic Sir Philip Sidney 
 who wrote the Arcadia and who died at Zutphen 
 nearly thirty years before her birth, though when 
 the latter event took place, Waller's commentator 
 Fenton was unable to discover from the register at 
 Penshurst. We may be sure that it was not much 
 earlier than 161 5, and that when Waller began to 
 address her about 1632, she was still quite young 2 . 
 
 The course of this true love, though so stately 
 and imposing, was not much troubled, it would 
 appear, by mundane temper. There is no trace of 
 emotion, of doubt, of terror on the lover's part. 
 
 1 Exactly a hundred years later, we find Sacharissa still named 
 among the immortal ladies of poetic history. Elijah Fenton, in 
 1 730, confidently sings : — 
 
 "Secure beneath the wing of withering time, 
 Her beauties flourish in ambrosial prime; 
 Still kindling rapture, see ! she moves in state ; 
 Gods, nymphs and heroes on her triumph wait." 
 
 2 The card now (July 1885) attached to the beautiful portrait of 
 her, by Vandyke, at Penshurst, says that she was born in 161 7; but 
 this seems to be conjectural. In this picture she appears as a 
 lovely and buxom young shepherdess of about twenty.
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 65 
 
 The lady is cruel, the bard is despairing, and after 
 the pompous suit has been carried on without 
 incident of any kind for seven years, we find the 
 lady suddenly falling in love with a real flesh-and- 
 blood young gentleman, of only nineteen summers, 
 whom she promptly marries. It must be confessed 
 that, as we shall presently see, nothing in the 
 process of this suit became Waller so well as the 
 manner in which he made his bow on abandoning 
 it. In the meantime we must give ourselves to the 
 examination of this, the most famous cycle of love- 
 poems which the seventeenth century possesses. 
 
 The moralists who ever and again remind us 
 that the really great is the materially small, and 
 that Athens and Weimar ruled the world of letters, 
 may point if they will to the Sacharissa Poems as 
 an example of the truth of their position. It is 
 quite extraordinary to find when we sift these 
 famous pieces from the body of Waller's writings, 
 how slender a bundle they form. The immortality 
 of the fair, the cruel, the disdainful Sacharissa 
 hangs upon no more than ten direct poetical 
 addresses, and about half as many indirect tes- 
 timonies to her beauty and her scorn. The long 
 heroic poem, called The Battle of the Summer 
 Islands, it is true, is dragged behind the car of the 
 cruelty of Sacharissa by means of a few allusions 
 G. 5
 
 66 Waller and Sacharissa. 
 
 that look sadly as though they were manufactured 
 to satisfy a public demand, but of genuine lyrics 
 dedicated to Lady Dorothy Sidney we do not 
 possess enough to form the thinnest of pamphlets. 
 It is, of course, possible that as none of these 
 poems were printed until long after the suit was 
 over, and as Waller affected indifference for merely 
 literary glory, many were written which the young 
 lady and her friends neglected to preserve. It 
 seems to me probable, however, that Waller did 
 not address her very often, or upon any occasions 
 except those on which he was sure to make a 
 direct social sensation. 
 
 There is nothing tender, nothing personal in 
 any of these famous verses. They form a straight- 
 forward and manly statement of devotion, after 
 its kind, but they are as far from passion as from 
 indiscretion. The lover addresses his mistress as 
 if in the hearing of a large and courtly throng of 
 persons, who seem lightly to applaud a suit so 
 elegant and so genteel. He is as deliberate, as 
 allusive, as calm and as gentlemanlike as Magdelon 
 in the Precieuses Ridicules wishes her suitor to be, 
 and we have an indescribable sensation that the 
 verses are composed and recited by a person whose 
 wig and gloves and shoe-strings are invariably in 
 the most admirable order. We feel in reading
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 6 J 
 
 these Sacharissa poems that we are slipping into 
 the classical atmosphere, with its horror of the 
 personal note. Not thus have the English poets 
 hitherto made love, Drayton with his 
 
 "Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part," 
 or Donne with his 
 
 "O more than Moon, 
 Draw not thy seas to drown me in thy sphere." 
 There is no whisper here, no trouble of the 
 pulses, no mystery. We are positively astonished 
 to hear this grave and wealthy young man at 
 Beaconsfield discoursing so placidly and decorously 
 of his sorrows : — 
 
 In vain, he says : — 
 
 "In vain I struggled with the yoke 
 Of mighty Love ; that conqu'ring look, 
 When next beheld, like lightning strook 
 My blasted soul; and made me bow 
 Lower than those I pity'd now. 
 
 So the tall stag, upon the brink 
 Of some smooth stream about to drink, 
 Surveying there his armed head, 
 With shame remembers that he fled 
 The scorned dogs ; resolves to try 
 The combat next : but if their cry 
 Invades again his trembling ear, 
 He straight resumes his wonted care ; 
 
 5—2
 
 68 i Waller and Sacharissa. 
 
 Leaves the untasted spring behind, 
 
 And, winged with fear, outflies the wind." 
 
 We feel that nothing could be more gracefully 
 turned ; we seem to hear a murmur run through 
 the audience of "Charming! Charming!" but the 
 last thing that crosses our mind is to sympathize 
 with the stricken deer. 
 
 To see in how conscious and how public a spirit 
 the whole suit was conducted, we have only to 
 examine the very curious piece entitled The Story 
 of Phoebus and Daphne applied. Here Waller calls 
 himself Thirsis : 
 
 "Thirsis, a youth of the inspired Train, 
 Fair Sacharissa loved, but loved in vain; 
 Like Phoebus sung the no less amorous boy, 
 Like Daphne she as lovely and as coy." 
 
 The confident conceit of these verses is very 
 remarkable. He positively ventures to say that 
 he, Mr Edmund Waller, is pursuing the flying 
 Nymph "with numbers such as Phcebus' self might 
 use" and with an eye turned directly to the audi- 
 torium, does not even hesitate to declare that 
 
 "What he sung in his immortal strain, 
 Though unsuccessful, was not sung in vain." 
 
 Many of the poets of the seventeenth century, 
 from Shakespeare downwards, prophesied for the
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 69 
 
 objects of their passion an immortality in their 
 verse, but this of Waller's is a singular instance of 
 a poet promising himself immortality, in spite of 
 the object of his verse. This resolute self-ag- 
 grandizement, too nobly born to seem vulgar or 
 fatuous, must be taken into consideration as a 
 factor in Waller's poetical success 1 . From the 
 summit of a position to which his wealth, his social 
 graces, his wit and his adroitness had raised him, 
 he gravely announced himself to the world as 
 Phcebi Sacerdos, not a priest only, but the high- 
 priest of Apollo. 
 
 We can form but a very vague idea of Lady 
 Dorothy Sidney from the Sacharissa poems ; she 
 is everywhere overshadowed by Waller himself. 
 We are told that she can sleep when she pleases, 
 and this inspires a copy of verses ; but later on 
 we are told that she can do anything but sleep 
 when she pleases, and this leads to another copy of 
 verses which leave us exactly where we were when 
 we started. We are told of a misreport of her 
 being painted, of the likelihood of her being 
 painted, in another sense, by Vandyke, of a crowd 
 in which she nearly became crushed, of how her 
 
 1 Malherbe, his French prototype, had possessed the same 
 sacerdotal dignity. In his sonnet to the King he had remarked : — 
 Les ouvrages communs vivent quelques annees, 
 Ce que Malherbe ecrit dure eternellement.
 
 yo Waller and SacJiarissa. 
 
 lover keeps away from her lest he should love her 
 more. There is nothing positive, nothing concrete ; 
 we move about among rumours that are unfounded 
 and events that never happen. Yet it is noticeable 
 that each arqu ebusade of wit, each cunning attack 
 upon this battlemented beauty, is made at a 
 moment when the eyes of society are upon her and 
 him. A great poet of the generation before 
 Waller's had said — in lines which have no appear- 
 ance of having been intended for publication, and 
 which in fact were never published during his life- 
 time — 
 
 " 'Twere profanation of our joys 
 To tell the laity our love." 
 
 The Sacharissa cycle is at the extreme opposite 
 of this tender and intimate manner of poetry. If 
 the laity is not listening, and if the laity is not 
 largely composed of persons of quality, Waller is 
 silent as a lover. 
 
 And yet the Sacharissa poems contain some 
 exquisite numbers, and it is to be noted that, under 
 the influence of George Morley, Waller lost for a 
 time that persistence in the heroic distich which 
 had distinguished his early youth, and was to be 
 the unbroken habit of his middle and later life. 
 The So7ig to a Rose is well known, but deserves 
 repetition : —
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 71 
 
 " Song. 
 
 Go, lovely rose ! 
 Tell her that wastes her time, and me, 
 
 That now she knows, 
 When I resemble her to thee, 
 How sweet, and fair, she seems to be. 
 
 Tell her that's young, 
 And shuns to have her graces spy'd 1 , 
 
 That had'st thou sprung 
 In deserts, where no men abide, 
 Thou must have uncommended dy'd. 
 
 Small is the worth 
 Of beauty from the light retir'd : 
 
 Bid her come forth, 
 Suffer herself to be desir'd, 
 And not blush so to be admir'd. 
 
 Then die ! that she 
 The common fate of all things rare 
 
 May read in thee : 
 How small a part of time they share, 
 That are so wondrous sweet, and fair!" 
 
 1 The syllables "graces spy'd" drag painfully on the tongue, 
 and I remember to have heard the greatest living authority on 
 melodious numbers suggest that Waller must have written "graces 
 eyed." The first edition of 1645, however, has, by an obvious 
 misprint, "grace spy'd," and I believe that what Waller wrote was 
 "grace espy'd."
 
 7- Waller and Sacharissa. 
 
 Less known, but almost as perfect, is "On a 
 Girdle." 
 
 " On a Girdle. 
 That which her slender waist confin'd, 
 Shall now my joyful temples bind ; 
 No monarch but would give his crown 
 His arms might do what this has done 
 
 It was 1 my heaven's extremest sphere, 
 The pale which held that lovely deer : 
 My joy, my grief, my hope, my love, 
 Did all within this circle move ! 
 
 A narrow compass ! and yet there 
 Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair : 
 Give me but what this riband bound, 
 Take all the rest the sun goes round 2 ." 
 
 The power of writing songs like these survived 
 the introduction of classical taste in England, as it 
 had done in France. Gradually it declined, until 
 for a short time during the preeminence of Pope, 
 it may almost be said to have disappeared ; but 
 throughout the remainder of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury the gift of song-writing was present among 
 
 1 "Is," in the edition of 1645, where the present tense is kept up 
 through the poem. 
 * In 1645:— 
 
 "Give me but what this riband tied, 
 Take all the sun eoes round beside."
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. J2> 
 
 the English poets. It is in the non-lyrical depart- 
 ments of poetic art, especially in didactic, descrip- 
 tive, and dramatic verse, that we have to look for 
 the change that now was imminent. 
 
 The next example of Waller's work which 
 comes before us, the heroic poem called The Battle 
 of the Summer Islands, throws more light upon the 
 development of this change than the love-songs to 
 Sacharissa. It is therefore more interesting to us, 
 although a comparatively insignificant work in 
 itself. It is the most considerable poem, in length, 
 which Waller ever published, and deals, in three 
 cantos, with a sort of pseudo-Homeric subject, a 
 battle between the islanders of Bermuda and two 
 spermaceti whales that had got stranded in a 
 shallow bay. It used to be taken for granted that 
 Waller visited Bermuda about this time, or in 1640; 
 it is almost certain that he was one of the Adven- 
 turers, or landlords, into whose plantations the 
 archipelago was divided. But Major-General Le- 
 froy, who has lately chronicled the early history of 
 the islands in two copious volumes, has found no 
 trace of the poet's visit, and disbelieves in it. He 
 points out that Waller makes blunders in his 
 description, such as no real observer could make ; 
 he takes the low cedars which covered the islands 
 to be cedars of Lebanon, and talks of " the lofty
 
 74 Waller and Sacharissa. 
 
 cedar which to Heaven aspires:" while he promises 
 to lull the savages with Sacharissa's name although 
 there was not a single savage there to lull. It 
 seems, however, to have escaped Major-General 
 Lefroy that the report that Waller visited Bermuda 
 cannot have been set afloat by the fact that he 
 wrote the Battle of the Summer Islands, from the 
 simple circumstance that he represents himself in 
 that poem not as having yet seen Bermuda, but as 
 longing and hoping to do so 1 . 
 
 My own belief is, that the astute Waller, having 
 property on the islands, and having, as I should 
 conjecture, embarked money in the company which 
 was started in 1637, under the auspices of Governor 
 Chaddock, wrote his heroic poem, and circulated it 
 among wealthy and noble friends, as an advertise- 
 ment. Until that time, passion, ambition, the 
 urging sense of harmony or beauty, had inspired 
 English heroic poems ; but this was in future to be 
 
 1 His words are : — 
 
 "O how I long my careless limbs to lay 
 Under the Plantan's shade, and all the day 
 With amorous airs my fancy entertain, 
 Invoke the Muses, and improve my vein!" 
 My conviction is that he no more reached Bermuda than George 
 Herbert or Bishop Berkeley did. These islands have attracted 
 much notice from English men of letters, but have proved difficult 
 of access. Tom Moore reached them, but quitted them soon and 
 eagerly.
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 75 
 
 by no means de rigueur. Half a century later, when 
 the classical transformation was almost complete, 
 Hobbes in his essay Concerning the Vertties of an 
 Heroique Poem laid down as the first rule for its 
 composition that it should possess "perspicuity 
 and facility of construction." The heroic poems of 
 the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages, — The Barons' 
 Wars of Drayton, the Albion s England of Warner, 
 the Ovid's Banquet of Sense of Chapman, for in- 
 stance, — had possessed various brilliant and touch- 
 ing qualities, irregular force and sudden brilliance 
 of style, but certainly not what Hobbes means by 
 " perspicuity and facility of construction." The 
 Arcadia of Sidney is not facile, the Christ 's Victory 
 and Triumph of Giles Fletcher is not, in this sense, 
 perspicuous, but Waller's Battle of the Summer 
 Islands is, just as The Hind and the Panther of 
 Dryden is perspicuous, and The Dunciad admirable 
 for its facility of construction. 
 
 Waller's little epic is a perfectly straightforward 
 narration in three parts, the first containing a 
 highly-pitched description, the exaggerated ful- 
 someness of which irritates the historian of the 
 Bermudas, of the commercial and natural ad- 
 vantages of that colony ; the second containing an 
 account of the stranding of the whales ; and the 
 third of the battle itself. Nothing could be pitched
 
 7 6 Waller and Sacharissa. 
 
 more definitely in the key of common-sense. We 
 arc told with scrupulous fidelity, — the puff of the 
 oranges and grapes and melons being finished, — 
 what exactly happened on this curious occasion : — 
 
 "The Boat which on the first assault did go, 
 Struck with a harping Iron the younger foe ; 
 Who, when he felt his side so rudely gored, 
 Loud as the Sea that nourished him, he roared ; 
 As a broad bream, to please some curious taste, 
 While yet alive in boiling water cast, 
 Vext with unwonted heats, boils, flings about 
 The scorching brass, and hurls the liquor out ; 
 So, with the barbed javelin stung, he raves, 
 And scourges with his tail the suffering waves." 
 
 It is very difficult in reading these lines to realise 
 that when they were written Dryden was an infant, 
 and that the men were still in the prime of life who 
 had known Shakespeare and had served him in the 
 production of his romantic plays. 
 
 In 1639, tne y ear after the composition of The 
 Battle of the Summer Islands, Lady Dorothy Sidney 
 suddenly grew tired of hearing Waller 
 
 "twang his tiresome instrument 
 Above her unconcern," 
 
 and she married Henry, Lord Spencer, who was 
 presently created Earl of Sunderland. However
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 77 
 
 young Sacharissa may have been when Waller first 
 addressed her, she must have been by this time a 
 good deal older than her bridegroom, who was only 
 nineteen. After four short years of married life, 
 her young husband was killed fighting for his King 
 at the battle of Newbury, and Sacharissa settled 
 down for forty years as a widow, devoting herself 
 to the education of three children, and never losing 
 sight of her old persistent poet-lover. There is a 
 story extant to the effect that \vhen they were both 
 very old the Dowager Duchess of Sunderland 
 rallied her friend by saying, " Ah ! Mr Waller, 
 when will you make such beautiful verses about me 
 again ? " " Madam," said the poet, with more of 
 gallantry, we must hope, in his eyes than in his 
 words, " when your ladyship is as young again ! " 
 But before we turn from the Sacharissa episode 
 which has taken so prominent a part in the legend 
 of Waller's life, we must quote the letter which he 
 wrote to Lady Lucy Sidney, the younger sister, in 
 July, 1639, when Sacharissa had just been married. 
 
 " Madam, 
 
 " In this common joy at Penshurst I know none 
 to whom complaints may come less unseasonable 
 than to your Ladyship ; the loss of a bed-fellow 
 being almost equal to that of a mistress : and there-
 
 78 Waller and Sacharissa. 
 
 fore you ought, at least, to pardon, if you consent 
 not to, the imprecations of the deserted ; which 
 just heaven no doubt will hear ! 
 
 " May my Lady Dorothy, (if we may yet call 
 her so,) suffer so much, and have the like passion 
 for this young Lord, whom she has preferr'd to the 
 rest of mankind, as others have had for her ! And 
 may this love, before the year go about, make her 
 taste of the first curse impos'd on womankind, the 
 pains of becoming a mother ! May her first-born 
 be none of her own sex ! nor so like her, but that 
 he may resemble her Lord as much as herself! 
 
 " May she that always affected silence, and 
 retiredness, have the house fill'd with the noise, 
 and number, of her children ; and hereafter of her 
 grandchildren ! and then, may she arrive at that 
 great curse so much declin'd by fair Ladies, old 
 age ! May she live to be very old, and yet seem 
 young ; be told so by her glass, and have no aches 
 to inform her of the truth ! And when she shall 
 appear to be mortal, may her Lord not mourn for 
 her, but go hand in hand with her to that place, 
 where we are told there is neither marrying, nor 
 giving in marriage ; that being there divorced, we 
 may all have an equal interest in her again ! My re- 
 venge being immortal, I wish all this may also befall 
 their posterity to the world's end, and afterwards !
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 79 
 
 " To you, Madam, I wish all good things ; and 
 that this loss may in gootl time be happily 
 supply'd with a more constant bed-fellow of the 
 other sex. 
 
 " Madam, I humbly kiss your hands, and beg 
 pardon for this trouble, from 
 
 " Your Ladyship's most humble servant, 
 
 Edm. Waller." 
 
 Among the poems which belong to the Sacha- 
 rissa period, but show much more than the lyrics 
 the classical tendency of Waller's taste, that Upon 
 His Majesty's repairing of Paul's demands especial 
 notice, because of its popularity, and the influence 
 which it exercised upon younger minds. That 
 Waller's poems circulated in MS. so widely as to 
 enjoy positive popularity is proved by an allusion 
 to this piece, which forms the earliest mention of 
 Waller which I have been able to discover, and 
 which preceded by three years the publication of 
 the lines referred to. In the first anonymous 
 edition of his Cooper s Hill, an edition in which 
 the poet displayed the courage of his anonymity, 
 Sir John Denham delivers himself of the following 
 notable piece of criticism. He is standing on 
 Cooper's Hill, and surveying the horizon, till 
 he reaches the point where the cathedral cuts 
 it:—
 
 80 Waller and Sacharissa. 
 
 " Paul's, the late theme of such a Muse whose flight 
 Has bravely reached and soared above thy height ; 
 Now shalt thou stand, though sword, or time, or fire 
 Or zeal more fierce than they, thy fall conspire, 
 Secure while thee the best of Poets sings, 
 Preserved from ruin by the best of Kings." 
 
 And for fear that his readers should not know 
 who " the best of Poets " was, Denham adds a 
 note, " Master Waller," a note in subsequent 
 editions reduced to M. W. But here, in 1642, 
 before Waller had printed a line, we find him 
 boldly addressed as "the best of Poets" by the 
 pupil who was treading most closely in his foot- 
 steps, and who, though ten years his junior, had 
 outstripped him in the date of publication. 
 
 We must reserve consideration of Denham, 
 however, until our next chapter, and glance for a 
 few moments at the poem which called forth such 
 eulogy from him. We find it to be of the class 
 which we are beginning to expect from Waller — 
 that is, an adroit and graphic account in graceful 
 distichs of an event which was happening at that 
 moment to entertain the public. The commis- 
 sioners had met to discuss the question of re- 
 building St Paul's in 1632, and in the following 
 spring the mean buildings which were clustered 
 around the cathedral, and which clung to its sides
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 81 
 
 like parasites, were bought and destroyed. The 
 poet plays about the subject with elegance unusual 
 even in him, who seldom wrote otherwise than as 
 a courtier and a gentleman. He refers to the 
 wonders of old, the cities built to music, the magic 
 instrumentation of Orpheus and Amphion. 
 
 "Those antique minstrels sure were Charles-like kings, 
 Cities their lutes, and subjects' hearts their strings, 
 On which with so divine a hand they strook 
 Consent of motion from their breath they took." 
 
 The augury is perhaps a little unhappy, to us 
 who can see this Orpheus-like Charles presently 
 torn to pieces by the outraged liberties of England, 
 and that comely head floating down the Hebrus of 
 the Revolution, but the allusion — for a classical 
 allusion — was pretty, and the verse wonderfully 
 polished. With singular skill Waller interweaves 
 this strain of panegyric, this warm cloud of incense 
 waved under the nostrils of Charles, with accurate 
 and prosaic information about the edifice' described. 
 He tells us that the Choir is nearly finished, — 
 which conveniently helps us to the date, 1635 ; 
 that the western end, with its stately Corinthian 
 portico, was raised at the King's personal expense, 
 and what share private bounty had in paying for 
 the rest of the architecture. 
 
 We have but to consider how difficult it would 
 G. 6
 
 82 Waller and Sacharissa. 
 
 have been for one of the romantic poets, his pre- 
 decessors, to have proceeded with a theme like 
 this, to feel the importance of the change in favour 
 of grace, common-sense, and precision 1 . The 
 Muse of the romantic period was like the fleet and 
 lovely Atalanta, who is conquered by the apples 
 flung on either side of her path ; she catches sight 
 of these tempting accidents of style, these shining 
 images, allusions, and conceits, and she falters in 
 her flight, pauses, and is left behind by her heavier 
 and duller companion. The charm that Waller 
 had for his contemporaries seems to me to have 
 been the charm that a sensible, calm person of 
 elegant tastes and manners may possess for one 
 who has been for some time thrown exclusively 
 into the society of over-excited, hysterical people, 
 who have wearied him with their demands upon 
 his enthusiasm and his sensibility. The seventeenth 
 century was labouring under a plethora of ebullient 
 genius ; it craved a little rest, a period of common- 
 sense and literary decorum. 
 
 The remainder of Waller's career before his 
 exile at the Revolution belongs to politics and not 
 
 1 It was very seldom that they would allow themselves to be 
 entrapped into the treatment of public recent events, but observe 
 the agonies and contortions of Carew in attempting to obey 
 Aurelian Townsend, who had bidden him describe the death 
 of the King of Sweden.
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 8 
 
 o 
 
 to literature, but we may close our present exam- 
 ination of his services by a brief survey of these 
 years, in order that we may escape the need to 
 return to them in our next chapter. For a little 
 while Waller took a position in public affairs more 
 prominent than that which any other English poet 
 has attained, a position which might easily have 
 placed him where Lamartine was placed long 
 afterwards in France. When the breach widened 
 between the Houses and the King, Waller found 
 himself suspended between the two parties in a 
 perilous isolation. There was a great deal to 
 attract him in each party. Clarendon tells us that 
 he was always welcome at court, because of his 
 parts and courtesy, and because he had the tact 
 never to ask for any honours or preferments. On 
 the other hand, he was the nephew of Hampden, 
 the cousin of Cromwell, a country gentleman who 
 suffered as his neighbours did from the intolerable 
 tax of ship-moneys. His subsequent fiasco made 
 him contemned by each party, but a careful study 
 of what Lord Clarendon, no quite unimpeachable 
 witness, has written, and above all of Waller's own 
 speeches in the House of Commons, leads me to 
 believe that he was not a hypocrite or a traitor, in 
 the worst sense, but a vacillating and trimming 
 creature, dowered, like all poets, with a mixture of 
 
 6—2
 
 S4 Waller and SacJiarissa. 
 
 farsightedness and nearsightedness which was fatal 
 to him as a politician. He saw that the statesmen 
 of Charles had, in his own words, " dipped their 
 dart in such a poison that, so far as in them lay, 
 the commonwealth might never receive a cure 1 ;" 
 he could not believe in the power of the nation to' 
 find an antidote, and, while believing the Houses 
 to be in the right, he yet plotted to betray them to 
 the King, because he thought their opposition was 
 hopeless, and would merely launch England upon 
 massacre. 
 
 In 1641. he wavered so far on the popular side, 
 that he was chosen by the Commons to impeach 
 Judge Crawley, on whom the sin of ship-money 
 had been fastened. His speech was scathing in 
 its eloquent denunciation of the venal lawyer, but 
 it is almost the only proof we have of his adherence 
 to Pym and Hampden. It was during the famous 
 debate of February 8th, 1642, on the ecclesiastical 
 petitions, that Waller seems to have made up his 
 mind to quit the party which was presently to 
 become that of Root and Branch. In company 
 with Falkland and Digby, he took his place in the 
 Episcopalian group which that debate created. 
 Two months later his pungent questionings brought 
 down on him a rough reply from Maynard, who 
 1 "Speech in the Painted Chamber," delivered July 6, 1641.
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 85 
 
 roundly told him he had no business to sit in that 
 house. In November he was still more publicly 
 reprimanded for his outspoken criticism, and forced 
 to apologise. 
 
 All that year Waller was noiselessly drifting 
 closer and closer to the King. In 1642, he sent 
 Charles ,£1,000 to Nottingham, to support his 
 army, and throughout that year, according to 
 Clarendon, "he spoke every day with impunity 
 against the sense and proceedings of the House " 
 of Commons. Yet the Roundheads seem to have 
 trusted him no less than the Royalists, and after 
 the battle of Edgehill, he was sent down with other 
 free commissioners, to propose terms of peace to 
 the King at Oxford. They found Charles walking 
 in the garden of Christchurch, and all his com- 
 panions being peers, Waller was the last to kiss 
 the King's hand. Charles I. said, in a very marked 
 manner, " Though you are the last, Mr Waller, you 
 are not the worst, nor the least in our favour." 
 There can be no doubt that these too-gracious 
 words were but the prelude to one of those fatal 
 confidences by which Charles lightly threw away 
 the lives of his best servants, as a chess-player 
 abandons his pawns. It is not to be doubted that 
 before Waller left Oxford he was pledged to 
 treason against the Houses of Parliament.
 
 86 Waller and Sacliarissa. 
 
 Lord Clarendon's account of the plot is con- 
 fused and scanty 1 , but we are enabled to follow the 
 course of events with tolerable accuracy. Waller 
 seems to have promised to use his influence to 
 collect the Neuters into a body strong enough to 
 paralyze the extreme party, and deliver the city 
 into the King's hands. He made a proselyte of 
 a gentleman named Tompkins, who had married 
 his sister, and Alexander Hampden, a royalist, 
 although of the popular family, actively espoused 
 the same cause. The Earl of Portland was doubt- 
 less with them 2 , and Lord Conway too ; whether 
 the great Earl of Northumberland actually pledged 
 himself is matter of doubt. Tompkins, under 
 Waller's direction, made a kind of census of the 
 city trained bands, and counted up malcontents 
 that could be trusted in every parish and ward. 
 Finally, as far as we can gather through the mist 
 of conflicting evidence, Lady Daubigny had been 
 sent forth from Oxford, two months earlier, with a 
 
 1 There can be little doubt that his relations with Portland 
 induced Clarendon to be purposely vague in dealing with this 
 portion of his subject. 
 
 2 Prof. S. R. Gardiner has discovered an unprinted letter from 
 Waller to Portland which seems to prove, beyond all doubt, that 
 the latter lied when he asseverated his ignorance of the plot. He 
 was one of those with whom Waller had been seen only too rashly 
 whispering.
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 87 
 
 special pass, and carrying innocently in her bosom 
 a commission from the King to various persons in 
 London giving them command over the civic forces 
 of London. 
 
 There were various accounts of the way in which 
 the plot was discovered. One was that Waller's 
 sister, — not Mrs Tompkins, but a Mrs Price, — 
 was led to relieve her conscience by revealing the 
 whole story to. her chaplain, a strong presbyterian. 
 Another was, that a man-servant of Tompkins', 
 like a Puritan Polonius, hid behind the arras until 
 he had heard enough to compromise the leaders. 
 But the genuine one now appears from the 
 D'Ewes MSS. to be that Lord Dover from Oxford 
 wrote a rash letter to his wife, warning her to leave 
 London, and that, a day or two later, a certain 
 Hassel boasted that London would very shortly be 
 in flames. At any rate, the mode of the disclosure 
 of the plot was startling and almost theatrical. 
 The parliamentarians were collected at morning- 
 prayers on a solemn fast-day, May the 31st, 
 in the church of St Margaret's, Westminster. A 
 message was brought in from the Speaker, sum- 
 moning all members to a special session of the 
 House ; there was much whispering and agitation, 
 and most of those addressed left the church. 
 D'Ewes, indeed, thought lightly of it, and would
 
 88 Waller and Sacharissa. 
 
 not go. But rumours of the most exaggerated 
 description spread at once through London; Waller 
 and Tompkins were arrested before nightfall, and 
 a sketch of their plot was published by the House 
 of Commons to allay popular alarm 1 . 
 
 Waller's conduct under this sudden calamity 
 was deplorable. He lost all presence of mind, all 
 decency, all manliness. He confessed everything, 
 and finding that all the others denied complicity, 
 he overwhelmed the whole circle of his acquaint- 
 ance in universal denunciation. He seems to have 
 hoped to escape punishment by including half of 
 England in his fault. He who had been so gallant, 
 such a champion of beauty, in his mortal terror 
 was poltroon enough to accuse a number of great 
 ladies and to charge them with inciting him to this 
 rebellion. His fright, to be sure, was only too well 
 grounded. The Parliament was in no temper to 
 be trifled with. A short way was made with poor 
 Tompkins. He had a handsome house in Holborn; 
 a gallows was promptly raised in the street in front 
 of it, and there Tompkins was hanged. A like 
 fate befell others far less deeply implicated than 
 W'aller, and the luxurious poet felt a terrible 
 
 1 This pamphlet, which it would be interesting to possess, 
 appears to have totally disappeared. Even Prof. Gardiner has 
 never come across it.
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 89 
 
 sensation, no doubt, in the region of his neck. 
 He was within a hair's breadth of being hanged, 
 as it was ; but his amazing cleverness and duplicity 
 dragged him through. He professed to be so 
 overwhelmed with remorse, that his judges allowed 
 his case to be postponed till his frantic paroxysms 
 of grief should have subsided. 
 
 When at last he did appear, July 4th, he 
 claimed his right to be heard in the House of 
 Commons 1 . He appeared in Westminster in a 
 
 1 I am able to print, for the first time, an account of this 
 extraordinary scene from an eye-witness. In the MS. Diary of 
 Sir Symeon D'Ewes, under the date "July 4, Tuesday 1643," 
 I find this account of Waller's appearance at the bar of the 
 House : — 
 
 "He was all clothed in mourning as if he had been going 
 to execution itself, his demeanour was also composed to a despairing 
 dejectedness, and when he came to the Bar he kneeled down, and 
 so continued kneeling, until myself and some others who stood 
 near to the Bar bade him stand up. For his great fear that he 
 should be executed for this conspiracy (which he much more 
 deserved than Mr TQmpkins his brother-in-law, who had already 
 suffered, although he had been merely drawn into the same by the 
 said Mr Waller whose sister he had married) did almost compel 
 him to say or do anything, and certainly he would have deserved 
 and would have found much more pity than he did, had he not a 
 little before his coming to the House basely accused Algernon Earl 
 of Northumberland to have been privy to this conspiracy, whom 
 upon his first examination he had cleared, and yet divers of the 
 House seeing his sad and dejected condition at the Bar whom they 
 had formerly heard speak in public with so much applause, could 
 not forbear shedding of tears. One thing was most remarkable,
 
 go Waller and Sacharissa. 
 
 costume of the deepest mourning, in an attitude of 
 utter despair ; he seemed about to sink into the 
 earth, and in accents of the profoundest humility he 
 delivered a speech to the eloquence of which, as 
 Clarendon has aptly said, he owed the keeping of 
 his head as much as Catiline owed the loss of his 
 to that of Cicero. He urged on the parliament 
 the unwisdom of allowing the soldiers to try any 
 member of that great House, "however unworthy 
 and monstrous," and endeavoured to persuade 
 them to take him under their own jurisdiction and 
 to spare him. The accounts of this speech are not 
 
 that he did look exceeding well, the reason of which was easily 
 guessed at by those who had heard of his secret actions, for, havmg 
 been a widower many years, he was so extremely addicted and 
 given to the use of strange women as it did for the most part alter 
 his very countenance, and make him look as if his face had been 
 parboiled, being naturally of a very pleasing and well-tempered 
 complexion." D'Ewes goes on to say that six or seven years 
 before Waller had been attacked by a fever, of which he was like 
 to die, and that his aunt, Lady Scudamore, took the opportunity to 
 speak to him very gravely about his profligate habits, whereupon 
 Waller, with tears and great show of penitence, said that if his life 
 were spared, he would turn over a new leaf. However, on getting 
 well, he returned at once to his old ways, and on Lady Scudamore's 
 expostulating with him, he told her, with great jocularity, that she 
 ought to have known better than to trust to sick men's vows. 
 Whereupon she warned him that calamity would fall upon him, 
 and when the plot was discovered, she did not fail to visit him in 
 prison and to point the moral. Waller's character does not im- 
 prove as we turn upon it more and more the bull's eye of history. 
 The reference to D'Ewes' words is Harl. MSS. 165, foi. 144.
 
 Waller and Sacharissa. 91 
 
 creditable to human nature ; the miserable Waller, 
 crawling and fawning for his life, is a loathsome 
 subject of contemplation, and we cannot wonder 
 at the indignation of May, the tragic poet, who 
 was secretary to the House of Commons at that 
 time, and who has no contempt bitter enough for 
 the way in which Waller, in his decent black, 
 whined before his colleagues, "bewailing his offence, 
 and thanking God that so mischievous and bloody 
 a conspiracy was discovered before it could take 
 effect." 
 
 The House, however, proved implacable. Waller 
 was expelled from Parliament and handed over to 
 the army to be court-martialed. He was con- 
 demned to death, but after long pleading and 
 parleying, Essex consented to pardon him, with a 
 fine of £10,000. He was ordered to leave the 
 country instantly ; he did not wait to be twice 
 asked to go, but fled to France, and settled with 
 his family at Rouen, early in 1644. With this we 
 may take leave of him for the present ; his exile 
 was the close of the first act in the development of 
 classical poetry in England.
 
 THE EXILES.
 
 THE EXILES. 
 
 THE earliest critics of our classical poetry never 
 wavered in their allegiance to Waller and to 
 Denham as the Castor and Pollux, the divine 
 twin brethren, who first refined the art of verse 
 and taught us Englishmen the graces. In dedi- 
 cating his tragedy of The Rival Ladies to Lord 
 Orrery, himself a rhyming tragedian, Dryden says: 
 " The excellence and dignity of rime were never 
 fully known till Mr Waller taught it ; but this 
 sweetness of his lyric poesy was afterwards fol- 
 lowed in the epic by Sir John Denham, in his 
 Cooper 's Hill, a poem which, your lordship knows, 
 for the majesty of the style, is, and ever will be, 
 the exact standard of good writing." With the 
 sweetness of Waller we are already acquainted. 
 We must now introduce ourselves to this majesty 
 of Denham, who demands our consideration all the 
 more because it happened that a book of his was 
 the first poetry published by the English classicists 1 . 
 Waller's Poems were widely circulated from hand 
 
 1 Appendix I.
 
 96 The Exiles. 
 
 to hand, but they remained in MS. until 1645. 
 Denham's Sopliy was published in 1642, and his 
 Cooper s Hill later in the same year. 
 
 John Denham was ten years younger than 
 Edmund Waller, towards whom in spite of all 
 his literary successes he remained till the end of 
 his life in the position of a pupil. His father, also 
 John Denham, and a knight, was an English 
 lawyer, who became Chief Baron of the Exchequer 
 in Ireland, and who married the daughter of an 
 Irish peer, Lord Mellisfont. The poet was born 
 at Dublin in 161 5 into a flourishing and luxurious 
 condition, and he remained through his whole life 
 a man of high social position and recognized 
 quality. When the poet was two years old, his 
 father was recalled to England, as one of the 
 Barons of the home Exchequer, and Denham's 
 early education was acquired in London. At the 
 age of sixteen he was entered a gentleman-com- 
 moner in Trinity College, Oxford, and remained 
 there until 1634. Anthony a Wood has preserved 
 this quaint picture of Denham as an undergraduate: 
 " He was looked upon as a slow, dreaming young 
 man, and more addicted to gaming than study ; 
 they could never imagine that he could ever enrich 
 the world with the issue of his brain, as he after- 
 wards did."
 
 The Exiles. 97 
 
 There are no youthful verses of Denham's 
 existing, nor any record that he wrote at Oxford. 
 His first cousin, George Morley, the son of his 
 father's sister, was living all this time in retirement 
 with Waller at Beaconsfield, and we cannot doubt 
 that it was through this relative that he became 
 interested in the new school of poetry. The lyrics 
 to Sacharissa were being handed about, and possibly 
 Denham saw these ; but it is Waller's exercises in 
 the heroic couplet which have left a trace on his 
 own work, and to which he actually refers with 
 praise. In 1634 the young Denham was entered 
 at Lincoln's Inn, it being proposed that he should 
 follow his father's profession, the law. It would 
 seem that he worked pretty closely under the 
 paternal eye, and even apparently lived during 
 these years, when he was not in London, in his 
 father's house at Egham on the Thames, close to 
 the gentle acclivity of that Cooper's Hill which he 
 was to make so famous. Young Denham was 
 bitten with the rage for gambling which infected 
 so many clever youths in the seventeenth century, 
 and references to which swell the jeremiads of the 
 satirists. He was constantly stripped of all his 
 allowance, and on his father's chiding him, and 
 threatening to cut him off with a shilling unless he 
 amended, he wrote a little Essay against Gaming, 
 G. 7
 
 9 8 The Exiles. 
 
 in which he eloquently declared that the very 
 notion of gambling filled him with detestation. 
 This was the more ingenious of him, because he 
 was all the time as mad after cards as ever; his 
 father, however, seems to have been pacified. 
 
 In 1636, at the age of twenty-one, Denham 
 wrote the earliest copy of his verses which has 
 been preserved. It is called The Destruction of 
 Troy, and it is a paraphrase of the second book 
 of the Aineid. He kept this piece in MS. for 
 twenty years, and then published it, at last, with 
 an elegant and pleasing essay on the art of 
 translating 1 , which is much more mature than 
 the poem itself, and is probably of a much later 
 date. The Destructio7i of Troy is one of those 
 poems which baffle criticism. There is really 
 nothing to say about it, and even if it were an 
 excellent piece of writing, it would lie outside the 
 range of our present inquiry, for it is written in 
 the old, slipshod verse, against which Waller had 
 already rebelled 2 . The preface, about the mode 
 
 1 Appendix II. 
 
 2 Even here, in occasional passages, the new prosody asserts it- 
 self. The last lines, however, I feel convinced, were added in 1656 : — 
 
 "Thus fell the King, who yet surviv'd the State, 
 With such a signal and peculiar fate ; 
 Under so vast a ruin not a grave, 
 Nor in such flames a funeral fire to have ;
 
 The Exiles. 99 
 
 of translating, is much more valuable, and if a 
 collection be ever made of the first breathings of 
 poetical criticism in England, this should certainly 
 be included in it. The main point which Denham 
 brings forward is the importance of securing the 
 spirit, grace, and movement of the original writer, 
 even at the risk of losing some of his exact ex- 
 pressions. 
 
 In January, 1638, the elder Denham died, and 
 was buried at Egham. The poet, thanks to that 
 smart little Essay against Gaming, inherited a 
 fortune, and spent the next two or three years in 
 squandering several thousand pounds. It is much 
 to be regretted that we possess no record of these 
 years, for we lack the link that should bind the 
 author of the limping paraphrase of Virgil with 
 the stately buskined writer of The Sophy and of 
 Cooper's Hill. It is quite plain that he had by this 
 time become acquainted, probably through the 
 good offices of his cousin Morley, with the MS. 
 poems of Waller. The Sophy, however, which was 
 published in 1642, is not in the style of any 
 particular work of Waller's. It is a tragedy in 
 
 He, whom such titles swelled, such power made proud, 
 To whom the sceptres of all Asia bowed, 
 On the cold earth lies th' unregarded King, 
 A headless carcase and a nameless thing." 
 This is in the mature style of Denham. 
 
 7 — 2
 
 ioo The Exiles. 
 
 five acts, in blank verse, and although it is far from 
 interesting or invigorating, we must conquer our 
 repugnance, and allow our attention to rest upon it." 
 The Sophy is a very curious experiment, an 
 attempt to enchain English drama as French 
 drama is enchained, to relinquish all those privi- 
 leges, those capacities for licence, which had made 
 English tragedy the beautiful and bewildering 
 thing we know. When it was published, the great 
 dramatic school was just closing. Ford and Mas- 
 singer were resigning the art which they had 
 received from Webster and Fletcher into the hands 
 of Shirley. There is no means of discovering now 
 where Denham got the idea of the style of his 
 play \ It is very brief and brisk ; delayed by no 
 
 1 The plot is borrowed from Sir W. Herbert's Travels. The 
 same story was dramatised shortly after by Robert Baron, in his 
 Mirza, published, without a date, apparently in 1647. Baron thus 
 refers to Denham: — 
 
 "I am not ignorant that there is a Tragedy abroad of this 
 subject, intitled The Sophy ; but it may be said of me as Terence 
 makes his Prologue to his Etinuchus speak of him (though in a 
 cause somewhat different) 
 
 'sed eas fabulas factas prius 
 Latinas scisse sese, id vero pernegat.' 
 
 I had finished three complete acts of this tragedy before I saw- 
 that, nor was I then discouraged from proceeding, seeing the most 
 ingenious Author of that has made his seem quite another story 
 from this." 
 
 Mirza, which has never enjoyed the attention its cleverness
 
 The Exiles. 101 
 
 poetical passages, or lyricism, at all ; it contains 
 but one or two soliloquies, and those carefully 
 prepared for effect, like Racine's afterwards. The 
 language is stilted, but never vociferous ; it runs on 
 a level, with none of the usual English ups and 
 downs. Variety of action is subordinated to the 
 illustration of character exactly in the French style. 
 The question is, however, where can Denham 
 have seen any French tragedies ? He had not 
 at that date left his own country, and French 
 books, especially plays and poems, were very slow 
 to cross the Channel. It would be preposterous 
 to suppose him affected by Montchrestien, Hardy, 
 or Rotrou ; while the great Corneille, to whose 
 tragedies The Sophy does bear a distinct affinity, 
 was so exactly Denham's contemporary, that it is 
 very difficult to admit the notion of his influence. 
 Until the production of the Cid, Corneille had 
 published nothing that Denham could possibly 
 copy ; is it or is it not within the range of credi- 
 bility that between 1636 and 1642 Denham could 
 have seen the Cid? There is, however, practically 
 no resemblance between the two plays, and if 
 Denham imitated Corneille at all, it must have 
 
 demands, is full of good poetical passages in the old blood-and- 
 thunder style, and is noticeable, moreover, for what appears to 
 me to be very early imitation of Milton's lyrics.
 
 102 77/ e Exiles. 
 
 been in Cinna. I do not, however, believe that, 
 curious as is the analogy, there was any actual 
 prompting from France, but that The Sophy 
 remains a solitary 1 specimen of the Seneca tragedy 
 amongst the English drama of the age, just as the 
 curious play of Tyr et Sidon, as Mr Saintsbury 
 was the first to point out, remains a solitary ex- 
 periment in romantic tragedy in seventeenth- 
 century French. 
 
 We are told that on the publication of The 
 Sophy, Waller said that Denham had " broken out, 
 like the Irish rebellion, threescore thousand strong, 
 when no one was aware, or the least suspected it." 
 It is interesting to see Waller, who seems never to 
 have praised his romantic contemporaries, instantly 
 perceiving that this was a spiritual comrade of his 
 own. We have already observed with how much 
 tact Waller seized the passing events of the hour 
 as topics for his poetry. Denham did the same, 
 even in this tragedy about the Turk. He wrote it 
 in the great year of suspense, 164.1, and it is full of 
 little allusions to current politics. It is certain — 
 I shall presently be able to prove it — that Denham, 
 though a staunch Cavalier, leaned towards the 
 
 1 Half a century had passed since Daniel had written his choral 
 tragicomedies, the Cleopatra and the Philotas, imitations, I suppose, 
 rather of Jodelle's French than of Seneca's Latin.
 
 The Exiles. 103 
 
 party of peace. When he puts into the mouth 
 of his Turkish lord these sentiments, 
 
 " It is the fate of princes, that no knowledge 
 Comes pure to them, but passing through the eyes 
 And ears of other men it takes a tincture 
 From every channel; and still bears a relish 
 Of flattery or private ends;" 
 
 it is impossible not to see him shaking his head 
 over Charles's mad answer in July to the demand 
 of the Houses for the removal of evil counsellors ; 
 and still plainer is the irony about the King, who 
 has been so long divided from his subjects that he 
 becomes a tale to them, and who, when he asks 
 whether he is still beloved, is told that 
 
 " Still some old men 
 Tell stories of you in the chimney-corner." 
 
 Events hurried on, and, amidst the momentous 
 bustle of the first years of civil war, it may surprise 
 us to hear the little voice of poetry raised above 
 the din. It was in 1642, the year before Chalgrove 
 Field and Newbury, the year too before Waller's 
 terrible and almost fatal collapse, that Denham 
 published his celebrated poem of Cooper s Hill, 
 a piece conceived in a mood as calm and philo- 
 sophical as if the halcyons had been brooding over 
 the placid ocean of English politics. This poem
 
 104 The Exiles. 
 
 was so decisive a victory for the adherents of the 
 classical school that we may call it their Marston 
 Moor, and not too fantastically conceive Denham 
 and Waller, for Waller certainly had a share in its 
 execution, as routing the forces of the romanti- 
 cists with their ranks of serried couplets. In spite 
 of all successive attempts in the same style, — and 
 they have been myriad, — Coopers Hill still re- 
 mains the most celebrated, though perhaps the 
 last read of topographical poems. 
 
 It is not quite true, as all the Augustan critics 
 used to aver, that no topographical poetry had been 
 written in England before Denham. Drayton's 
 Polyolbion and Browne's Britannia s Pastorals be- 
 long, no doubt, to altogether a different order ; 
 but it is very extraordinary if Denham had never 
 read the Pensharst of Ben Jonson. There was, 
 however, something to be distinguished between 
 the praise of a great peer's house and the tribute to 
 a national river. The PcnsJuirst belonged to the 
 old political dispensation, Coopers Hill to the 
 
 new. As before, Denham showed himself extremely 
 
 < 
 
 dexterous in calling public attention to his verses ; 
 they were full of actuality. He opens by rejecting 
 the habitual appeal to Parnassus and Helicon. 
 To this green hill on the south side of the Thames 
 he cries : —
 
 The Exiles. 105 
 
 " If I can be to thee 
 A Poet, thou Parnassus art to me," 
 
 and the stately winding river shall take a nobler 
 place than Helicon. There was a certain manly 
 directness about Denham, which at once recom- 
 mended him to the public. 
 
 In the reprints of his poems which he himself 
 issued, and in those which have since been standard, 
 the tone of Cooper s Hill is rigidly Royalist. But a 
 glance at the very rare first edition of 1642 l , shows 
 that the author revised almost every other line, 
 and omitted whole passages which proved him to 
 lean towards the Neuters. At present the sudden 
 reference to St Paul's, and the eulogy of Waller, 
 follow the invocation very abruptly. In 1642 
 these were led up to by some curious lines, the 
 appropriateness of which when Waller's plot was 
 discovered a few months later on, must have made 
 Denham's ears tingle and his hair stand on end : — 
 
 "Some study plots, and some those plots to undo, 
 Others to make them and undo them too, 
 False to their hopes, afraid to be secure, 
 Those mischiefs only which they make, endure ; 
 
 1 "Cooper's Hill. A Poeme. London. Printed for Tho. 
 Walkley, and are to be sold at his shop at the Signe of the Flying 
 Horse between York House and Britain's Burse. 1642." Tho. 
 "Walkley was the printer of Waller's first genuine edition.
 
 106 The Exiles. 
 
 Blinded of light, and sick of being well, 
 
 'In tumult seek their peace, their heaven in hell." 
 
 Of course Denham intended no reference to his 
 friend's projects, of which he probably knew nothing ; 
 his mysterious allusions are doubtless to such double 
 dealings as Hotham's conduct, with regard to the 
 proposed capitulation of Hull. Our author's most 
 extraordinary indiscretion, however, occurs at the 
 close of the first edition, which ended with these 
 lines : — 
 
 "Therefore their boundless power let Princes draw 
 Within the channel and the shores of law, 
 And may that law, which teaches Kings to sway 
 Their sceptres, teach their subjects to obey." 
 
 This was the very doctrine of the Neuters, and 
 cannot have given Charles I. any satisfaction, if a 
 copy of his servant's poem came into his hands as 
 he sat down in a passion to the beleaguerment of 
 Gloucester. 
 
 The passage by which Cooper s Hill is best 
 known, consists of four lines which I cannot resist 
 the pleasure of now once more repeating. He says 
 to the Thames, which he has been praising above 
 Eridanus and Pactolus : — 
 
 " O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream 
 My great example, as it is my theme !
 
 The Exiles. 107 
 
 Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, 
 Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full." 
 
 These are marvellous lines; they are among the 
 memories of our language; and if Sir John Denham 
 had been habitually lifted on this graceful and pure 
 level of eloquence, most later poets, at all events 
 those of his own order, might have addressed to 
 him the same adroit compliment. But there exists 
 a mystery about these lines. In collating the first 
 edition I was amazed to find them entirely absent, 
 and they do not occur until the second edition of 
 the poem, published in 1643. Their place is taken 
 until then by a quaint and rather silly promise that 
 »the waters of Thames, in reward for their exem- 
 plary behaviour in the neighbourhood of Chertsey 
 and Egham, 
 
 " Shall visit Jove's abodes 
 To shine amongst the stars, and bathe the Gods." 
 
 Nor is the versification of the poem in any other 
 instance so fine and regular as in the celebrated 
 quatrain, which, for want of better information, we 
 must continue to consider the most brilliant example 
 of second thoughts in the English language. 
 
 On the whole, there are few poems which have 
 enjoyed so great and so sustained a reputation 
 as Cooper s Hill, which so little respond to it in the
 
 10S The Exiles. 
 
 eyes of a modern reader 1 . Yet we must not lose 
 sight of the fact that its fame was sustained, and 
 seek to discover the cause. Long after Cowley, 
 Davenant, and their crew had sunk into neglect, 
 Denham and Waller preserved their reputation un- 
 assailed. Prior asserts their importance, as the 
 two pioneers of our poetry. Pope and Garth, who 
 represented the extremity of critical acumen in an 
 age which had begun to look without prejudice on 
 the founders of its own fashions, spoke out clearly 
 in praise of Denham. The Windsor Forest of the 
 one and the Claremont of the other were direct 
 imitations of Cooper s Hill, written no less than 
 seventy years after its publication 2 . " On Cooper's 
 Hill," says Pope, moved to unusual enthusiasm, 
 
 " On Cooper's Hill eternal wreaths shall grow 
 While lasts the mountain, or while Thames shall flow." 
 
 To comprehend all this, we must, in the first 
 place, acknowledge the genuine force and sinew of 
 
 1 It would seem that Denham's ear was imperfect, though I 
 confess I have not been able to convict him of that pravity in 
 riming of which Johnson accused him. 
 
 2 Perhaps the latest tribute of unmitigated praise, is Somerville's, 
 in the third book of The Chace, 1735 : — 
 
 "tread, with respectful awe, 
 Windsor's green glades, where Denham, tuneful bard, 
 Charm'd once the list'ning Dryads with his song, 
 Sublimely sweet."
 
 The Exiles. 109 
 
 Denham's rugged poem. There is sound thought 
 in it, carefully expressed, without adornment or 
 choice of melody, in successive blows of the sledge- 
 hammer. After this sort of writing had once been 
 conceived, it was comparatively easy to improve 
 upon it, to give regularity to the stroke, grace and 
 ease to the movement. The praise of having in- 
 vented, or at least having been the first to employ 
 in a sustained effort, a new form of English poetry 
 must always insure Denham a niche in the history 
 of our literature. 
 
 In this same year, 1643, an event occurred which 
 attracted little notice in those dreadful years. The 
 Civil War had broken out, and in the west one by 
 one the parliamentary towns were falling into the 
 hands of the King's generals. But late in the 
 summer one handsome and gallant young fellow, 
 riding down the deep-leaved lanes that led from 
 Dartmoor into the little ancient borough of Chag- 
 ford, at the head of a troop of the King's horse, 
 met a party of Roundheads at the entrance of the 
 town, and was cut down and killed. This was 
 Sidney Godolphin, the hope of a great house, a 
 courtier, a scholar, and a poet as well as a brave 
 soldier. 
 
 We may search in vain for the Poems of Sidney 
 Godolphin. Waller, who had been his friend and
 
 1 10 TJic Exiles. 
 
 master in the art of verse, preserved a few of them, 
 and others arc to be picked up here and there by 
 accident; but they never have been collected, in that 
 day or in this. He died too young to win a place in 
 literature, and he formed merely one more precious 
 sacrifice laid on the vast altar of Charles I.'s stupid 
 and obstinate pride. But if he had lived he would 
 have won a name for himself. He was the first 
 young man clearly to see what it was that Waller 
 wished to do in modification of our national prosody, 
 and his thin remains are singularly ripe and strangely 
 free from all romantic influence. He had moved 
 in the circle of Waller's friends at Lees and at 
 Penshurst, and like Waller, he had written verses 
 on the untimely death of the beautiful Lady Rich, 
 Sacharissa's cousin. Here are some of these verses, 
 which Elijah Fenton found and printed in 1729: — 
 
 " Possess'd of all that nature could bestow, 
 All we can wish to be, or reach to know : 
 Equal to all the patterns which our mind 
 Can frame of good, beyond the good we find : 
 All beauties which have pow'r to bless the sight, 
 Mix'd with transparent virtue's greater light, 
 At once producing love, and reverence, 
 The admiration of the soul, and sense ; 
 The most discerning thoughts; the calmest breast, 
 Most apt to pardon, needing pardon least ;
 
 The Exiles. 1 1 1 
 
 The largest mind, and which did most extend 
 
 To all the laws of daughter, wife, and friend ; 
 
 The most allow'd example, by what line 
 
 To live ; what path to follow ; what decline ; 
 
 Who best all distant virtues reconcil'd, 
 
 Strict, cheerful, humble, great, severe, and mild ; 
 
 Constantly pious to her latest breath, 
 
 Not more a pattern in her life than death, 
 
 The Lady Rich lies here ! More frequent tears 
 
 Have never honour'd any tomb, than Hers." 
 
 There is perhaps a touch of the old-fashioned 
 method of versification in the final couplet. The 
 remainder is sustained at a far more even height of 
 eloquence, and in neater couplets than Denham 
 could at that time pretend to have reached, and it 
 is probable that if Godolphin had lived, his execu- 
 tive skill in verse would have hastened the coming 
 of the Augustan era. 
 
 The date, 1643, then, is a very important one 
 in our whole inquiry. It has hitherto been rashly 
 presumed that it was the Exile, which by bringing 
 the poets to Paris, and placing them in contact 
 with the French masters of literature, brought 
 about the Classical reaction. But if I have been 
 able to prove anything it is this, that the Exile 
 had not taken place, that not a single Royalist 
 writer had come under the French influence, when
 
 i i 2 The Exiles. 
 
 that reaction had already begun, and had even 
 advanced to a certain point of development. The 
 year 1643 gives us the opportunity of exactly 
 gauging what had been done ; it is the date of 
 Waller's flight, of Sidney Godolphin's death, of 
 Denham's publication of his Cooper s Hill revised ; 
 and we see that before the Exile began each of 
 these important writers had finished the most 
 characteristic part of his works, that part which the 
 critics of the coming age were principally to point 
 to as his respective contribution to the change. 
 Two of them were to write much more, a'nd Den- 
 ham, at least, was to write with considerably more 
 of the Gallic grace, but no one who reads their 
 early pieces can doubt the direction their talent 
 was spontaneously taking. The Revolution swept 
 them over to France, and there there was much for 
 them to learn ; but the great point upon which I 
 desire to insist is that before they started they knew 
 as clearly as possible what it was they wished for. 
 French taste and practice merely provided them 
 with a primrose path up the prim and dusty 
 Helicon which they had long determined to climb. 
 It is extremely difficult to follow the fortunes 
 of literature through the vicissitudes of the Civil 
 War. In order to do so with some measure of 
 success we must fix our attention on the move-
 
 The Exiles. 1 1 3 
 
 ments of Queen Henrietta Maria. Several of the 
 most important men of letters were entirely devoted 
 to her service. We shall see, later on, what part 
 she gave to Davenant in her first visit to France. 
 When she fled from Exeter with the newborn 
 Princess of Wales in July, 1644, Cowley was with 
 her, and for the next twelve years was constantly 
 attached to her person. Another interesting figure 
 in letters took part in that doleful flight, namely, 
 Margaret Lucas, the girl who was to become the 
 most eccentric of all poetasters, the erudite and 
 fantastic Duchess of Newcastle. The Queen settled 
 for three months at the baths of Bourbon, whither, 
 to soothe her misery, as Madame de Motteville tells 
 us, Anne of Austria sent her sympathetic messages, 
 and a nurse, and 20,000 pistoles. She passed on 
 for the winter to Paris, and hither the young Duke 
 of Newcastle, flying from defeat at Marston Moor, 
 joined her, swiftly to be smitten by the lettered 
 charms of Margaret Lucas. There was presently 
 a colony of English people in Paris. Hobbes, the 
 philosopher and critic, Leviathan himself, was- 
 already there, and the last of the great Jacobean 
 dramatists, James Shirley, who had left a starving 
 wife and children behind him, was in attendance 
 upon the Royal Mistress who had been his con- 
 sistent patron. 
 
 G. 8
 
 1 14 The Exiles. 
 
 Well might Cowley speak with bitterness of 
 "us, the poets militant below." As he walked in 
 the streets of Paris, he met his old friend Crashaw 
 starving", and had but just enough patronage left to 
 find him a place in the household of a Roman 
 cardinal, where he might eat a piece of bread. 
 Killigrew, wearily wasting the vigour of his youth 
 in secret missions to all the courts of Europe, came 
 back each time more wretched, with a dismaller 
 tale to tell. Yet, at worst, the poets in exile, with 
 all their poverty and discomfort, fared better than 
 the poets at home 1 . The first great loss which 
 letters and statecraft suffered was when Lord Falk- 
 land fell, on the 20th of September, 1643, at the 
 Battle of Newbury. He called for a clean shirt 
 before he went into battle, for, said he, " They 
 shall not find my dead body in foul linen." And 
 as his friends begged him, a civilian, not to rush 
 into a needless danger, he bid them know that 
 he was weary of the times, and believed he should 
 be out of it all ere night. He was ; and with him 
 
 1 Denham says of Killigrew, William Murray and himself : — 
 
 "Mirth makes us not mad, 
 
 Nor sobriety sad, 
 But of that we are seldom in danger ; 
 
 At Paris, at Rome, 
 
 At the Hague, we're at home, 
 The Good Fellow is nowhere a stranger."
 
 The Exiles. 1 1 5 
 
 fell the greatest ornament of the Royalist party, 
 the man from whom more might have been ex- 
 pected than from any other soldier or civilian in 
 all the King's party, that almost fabulous Cary, 
 Viscount Falkland, of whom Clarendon, as the 
 mouthpiece of the times, says, that he "was a 
 person of such prodigious parts of learning and 
 knowledge, of that inimitable sweetness and delight 
 in conversation, and so flowing and obliging a 
 humanity and goodness to mankind, and of that 
 primitive simplicity and integrity of life, that if 
 there were no other brand upon this odious and 
 accursed civil war, than that single loss, it must 
 be most infamous and execrable to all posterity." 
 The body in which so much wit, virtue, and energy 
 resided was small and feeble ; those who knew 
 him noted the brightness of his black eyes ; 
 Mr Matthew Arnold, in a most striking essay, 
 has drawn attention recently to his intellectual 
 character. 
 
 Lord Falkland was the centre of the group 
 of wits to which Waller, Morley, and Godolphin 
 belonged, and we should expect him, with his 
 liberal and sympathetic character, to be with them 
 in their literary revolution. But, on the contrary, 
 the existing poems of Lord Falkland belong entire- 
 ly to the old school, with frequent use of overflow, 
 
 8—2
 
 1 1 6 The Exiles. 
 
 and with the accent shifting from place to place in 
 successive lines. If we had space for such com- 
 parisons, it would not be uninteresting to place 
 side by side an exercise of Lord Falkland's and 
 one of Sidney Godolphin's, each in heroic couplet, 
 by way of emphasizing the distinction between 
 the two styles ; but we may remark, in passing, 
 that the men who showed the truest aptitude for 
 the new manner of writing appeared scarcely to 
 have learnt, but to be born into it. 
 
 Meanwhile Falkland was not the only poet 
 who did not bear his life away from the battle 
 fields of the Civil War. Peter Hausted, a Cam- 
 bridge clergyman, who wrote one remarkable play, 
 The Rival Friends, was shot on the ramparts of 
 Banbury, while the Roundheads were vigorously 
 besieging it in 1645, and he lies buried in Banbury 
 Church. Fanshawe had been made tutor to the 
 Prince of Wales, and fled with him from Exeter to 
 Scilly, thence to Jersey, and placed him at last, 
 in 1646, in the hands of his mother in Paris, 
 after infinite toil and alarm by land and sea. 
 Cleveland, the forerunner of Hudibras, had, per- 
 haps, the hardest fate of all, for, although he was 
 by no means a fanatical supporter of the King's 
 extreme views, he left Cambridge for Oxford to 
 wait upon Charles, helped to defend Newark
 
 The Exiles. 1 1 7 
 
 through the assault and siege of that town, and 
 avoided no hardship of the war, until at last he 
 was taken prisoner and thrown into jail at Yar- 
 mouth, where he languished for years, until Oliver 
 Cromwell released him in consideration of his 
 literary gifts and his political helplessness. 
 
 Most of the leading men of letters, however, 
 and in particular those in whom we now take an 
 interest, escaped to France. All the English exiles 
 were well received, for the sake of Henrietta Maria, 
 who was a very great favourite, even with the 
 common • people. We may read in the Memoires 
 of Madame de Motteville how inconsolable, how 
 like a draggled and bespattered bird of gorgeous 
 plumage, the Queen of England seemed at first, 
 and how, slowly, as one of her children after 
 another was restored to her, she preened her 
 feathers, and regained something of her sanguine 
 composure. We read of the fetes at Fontainebleau 
 in the summer of 1646, and again in 1647 ; of the 
 urbane affability of Anne of Austria and of the good 
 manners of little Louis XIV., of the "balls, comedies 
 and promenades " with which the English exiles 
 were regaled, and in the reading of all this we 
 must interpolate for our present entertainment that 
 among those exiles were some of the brightest 
 Englishmen then living — probably Waller and
 
 1 1 8 The Exiles. 
 
 Hobbes, certainly Cowley, Fanshawe, Shirley, and 
 Davenant. 
 
 What, then, were the influences which were 
 exercised on these men's minds by their exchange 
 of London and Oxford for Paris and Fontaine- 
 blcau ? On some of them we may safely say, 
 There was none at all. Sir Richard Fanshawe, 
 for instance, a learned and industrious poet of the 
 third order, was about thirty-eight years of age 
 when he conducted the future Charles II. to 
 France. On him France had no effect whatever. 
 His famous translation of the Pastor Fido, pub- 
 lished in 1647, hi s little epic of Dido and ALneas in 
 the Spenserian stanza, his odes and sonnets, his 
 epistles and addresses, are all of them in the full- 
 blown Marinist manner of the preceding gene- 
 ration. Here is an example of a pretty stanza 
 in praise of peace: — 
 
 "Plant trees you may, and see them shoot 
 
 Up with your children, to be served 
 To your clean boards, and the fair'st fruit 
 
 To be preserved, 
 And learn to use their several gums ; 
 
 'Tis innocence in the sweet blood 
 Of cherries, apricots, and plums 
 To be imbrued." 
 
 Not a line of this but Waller or Denham would
 
 The Exiles. 1 1 9 
 
 have rejected. It was precisely these dislocated 
 constructions, these languid broken rhythms, these 
 harsh clusters of consonants that it was their 
 function to rebel against. And yet, for a Mari- 
 nist stanza of the school of 1630, it is distinctly 
 pretty. 
 
 To men like Shirley and Fanshawe, then, 
 France had no lesson ; but what did it say to 
 the reformers, to the men whose ears were open ? 
 The posthumous poems of Malherbe, could they 
 be without interest to Waller ? Is it credible that 
 the relation of Chapelain's odes and St Amant's 
 anacreontics to the anacreontics and odes of Cowley 
 is purely accidental ? I think not. The condition 
 of French literature was precisely that which was 
 likely to discourage the romantic and Spanish 
 tendencies in our poets, and to encourage the 
 feeling for classical precision. Some wit said that 
 French poetry in the age of Anne of Austria was a 
 young lady, no longer quite young, who had 
 missed two or three advantageous marriages, and 
 who, in order not to die a maid, accepted the hand 
 of M. de Malherbe, an elderly gentleman. We 
 might, perhaps, say that English poetry was a 
 widow, who had married Shakespeare for love, 
 and now consented to marry Waller for a position. 
 The state of things was so exactly analogous that
 
 i 20 The Exiles. 
 
 the lad)' from the north could learn much by the 
 experience of her slightly older sister. 
 
 But, to descend from this too oriental region of 
 simile, the parallelism between the history of 
 French and English poetry of precision is in one 
 particular so exact that I wonder that it has not 
 been, as I believe it has not, already observed. 
 The sweet and monotonous versification of Mal- 
 herbe was first of all emulated by his pupil 
 Maynard, whose slightly provincial vein of re- 
 flection was expressed with a more rugged vigour 
 than Malherbe had displayed. Exactly the same 
 language might be used to describe the relation of 
 Waller to Denham, and the latter, with his slight 
 touch of provinciality, from which the former is 
 free, and with his force of versification, would be 
 singularly like Maynard, even if it were not the 
 case that the principal poems of them both — the 
 Coopers Hill and the Alcippe — are occupied by 
 precisely the same order of reflections, and might 
 each, in parts, be a paraphrase of the other. It 
 would be exceedingly rash to take for granted 
 that Maynard ever heard of Denham, or vice 
 versa; such a supposition, indeed, is extremely 
 improbable ; but the same ideas were common 
 to both, and it seems to me beyond a doubt that 
 by transplanting English poetry into French air
 
 The Exiles. 121 
 
 we encouraged the growth of that particular branch 
 of it which was in sympathy with France. 
 
 It would be interesting to know, it is possibly 
 within the bounds of research to discover, what 
 plays were performed at Fontainebleau to dissolve 
 the sad thoughts of Henrietta Maria and to amuse 
 her silent children. The Menteur of Corneille 
 belongs to that year, 1646. It is not to be doubted 
 that amateurs of verse, such as were so many of 
 the English exiles, would follow with interest what 
 the great Corneille was doing with the alexan- 
 drine, how he was polishing it, and learning to 
 direct it like a javelin, ponderous, inavertible, 
 lethal. This was what English verse had to learn 
 to become. Denham had caught the notion of the 
 clean, self-sustaining verse in his Corneille-like 
 
 " Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full," 
 
 and Dryden was to carry on the discovery with 
 a sullen majesty that was all his own. 
 
 "Like a wedge in a block, ringed to the bar," 
 
 had seemed a sufficiently melodious example of 
 five-foot iambic verse to Donne and the Marinists. 
 It still seemed good enough to Fanshawe and 
 Shirley. It had never seemed good enough to 
 Waller and Denham. Cowley and Davenant first 
 awoke to a sense of its insufficiency on their
 
 i 2 2 The Exiles. 
 
 arrival in France. In this summary we may say 
 that we hold the theme of these lectures in a nut- 
 shell. 
 
 We saw in our last discourse that Waller, 
 detected in a serious plot, contrived by the exercise 
 of great adroitness, and, I am afraid we must add, 
 great hypocrisy, to escape to France alive in 1643. 
 To buy his release he had to sell estates which 
 produced a rental of ,£1,000 a year. With part 
 of this money he probably fled, for it seems that 
 his mother — who continued to live at Beaconsfield, 
 and to nurse the property, as she had done before, 
 when her son was a child, — was not allowed to 
 send him any remittances. This, at all events, 
 was the story, and Waller took care to give out 
 that he was living entirely on the sale of his wife's 
 jewels. As he kept open table in Paris for ten 
 years, and was the only English exile except Lord 
 Jermyn, Henrietta Maria's second husband, who 
 could afford to do so, and as he certainly was in 
 much more luxurious circumstances than the queen 
 herself, we may be allowed to doubt this. 
 
 Old Mrs Waller at Beaconsfield seems to have 
 been a lady of great astuteness. Like her son, she 
 was an adept in the art of trimming, and while 
 remaining at heart a Royalist, she made capital 
 of her relationships as the sister of Hampden and
 
 The Exiles. 123 
 
 cousin of Cromwell. The Protector used to visit 
 at her house, and it is said that once, at her table, 
 she ventured to tease him so far with predictions of 
 his political downfall, that he suddenly threw his 
 napkin over her head to silence her. Later on, 
 it would appear, her tongue began to wag still more 
 freely, for not only did Cromwell cease to visit 
 her, but he forbade her to leave her house at 
 Beaconsfield. But these comfortable visits to the 
 mother, and horseplay with napkins at cosy little 
 dinners, may perhaps serve to account for the fact 
 that Waller kept his head on his shoulders in 1643. 
 My eminent friend Prof. Gardiner is just about 
 to deal with this year in detail, and I expect that 
 his researches will throw fresh light upon Waller's 
 plot. We saw that he freely denounced everybody 
 he could think of as an accomplice ; even the 
 great Selden was one of his victims. Nevertheless, $r 
 as Clarendon has noted, he was not ostracized 
 among the Royalist party for what looks to us like 
 boundless and cowardly treachery. Yet there was 
 no tendency to overlook such conduct in others. 
 For a much less shameful temporizing than this, 
 Barton Holiday, the author of TccJinogamia, was 
 rancorously attacked by his own party, and never 
 forgiven. I expect that the accusations of Waller 
 were chiefly against persons wholly out of the
 
 i 24 The Exiles. 
 
 power of the Parliamentarians, and that his party 
 recognized that there had been more cry than wool 
 in his boisterous confessions. No reflections were 
 made against him, at all events, and nobody avoid- 
 ed him. He went to Rouen, married a second 
 wife, and seems to have resided two years there. 
 His favourite daughter, Margaret, who became 
 his amanuensis, was born in Rouen. 
 
 In 1645, while he was in Rouen, he published 
 his poems. The bibliography of Waller is rather 
 obscure, but it seems that of the three editions 
 which appeared, under the names of three different 
 booksellers, in that year, the first was a mere 
 piracy, the second published with the author's 
 consent, and the third a theft emboldened by the 
 poet's enforced absence from home 1 . The instant 
 success of all three editions testifies to the interest 
 
 1 The editions of 1645 may thus be distinguished : 
 
 a. "Printed for T. Walkley." This is the first spurious 
 edition, "the adulterate Copy, surreptitiously and illegally imprinted, 
 to the derogation of the Author and the abuse of the Buyer." 
 
 b. "Printed by T. W. for Humphrey Mosley." With a 
 preface signed E. W. This seems to be genuine. It consists of 
 pp. 92, carried on to p. in by insertion of "Mr Waller's Speeches 
 in Parliament," after which, in the copy which I possesses added an 
 appendix to the poems, paged 93 — 96, and containing, among other 
 pieces, "Love's Farewell," "On a Girdle," and "To Chloris." 
 
 c. "Printed by J. N. for H. Moseley." These three simul- 
 taneous editions satisfied public curiosity until 1664.
 
 The Exiles. 1 2 5 
 * 
 
 that Waller's reputation had excited, and the readi- 
 ness with which his experiments in versification 
 were received. He was forty years of age when 
 this first issue of his poems was published 1 , and 
 we may remember that it was also in 1645, and at 
 an age almost as mature, that Milton came forward 
 for the first time with a collection of poems. There 
 exists a portrait of Waller from this same year, 
 first engraved for Fenton's edition ; it represents 
 him in a heavy, dark periwig, with clean-shaven 
 face, the whole style that of the new age, the age of 
 Louis XIV. The likeness must have been a good 
 one, for in the close, discreet lips, the handsome 
 but somewhat furtive eyes, and the ill-shapen nose, 
 there is more individuality than a flattering painter 
 would affect. 
 
 It seems probable that in the winter of 1645 
 Waller broke up his establishment at Rouen, and 
 settled his wife and children in Paris, while he 
 went for the winter to Italy. In March, 1646, 
 John Evelyn found him at Venice, and persuaded 
 him to be his travelling companion. In company 
 with " Mr Waller the celebrated poet," a Mr Abdy, 
 and one Captain Wray, Evelyn set forth on Easter 
 Monday, and we are able to follow Waller in his 
 friend's diary for the next six months. He waited 
 1 Appendix III.
 
 126 The Jixilcs. 
 
 1 
 
 in the coach below, while Evelyn took leave of the 
 dying Earl of Arundel, and then the four gentle- 
 men drove away to Vicenza. Here they found, at 
 once, that they had one person in their company 
 who was distasteful to the others. Captain Wray. 
 besides being the son of a pestilent Roundhead, 
 " minded," says Evelyn, " nothing save drinking 
 and folly,". and was for hurrying them on whenever 
 they wished to stop and enjoy pictures or statues. 
 At Lodi, Evelyn strayed from his companions, and 
 was caught peeping at the governor of the city, 
 who was being shaved ; and was only just in time 
 to run like a schoolboy through the streets to 
 the Jesuits' church, where Waller and the others 
 were, and to succeed, when the Swiss guard ar- 
 rived, in looking as though he knew nothing about 
 governors or peeping. 
 
 At Milan, Dr Ferrarius carried them in his 
 coach to see the Borromean Library, and here 
 took place the terrible incident, which Evelyn 
 graphically describes, in which a hospitable Scots 
 Colonel, at the close of a sumptuous dinner which 
 he gave them, must needs show them his stable, 
 and mounting a beautiful horse against the advice 
 of his groom, was crushed to death before their 
 eyes by the creature viciously rearing with him 
 against the wall. Next day they hastened to be
 
 The Exiles. 127 
 
 gone, and made their way to Lake Maggiore, up to 
 the head of which they sailed, and then ascended 
 the Alps, " through strange, horrid, and fearful 
 crags and tracts." There was never a writer who 
 was less in sympathy with Alpine scenery, we may 
 be sure, than Waller. At the village of Simplon, 
 Captain Wray, who was constantly vexing the 
 quiet souls of the other three travellers, got into a 
 real scrape. He had brought a water-spaniel from 
 England, " a huge, filthy cur," says Evelyn, and this 
 beast amused itself by hunting a herd of goats 
 down a gully into a stream. One goat, at least, 
 was drowned, and next morning when the English 
 party started they were set upon by the in- 
 habitants, were beaten and imprisoned. Their 
 sorrows were great, and when at last they reached 
 the valley of the Rhone, their hearts sang within 
 them. To cross the Alps in those days was 
 certainly no holiday-task. 
 
 It is not necessary for us to follow the friends 
 closely in their travels, especially as Waller seems 
 to have done nothing remarkable, not even by 
 making himself disagreeable or by keeping a water- 
 spaniel. At Martigny Evelyn made a remark 
 which has been attributed to various later wits, 
 and in particular to Rogers, namely, that one lusty 
 Swiss could keep the gate of the Valais against
 
 128 The Exiles. 
 
 an army. At Geneva the other three waited for 
 Evelyn to sicken of the small-pox, and to recover 
 of it. Waller would seem to have beguiled the 
 tedium of nearly two months' idleness by con- 
 versing with the famous Genevese scholar, Dr Dio- 
 dati. It seems odd that, as he could really be 
 of no service to Evelyn, he did not push on at once 
 for Paris. It was July before the travellers went to 
 Lyons, whence they proceeded to Roanne. They 
 lay in that town in damask beds, and " felt like 
 emperors," and there it occurred to them to do a 
 very picturesque and unusual thing. Instead of 
 posting through the plains of France, they deter- 
 mined to sail down the Loire to Orleans ; they 
 chartered a boat, and performed the voyage in two 
 days, taking turns to row, and it seems to have 
 been a very charming little finale to their long 
 tour. Evelyn says : — 
 
 " Sometimes we footed it through pleasant 
 fields and meadows ; sometimes we shot at fowls, 
 and other birds. [This shooting at fowls was a 
 little hazardous.] Nothing came amiss : sometimes 
 we played at cards, whilst others sung, or were 
 composing verses ; for had we not the great poet, 
 Mr Waller, in our company." 
 
 Waller now seems to have settled at Paris. In 
 1647 ne was a * St Valery, probably for some
 
 The Exiles. 129 
 
 political purpose, to be near the English coast, 
 for his home undoubtedly was at Paris until 1653, 
 when he petitioned Cromwell to let him return 
 to England and was allowed to do so. The poem 
 which he wrote on that occasion, although far too 
 fulsome to come with propriety from a man in 
 his political position and of his antecedents, con- 
 tains some interesting writing. Here is a passage 
 in which, when we take into account the exag- 
 gerated strain of panegyric then universally in- 
 dulged in, we may find a just appreciation of what 
 Cromwell had done to raise the prestige of England 
 among the nations of the Continent. It will also 
 show us that Waller had carried the refining and 
 polishing of his versification to a still higher pitch 
 during his ten years in France. 
 
 " Lords of the world's great waste, the ocean, we 
 Whole forests send to reign upon the sea ; 
 And ev'ry coast may trouble, or relieve : 
 But none can visit us without your leave. 
 Angels, and we, have this prerogative, 
 That none can at our happy seats arrive : 
 While we descend at pleasure, to invade 
 The bad with vengeance, and the good to aid. 
 Our little world, the image of the great, 
 Like that, amidst the boundless ocean set, 
 G. 9
 
 130 The Exiles. 
 
 Of her own growth, hath all that nature craves ; 
 And all that's rare, as tribute from the waves. 
 As Egypt does not on the clouds rely, 
 But to the Nile owes more than to the sky; 
 So, what our earth, and what our heav'n, denies, 
 Our ever-constant friend, the sea, supplies. 
 The taste of hot Arabia's spice we know, 
 Free from the scorching sun, that makes it grow: 
 Without the worm, in Persian silks we shine ; 
 And, without planting, drink of ev'ry wine. 
 To dig for wealth we weary not our limbs ; 
 Gold, tho' the heaviest metal, hither swims : 
 Ours is the harvest where the Indians mow, 
 We plough the deep, and reap what others sow. 
 Things of the noblest kind our own soil breeds; 
 Stout are our men, and warlike are our steeds : 
 Rome, tho' her eagle thro' the world had flown, 
 Could never make this Island all her own." 
 
 Denham's career during the Commonwealth 
 was a very different one from Waller's. At the 
 breaking out of the Civil War an attempt was 
 made to turn him into a soldier. He was sent as 
 Governor of Farnham Castle to hold that fortress 
 for the King; but he was a failure there, and 
 retired for a while into obscurity. He seems to 
 have followed Charles about from place to place, 
 and he tells us that one morning, when he waited
 
 The Exiles. 131 
 
 upon the King in the garden at Caversham, his 
 
 Majesty smiled and said that he could give him 
 
 news of himself, for that he had just seen some 
 
 verses of his. The verses 1 were those prefixed in 
 
 1647, to Fanshawe's Pastor Fido, a presentation 
 
 copy of which had probably just reached the King. 
 
 Charles seems to have been very unsympathetic 
 
 about them : perhaps he had no great idea of 
 
 Denham's ability in other matters. He told him, 
 
 in terms which must have been very galling to the 
 
 author of Cooper's Hill, that he liked the verses 
 
 well, but he would advise him to write no more, 
 
 ** for that when men are young and have little else 
 
 to do, they may vent the outcomings of their fancy 
 
 in that way, but when they are thought fit for 
 
 more serious employments, if they still persisted in 
 
 that course, it would look as if they minded not 
 
 the way to any better." 
 
 It is a little odd that Denham himself was the 
 
 person who informed the world of this royal 
 
 reprimand ; the reason possibly was that he might 
 
 remind Charles II., to whom he addressed these 
 
 remarks in 1667, of the "serious employment" he 
 
 1 Four of them are worth quoting : — 
 
 A new and nobler way thou dost pursue 
 To make translations, and translators too; 
 They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame, 
 True to his sense, but truer to his fame. 
 
 9—2
 
 132 The Exiles. 
 
 had been entrusted with in 1647, namely, the being 
 charged by the Queen with a private message to 
 Charles I., who was then at St James's. Denham 
 stayed with the King, until in November the latter 
 made his escape from Hampton Court. Denham 
 remained in London, and in April, 1648, after the 
 civil war had broken out anew, he managed to 
 steal from the Earl of Northumberland his royal 
 charge the Duke of York, then a boy of fifteen. It 
 would seem from what Clarendon and others say 
 of this flight of James, who was dressed as a girl, 
 and had great difficulty in reaching Middelburg 
 without discovery, that Denham's share in effecting 
 his escape was less than the poet afterward re- 
 ported it to be. 
 
 He seems, however, to have gained a reputation 
 for diplomacy, for soon after the execution of the 
 King, he was sent from Paris, in company with 
 William, Lord Crofts, to collect money in Poland 
 from Scotch people settled in that country, and 
 with such extraordinary success that he brought 
 .£10,000 back with him. He made a doggerel 
 poem about this expedition, in which he gives us 
 no very clear account of what occurred on the 
 occasion. He wrote very little more verse until 
 the Restoration. He pretends that he took that 
 remark of His Majesty's in the garden at Caversham
 
 The Exiles. 133 
 
 so much to heart that he never felt any inclination 
 to write again ; but that, of course, is nonsense 1 . 
 He probably found that his vein, which never 
 flowed very freely, had run dry. It gushed again 
 before he died, as we shall see. His best poem 
 written during the Exile is one " Against Love," 
 which is inspired by a sort of spirited cynicism, 
 very paradoxical and fantastic, but rather refreshing 
 after the interminable love-languishings and melting 
 sonnets to my lady's eyebrow which had con- 
 stituted the main part of lyrical literature in the 
 preceding generation. I will close the present 
 chapter by printing a few of these stanzas, the 
 versification of which appears to me to be parti- 
 cularly forcible and graceful : 
 
 " Against Love. 
 
 Love making all things else his foes, 
 Like a fierce torrent overflows 
 Whatever doth his course oppose. 
 
 This was the cause the poets sung, 
 Thy Mother from the sea was sprung, 
 But they were mad to make thee young. 
 
 1 He had forgotten that in the very next year, 1648, he had 
 published a paraphrase of Cato Major on Old Age. Was it modesty 
 at the Royal reprimand, or a desire to seem consistent, which made 
 him omit this poem in 1667 ?
 
 134 The Exiles. 
 
 Her father, not her son, art thou ; 
 From our desires our actions grow, 
 And from the cause the effect must flow. 
 
 Love is as old as place or time; 
 'Twas he the fatal tree did climb, 
 Grandsire of Father Adam's crime. 
 
 Love drowsy days and stormy nights 
 
 Makes, and breaks friendship, whose delights 
 
 Feed, but not glut our appetites. 
 
 How happy he, that loves not, lives ! 
 Him neither hope nor fear deceives 
 To Fortune who no hostage gives. 
 
 How unconcerned in things to come ! 
 If here he frets, he finds at Rome, 
 At Paris, or Madrid his home. 
 
 Secure from low and private ends, 
 
 His life, his zeal, his wealth attends 
 
 His prince, his country and his friends."
 
 DAVENANT AND COWLEY.
 
 DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 
 
 It is very important that we should appreciate the 
 temper of mind in which it is desirable to approach 
 literature as distinguished from the history of 
 literature, and still more poetry as distinguished 
 from the history of poetry. Literature, in the 
 exact sense in which I use the word here, is a 
 somewhat rare product. It is the quintessence of 
 good writing, in all ages, in all languages, and no 
 single nation within one single century can be 
 presumed to have supplied very much of it. For 
 instance, this very seventeenth century which we 
 are considering produced of the highest poetic 
 literature, of the literature which is of universal 
 importance, just the writings of Shakespeare and 
 Milton, with some sparse pages from Ben Jonson 
 and Dryden. We look a little closer, with eyes a 
 little less critical, and we see a great deal more 
 than this which is sound poetic literature ; we 
 begin to perceive Webster and Herrick, Fletcher 
 and Marvell, Browne and Otway, with a score of 
 lyrists, a score of playwrights, to whom the praise
 
 138 Davenant and Cowley, 
 
 of genuine literary execution, in isolated bursts and 
 fragments, must not be denied. But if we are set 
 upon the discovery of literature .alone, and not on 
 the observation of literary history, we must then go 
 no further. 
 
 At the present day it is a great temptation to 
 those who have made special periods and segments 
 of the poetic produce of a nation their peculiar 
 care, to exaggerate the value of what they have 
 unearthed. It is human to see exotic beauties in 
 the weed that we ourselves have discovered. But 
 this tendency is one to be avoided, since it is 
 commonly accompanied by an inability to enjoy 
 what is really great in other schools than that in 
 which the education of the taste has been conducted. 
 I have known a scholar, who delighted to excess in 
 Ouarles, express an utter contempt for Gray, and 
 another whose taste lay in Occleve confound his 
 own judgment by confessing that he saw nothing 
 praiseworthy in Pope. From this narrowness, from 
 this provincial attitude, which may easily become 
 a snare for those who pursue literature alone, the 
 study of the history of literature may be recom- 
 mended as an escape. 
 
 In this delightful inquiry, — and one of the few 
 pleasant things that Bishop Warburton said, was 
 his remark that the history of literature was the
 
 Davenant and Cowley. 139 
 
 most charming exercise of the human mind, — we 
 are released from the contemplation of the best, 
 and of nothing but the best, from that communion 
 with the quintessence of things which no taste can 
 long endure without feeling a strain, and we are 
 permitted to indulge that curiosity which is excited 
 by the spectacle of motion, of evolution. A writer 
 too crabbed or too insignificant to claim our praise 
 on the score of his verses alone, becomes interesting 
 at once, and important, when we see that he 
 possessed an influence over a younger writer than 
 himself, who attained genuine success, or when he 
 marks a step in the range which culminated at last 
 in a poet. 
 
 It is this second attitude of mind which I have 
 to beg from my readers in the whole course of the 
 present argument. From the beginning to the end 
 of it I have been and shall be beset with siren 
 enticements to break away on this side and on that 
 to the fields of genuine literature which lie just 
 beyond our range. I do not deceive myself that 
 there is much literature, of the finer sort, in Waller 
 or in Denham, and I am about to introduce an 
 author in whom I should be almost inclined to say 
 that there is none at all. It would be refreshing 
 to close such books as Madagascar and Gondibert, 
 and listen to those Dorian strains from Milton's
 
 140 Davenant and Cowley. 
 
 oaten stop, which were making the solitudes of 
 Horton vocal. But literature just now is not our 
 pursuit, but the history of literature, and, paradox- 
 ical as it may be, in the development of English 
 poetical taste in the middle of the seventeenth 
 century, Milton took a part decidedly less prominent 
 than Davenant. 
 
 We have already acquainted ourselves with the 
 pioneers of the classical transition, with Waller and 
 with Denham. Next in honour after these names 
 were quoted, when the transition was complete, 
 those of Davenant and Cowley. The peculiarity in 
 the position of these two latter poets lay in the 
 fact that they were both of them, but Davenant 
 especially, perverts from the older romantic school. 
 Waller, as we have seen, was born with a curious 
 gift for distich, and carefully held himself aloof from 
 the men of the age into which he was bred, and 
 Denham more or less did the same. They had to 
 struggle against adverse fashion, but that struggle 
 was all without. Davenant, on the other hand, 
 was nurtured in the very heart of romance; we 
 shall see that he had deliberately to unlearn all he 
 had learned, to wean himself from all he had loved. 
 It is possible that the reason why his defection to 
 the classical camp was considered such a triumph, 
 and why his poems excited so much adverse
 
 Davtnant and Cowley. -141 
 
 criticism, was because he was felt to be a prize, no 
 common soldier or townsman, but a princeling born 
 in the purple. 
 
 There are few things more exasperating than 
 the tendency which abides in the gossipy human 
 tongue to spoil a pretty story, which is true, by 
 embroidering upon it a scandalous story, which is 
 not true. The legend which makes Shakespeare 
 the actual father of William Davenant 1 , obscures 
 the really charming relations which existed between 
 that hero's parents and the greatest of poets. This 
 legend recurs so frequently, and is so often rather 
 attacked from its unpleasantness than confuted as 
 history, that we may spare a few minutes for its 
 examination. In France it is so much delighted 
 in, that no account of English literature is complete 
 without it, and a living playwright has made it the 
 subject of a drama, which the French company 
 brought to London in its repertory, and acted in 
 compliment to our nation. The real truth about 
 Davenant's childhood, then, as far as we can make 
 it out, is this. 
 
 1 I see no reason for retaining the spelling "D'Avenant," 
 or "D'avenant," which the poet occasionally affected. The ancient 
 family from which he claimed to spring, the Davenants of Sible 
 Hedingham, knew no such refinement, nor did the illustrious 
 Bishop of Salisbury. His father, the vintner, signs his will 
 " John Davenentt."
 
 i4- Davenant and Cowley. 
 
 In coming up to London from Stratford, Shake- 
 speare was accustomed to call at the Crown Tavern, 
 in Oxford, which was kept by Mr John Davenant, 
 vintner, a respectable and wealthy citizen, who 
 afterwards rose to be Mayor of Oxford, and who 
 possessed an unusual taste for plays, playwrights, 
 and everything connected with acting. He was a 
 grave and melancholy man, but his gravity was 
 tempered by the vivacity of his wife, who was 
 noticeably handsome 1 . This couple, of whose 
 mutual affection and loyalty we have contemporary 
 evidence, had a family of seven children during the 
 last years of Shakespeare's life. The eldest of 
 these, the Rev. Robert Davenant, grew up to be 
 a commonplace clergyman, of whom only one 
 interesting thing is recorded. When he was an 
 old man, somewhere in the third quarter of the 
 century, he was asked if he had known Shake- 
 speare. '"Ay," he answered, "and he hath kissed 
 me a hundred times 2 ." Curious to think of this 
 old clerical gentleman whose only interest to us or 
 
 1 Anthony a Wood says: Davenant's "mother was a very 
 beautiful woman, of a good wit and conversation, in which she was 
 imitated by none of her children but by this William." Ath. Oxon. 
 ii. col. 41 1. 
 
 2 Aubrey. This Robert Davenant was a Fellow of St John's 
 College, Oxford, and became chaplain to John Davenant, the Bishop 
 of Salisbury.
 
 Davenant and Cowley. 143 
 
 to anyone is that, when he was a child, Shakespeare 
 had kissed him. 
 
 On such intimate terms was the great man with 
 this family ; and what could be more natural than 
 that he should stand godfather, as he did, to the 
 next son, William, our poet ? On the 3rd of March, 
 1606, this interesting ceremonial took place, in the 
 church of St Martin's at Oxford. It seems that 
 Shakespeare remained on a familiar footing with 
 the family until his death in 16 16, and there can be 
 no doubt that he had instilled a love of poetry into 
 the mind of his godchild, for the very first verses 
 which Davenant wrote, at the age of eleven, were 
 those composing the " Ode in Remembrance of 
 Master William Shakespeare," which we find 
 appended to his Madagascar. This ode is of no 
 use to us ; it is crammed with effete and monstrous 
 conceits, but contains no single crumb of auto- 
 biographical evidence. Presently, in 1622, the 
 mother, Mrs Davenant, died, and her husband only 
 survived her a few days, pined away, and was 
 buried in the same grave. 
 
 This pleasant story about Shakespeare and his 
 Oxford friends would probably have come down to 
 us unspoiled if it had not been for the tattling 
 monkey-tongue of Pope. Oldys, the antiquary, 
 sitting beside Pope at the dinner-table of the Earl
 
 144 Davenant and Cowley 
 
 of Oxford, was regaled by him with the story, that 
 one day little William Davenant, being met madly 
 flying from school down the street at Oxford, was 
 caught and stopped by an elderly townsman, who 
 wished to know whither he was posting in that heat 
 and hurry. " To see my godfather, Master Shake- 
 speare." "That's a good boy," said the old man, 
 " but have a care of taking God's name in vain." 
 Naturally all the company at Lord Oxford's asked 
 Pope where he found this story, and he immediately 
 quoted Betterton as his authority. Mr Betterton, 
 the player, he said, who had known Davenant 
 intimately, had told him the story, and himself 
 believed it. It was then noticed that the gossipy 
 and delightful Aubrey, who had been a still greater 
 ally of Davenant's, had recorded that when that 
 poet was among his familiar friends he was in the 
 habit of appealing to them to know whether he did 
 not write as befitted Shakespeare's son. This was 
 thereupon taken as proving that Davenant himself 
 believed and delighted in the story, for the 
 eighteenth century had forgotten the seventeenth- 
 century custom of calling the pupils or enthusiastic 
 imitators of a poet his sons. When Davenant 
 made this boast to Butler and other friends, 
 he evidently meant no more than to claim 
 such kinship with Shakespeare as Randolph,
 
 Davenant and Cowley. 145 
 
 Herrick, and Cartwright claimed with Ben Jon- 
 son. 
 
 We may therefore dismiss the legend ; but we 
 must remember that it was no legend that young 
 William Davenant was the godson and pet of 
 Shakespeare, the only child, indeed, with whose 
 first buddings of talent the patronage of that great 
 name can be identified. This was his first romantic 
 distinction ; his second was only just a little less 
 distinguished, namely, his association with Fulke 
 Greville, Lord Brooke. He left Lincoln College, 
 Oxford, where he was an undergraduate, and went 
 up to town soon after the death of his parents in 
 1622. His father had wished him to be apprenticed 
 to a City merchant, but the boy successfully avoided 
 this, and secured an easier appointment. He was 
 made page to the Duchess of Richmond, and traces 
 of his stay with this fashionable and superstitious 
 great lady have been discovered in his plays. 
 
 From her service he passed, probably about 
 1624, into that of one of the most interesting minor 
 personages of the day, Lord Brooke. This was a 
 stately old relic from the beautiful days of Elizabeth, 
 the last of all the clan that had sung her praises. 
 He had been the bosom-friend of Sir Philip Sidney ; 
 and he and Sir Edward Dyer, who had himself 
 now been dead for nearly twenty years, had held 
 G. 10
 
 146 Dave nan t and Cowley. 
 
 the pall at the funeral of that beloved and im- 
 mortal poet. In the person of Fulke Greville, poet, 
 statesman, and soldier, and eminent in all three 
 professions, the chivalry of the era of the Maiden 
 Queen found its last harbour. He was the Sir 
 Bedivere of that romantic Court of the virgin Star 
 of the North, who sat, as he himself had said, with 
 
 "The red and white rose quartered in her face." 
 
 That Davenant should be received under the 
 personal patronage of such a man, was tantamount 
 to saying that he was received into the penetralia 
 of what remained of the great romantic school 1 . 
 In his own abstruse, but weighty and dignified 
 poetry, Lord Brooke combined, with the old 
 Sidneian sweetness, an ingenuity of phrase, an 
 intellectual and fanciful, rather than a sensual and 
 imaginative element, which really stepped over the 
 Marinists, and linked the Elizabethans with the 
 classical school. In other words, his poetry 
 strongly affected Davenant, and, through him, the 
 school itself. We shall presently see how important 
 a place the poem of Gondibert holds in the history 
 
 1 So Edward Hyde, afterwards Lord Clarendon, reminds him in 
 the childish verses prefixed to Albovine in 1629 : — 
 
 "Thy wit hath purchas'd such a Patron's name 
 To deck thy front, etc."
 
 Davenant and Cowley. 147 
 
 of this classical transition ; and nothing appears to 
 me to be more plain than the effect which the 
 versification as well as the matter and manner of 
 Lord Brooke's dramatic pamphlets had upon 
 Gondibert, although the latter was written a quarter 
 of a century after his death. 
 
 It is, therefore, not unfitting that we should 
 dwell a little upon Lord Brooke's relations with 
 Davenant, who was his companion until the latter 
 was three-and-twenty years of age. It was at 
 Lord Brooke's house that Davenant began to work 
 seriously at poetic art. I do not think it has been 
 hitherto noticed that one of Davenant's plays, The 
 Cruel Brother, was licensed by the Master of the 
 Revels in January, 1627, that is to say, nearly two 
 years before Lord Brooke was murdered. This 
 terrible event, which would have excited interest 
 as one of the most sensational crimes of the day, 
 even if the victim had been a less illustrious and 
 public personage, took place on the 1st of 
 September, 1628. Lord Brooke, who was seventy- 
 four years of age, lived in considerable state at 
 Brooke House in London, with a little court of 
 retainers around him. He had lately made a will, 
 one of the witnesses to which had been a gentle- 
 man-servant, Ralph Haywood by name, who had 
 waited on him for many years. This man, who 
 
 to — 2
 
 148 Davenant and Cowley. 
 
 expected his Lordship to leave him something, 
 cast his eye over the will, and was enraged to find 
 himself not mentioned in it. This preyed on his 
 mind, and he probably became mad. At all 
 events, on the morning of the 1st of September he 
 went to Lord Brooke's bed-chamber as usual, and 
 wakened him ; nothing seems to have raised the 
 poet's suspicions; he rose, and Haywood helped 
 him to dress. 
 
 Lord Brooke, as an old gentleman of quality, 
 still wore the antiquated costume of the reign of 
 Elizabeth, the trunk-hose and doublet, which had 
 to be fastened together with points when the 
 garments were on. Haywood was stooping behind 
 Lord Brooke, trussing these points, when suddenly, 
 without the least warning, he drew out a knife and 
 stabbed him in the back. At the noise of this, the 
 other servants and attendants, among whom Dave- 
 nant appears to have been one, hurried to the 
 spot. The murderer, still grasping the knife, 
 rushed into another room, locked himself in, and 
 stabbed himself to death. Lord Brooke lingered 
 for a month, and then died, on the 30th of 
 September, and Davenant was once more thrown 
 upon the world. 
 
 He seems to have been taken up at Court, and 
 to have thrown himself upon the stage as a pro-
 
 Davenant and Cowley. 149 
 
 fession. During the next ten years he caused as 
 many of his dramatic productions — tragedies, 
 comedies, and masques — as amounted to ten or 
 twelve to be acted in London, and he grew in the 
 estimation of such influential men as Endymion 
 Porter and Henry Jermyn 1 , who introduced him to 
 the notice of the Queen herself. Although he had 
 published nothing but plays, he was selected, in 
 1637, to succeed Ben Jonson in the distinguished 
 office of poet laureate. Yet these early plays of 
 Davenant's give little excuse for the reputation 
 which their author secured. They are miserable 
 productions, noisy, flashy, insufferably dull. As 
 specimens of versification they are more hopelessly 
 and deliberately faulty than any that had preceded 
 them, and they might almost be suspected of being 
 written to disgust the age with the loose romantic 
 
 1 The dedication of Madagascar, pretty in itself, and throwing a 
 curious side-light on the mysterious dedication of Shakespeare's 
 Sonnets, runs thus : — 
 
 If 
 These Poems live 
 
 May 
 
 Their Memories 
 
 By Whom 
 
 They Were Cherish'd 
 
 END. PORTER, H. JARMYN 
 
 Live With them.
 
 150 Davenant and Cowley 
 
 prosody, and to force the classical distich on the 
 literature of the country. If Lord Brooke read 
 The Cruel Brother or Albovi)ie, as it is possible that 
 he did, there could be nothing in either the one or 
 the other to please his severe and super-exquisite 
 taste, and this may perhaps account for the petu- 
 lance of Davenant in referring to the care with 
 which his master polished and re-polished his own 
 stately periods. 
 
 In the year after his appointment to the 
 Laureateship, in 1638, Davenant collected, for the 
 first time, his scattered copies of verses into a 
 volume, which he called Madagascar, from the 
 opening poem. Endymion Porter, Suckling, Carew, 
 and Habington, that is to say, the group of 
 Marinist wits who specially flourished just then at 
 the Court of Whitehall, ushered in Madagascar 
 with copies of laudatory verses. This piece, which 
 is written in heroic couplets of the old-fashioned 
 kind, is chiefly interesting because it seems to 
 be an imitation of Waller's Battle of the Summer 
 Islands, which had probably been written and 
 circulated in MS. a few months earlier; there 
 seems a direct reference to Waller as one 
 
 " Whose music might incite 
 The Swordfish, Thrasher, and the Whale to fight,''
 
 Davenant and Cowley. 151 
 
 in allusion to the fight with the whales at the end 
 of the Battle of the Summer Islands. For the rest, 
 Madagascar displays all the faults of Davenant's 
 early style — the absolute want of progression, so 
 that he cannot induce the story to move on at all, 
 the uncouth and broken versification, the in- 
 tolerable lack of style 1 . The rest of the poems in 
 the volume are better than this opening piece, but 
 none of them are very good. By far the best 
 is this address to Lady Olivia Porter, his friend's 
 wife, which possesses a certain glow and declama- 
 tory vigour, not quite unworthy of the page of 
 Fulke Greville and godson of Shakespeare : — 
 
 " Go ! hunt the whiter ermine, and present 
 His wealthy skin as this day's tribute sent 
 To my Endymion's Love ; though she be far 
 More gently smooth, more soft than ermines are. 
 
 Go ! climb that rock, and when thou there hast found 
 A star contracted in a diamond, 
 Give it Endymion's Love, whose lasting eyes 
 Outlook the starry jewels of the skies. 
 
 1 Or, as Suckling puts it : — 
 
 " Since the great Lord of wit, 
 Donne, parted hence, no man has ever writ 
 So near him, in his own way."
 
 152 Davenant and Coivley. 
 
 Go ! dive into the southern sea, and when 
 Thou hast found, to trouble the nice sight of men, 
 A swelling pearl, and such whose single worth 
 Boasts all the wonders which the seas bring forth ; 
 Give it Endymion's Love ! whose every tear 
 Would more enrich the skilful jeweller. 
 
 How I command ! how slowly they obey ! 
 The churlish Tartar will not hunt to-day, 
 Nor will that lazy sallow Indian strive 
 To climb the rock, nor that dull negro dive. 
 Thus poets, like to kings, by trust deceived, 
 Give oftener what is heard of than received." 
 
 We may notice throughout this piece the 
 presence of the old broken prosody, although the 
 verse is particularly good for Davenant. There 
 is as yet in his work no trace of intelligent interest 
 in the innovations of Waller. He was the associate 
 of the Whitehall group of poets, whose work was 
 peculiarly unsympathetic to Waller, and which 
 was destined to be swept away by the first tides 
 of the classical innovation. It would, therefore, 
 have been difficult to find a poet apparently less fit 
 than Davenant to take a part in the new school. 
 He was now thirty-three years of age, and his 
 whole life had been passed in intimate companion- 
 ship with one after another of the leaders of the 
 romantic party, while, in his own poetry, he had
 
 Davenant and Cowley. 153 
 
 hitherto shown no sign of dissatisfaction with the 
 practice of his masters and his friends. Yet a 
 totally different future was awaiting him ; his 
 literary life had really not begun, and he would yet 
 take his place as the third of the renovators of 
 English verse, as they stand in Dryden's list — 
 Waller, Denham, Davenant. 
 
 We have little or no record of the process by 
 which Davenant was converted. Politics, di- 
 plomacy, and fighting took up a great part of the 
 next twelve years of his life, and when he re- 
 appears as a poet, in 1650, the transformation 
 is complete. He puts the last finishing touches to 
 the first volume of his epic poem of Gondibert 
 at the Louvre in Paris on the 2nd of January of 
 that year. He then sent it off to press, and him- 
 self proceeded in a vessel, manned by destitute 
 Englishmen in France, to found a new colony for 
 the Queen in Virginia. He set sail from Nor- 
 mandy, but before he left the English Channel his 
 vessel was captured by one of the Parliament 
 cruizers, and Davenant was imprisoned in Cowes 
 Castle, in the Isle of Wight. Meanwhile Gondibert 
 was being printed, and its author, who expected to 
 be hanged from day to day, was just in time to 
 append to it a dejected postscript, dated from his 
 island prison, October 22, 1650, in which he said
 
 154 Davenant and Cozvley. 
 
 that no second volume of the poem must be 
 expected. 
 
 The book issued under these melancholy- 
 auspices was really nothing less than a manifesto 
 from the classical school, on the first occasion 
 which it had found to address the public conjointly. 
 Denham took no part in it, for Denham seems 
 to have had a personal dislike to Davenant. But 
 all the rest were there. The author himself, in 
 a very long and interesting preface to Hobbes, 
 discoursed on heroic poetry in general, and his 
 views of the necessity of a revolution in taste. 
 Our verse, he said, had become lax and trivial, 
 and we needed to be recalled to precision and 
 moral vigour. Hobbes's reply, a very graceful 
 critical essay on the same subject, was printed 
 next; and then followed commendatory copies 
 of verses by Waller and by Cowley. Waller's 
 eulogy was expressed in admirable couplets, polish- 
 ed to the highest pitch, as though on so great 
 an occasion he was bound to show how smooth 
 and dignified the new kind of poetical numbers 
 could be. And thus he sums up the matter of his 
 friend's epic : — 
 
 " Man is thy theme, his virtue or his rage 
 Drawn to the life in each elaborate page;
 
 Davenant and Cozvley. 1 5 5 
 
 Mars nor Bellona are not named here, 
 But such a Gondibert as both might fear. 
 Venus had here, and Hebe, been outshined 
 By thy bright Bertha and thy Rhodolind; 
 Such is thy happy skill and such the odds 
 Between thy worthies and the Grecian gods." 
 
 Cowley, in a less skilful address, dwells upon the 
 novelty of Davenant's design, and compares his 
 zeal in starting to colonize a new world, with his 
 enthusiasm in founding a new school in poetry 1 . 
 It is plain that to all the group in Paris the 
 publication of Gondibert appeared a very important 
 and epoch-making event. 
 
 There is one writer of the nineteenth century 
 whose position in poetical history is so analogous to 
 that of Davenant, that when the idea has once 
 occurred to us, we see the parallel in numberless 
 instances. This is Southey, a learned, ingenious, 
 and fertile writer to whom it is with the greatest 
 hesitation, and more for compliment than merit, 
 that we can allow the title of poet. Like Southey, 
 
 1 " Sure 'twas this noble boldness of thy muse 
 Did thy desire to seek new worlds infuse, 
 And ne'er did Heaven so much a voyage bless, 
 If thou canst plant but there with like success." 
 It seems almost incredible that Newcomb the publisher could 
 complacently print these verses when the "voyage" had just come 
 to so premature and so humiliating a close.
 
 156 Davenant and Cowley. 
 
 Davenant imposed himself upon his own genera- 
 tion by the force of his character, by the abundance 
 of his writings, and by the tact with which he 
 attached himself to that party which was destined 
 to popularity in the immediate future. 
 
 As Southey foresaw that Wordsworth and 
 Coleridge, though in 1800 still the objects of 
 ridicule and dislike, would reign over English 
 poetry in 1830, so Davenant had the wit to see 
 that it was Waller and Denham who in twenty 
 years' time would conquer the field from which 
 they had not as yet begun to dislodge their pre- 
 decessors ; and he came over to their camp with 
 equal frankness and adroitness. Like his later 
 analogue he was supported and encouraged by 
 an extraordinary belief in his own powers and 
 merit. When Southey, in 1837, told the public 
 that hi's " poetical works had obtained a reputation 
 equal to his wishes ; and that he had grounds 
 for hoping that it might not be deemed hereafter 
 more than commensurate with their deserts," we 
 might really be reading one of the clumsy sen- 
 tences in which the author of Gondibert blows his 
 own trumpet. Their strenuous self-praise and 
 dignity of demeanour were a great source of 
 strength alike to Southey and to Davenant, and 
 these personal qualities have so far imposed upon
 
 Davenant and Cowley. 157 
 
 the public, even posthumously, that the true judg- 
 ment has hardly yet been passed on the one or on 
 the other. 
 
 From the point of view of literary history, 
 there must always be room found in our memories 
 for Davenant as for Southey. They were singular- 
 ly interesting figures, they took a very leading 
 part in the intellectual movement of their times, 
 their mental vigour and their desire to excel in 
 verse combined to give them a prominence in 
 current poetry. Moreover, they both contrived 
 to shelter themselves so snugly under the friend- 
 ship of great men, that to this day criticism shrinks 
 from dragging them forth into the glare of noon. 
 After all these years it still seems something like 
 treason to Wordsworth, to Landor, to our vener- 
 able and admired Sir Henry Taylor, to say that 
 Southey was no poet in the true sense. It shows 
 the wonderful force and clearness of the man that 
 we should be so loath to say it. But nothing 
 can be more certain than that it is true, whether it 
 is agreeable to us to say so or not. The vast 
 tree of his poetical works, with its spreading 
 epic branches, its close foliage of tales and ballads, 
 and its parasitical growths of laureate odes and 
 hymns, is dead at the root, and the wind rustles 
 in its dry leaves. It will stand there in the wood,
 
 158 Davenant and Cowley. 
 
 a vast sapless trunk, a mere historic memorial, 
 while every year its sisters of the forest put forth 
 fresh foliage and renew their youth. So stands 
 Davenant in that closer and more fantastic grove 
 of the seventeenth century, one of the largest of the 
 trees in girth and height, but the deadest of them 
 all, with scarcely a cluster of green buds here and 
 there when the sap rises in the woodland. 
 
 To understand the vogue of Gondibert in the 
 middle of the seventeenth century, we have to 
 remind ourselves of the reception which our 
 grandfathers and grandmothers gave to Thalaba 
 and to the Curse of KeJiama. As in the case of 
 those shapeless Indian epics, so in that of Dave- 
 nant's long-winded Lombardian heroic, there were 
 not a few critics and lovers of poetry who refused 
 to bow the knee to a poetical Baal so foreign to 
 the imaginative tradition of the race. But to the 
 public at large the one class of epic and the other 
 were equally attractive for the moment. The 
 strenuous didactic tone of morality, the emphatic 
 wish to improve the condition and raise the 
 dignity of poetry, the gorgeous and exotic imagery 
 with which the improbable, and, indeed, unin- 
 teresting tales were adorned, impressed the ma- 
 jority of readers, and secured the elder, as the 
 later poet, a large audience, recruited even from
 
 Davenant and Cozvley. 159 
 
 the literary class itself. Goudibert was widely 
 read, and still more widely praised. No single 
 poem of the like ambition, and sustained at the 
 like pitch, had been printed in England since 
 Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island, published nearly 
 twenty years before. 
 
 It was widely praised, as I have said, and still 
 more widely discussed. The form in which it was 
 issued, with the polemical prefaces of the author 
 and of Hobbes, and the manifestoes of Waller and 
 Cowley at the head of it, naturally provoked 
 attention. It was at the publication of Goudibert 
 that the leaders of the old school first perceived 
 that a phalanx of young writers was marching to 
 attack them, and hence it was over the body of this 
 poem that the thickest of the fight went on, in the 
 long and hopeless battle of the romantic against 
 the classical influence. The allusions to Goudibert in 
 contemporary literature are very numerous, and I 
 possess in my own collection two extremely rare 
 pamphlets entirely dedicated to attacks upon it 
 in verse. They take a somewhat important place 
 in the history of the movement. The first, pub- 
 lished in 1653, is entitled Certain Verses written 
 by several of the Authors friends, to be reprinted 
 with the second edition of Goudibert. The verses 
 are certainly by four several hands ; I believe that
 
 160 Davenant and Cowley. 
 
 I detect Denham, Cleveland, the younger Donne, 
 and Jasper Mayne as the wicked anonymous 
 quartet 1 . 
 
 Like most satiric fooling, much of the stinging 
 wit has evaporated out of the rhymes ; they are 
 tolerably flat now. But plainly they were cal- 
 culated to hurt the sensitive and conceited Dave- 
 nant, who is mercilessly chaffed, under the pseudo- 
 nym of Dafne, about his name, his personal 
 appearance, his misfortunes as a prisoner, his 
 supposed cowardice in battle, and, a little more 
 legitimately, about the tediousness of his poetry. 
 One satirist makes him describe himself: — 
 
 " I am old Davenant 
 With my fustian quill, 
 Though skill I have not, 
 I must be writing still 
 On Gondibert .... 
 Waller and Cowley, 
 'Tis true, have praised my book, 
 But how untruly 
 All they that read may look ; 
 Nor can old Hobbes defend me." 
 
 1 After forming this conjecture, I discovered, in a copy of the 
 1653 pamphlet in the library of Yale College, Connecticut, a MS. 
 note in writing of the end of the seventeenth century suggesting that 
 the four authors were Denham, the younger Donne, Sir Allen 
 Broderick and William Crofts.
 
 Davenant and Cowley. 161 
 
 Another undertakes, in triplets that are sometimes 
 smart, to give a comic summary of the famous 
 epic; another parodies the lumbering quatrains, 
 with their affected new coinages, abstersive, etJurick, 
 and the like. One bard picks out the following 
 bundle of adjectives, which he says will serve for 
 any substantive under any circumstances, and he 
 arranges them in a rude elegiac couplet : — 
 
 " Nice, wise, important, eager, grave, busy, recorded, 
 Ancient, abstersive, Roman, experienc'd, shy." 
 
 A still rarer pamphlet, The Incomparable Poem 
 Gondibert vindicated from the Wit Combats of 
 Four Esquires was published in 1655. This is so 
 rare that I do not happen to have met with any 
 copy but the one which I possess. It has far less 
 literary merit than the former, of which it is a 
 deliberate and painstaking imitation. Each piece 
 contained in the first collection is imitated in the 
 second in exactly the same metre. The writer I 
 take to be the curious poetaster Wild, the author 
 of the Iter Boreale. The principal interest it 
 possesses, beyond certain biographical allusions 
 into which it is needless to enter now, is the 
 attitude it takes with regard to the classical school. 
 It dwells on the fact that Denham and young 
 Donne have no right to be laughing at Davenant, 
 G. 11
 
 162 Davenant and Cowley. 
 
 for that they and he, and Waller and Cowley as 
 well, are all tarred with the same brush 1 , and 
 together form a group of pestilent writers who are 
 seeking to overthrow the tradition of the national 
 poetry. To such a spreading plant the seed 
 that Waller sowed had grown by the year 1655. 
 
 We must, however, return to Gondibert. To 
 give any account of the story is beyond my power, 
 for though I have read it through with more care 
 than I can recommend to any of my own readers, 
 the tenour of the plot has escaped me. I believe 
 that there is a consecutive story, but it has not 
 been vouchsafed to me to unravel its mystery. 
 There is an incomparable Lombard hero, Gondi- 
 bert ; an old king, Aribert ; and his renowned 
 daughter, Rhodolind. The virtuous Prince Gondi- 
 bert meets in combat a Prince Oswald, no less 
 virtuous than he. A certain Laura, when she sees 
 Oswald slain, finds that her blood flies back into 
 her liver, and she dies. The renowned Rhodolind 
 would love Gondibert, and yet would not, and is so 
 long making up her mind that he loves Berthe. 
 
 1 "You think they feign, that is, they lie, 
 
 That speak of Gondibert so high ; 
 If that their verses were much taller, 
 Waller hath since out-Gonded Waller," 
 
 that is to say, no doubt, in the pompous rhetoric of his " Panegyric 
 
 on Oliver Cromwell" in 1653.
 
 Davenant and Cowley. 163 
 
 There are also "busy Goltho" and "wise Astragon," 
 and " distempered Ulfinere," to discover whose 
 relation to the pre-named characters would puzzle 
 a professional interpreter of conundrums. The 
 poem, in short, is a fiasco, as a narrative poem 
 or epic ; its only merit consists in its episodes, 
 and in the sententious vigour of single lines. 
 One of the most graceful episodes, and one which 
 does most credit to Davenant's versification, is that 
 of the hunted stag who takes to the water : — 
 
 " This frail relief was like short gales of breath 
 Which oft at sea a long dead calm prepare ; 
 Or like our curtains drawn at point of death, 
 When all our lungs are spent to give us air. 
 
 For on the shore the hunters him attend ; 
 
 And whilst the chace grew warm as is the day 
 (Which now from the hot zenith does descend) 
 
 He is imbos'd, and weary'd to a bay. 
 
 The jewel, Life, he must surrender here ; 
 
 Which the world's mistress, Nature, does not give, 
 But like dropp'd favours suffers us to weare, 
 
 Such as by which pleas'd lovers think they live. 
 
 Yet life he so esteems, that he allows 
 
 It all defence his force and rage can make ; 
 
 And to the Regian race such fury shows 
 
 As their last blood some unreveng'd forsake. 
 
 II — 2
 
 164 Davcnant and Cowley. 
 
 But now the Monarch Murderer comes in, 
 
 Destructive man ! whom Nature would not arm, 
 
 As when in madness mischief is foreseen 
 We leave it weaponless for fear of harm. 
 
 For she defenceless made him that he might 
 Less readily offend ; but Art arms all, 
 
 From single strife makes us in numbers fight ; 
 And by such art this royal stag did fall. 
 
 Now weeps till grief does even his murd'rers pierce,— 
 Grief which so nobly through his anger strove, 
 
 That it deserved the dignity of verse, 
 
 And had it words as humanly would move. 
 
 Thrice from the ground his vanquished head he rear'd, 
 And with last looks his forest-walks did view: 
 
 Where sixty summers he had rul'd the herd, 
 And where sharp dittany now vainly grew, 
 
 Whose hoary leaves no more his wounds shall heal ; 
 
 For with a sigh (a blast of all his breath) 
 That viewless thing call'd Life, did from him steal; 
 
 And with their bugle horns they wind his death. 
 
 It will be noticed that the stanza in which 
 Gondibert is composed is the four-line heroic 
 stanza with alternate rhymes which Gray made so 
 popular by his Elegy in a Country Churchyard. 
 The history of this stanza is somewhat interesting. 
 It was first used for a poem of considerable length
 
 Davenant and Cowley. 165 
 
 by Sir John Davies, an Elizabethan who possessed 
 more than any of his fellows the instinct of the 
 classical school. His Nosce Teipsum, a long 
 didactic poem full of thought and dignified rhe- 
 toric, was admired by reading men all through the 
 eighteenth century. When I had to examine the 
 commonplace-books of Gray, preserved at Pem- 
 broke College, Cambridge, I found that he had 
 been a minute student of the Nosce Teipsum, and 
 that he had copied many of its sections. Gondibert 
 was the next lengthy essay in the same style 1 ; 
 Hobbes immediately adopted it for his translation 
 of Homer 2 , and this was followed a dozen years 
 later by Dryden's Annus Mirabilis. It was not 
 again employed, so far as I remember, all through 
 the Restoration or the Augustan age nor again 
 until, in 1743, the Earl of Chesterfield brought out 
 the posthumous Love Elegies of his young cousin 
 Hammond, which were almost entirely couched 
 in these solemn quatrains. 
 
 1 Davenant's attention may possibly have been called to the 
 metre from the fact that Robert Ellice had used it in his prefatory 
 verses to Albovine in 1629. 
 
 2 This is how Hobbes opens his Iliad: — 
 
 "O Goddess, sing what woe the discontent 
 
 Of Thetis' son brought to the Greeks, what souls 
 Of heroes down to Erebus it sent, 
 
 Leaving their bodies unto dogs and fowls."
 
 1 66 Davenant and Cowley. 
 
 It is believed that the printing of Hammond's 
 verses incited Gray to begin his Churchyard Elegy, 
 and to make the four-line stanza the basis of most 
 of his harmonies. But it has not been much used 
 since the end of last century, in spite of Gray's 
 success. The fact is that, while it undoubtedly is 
 the most sonorous and dignified measure in English 
 verse, its incapacity for passion, even for the pas- 
 sion of grief, narrows the ground within which it 
 can be employed. Of the three long seventeenth- 
 century poems which I have mentioned as written 
 in it, there is not one that is not too copious and 
 long-winded for a modern reader. Still it is a 
 curious thing that so noble a stanza should be 
 abandoned altogether, and a young poet who 
 should now employ it to embody a series of grave 
 and philosophical ideas would be rewarded by 
 conveying a sense of novelty in form. Gondibert, 
 which, to the monotony of this four-line stanza, 
 adds a turgid weight, a plethora of thought and 
 allusion, copied from Lord Brooke, belongs without 
 doubt to the one class of literature which Voltaire 
 said had no right to exist, the tiresome class. 
 And yet there were hundreds of readers in its own 
 age who did not find it dull 1 . 
 
 1 It even superseded, for the moment, the French romances which 
 were the darling reading of the ladies. A contemporary ballad says,
 
 Davenant and Cowley. 167 
 
 Davenant's life was crowded with incidents 
 during the months that succeeded the publication 
 of his epic. He was not hanged at Cowes Castle, 
 as he feared that he should be, but he was removed 
 to the Tower of London, which gave him very- 
 little solace in his terrors. He was, in fact, 
 delivered over to be tried by a court of high com- 
 mission, which was almost tantamount to sending 
 him straight to the scaffold. We learn, however, 
 from his friend Aubrey, that two aldermen of York, 
 to whom he had been very kind when they were 
 prisoners, applied on his behalf to a person of in- 
 fluence with Cromwell, and that his life was saved 
 in this way. What makes this legend extremely 
 pleasant and interesting is that tradition confidently 
 declares the person through whose final interposi- 
 tion Davenant's life was given him to have been 
 Milton, and adds that the Royalist writer recollected 
 this at the Restoration, and pleaded successfully 
 for the safety of the great Puritan. This is one of 
 those stories which are so charming in themselves, 
 
 addressing Gondibert : — 
 
 "Thou art the public Icon moritm, 
 The ladies lay the book before 'em, 
 And Polexandcr 's not o' the quorum. 
 
 Before they treat a Lord, a part 
 Of thee is read or got by heart ; 
 They're catechised in Gondibert."
 
 1 68 Davenant and Cowley. 
 
 and so flattering to the better instincts of human 
 nature, that we do not desire to pry too minutely 
 into the evidence upon which they are based. 
 Davenant languished in the Tower of London for 
 two years, and then was allowed quietly to emerge 
 and live at peace. 
 
 A final impetus was given by Davenant to the 
 classical manner in poetry in his attempts to amuse 
 the fashionables with dramatic pastimes before the 
 Restoration came about. The operas and rhymed 
 tragedies cast a pale shadow before them in the 
 shape of The Entertainment at Rutland House in 
 1656. This was a very dreary and timid succession 
 of soliloquies in prose 1 , with, however, a prologue 
 and an epilogue in the heroic couplet, neither of 
 which show any great aptitude for distich. But in 
 September of the same year Davenant printed the 
 long opera of The Siege of Rhodes, quite a volume 
 in itself, most of the recitative of which is written 
 in heroic couplet. The best of it has by this time 
 become so like Waller's verse as to be undistinguish- 
 able from it. The following passage from The 
 Siege of Rhodes is typical of the rest, and con- 
 tains no single tone or ring of the versification 
 
 1 The Entertainment is really a polemical treatise, in dialogue 
 form, on behalf of the drama. It is difficult to know what Davenant 
 meant by styling it an "opera."
 
 Davenant and Cowley. 169 
 
 which Davenant used during his youth or middle 
 age:— 
 
 "Pale show those crescents to our bloody cross; 
 Sink not the western kingdoms in our loss ? 
 Will not the Austrian eagle moult her wings, 
 That long have hovered o'er the Gallic kings? 
 Whose lilies too will wither when we fade, 
 And the English lion sink into a shade. 
 Thou see'st not, whilst so young and guiltless too, 
 That Kings mean seldom what their statesmen do ; 
 Who measure not the compass of a crown 
 To fit the head that wears it, but their own ; 
 Still hindering peace, because they stewards are, 
 Without account, to that wild spender, war." 
 
 This verse, as I have said, might just as well be 
 Waller's as Davenant's. The note of individuality 
 is removed from it. And this leads me to speak 
 of one strange and distressing characteristic of 
 the classical school in poetry, its horror of the 
 personal, the individual accent. Among the ro- 
 mantic poets of every age, the great aim has been 
 the expression of personal conviction, of personal 
 experience. We know the great poets by their 
 phrases. For instance, who but Spenser would 
 have written : — 
 
 " So fair and fresh that Lady shpwed herself in sight ;"
 
 170 Davenant and Cowley 
 
 who but Shakespeare : — 
 
 " Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May ; " 
 and who but Milton : — 
 
 " Busiris and his Memphian chivalry"? 
 
 These instances I give at random, the memory 
 of each of my readers will recall others at least as 
 cogent. From each of these it is not too fanciful 
 to say that we could build up some sort of theory 
 of the poetic character of the man, and catch an 
 intuition of Spenser's long-drawn, perfumed sweet- 
 ness, of the versatility and manly tenderness of 
 Shakespeare, of Milton's voluble grandeur. But it 
 would not be possible, or at least if it be possible it 
 is so because the character of a great man will 
 assert itself, to detect this individuality in any 
 single line of the classical poets from Waller to 
 Darwin. With them the effort was towards a com- 
 posite thing, a vehicle to be used by all scholars 
 who were also artists in verse, and this thing which 
 they combined to polish and to refine was the 
 iambic distich. The poet was no longer Teucer, 
 forging his own yew-tree shafts, and sending them 
 whither he would, but merely one member of a 
 regiment of archers, always sharpening their 
 burning arrows, but acting in concert, and in 
 obedience to certain set rules of warfare.
 
 Davenant and Cowley. 1 7 1 
 
 I proposed, however, at the outset of this 
 chapter, to devote it to Cowley as well as to 
 Davenant ; and already three-fourths of my space 
 has been given to the latter. I am the less con- 
 cerned at this, partly because I have already, in 
 my volume of Seventeenth Century Studies, given a 
 very minute examination to the life and writings 
 of Cowley, and partly because the position he 
 holds in the history of the classical movement is 
 much less influential than that of Davenant. He 
 was, no doubt, a poet of a far higher class than 
 Davenant, the only poet, indeed, of very high 
 native merit between the romantic school and 
 Dryden, but his allegiance to the classical in- 
 novators was only half-hearted. He was their 
 friend and companion, he was associated with 
 them in political ambition and in the adversity of 
 exile, and he was too vivid, too modern, not to be 
 interested by what they were doing and to be 
 affected by it. But while Waller, Denham, Dave- 
 nant, and, by-and-by, such followers as Lower, 
 Katharine Philips, and Lord Orrery, fade into one 
 entity, and are, as we have seen, almost un- 
 distinguishable, Cowley was much too strong to 
 relinquish his individuality even for the sake of 
 endowing his country with a school of correct 
 writers.
 
 i 7 2 Davenant and Cowley. 
 
 Cowley, like Davenant, had begun to write 
 among the romantic poets. He was a precocious 
 Cambridge verseman, the author of three successful 
 volumes of poetry before he ceased to be an under- 
 graduate, and the influences of the university clung 
 to him strongly through life. What those in- 
 fluences were in the second quarter of the seven- 
 teenth century we may see in such highly-coloured, 
 elaborate, and hyper-intellectual poems as the 
 Psyche of Joseph Beaumont and the Psychozoia of 
 Henry More, distinguished members of the uni- 
 versity during Cowley's undergraduate days. There 
 was an attempt made at Cambridge to sanctify 
 the rainbow fancies of the Marinist school by 
 hallowing them to sacred uses. Crashaw did this 
 in one way, and Milton, in his Nativity Ode, in 
 another, — the thing was a Cambridge fashion 1 . 
 They were very pious, all these youths, very earnest, 
 glowing and ingenious, and their work has been 
 too hastily confounded with that of the cavalier 
 song-writers and courtier forgers of concetti. 
 
 From this interesting school of Cambridge 
 
 1 " Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute, 
 
 Tempered to th' oaten flute." 
 
 See. also, the lines in which Dr Lany, Master of Pembroke, is 
 congratulated by Crashaw on being surrounded by "a Pierian flock" 
 of pious young poets, in 1631.
 
 Davenant a7td Cowley. 173 
 
 writers, Cowley emerged, the last and the most 
 exhausted of them all. It seemed as if all the 
 azure and the scarlet and the amber had been 
 squandered before he appeared ; and his conceits, — 
 if it be not too much of a conceit to say so, — look 
 as if they had been drawn, but never filled up in 
 colour. With him, rhetoric takes the place of a 
 coloured fancy, and the development of rhetoric in 
 his verse was what drew him towards Waller, 
 whose work was all in the direction of oratorical 
 effect. I am inclined to think that Cowley was 
 born with gifts in the way of poetic rhetoric which 
 have scarcely been excelled. He is so extremely 
 unequal that he almost eludes criticism, but at his 
 very best he possesses, more perhaps than any 
 other English writer, that peculiar Latin magni- 
 ficence of phrase which is so characteristic of Victor 
 Hugo. I am ready to withdraw the suggestion the 
 moment that I have made it, so absurd does it 
 seem to compare the author of Lcs CJidtiments 
 with the author of Davideis. But if I am distinctly 
 understood to mean no more than this, that in the 
 rare passages where Cowley excells, it is with a 
 tendency towards the excellence so general in 
 Victor Hugo, I wish to retain the criticism. To 
 my ear, the close of the elegy on Cowl e y , which I 
 will now read, has this quality of Hugo; the
 
 i 74 Davenant and Cowley. 
 
 passage is, moreover, valuable in our present inquiry 
 as showing to how great an extent Cowley, when 
 he chose, and as early as 1650, conformed to 
 Wallers new rules for the conduct of the heroic 
 couplet : — 
 
 "Pardon, my Mother Church 1 , if I consent, 
 That a?igcls led him when from thee he went ; 
 For even in error sure no danger is 
 When join'd with so much piety as his. 
 Ah, mighty God, with shame I speak't, and grief, 
 Ah that our greatest faults were in belief I 
 And our weak reason were ev'n weaker yet, 
 Rather than thus our wills too strong for it. 
 His faith perhaps in some nice tenets might 
 Be wrong; his life, I'm sure, was in the right. 
 And I myself a Catholic will be, 
 So far, at least, great Saint, to pray to thee. 
 Hail, Bard triumphant! and some care bestow 
 On us, the Poets Militant below ! 
 Oppos'd by our old enemy, adverse Chance, 
 Attack'd by Envy, and by Ignorance, 
 Enchain'd by Beauty, tortur'd by Desires, 
 Expos'd by Tyrant-Love to savage beasts and fires. 
 Thou from low earth in nobler flames didst rise, 
 And like Elijah, mount alive the skies, 
 
 1 I leave the italics as Cowley printed them, for I believe that 
 they represent his own view of the points where stress and emphasis 
 should be laid by the reader.
 
 Dave riant and Cowley. 1 75 
 
 JSliska-like (but with a wish much less. 
 
 More fit thy greatness, and my littleness) 
 
 Lo here I beg, (I whom thou once didst prove 
 
 So humble to esteem, so good to love), 
 
 Not that thy spirit might on me doubled be, 
 
 I ask but half thy mighty spirit for me, 
 
 And when my Muse soars with so strong a wing, 
 
 'Twill learn of things divine, and first of Thee to sing." 
 
 This is very tender and beautiful, I think ; 
 quite an oasis of real literature to cheer us in 
 our journey through the wilderness. But the 
 individuality of Cowley is too strong in this to 
 make it a good example of classical writing. The 
 principal contribution which he made to the new 
 order of style was a sacred epic, on the history 
 of David, which I suspect of being as little read in 
 the present day as any epic poem in existence. It 
 does not, to be frank, invite perusal, although it 
 would not be Cowley's if it did not contain a great 
 many oddities and a certain number of beauties. 
 Its principal interest is that it is the earliest 
 example of a sustained narrative poem in the new 
 distich, and it is quite plain that if Cowley had 
 only possessed a little more genius and Milton 
 a little less, there would have been the greatest 
 possible chance that the couplet would have be- 
 come the normal epic form with us, as it had
 
 176 Davenant and Cowley. 
 
 become with the French. Fortunately Milton 
 showed us a better way. We may recollect any 
 passage of Paradise Regained, and compare it with 
 the following fragment from Cowley's Davideis. 
 
 " Whilst thus his wrath with threats the tyrant fed, 
 The threatned youth slept fearless on his bed ; 
 Sleep on, rest quiet as thy conscience take, 
 For though thou sleep' st thy self, thy God's awake ! 
 Above the subtle foldings of the sky, 
 Above the well-set orbs' soft harmony, 
 Above those petty lamps that gild the night, 
 There is a place o'erflown with hallowed light, 
 Where Heaven, as if it left it self behind, 
 Is stretcht out far, nor its own bounds can find : 
 Here peacefid flames swell up the sacred place, 
 Nor can contain themselves in th' endless space. 
 For there no twilight of the sun's dull ray, 
 Glimmers upon the pure and native day; 
 No pale-fac'd moon does in stol'n beams appear, 
 Or with dim taper scatters darkness there; 
 On no smooth sphere the restless seasons slide, 
 No circling motion doth swift time divide ; 
 Nothing is there To come, and nothing Past, 
 But an eternal Now does always last. 
 There sits th' Almighty, First of all, and End, 
 Whom nothing but Himself can comprehend ; 
 Who with his word commanded all to be, 
 And all obey'd him, for that word was He.
 
 Davenant and Cowley. 177 
 
 While examining Cowley's position in the 
 poetic literature of the age, we are struck by the 
 fact that he was with the classicists, yet not of 
 them. Their relations were with antiquity through 
 France, his with antiquity through Spain. I am not 
 certain that I perceive in his writings any direct 
 imitation of Spanish literature, but he has the 
 cultismo, the desire to speak politely and artificially, 
 which the critics of the age rightly identified with 
 the poets of Madrid. His great influence, his great 
 prestige, clashed with those of Waller, and after 
 having at least as much to do with forming 
 Dryden's style as Waller had, Cowley sank into 
 the second rank. Pope, while bending respectfully 
 to Waller and Denham, could sneer at Cowley 1 , 
 and treat him as a dethroned monarch of litera- 
 ture. 
 
 But a curious thing happened. When the 
 prestige of Pope himself was waning at last, and 
 when Waller began to fade back into disrepute, 
 the prosody of Cowley revived once more, and in 
 the hands of Gray became the main poetic in- 
 
 1 Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet 
 
 His Moral pleases, not his pointed wit; 
 Forgot his epic, nay Pindaric art, 
 But still I love the language of his heart. 
 Pope: Imitations of Horace. Bk. ii. Epis. i. 1 741. 
 G. 12
 
 1 78 Davenant and Cowley 
 
 fluence of the middle of the eighteenth century. 
 It was the echo of Cowley's harmonies that broke 
 the monotonous twanging of the distich, and in 
 Shelley, in Coleridge, in the fluent and ingenious 
 inventions of Mr Swinburne, we still hear varia- 
 tions upon that broken lyrical music, while the 
 brilliant couplet that Waller was so assiduous in 
 introducing has quite passed away out of our 
 living literature.
 
 THE REACTION. 
 
 1 2 — 2
 
 THE REACTION. 
 
 The student who considers the luxuriance of 
 English lyrical and descriptive poetry in the early 
 part of the seventeenth century finds himself easily 
 amazed at the suddenness of the decline into the 
 prosaic school. The enclosure of British verse, 
 soon after the death of Shakespeare, was less like a 
 rich and crowded garden of the usual sort than like 
 the famous parterre of " Mistress Mary, all con- 
 trary," in which, as we know, there were "silver bells 
 and cockle-shells and pretty maids all of a row." 
 It was a mixture, as mad as any which the human 
 mind is able to conceive, of real ornament and 
 fictitious, the fresh rose-bud and the painted rose 
 and the mock-rose made of pink paper, all planted 
 and blowing side by side. Now throughout the 
 history of the world it is to be noted that literature 
 of this sort, — to which we give the general title 
 of Alexandrian, because in the eclipse of Greece 
 it flourished at Alexandria, — needs but a breath to 
 disappear. When it is most gay and floribund,
 
 [82 The Reaction. 
 
 it is so close to the borders of dissolution, that 
 the passage of a cloud over its surface, a change in 
 the direction of the wind, is sufficient to destroy it. 
 Its prosperity is only partially real. It contains 
 the elements of beauty, fragrance, brightness, but 
 the absence of literary sincerity is fatal to its 
 permanence. I speak here of this sort of hybrid 
 literature in general, whether we meet with it in 
 Egypt or in Spain, in the France of the Pleiade 
 or in the England of the disciples of Donne ; but in 
 the latter instance everything conspired to make 
 the process of decay particularly irresistible and 
 complete. 
 
 Hence we have hitherto noted no opposition to 
 the new forms of poetical writing. So far as we 
 have yet proceeded it was indeed quite inconsider- 
 able. Waller put out his discovery, his fascinating 
 new form, and the young poets only needed to 
 perceive it, to understand what he was talking 
 about, to follow him like sheep 1 . He piped his 
 
 1 "Such tributes are, like tenures, only fit 
 
 To show from whom we hold our right to wit," 
 
 says Aphara Behn, in reference to the imitations of Waller which 
 were becoming universal. In another place, absolutely intoxicated 
 with the new form of writing, she declares, addressing Waller: — 
 
 "Long did the untuned world in ignorance stray, 
 Producing nothing that was great or gay, 
 Till taught by thee the true poetic way."
 
 The Reaction. iS 
 
 3 
 
 shrill monotonous treble, like the man of Hamelin, 
 and the streets of the Marinists were emptied. 
 It has, at all events, up to this moment seemed 
 desirable to represent him as doing this. His 
 heterodoxy so rapidly and so smoothly became 
 orthodoxy that it appeared to be most accurate 
 to give an impression of the movement, as of a 
 stream, which, once having filtered through the 
 dam, simply gains in volume as it proceeds, and 
 presently carries all before it. 
 
 Yet as a matter of fact, to pursue our simile, 
 a good deal of water remained for a long time 
 in the old channel, and some spurted with ve- 
 hemence in an independent direction, and tried 
 to create a new diversion for itself. It is time 
 that we should pause and consider these two classes 
 of reaction, active and passive, neither of which 
 was capable of doing more than diversify the 
 history of the period, since neither can be said 
 to have delayed the triumph of the classical forms 
 by a single day. First, then, we may discuss the 
 recusants who saw that a change in the style of 
 English poetry was needed, but who were not 
 content to make that change in the mode which 
 Waller and Denham indicated. The aim of these 
 writers was to restore poetry to a rugged English 
 force, to dismiss the elegancies of a Gallic style,
 
 1 84 The Reaction. 
 
 and to strengthen verse without abandoning the 
 overflow. 
 
 The aim so laid down, more or less consciously, 
 by Cleveland first and then by Wild, was one with 
 which it is possible for a modern critic to sym- 
 pathize. It was, in fact, an admirable notion born 
 out of due time, and one which, if it could have 
 been carried out, might have obviated all succeed- 
 ing revolutions in poetic taste. A strong romantic 
 poetry, freed from the tawdry ornament of the 
 Marinists, was a middle course between Donne 
 and Waller, which it would have been a happy 
 thing if Cleveland could have seen his way to 
 create. But the instinct of the people was against 
 it in the middle of the seventeenth century. There 
 was a craving after elegance, directness, lucidity, 
 and to secure these qualities the public was pre- 
 pared to surrender everything else without a sigh. 
 
 Neither Cleveland nor Wild has contrived to 
 keep a place for himself in the history of English 
 literature. I do not know any book on poetry, 
 however detailed, which gives even the slightest 
 notice of the latter. Cleveland has succeeded, 
 chiefly on the tradition that he pointed the way to 
 Hudibras, in keeping a very shadowy hold upon 
 students. But from the historian of style he claims 
 a great deal more than this. A bitter and deter-
 
 The Reaction. 185 
 
 mined foe to Marinism in his mature years, he 
 began life as a Marinist of the most frantic species. 
 The rage for ingenious similes, for twisted images 
 of the fancy, was perhaps never carried to so 
 monstrous an excess in any language as it is in 
 Cleveland's scarcely intelligible love-poems, the 
 Senses' Festival and the Fuscara 1 . Having sown 
 his poetical wild oats in this way, at Cambridge, 
 where, we are told, his verses were voted too 
 extravagant even at that sanctum and high altar of 
 extravagance, he turned satirist, and as a waspish 
 cavalier in the train of Charles, he did his best 
 to madden the roundheads with rough metrical 
 
 1 Thus, in Fuscara, he plays upon the notion that a bee has been 
 settling on his mistress's hand : — 
 
 "He perches now upon her wrist, 
 A proper hawk for such a fist, 
 Making that flesh his bill of fare, 
 Which hungry cannibals would spare, 
 Where lilies in a lovely brown 
 Inoculate carnation ; " 
 (that is to say, the wrist is freckled) 
 
 " He[r] argent skin with or so streamed 
 A% if the milky way were creamed," 
 (by her small, invisible golden hairs) ; 
 
 "From hence he to the wood-bine bends 
 That quivers at her finger-ends, 
 That run division on the tree 
 Like a thick-branching pedigree," 
 and so on.
 
 1 86 The Reaction. 
 
 tirades, until, in 1655, he was seized at Norwich, 
 and crushed, as a wasp is crushed. 
 
 Cleveland betrays a curious sense of his own 
 failure as a poet ; he is on the borderland of 
 distinction, but he never quite crosses it. He 
 would fain have made his gift of real service to the 
 State, as young fellows to this day protest about 
 " the might of poesy." But he was conscious all 
 the time that he was not a force. He says : — 
 " O that I could but vote myself a poet ! 
 Or had the legislative knack to do it ! 
 Or like the doctors militant, could get 
 Dubbed at adventurers' Verser Bannaret ' ! " 
 
 When we see him cheering Prince Rupert on 
 to slaughter, or rating the rebel Scots like a fish- 
 wife, or pouring out a soldierly extravagance of 
 grief in Charles Spikc7iard, we think of the siege 
 of Newark, the desperate flight from Norwich, and 
 we sigh to think of the misfortunes of the King's 
 too-eager Verser Bannaret. 
 
 Cleveland was a disappointment in politics, in 
 sword-craft, and even in poetry. But he had an 
 inkling of several remarkable things. Not only 
 did he lead the way for Hudibras, about which 
 much might be said if we were here considering 
 the history of humoristic literature in England, but 
 
 1 Rupcrlismus, i — 4.
 
 The Reaction. 
 
 he saw various truths with regard to metre and 
 rhythm which had not been perceived by any 
 writer before him. One of the chief of these was 
 the great variety of cadence which was possible 
 in English verse. Up to his time and to that of 
 Waller, the triple or anapaestic cadence, which 
 is now so familiar to us, and which the facilities 
 of its use have even vulgarized, had not been 
 used since the pre- Chaucerian epoch. The great 
 Elizabethan poets had achieved their marvellous 
 effects without its ever occurring to them that they 
 had at their elbow a dancing or lilting cadence 
 which the very ballads of the peasantry might 
 have revealed to them. It is in fact exactly when 
 they abandoned themselves to the loose ballad- 
 rhythms that they approached it nearest. Shake- 
 speare, of course, in such songs as " Come away, 
 come away, Death!" glides into the triple cadence, 
 and so, as Mr Coventry Patmore points out, does 
 the early Elizabethan Phaer, in his version of the 
 sEneid. I have remarked another instance in a 
 ballad of Bishop Corbet's. But these felicities 
 were the result either of accident, or, in the case of 
 Shakespeare, for instance, of an art above artifice. 
 There are but few instances of the deliberate use 
 of English dactyls or anapaests until the period we 
 are examinine:.
 
 188 The Reaction. 
 
 It would be a very remarkable thing if we 
 should discover that we owe not merely our 
 serried couplet without overflow, but our dancing 
 and tripping cadence also to Waller. It would 
 point him out to us as one of the most vivid 
 metrical inventors in our literature; and I do 
 not think we can deny him this second glory 
 in addition to the first. In his 1645 volume of 
 Poems there is a copy of verses called CJdoris and 
 Hilas, which is written in faltering, but unmis- 
 takable dactyls. Waller long afterwards said that 
 it was composed to imitate the motion of a sara- 
 band. Here are certain portions of it, those in 
 which the triple cadence is most audible : — 
 
 " Hilas, O Hilas, why sit we mute, 
 
 Now that each bird saluteth the Spring; 
 Wind up the slackened strings of thy lute, 
 Never can'st thou want matter to sing ! 
 * * % * * * * 
 Sweetest, you know, the sweetest of things 
 Of various flowers the bees do compose, 
 Yet no particular taste it brings 
 Of violet, woodbine, pink or rose." 
 
 These stanzas, as our ear will instruct us, are built 
 up on three beats and a pause, 
 
 "Wind up the | slackened | strings of thy | lute"
 
 The Reaction. 189 
 
 exactly on the plan, though not with the agility 
 and skill, of the cadences in Moore's Lalla Rookh: — 
 
 "Who has not | heard of the | vale of Cash [ mere?" 
 
 And this was a discovery, which, if we may attri- 
 bute it to Waller, raises him to the dignity of 
 a poetical Columbus. But this is in itself a 
 dubious and apparently accidental thing ; Waller 
 attained it almost by chance, through his surprising 
 quickness of ear in imitation, but he does not seem 
 to have known what he had found, nor to have 
 tried to repeat his experiment. Cleveland, on the 
 other hand, deliberately studied, not once, but 
 repeatedly, dactylic effects of a really very delicate 
 kind. The first edition pf Cleveland's Poems 
 was published in 1647; but on this we can build 
 no theory of Waller's priority of composition. 
 Born eight years earlier than Cleveland, Waller is 
 likely to have been first in the field. But as 
 Cleveland's lyrical poems are, I believe, practically 
 unknown even to scholars, and as this point of the 
 introduction of the triple cadence is one of the 
 greatest interest, I will quote one or two examples. 
 In a strange, half-mad, indecorous lyric called 
 Mark Anthony, I find these lines : — 
 
 "When as the nightingale chanted her vespers, 
 And the wild forester crouched on the ground,
 
 190 The Reaction. 
 
 Venus invited me in th' evening whispers 
 Unto a fragrant field with roses crowned." 
 
 This drags a little ; but the intention is incontest- 
 able. This is better: — 
 
 " Mystical grammar of amorous glances, 
 Feeling of pulses, the physic of love, 
 Rhetorical courtings, and musical dances, 
 Numb'ring of kisses arithmetic prove." 
 
 Another poem, called Square-Cap, evidently written 
 at Cambridge in the author's undergraduate days, 
 gives us a totally distinct variety of the anapaestic 
 cadence : — 
 
 " Come hither Apollo's bouncing girl, 
 
 And in a whole Hfppocrene of Sherry, 
 Let's drink a round till our brains do whirl, 
 
 Tuning our pipes to make ourselves merry; 
 A Cambridge lass, Venus-like, born of the froth 
 Of an old half-filled jug of barley-broth, 
 
 She, she is my mistress, her suitors are many, 
 But she'll have a square-cap, if e'er she have any." 
 
 There is quite a ring of John Byrom or of 
 Shenstone in these last lines, the precursors of so 
 much that has pleased the ears of the eighteenth 
 and nineteenth centuries 1 . 
 
 1 The cantering measure, in its prettiest form, however, first 
 appears in our literature in one of the "terrestrial hymns and carnal
 
 The Reaction. 191 
 
 I have permitted myself to dwell a little on 
 these characteristics of Cleveland, although the 
 great movement which we are considering swept 
 by him. It swept still more impetuously past 
 another man, who, being born a generation later, 
 attempted to move the body of English poetry 
 when it had gained a still greater impetus in the 
 classical direction. Of Dr Robert Wild, author of 
 the Iter Boreale, extremely little is known. He 
 was a Nonconformist divine, and a free lance in 
 politics, ready to attack either side on a slight 
 provocation. Although in the nature of his talent 
 he closely resembled Cleveland, they Were at the 
 extreme ends of opposite camps, and Wild's chief 
 occupation was the defence of the Presbyterians, as 
 it was Cleveland's chief delight to attack them. 
 
 ejaculations " of Alexander Radcliffe, a very clever but most 
 disreputable literary soldier of the Restoration. One of his songs, 
 in The Ramble, 1682, runs thus : — ■ 
 
 "Away with these fellows' contriving, 
 
 They've spoilt all our pleasant design, 
 We were once in a way of true living, 
 
 Improving discourse with good wine ; 
 But now conversation grows tedious, 
 
 Over coffee they still confer notes, 
 'Stead of authors both learn'd and facetious, 
 
 They quote only Dugdale and Oates." 
 
 This sounds like a far away premonition of Praed.
 
 192 TJic Reaction. 
 
 Indeed, it seems to have been a couplet of Cleve- 
 land's: — 
 
 " Had Cain been Scot God would have changed his doom, 
 Not fore'd him wander, but confin'd him home'," 
 
 which aroused the indignation that brought forth 
 Wild's most successful verses, the Iter Boreale. 
 During the anarchical protectorate of Richard 
 Cromwell, Wild was certainly the most popular 
 living English poet. His verse, full of local and 
 momentary allusions, was inspired by the rage and 
 doubt that occupied men's minds, and when at last 
 he celebrated the winter journey of General Monk 
 in 1659 in a long poem, which was really a mani- 
 festo against Lambert and the Cabal, his popularity 
 among the party now in the ascendant was over- 
 whelming. 
 
 The Iter Boreale is a deliberate attempt, as I 
 read it, to foist Monk 2 upon the English nation as 
 a successor to Oliver Cromwell, perhaps as a 
 successor to Charles I., with a happy side- 
 
 1 From The Rebel Scot. The influence of this and other satires 
 of Cleveland upon the style of Dryden deserves close attention. 
 " Lord ! what a godly thing is want of shirts ! " is an example 
 of pure pre-Drydenic Dryden. But Marvel was Cleveland's most 
 direct pupil in satire. 
 
 - "Monk! the great Monk! that syllable outshines 
 Plantagenet's bright name, or Constantine 's." 
 
 Iter Boreale, ii. 21, 22.
 
 The Reaction. 193 
 
 suggestion that if this is not welcome to the 
 public, 
 
 "We have another Charles to fetch from Spain." 
 
 Wild, in this boisterous and vigorous poem, shows 
 himself the immediate harbinger of the Restora- 
 tion. The pieces by which during ten years past 
 he had won the favour of the public have, some of 
 them, a more genuine poetical merit. His writing 
 is mostly in heroic couplets, of the kind Cleveland 
 had used, less straggling and licentious in form 
 than the old verse, but full of abbreviations and 
 rude transpositions of accent 1 . He was not ignorant 
 of the great changes which were being introduced 
 into English prosody, nor did he wholly reject 
 them. He does not, so far as I remember, mention 
 any poets of the romantic school ; but he speaks of 
 Denham, Cowley, and Davenant in terms of surly 
 respect, and acknowledges their poetic supremacy, 
 even while he satirizes them, while for Waller, — 
 
 1 These peculiarities are easily exemplified. For instance: 
 
 "Yet, yet he liv'd, stout heart, he liv'd to be 
 Depriv'd, driv'n out, and kept out, liv'd to see 
 Wars, blazing stars, torches, which Heaven nev'r burns 
 But to light kings or kingdoms to their urns." 
 
 Wild : On the Death of Mr Calamy. 
 
 g. n
 
 194 The Reaction. 
 
 ' great poet and true prophet too " — he reserves an 
 enthusiasm which is not common to his nature. 
 
 By far the most pleasing of Wild's pieces, 
 however, is a lyrical record of his early failure 
 in life, his education at Cambridge serving only, in 
 the absence of patronage and preferment, to ac- 
 centuate the miseries of enforced idleness and 
 poverty. It is a curious picture of life under the 
 Commonwealth, and it is written in a romantic 
 and singular measure 1 , with great earnestness of 
 feeling ; among the literature of the age I know 
 nothing that quite resembles it : — 
 
 " In a melancholy study, 
 None but myself, 
 Methought my Muse grew muddy; 
 After seven years' reading, 
 And costly breeding, 
 I felt, but could find no pelf; 
 Into learned rags 
 
 I've rent my plush and satin, 
 And now am fit to beg 
 
 In Hebrew, Greek and Latin ; 
 Instead of Aristotle, 
 
 Would I had got a patten. 
 Alas ! poor scholar ! whither wilt thou go? 
 
 1 Imitated twenty years afterwards by Cleland in his ingenious 
 lyric Hallo my fancy.
 
 The Reaction. 195 
 
 Cambridge, now I must leave thee, 
 
 And follow fate, 
 College hopes do deceive me; 
 I oft expected 
 To have been elected, 
 But desert is reprobate. 
 Masters of colleges 
 
 Have no common graces, 
 And they that have fellowships 
 
 Have but commonplaces, 
 And those that scholars are 
 Must have handsome faces : 
 Alas! poor scholar! whither wilt thou go? 
 
 I have bow'd, I have bended, 
 
 And all in hope 
 One day to be befriended: 
 
 I have preached, I have printed 
 Whate'er I hinted 
 To please our English Pope; 
 I worship't towards the East, 
 
 But the Sun doth now forsake me; 
 I find that I am falling, 
 
 The Northern winds do shake me : 
 Would I had been upright 
 
 For bowing now will break me; 
 Alas ! poor scholar ! whither wilt thou go ? 
 
 13—2
 
 iq6 The Reaction. 
 
 Into some country Village 
 
 Now I must go, 
 Where neither tithe nor tillage 
 The greedy patron 
 And parched matron 
 Swear to the Church they owe : 
 Yet if I can preach 
 
 And pray too on a sudden, 
 And confute the Pope 
 
 At adventure, without studying, 
 Then — ten pounds a year, — 
 Besides a Sunday pudden. 
 Alas ! poor scholar ! whither wilt thou go? 
 
 Ships, ships, ships I discover, 
 
 Crossing the main ; 
 Shall I go in, and go over, 
 
 Turn Jew or Atheist, 
 Turk or Papist, 
 To Geneva or Amsterdam? 
 Bishoprics are void 
 
 In Scotland, — shall I thither? 
 Or follow Windebank 
 
 And Finch, to see if either 
 Do want a priest to shrive them? 
 O no ! 'tis blustering weather. 
 Alas! poor scholar! whither wilt thou go?"
 
 The Reaction. 197 
 
 At last he decides that nothing is left for him 
 but to be a schoolmaster, and he makes up his 
 mind to spend all his talents and acquirements in 
 the beggarly task of scourging a little Latin into a 
 parcel of thankless urchins. 
 
 The same year, 1659, that saw the publication 
 of the Iter Boreale, saw that of the first production 
 of a poet who stands alone among the writers of 
 his time, and who must now occupy our attention. 
 William Chamberlayne was born in 1619, fourteen 
 years after the birth of Waller, at Shaftesbury, in 
 Dorsetshire. He lived in that town for seventy 
 years, until in January, 1689, he died there, and 
 was buried in the churchyard by a son to whom he 
 had given the sounding and romantic name of 
 Valentine Chamberlayne. If any of my readers 
 happen to know the town of Shaftesbury, they will 
 easily understand why I compare it to the career 
 of its poet, and find in it a fit emblem of Chamber- 
 layne's position. Shaftesbury stands on the crown 
 of an abrupt hill of greensand, looking over the 
 Vale of Blackmore, between two pastoral rivers not 
 unknown to song, the Stour and the Nadder; its 
 churchyard, where Chamberlayne lies buried, looks 
 out from the terrace of this mimic fastness, the 
 isolation of which may be gathered from the fact 
 that, to this day, no railway has attempted to
 
 198 The Reaction. 
 
 approach its outposts. What Shaftesbury is among 
 the gentle and accessible market-towns of Dorset- 
 shire, that Chamberlayne was among the poets 
 of the Commonwealth. He was separated, not 
 merely from the new classical school, but from the 
 old Marinist school. He is not a Marinist at all ; 
 he goes back much farther for his inspiration, he 
 inherits much from Browne, much from Sidney, 
 much from the followers of Spenser. 
 
 Chamberlayne, as we have said, lived all his 
 life at Shaftesbury, where he was a physician. 
 Some of his best years seem to have been spent, at 
 the intervals of his professional work, in writing 
 his great heroic poem of PJiaronnida, which is one 
 of the longest works in verse in the English 
 language, extending to 13,000 lines, or very con- 
 siderably more than Paradise Lost. In addition 
 to this epic, he wrote a very pretty tragi-comedy, 
 called Love's Victory, in which the swains talk 
 West Country dialect, just as they do to the 
 present day. We only know of a single occasion 
 upon which Chamberlayne strayed from his native 
 precincts. He happened to be closing the second 
 book of his Pharonnida in the autumn of 1644, 
 when he put down the poem, as he quaintly tells 
 his readers, to fight in a battle for the King. He 
 promises that
 
 The Reaction. 199 
 
 "if in 
 This rising storm of blood, which doth begin 
 To drop already, I'm not washed into 
 The grave, my next safe quarter shall renew 
 Acquaintance with Pharonnida. Till then, 
 I leave the Muses, to converse with men." 
 
 He conversed with the men of the Parliament at 
 the indecisive battle of Newbury, on the 27th of 
 October, and, happily for us, returned safe and 
 sound to Shaftesbury to take up the history of the 
 fair Pharonnida where he laid it down. 
 
 In the first of these chapters, in order to give 
 a typical and even an extreme example of romantic 
 versification, I quoted an early passage from Keats. 
 Almost any page from Chamberlayne would have 
 served my purpose equally well, but in this connec- 
 tion it is extremely interesting to note the relation 
 of Keats to the Cavalier doctor. Quite lately, it 
 has been pointed out that a very peculiar phrase is 
 transferred bodily into Endymion from the Pharon- 
 nida, and now that Keats' knowledge of Chamber- 
 layne is proved we can only wonder that none of 
 us ever observed before how much Endymion owes 
 to the elder and less-known poem. The versifica- 
 tion is exactly of the same order ; Chamberlayne 
 leaps from rhyme to rhyme, treating them like 
 mere stepping-stones in the stream of his song,
 
 200 The Reaction. 
 
 exactly as Keats docs, and Campbell's simile 
 that the heroic couplet wandered at its own free 
 will through a wilderness of sweets, is equally 
 applicable to the one poet or to the other. This 
 characteristic, of course, gives Chamberlayne a 
 unique position among the writers of his time, all 
 the rest of whom, even if they had not absolutely 
 followed Waller into the enclosure of the distich, 
 were agreed that verse had to mend its ways, and 
 take a measured and decorous step. 
 
 The story of Pharonnida is laid in modern 
 Greece, the Greece of the poet's day, and from this 
 circumstance its episodes occasionally give us a 
 faint but curious foretaste of the romances of Byron 
 and Anastatius Hope. The rage against the Turk 
 is curious, and it should be interesting to modern 
 Greeks to note that at a date when the Cretan 
 poet Chortakes was almost the sole Hellenic 
 writer who was trying to keep the flame of Greek 
 patriotism alight, an English physician in a little 
 Dorsetshire borough was occupying himself in 
 romantic dreams of Epirote liberty. Campbell, 
 who was pleased to be the first critic to resuscitate 
 the Pharonnida, styles it "one of the most 
 interesting stories that ever was told in verse." 
 I cannot go with him so far, although a good 
 many years ago I contrived to read it right
 
 The Reaction. 201 
 
 through with no excessive weariness. The versifi- 
 cation produces a curious feeling in the reader 
 as he proceeds ; the student of Endymion may 
 have felt the same. It is something like what 
 every one of us may have noticed in the movement 
 of a startled snake in a meadow. Now it flies, long 
 drawn out, over the dry tops of the grasses, now it 
 sinks and seems to writhe into a knot at the bases 
 of the stalks, now it mounts and coils again, now 
 bounds in a glittering quivering line under the 
 open sky. The progress of the reptile is con- 
 tinuous, and ultimately in one visible direction, 
 but its deviations are excessive, and in its less 
 strenuous moments it goes over ten times the 
 ground that is needful for the purpose of its progress. 
 Already accustomed in these chapters to the regular 
 alternate movement of the classical verse, the 
 uniform tramp of the distich, I think my readers 
 will feel a strong contrast in the curious serpentine 
 movement of Chamberlayne's verse in the Pharon- 
 nida. Here is the passage in which the hero, 
 Argalia, wins his freedom through the violent 
 deaths of the Turk, Ammurat, and his mistress, 
 Janusa : — 
 
 " And here the speed Death's messengers did make 
 To hurry forth their souls, did faintly shake
 
 202 The Reaction. 
 
 Her words into imperfect accents. This, 
 She cries, is our last interview — a kiss 
 Then joins their bloodless lips — each close the eyes 
 Of the other, whilst the parting spirit flies 
 Mounted on both their breaths, the latest gasp 
 They ere must draw. Whilst with stiff arms they clasp 
 Each other's neck, Argalia through a cloud 
 Of liquid sorrow did behold the proud 
 Triumphs of death in their untimely fate ; 
 He sees great Ammurat for a robe of state 
 Grovelling in blood, the fair Janusa lie, 
 Purpled in death, like polished ivory 
 Dipped in vermilion ; the bright crystals, that 
 Her soul in conquering flames looked thorough at, 
 Both quenched and cooled in death. But time did lend 
 His tears scarce passage, till a drop could end 
 Its journey o'er his cheeks, before a page, 
 Whose cruelty had far out-grown his age, 
 Enters in haste; and with an anger that, 
 Though indiscreet, his wrongs seems kindled at, 
 In wounds did on the bassa's body vent 
 A spleen that death's discharge could not content." 
 
 Chamberlayne was altogether too remote as a 
 country practitioner to attract any notice, or to 
 exercise any influence. He had no acquaintances 
 among the literary class ; as he says, " Fortune 
 hath placed me in too low a sphere to be happy in 
 the acquaintance of the age's more celebrated wits."
 
 The Reaction. 20 ' 
 
 Had he possessed thrice the genius that he had, he 
 must have remained obscure to his own contem- 
 poraries. His opposition, therefore, to the classical 
 movement was passive and accidental. The same 
 cannot be said of that of Thomas Stanley, the next 
 name that meets us in the list of the little band 
 who resisted the new forms and the applications of 
 Waller. In 1649, in the middle of the Common- 
 wealth, there appeared a very small volume of 
 poems 1 , now extremely rare, which should have 
 prepared readers for a poet of quite a different 
 order from what was then in the ascendant. It 
 was a little collection of idyllic pieces from the 
 latest Greek and Latin writers, the Europa of 
 Moschus, the Cupido Cruci affixus of Ausonius, the 
 Pervigilium Veneris of an unknown but probably 
 African poet. Now, if it be true that we may 
 know a man by the company he keeps, it is no less 
 true that we may know a person of letters by the 
 books that he likes. Thomas Stanley, who was 
 then a young man of four-and-twenty, revealed his 
 taste beyond all manner of doubt when he chose 
 Moschus and Ausonius from all the Greek and 
 Roman curriculum to be the darlings of his Muse. 
 
 1 "Europa. Cupid Crucified. Venus Vigils. With annotations. 
 By Tho. Stanley Esq. London. Printed by W. W. for Humphrey 
 Moseley. 1649."
 
 204 The Reaction. 
 
 We shall presently find how characteristic of the 
 man was such a choice. In the meantime, let us 
 sec who and what he himself was. 
 
 Stanley was born, it appears, in 1625, so that 
 he was by twenty years Waller's junior. He came 
 up to Cambridge, and was entered as a gentleman- 
 commoner at Pembroke, a foundation which, for 
 its size and wealth, has produced or nourished a 
 greater proportion of the English poets than any 
 other educational body in the nation. His tutor 
 was, moreover, the son of the famous Edward 
 Fairfax, the incomparable translator of Tasso, 
 himself a nimble versifier, who was likely to impress 
 on an eager pupil the traditions of a great literary 
 house. Stanley was neither poor nor a recluse ; 
 an offshoot of the family of the Earls of Derby, he 
 was aristocratically reared and wealthily supported. 
 He left Cambridge, not, as Wild did, to starve 
 upon his five wits in a village school, but to spend 
 some years in making the grand tour, and in 
 gaining that learned and literary acquaintance with 
 the modern languages of Europe for which he 
 became distinguished. Anthony a Wood says 
 that he possessed one fair estate, and that he 
 married a wife who brought to him another. He 
 was a gentleman of generous fortune and ample 
 leisure. All this is reflected in his poetry, but all
 
 The Reaction. 205 
 
 this, in combination with his political bias, which 
 was strongly royalist, makes it the more observable 
 that he was absolutely unaffected by the new 
 school. Chamberlayne, in his Dorsetshire fastness, 
 might know nothing of what Waller and Denham 
 and Davenant were doing, but a man of leisure and 
 fashion, like Stanley, could not be so ignorant. The 
 position he took must have been deliberate, and 
 consequent upon the irresistible tenour of his taste. 
 When a young fellow prefers Moschus to Homer, 
 and Ausonius to Virgil, we know how to class him. 
 We accuse him of a little affectation, of a great love 
 of what is flowery, rococo, and even morbid, and of 
 a certain persistent preference for what the world 
 has decided to reject as sickly and over-ripe. In 
 our days we have witnessed an alarming recru- 
 descence of this sort of taste. It has been fostered 
 by certain developments of the fine arts, it has 
 found itself a voice in certain schools of criticism. 
 I am far from wishing to insinuate that such schools 
 and such developments are wanting in intelligence, 
 or that they do not reply to genuine demands from 
 the modern spirit. But I hold that they are 
 dangerous, because Alexandrian and sickly. The 
 hues on the dying dolphin are exquisite, no doubt, 
 but it will soon be a dead dolphin, and a very 
 disgusting object of study. In the age of the
 
 2o6 TJie Reaction. 
 
 Commonwealth culture was less broad than it now 
 is, though perhaps it was deeper. At all events, it 
 was not easy, without quite unusual scholarship, to 
 stray so far afield as to strike upon Ausonius and 
 Moschus. 
 
 Stanley, as we have said, was a very fine scholar, 
 and his instinct led him to the authors who had 
 possessed in antiquity the romantic and somewhat 
 morbid colouring that he desired. His Cupid 
 Crucified is perhaps the prettiest as it certainly 
 seems to be the most faithful piece of translated 
 work done in that age. Ausonius' original is ex- 
 cessively pretty, and Stanley loses very little in 
 putting the soft hexameters into English. The 
 whole is exactly like a picture by Mr Burne-Jones. 
 Guilty Love, captured and tortured by the famous 
 women whom he has betrayed, is crucified to a tree 
 in a dark grove of myrtles, and tormented there 
 by the wrathful ladies, until Venus his mother 
 pushes her way through the throng, and more 
 enraged than they, lashes her son's pale limbs with 
 wreaths of thorny roses, till they are stained with 
 purple. The opening lines seem to me so delicate 
 and felicitous, so suggestive of the road which 
 English poetry might have taken, that I venture to 
 quote them, the more as the volume in which they 
 were printed is almost inaccessible : —
 
 The Reaction. 207 
 
 " In the aery fields by Maro's muse display'd, 
 Where myrtle groves the frantic lovers shade, 
 The heroines their orgies celebrate, 
 And past occasions of their deaths relate ; 
 As in a spreading wood scarce pierc'd by day, 
 They 'mongst thin reeds and drooping poppy stray, 
 By stainless lakes, and rivers without noise 
 Upon whose banks sad flowers, by names of boys 
 And kings once known, i' the cloudy twilight wither, 
 Self-lov'd Narcissus, Hyacinth, together 
 With Crocus golden-haired, Adonis drest 
 In purple, Ajax with a sigh impressed." 
 
 He is not less softly musical, not less enthralled 
 by the spirit of his model, when he comes to 
 translate the Vigil of Venus, with its delicious 
 recurrent refrain — 
 
 "Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit eras 
 amet "■ — ■ 
 
 perhaps the most modern, the most unclassical 
 
 touch that antique literature has bequeathed to us 1 . 
 
 It is characteristic of a too obstinate pleasure 
 
 in literature of this sort, that it deprives its votaries 
 
 1 I cannot resist the temptation to refer to the charming fancies 
 which Mr Pater has woven around this poem in his new romance, 
 Marius the Epicurean. I hope it is not frivolous to wish that our 
 learned and exquisite Stanley could have enjoyed these ingenious 
 volumes.
 
 20S The Reaction. 
 
 of the power to rise to graver and more manly studies. 
 Stanley cannot be stigmatized with this fault as 
 a scholar, for he rose to a great attainment in his 
 once celebrated History of Greek PJiilosopJiy ; but 
 as a poet he showed something of this weakness. 
 The translations appeared in 1649; in 165 1 he 
 published his original poems, and they were dis- 
 appointing. We see in them the intellectual faults 
 which led him to exaggerate the value of writers 
 like Ausonius. If Waller met with them at Paris, 
 he would be sagacious enough to lay them down 
 with the remark that their author was no serious 
 opponent of his system in poetry. They belong to 
 a class which was already out of fashion when 
 Stanley was a child. They are lyrics of the elabo- 
 rate kind, mostly in extremely artificial metres, 
 which were in vogue among the cavalier poets of 
 the Court of Whitehall. They are of the kindred 
 of Carew and Lovelace, of Habington and Suckling, 
 but they possess a sort of cold refinement which 
 those brocaded lyrists would have disdained. I 
 have remarked elsewhere that in no poet of the 
 century is the negative quality of shrinking from 
 ugliness and coarseness so defined as in Stanley, 
 the world in which his fancy loved to wander being 
 one of refined Arcadian beauty, rather chilly and 
 autumnal, but inhabited by groups of nymphs and
 
 The Reaction. 209 
 
 shepherds, who hung garlands of flowers on votive 
 urns, or took hands in stately, pensive dances 1 . 
 
 As the century declined, the efforts at a poetical 
 reaction became rapidly fewer, less sincere, and less 
 apparent 2 . We need not stop to examine the work 
 of Vaughan, the Silurist, the last survivor of the 
 sacred school of Cambridge poets of whom Herbert 
 is the best known. It was an accident that Vaughan 
 lived on until the last decade of the century. His 
 lovely occasional pieces, " Happy those early days 
 when I " and " They are all gone into the world of 
 light," are contained in most collections. Vaughan 
 belongs to the survival, not to the reaction. John 
 Norris of Bemerton, on the other hand, a direct 
 
 1 The same year which saw the publication of Stanley's Poems 
 witnessed that of the one volume which he can be said to have 
 inspired, the Salmacis, Lyrian and Sylvia, Forsaken Lydia and the 
 Rape of Helen, of Edward Sherburne. From Sherburne, who dedi- 
 cates his volume to Stanley, we learn that the latter was equally 
 fluent in Greek, Latin, Italian, French and Spanish. 
 
 2 To enter into any discussion here of the vexed question of the 
 authorship of Thcalma and Clearchus, 1683, would lead me too far 
 afield. I have myself no doubt whatever that Izaak Walton was the 
 author of this poem, and "John Chalkhill" a half-myth, that is to say 
 a real person dead and forgotten so long before as not to endanger 
 Walton's harmless mystification. At the same time, it was certainly 
 not in May i67S,but probably thirty or thirty-five years earlier that, 
 as Walton would have us believe, "the Author died, and I hope 
 the Reader will be sorry." Flatman's poem has, I think, been 
 overlooked as a contemporary testimony to Walton's authorship. 
 
 G. 14
 
 2io The Reaction. 
 
 imitator of the Marinists, designed nothing less 
 than a revolution when, so late as 1678, he brought 
 out his Miscellanies. He says in the preface to the 
 reader : " The design of the present undertaking is 
 to restore the declining genius of poetry to its 
 primitive and genuine greatness, to wind up the 
 strings of the Muses' lyre, and to show that sense 
 and gracefulness are as consistent in these as in 
 any other compositions. I design here all the 
 masculine sense and argument of a dissertation, 
 with the advantage of poetic fineness, beauty, and 
 spirit." Norris, however, was read for his piety, 
 not for his poetry, and his own remark about most 
 religious verse, that it is " stiff, flat, and insipid," is 
 not belied by any flexibility or elevation in his own 
 odes and canticles. 
 
 The very last effort made to restore romantic 
 poetry to its old place in English literature, how- 
 ever, was made in 1687, the year that Waller died, 
 by a certain Philip Ayres, who published a volume 
 of Lyric Poems, mostly from the Italian and 
 Spanish, in the preface to which he spoke respect- 
 fully of the prestige of " Mr Waller, Mr Cowley, 
 and Mr Dryden," but hoped that he would not be 
 thought presumptuous if, in spite of their great 
 example, he himself recurred to the manner of 
 writing indulged in by " the famous Mr Spenser,
 
 The Reaction. 211 
 
 Sir Philip Sidney, and Mr Milton." Ayres is re- 
 markable as almost the only English sonneteer 
 between Milton and Gray, but his sonnets, though 
 sometimes singularly learned and precise in form, 
 are seldom otherwise interesting. His book en- 
 joyed no success, and we know nothing of his career, 
 except that he was a personal friend of Dryden, 
 and an excellent scholar. 
 
 I have, however, still to present the greatest 
 and the most interesting of the poets who wrote 
 during the Commonwealth in opposition to Waller 
 and his followers. The name of Andrew Marvell 
 is illustrious wherever political purity is valued, 
 wherever intellectual liberty is defended. To dwell 
 upon the qualities of a character so candid, and 
 upon the virtues of so single-minded a patriot, may 
 seem out of place in a disquisition on the rise of 
 classical poetry in England, but this patriot, this 
 exquisite citizen, was a poet also, and a poet 
 worthy of his civic reputation. Nor was there 
 anything inconsistent in the fact that a man whose 
 hands were pure in an age of universal corruption, 
 and who put the interests of the people first when 
 public virtue had scarcely been discovered, should 
 be a romantic idealist when he came to put his 
 innermost thoughts down in metre. Marvell is 
 nothing if not consistent, and we find the same 
 
 14—2
 
 2 1 2 The Reaction. 
 
 brain and heart engaged with rustic visions at 
 Nunapplcton and with the anger of statecraft at 
 Westminster. 
 
 Dr Grosart discovered that Andrew Marvell 
 was born at Winestead in Yorkshire on the 31st of 
 March, 1621. His father, a Puritan divine, was 
 translated to the wider field of a parish in Hull 
 when his son was four years old, and eventually to 
 the Mastership of the grammar-school there. The 
 future poet lived at Hull under the paternal roof 
 until he was fifteen. Whether he was very severely 
 kept in check all that time may be doubted ; his 
 antagonist, Bishop Parker, in future years, accused 
 him of having consorted with " boatswains and 
 cabin-boys " along the tarry quays of Hull, and he 
 may have thus early acquired that remarkable flow 
 of bad language which makes his satires somewhat 
 distressingly remarkable. 
 
 Like almost all the poets of the age, Marvell 
 received his education at Cambridge. His father had 
 belonged to the puritan college of Emmanuel, but 
 the poet came to Trinity, whither he entered, just too 
 late to be at the University with Milton, Cowley, or 
 Waller, in 1633. While he was at Trinity, some men 
 at Peterhouse, who were tools of the Jesuits, inveigl- 
 ed him over to Rome, and actually, it would appear, 
 smuggled the boy up to one of their secret semi-
 
 The Reaction. 21 
 
 naries in London. The story is, that his father had 
 scent of this, and following his son up to town, 
 found him in a bookseller's shop, captured him, and 
 brought him, restored to the Church of England, 
 safely back to Trinity. The case was by no means 
 a solitary one at Cambridge, and the practice of 
 the Jesuits was so alarming to parents, as indeed it 
 well might be, that there was talk of passing a bill 
 through Star Chamber to deal with it. 
 
 Andrew Marvell lost his admirable father in 
 1640, just before he himself left college. The 
 circumstances of the death were romantic and have 
 often been repeated. The worthy puritan set sail 
 to cross the Humber in company with a lady, and 
 with " a young beautiful couple who were going to 
 be wedded." The day was calm and fair, but 
 Mr Marvell had so strong a presentiment of death 
 that he spoke of it cheerfully to those whom he 
 left, and even threw his staff ashore, exclaiming, 
 "Ho! for heaven!" The friends were only half 
 way across the estuary, when a sudden storm arose, 
 upset the boat, and utterly destroyed the whole 
 party, no remains either of the vessel or of the 
 passengers being ever recovered. It is said that 
 the mother of the young lady who was thus un- 
 timely drowned consoled herself by a whimsical 
 act of generosity, and that Marvell being left an
 
 214 The Reaction. 
 
 orphan through the accident, she sent for him 
 from college, and adopted him as her son. It is 
 probable that the munificence of this lady, who 
 was a near relative of Milton's friend Cyriack 
 Skinner, supplied the young man with the funds 
 needful to support him in France, Holland, Spain, 
 and Italy for the next six years. 
 
 It may well be that Mrs Skinner, although she 
 was able to support him during her lifetime, was 
 unable to provide for her protege after her death. 
 At all events we find him in 1650 earning his 
 livelihood as the tutor of Mary Fairfax, afterwards 
 Duchess of Buckingham. This little maid, daughter 
 of the great Lord Fairfax, was in her twelfth year 
 at the time, and it appears that Marvell lived as 
 her teacher in the house at Nunappleton for two 
 years. This home of the Fairfaxes was a mansion 
 romantically situated at the junction of the Ouse 
 and the Wharfe, in the lowlands of Yorkshire, and 
 on the very site of an ancient Cistercian nunnery. 
 There can be very little doubt that the greater 
 part of Marvell's lyrical poems were written at 
 this house, from his twenty-ninth to his thirty-first 
 year, in the beautiful seclusion from which Milton's 
 famous letter called him, as by the blast of a 
 trumpet. The neighbourhood of Nunappleton was 
 all given up to
 
 The Reaction. 2 1 5 
 
 "fragrant gardens, shady woods, 
 Deep meadows and transparent floods," 
 and its flowery wildernesses and rich grassy fields 
 inspired the remarkable series of lyrics to which we 
 must now give our attention. 
 
 The world is seldom told at what stray and 
 occasional moments, how hurriedly, and again how 
 seldom, a poet's inspiration flows. It may well be 
 that the music lies frozen at a young man's heart 
 until some peculiar condition in his circumstances, 
 a chain of emotions called forth by some peaceful 
 and novel situation, melts it into sudden poetry. 
 In a few months, perhaps, the conditions change, 
 the mind is released from its tension, and he has 
 written in that short time most of what is to intro- 
 duce him to posterity as a poet. In ages of 
 general political disorder, and of civic and personal 
 insecurity, this must particularly be the case. We 
 know for how long a time the muse of Milton was 
 silenced by public and private anxieties, and we 
 should be ignorant of one great section of his 
 genius, of his romantic and melodious power in 
 lyrical writing, if it had not been for his retirement 
 at Horton. What Horton was to Milton, Nun- 
 appleton v was to Marvell, it made a lyrical poet of 
 him. 
 
 This series of verses was carefully preserved by
 
 2i6 The Reaction. 
 
 his widow, and given to the world, with other of his 
 pieces, in a small folio, in 1681. A fine copy of 
 this rare book is one of the most dainty and 
 desirable of all English publications from the 
 Restoration to the end of the century. It is not 
 quite complete, and notably the celebrated Horatian 
 Ode on Oliver Cromwell is not included in it, — 
 Mrs Marvell did not trouble herself with any poems 
 but those which she possessed in her husband's 
 handwriting, — but it is still the most luxurious 
 shape in which Marvell's poems can be read. 
 The Nunappleton pieces are strewed over it with- 
 out any attempt at arrangement, and the one 
 which holds the key to the rest is printed last. 
 This is a long poem in praise of the house, written 
 in eight-line stanzas of octo-syllabic verse, and 
 extending to nearly eight hundred lines. Any 
 student who wishes to understand Marvell must 
 read this long and difficult piece with care. He 
 will soon see that he has to deal with what Dr. 
 Johnson called a " metaphysical," and what I have 
 ventured to call a "Marinist" poet of the most 
 extreme order. 
 
 Marvell is the last of the school of Donne, and 
 in several respects he comes nearer to the master 
 than any of his precursors. Certain conceits of 
 Donne's, for instance that one about the lover and
 
 The Reaction. 2 1 7 
 
 the pair of compasses 1 , are often quoted as ex- 
 amples of a monstrous class. We get to think of 
 Donne as exclusively the forger of tawdry false 
 jewellery such as this, " rime's sturdy cripple," as 
 Coleridge ingeniously calls him. But Donne was 
 also the writer of lines and passages that speak so 
 directly to the heart and to the senses that those 
 who have come under their spell feel a sort of 
 shyness in quoting them ; they are so personal 
 that to discuss them seems an indiscretion. Some- 
 thing of the same odd reserve seems due in the 
 reader of some of Shakespeare's Sonnets, of some 
 of Coleridge's shorter poems. I cannot, myself, 
 bear to hear poetry of this intimate kind analyzed 
 or even touched by unsympathetic people. This is 
 a feeling which may not be praiseworthy in the 
 
 1 "If they be two, they are two so 
 
 As stiff twin compasses are two, 
 Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show 
 To move, but doth, if th' other do. 
 
 And though it in the centre sit, 
 Yet when the other far doth roam, 
 
 It leans and hearkens after it, 
 
 And grows erect as that comes home. 
 
 Such wilt thou be to me, who must 
 Like th' other foot, obliquely run, 
 
 Thy firmness makes my circle just, 
 And makes me end where I begun." 
 
 A Valediction forbidding Mourning.
 
 j 1 8 The Reaction. 
 
 student, but it is a proof of extraordinary felicity, 
 mingled with sincerity, in the style of the writer so 
 discussed or touched. There can be no doubt that 
 Donne possesses this quality, denied perhaps to all 
 his scholars, until revealed again, in a certain 
 measure, in Marvell. The note, however, is not so 
 sharply struck in him as in Donne ; there is more 
 suavity and grace. The conceits are perhaps as 
 wild. Here is one : — 
 
 " Love wisely had of long foreseen 
 
 That he must once grow old, 
 And therefore stored a magazine, 
 
 To save him from the cold. 
 He kept the several cells replete 
 
 With nitre thrice refined, 
 The naphtha's and the sulphur's heat, 
 
 And all that burns the mind." 
 
 This terrible magazine, which is fortified by a 
 double gate, and which would have enflamed the 
 whole of nature if one spark had fallen into it, turns 
 out to be — the heart of Celia. Again, whole 
 stanzas in the Nunappleton poem are taken up 
 with a description of the garden as a military 
 camp, through which the bee beats his drum, while 
 the flowers are soldiers, who fire off volleys of 
 perfume, and stand at parade, under their various 
 colours, in stately regiments all day long : —
 
 The Reaction. 2 1 9 
 
 " But when the vigilant patrol 
 Of stars walks round about the pole, 
 Their leaves that to their stalks are curled, 
 Seem to their staves the ensigns furled. 
 Then in some flower's beloved hut 
 Each bee as sentinel is shut, 
 And sleeps so too, but if once stirr'd 
 She runs you thro' or asks the word." 
 
 This is pretty and harmless, but perhaps just 
 because it errs so gently against the canons of 
 style, we ask ourselves how so seriously-minded a 
 man as Marvell could run on in such a childish 
 way. There is a good deal in Marvell that is of 
 this species of wit, graceful and coloured, but 
 almost infantile. Waller and Denham had taught 
 English people to outgrow these childish toys of 
 fancy, and if there had been nothing more than 
 this in Marvell, we should not be regarding him as 
 a serious element in the reaction. But there is a 
 great deal more, and allowing the conceits to be 
 taken for granted, we may inquire into the character 
 of what is best in his lyrics. 
 
 In the long Nunappleton poem, then, and in 
 that celebrated piece which is printed now in most 
 collections of English poetry, The Garden, we find 
 a personal sympathy with nature, and particularly 
 with vegetation, which was quite a novel thing,
 
 2 20 The Reaction. 
 
 and which found no second exponent until Words- 
 worth came forward with his still wider and more 
 philosophical commerce with the inanimate world. 
 For flowers, trees, and grasses, Marvell expresses a 
 sort of personal passion. They stand between him 
 and humanity, they are to him " forms more real 
 than living man." He calls upon the woodlands 
 of Nunappleton to save him from the noisy 
 world : — 
 
 "Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines, 
 Curl me about, ye gadding vines, 
 And oh ! so close your circles lace 
 That I may never leave this place." 
 
 Again he says : — 
 
 " How safe, methinks, and strong, behind 
 These trees have I encamped my mind," 
 
 and he repeats this sentiment of the security of 
 natural solitude again and again. His style, when 
 he can put his conceits behind him, is extremely 
 sharp and delicate, with a distinction of phrase 
 that is quite unknown to most of his contemporaries. 
 To praise " The Garden " or " Bermudas " would be 
 an impertinence; but I think few readers know 
 what charming and unique poetry lies hid in the 
 series of poems in which Marvell writes as a
 
 The Reaction. 221 
 
 Mower, with a fantastical regret for the flowers and 
 grasses that he cuts down. He says : — 
 
 " I am the mower Damon, known 
 Through all the meadows I have mown, 
 On me the morn her dew distils 
 Before her darling daffodils." 
 
 He declares a profound passion for a possible 
 Juliana, but it is really the wood moths gleaming 
 on the bark, the vigilant heron in its nest at the 
 top of the ash-tree, the garish eye of the new- 
 hatched throstle staring through the hazels, that 
 hold his poetical affections. He is the last of the 
 English romantic poets for several generations, and 
 no one of them all, early or late, has regarded 
 nature with a quicker or more loving attention 
 than he. He is an alien indeed among the men of 
 periwigs and ruffles.
 
 THE RESTORATION.
 
 THE RESTORATION. 
 
 We have now reached the year of that event 
 which occupied so many lyres and awakened so 
 many darts and flames in poetic bosoms, namely, 
 the restitution of the monarchy, the return of the 
 exiled Stuart as King Charles the Second. This 
 date, 1660, is usually given in text-books of litera- 
 ture as marking the commencement of the change 
 to the classical style. As well might we call the 
 platform of the railway-station at St Lazare the 
 point of division between England and France. 
 In 1660 the journey was complete, the change was 
 made. Not one of the odes and paeans which 
 welcomed the Stuarts back, but proved, by the 
 internal evidence of each of its lines, that the old 
 order of poetry had given way to the new. Perhaps 
 not in all cases was the panegyrist conscious of 
 his voice ; sometimes he may even have supposed 
 himself to greet Charles II. in the accents dear to 
 the court of Charles I. In vain ; the new form 
 compelled him, the new order of ideas inspired 
 him. That worthy Conservative woman, the 
 G. 15
 
 226 The Restoration. 
 
 Matchless Orinda, with every desire to be writing- 
 in the good old Royalist way as Donne and 
 Herrick wrote, snatches her lyre and strikes the 
 rebellious strings. This is the sort of music which 
 they utter : — 
 
 "You justly may forsake a land which you 
 Have found so guilty and so fatal too ; 
 Fortune injurious to your innocence 
 Shot all her poison'd arrows here, or hence 1 ." 
 
 We need no more ; we see that Waller has be- 
 witched her, that she is totally ensnared. 
 
 It may be that my readers have been awaiting 
 the introduction of a great name into this dis- 
 course, which hitherto has scarcely been mentioned. 
 I may be asked, where is Dryden, the accredited 
 source and leader of the classical movement ? My 
 answer is, that in tracing the rise of that movement, 
 and in examining its early development, I do not 
 discover the influence of Dryden. In guiding the 
 movement when it was once organized, in lending 
 to it the force and prestige of his commanding 
 genius, in forging the distich anew and in directing 
 it as a missile is directed by a powerful machine, 
 in all this Dryden took a foremost part, but he 
 was not an inventor or a primal force in the new 
 
 1 To the Queen Mother's Majesty, 11 i — 4. Jan. 1, 1661.
 
 The Restoration. 227 
 
 scheme. When in the course of events he began 
 to follow it, he was long attracted to the most 
 volatile part of it, the heresy of Cowley. A glance 
 at dates is here most valuable. Dryden was born 
 in 1 63 1, more than a quarter of a century later 
 than Waller ; he was but a child when the epoch- 
 making volumes of the school were published, and 
 when at last he began himself to be a poet, — for 
 he was slow and laborious in development, — he 
 came forward as the most absurd of Marinists. 
 His lines on the death of Lord Hastings have 
 supplied matter for mirth to critic after critic ; the 
 terrible series of similes by which the symptoms of 
 the smallpox are described, are well known, and 
 offensive beyond measure. Here is a less hack- 
 neyed fragment, in which Dryden plays with the 
 notion that Lord Hastings' death was premature: — 
 
 " Thus fades the oak in the spring, in the blade the corn, 
 Thus, without young, this phoenix dies, new born ! 
 Must then old three-legged grey-beards, with their gout, 
 Catarrhs, rheums, aches, live three ages out? 
 Time's ofifals, only fit for the hospital, 
 Or to hang an antiquary's rooms withal." 
 
 In taste, in language, above all in versification, 
 this belongs to the first decades of the century ; it 
 is almost Elizabethan. Dryden's next departure 
 
 15—2
 
 2 28 'Ilic Restoration. 
 
 was in the direction of Davenant, whose Gondibert 
 affected him to the exclusion of almost every other 
 influence in the Heroic Stanzas of 1659 1 . and in 
 the Annus Mirabilis of 1666. In his Astrcea 
 Redux he is feeling after the new prosody, with 
 only doubtful success, and his verse is first worthy 
 to be named with that of Waller and Denham in 
 the Coronation Panegyric. But by this time the 
 Restoration was already a part of history, and we 
 feel that Dryden, as Eusden said, 
 
 " Faintly distinguished in his thirtieth year," 
 
 is by no means to be counted among those who 
 led the van of classicism. Of course a man so 
 intelligent and so worldly as he would not long 
 resist the dominant stream of his generation. 
 Milton, awakening from his long indifference to 
 verse, might disdain to observe the change in taste 
 which had taken place ; but Dryden was of a 
 temperament less sublime and less austere, and his 
 finger was ever upon the pulse of public feeling, 
 guiding it, indeed, in one sense, but none the less 
 directed by it in another. 
 
 It is time, however, if Dryden is excluded from 
 our attention in this place, for us to turn to those 
 
 1 It is noticeable that in this, his earliest publication, Dryden 
 was associated with Sprat and with the veteran Waller.
 
 The Restoration. 229 
 
 writers of far less genius than he who preceded 
 him and made a road for him. And chiefly Waller, 
 whose name has been so frequently repeated by 
 us ; and who has now for a long time been left in 
 the background. We saw that his mother, the 
 clever woman at Beaconsfield, had carried those 
 amiable pleasantries of hers with her awful cousin, 
 the Protector, to a point where the throwing of a 
 napkin over her head at the dinner-table seemed 
 scarcely chastisement enough. Oliver Cromwell 
 lost his temper with her at last ; Mrs Waller was 
 requested to pay her daughter, Mrs Scroope, a 
 visit, and to let it be a permanent one. The poet's 
 mother, in fact, became a prisoner in her son-in- 
 law's house, and though gifted with no small share 
 of her son's brazen and irrepressible assurance, she 
 seems to have felt that it was time for a change of 
 tactics. We do not know the terms upon which 
 she, and presently Edmund Waller, also, made 
 peace with the Commonwealth, nor how the poet 
 contrived to temper this second act of apparent 
 treachery to his Queen and their common friends. 
 
 In spite of our romantic confidence in the 
 chivalry of our ancestors, it is certain that personal 
 honour was not regarded as we regard it now. 
 Waller had lost no caste with his own party by his 
 pusillanimous confessions in 1643; he found no
 
 230 The Restoration. 
 
 want of warmth among the Roundheads when he 
 ratted to them in 1654. Among the pencil me- 
 moranda taken in the House of Commons during 
 the Long Parliament, by Sir Ralph Verney, there 
 is this astounding entry, namely, that Waller, from 
 his place in the House, remarked on Tuesday, 
 the 23rd of June, 1642, "Let us look first to our 
 safety, and then to our honour." Nobody seems 
 to have been shocked, although subsequent speakers 
 expressed a different view regarding the duty of 
 parliament. We may gauge the difference between 
 now and then, and in so doing excuse a little the 
 apparent worthlessness of Waller's morality, by 
 imagining the uproar which such a sentiment 
 would nowadays create in any representative body 
 of legislators in the world. 
 
 Another phrase of Waller's, casually noted 
 down by Sir Ralph Verney, is also perhaps worthy 
 of citation as throwing light upon the poet's 
 character and position. When the ire of the Long 
 Parliament was roused by Palmer's protestation, 
 Waller rose and said, " Let no man be punished 
 for temperance, lest we seem to punish virtue." 
 This was the voice of the neutral, of the scholarly 
 man who saw right on both sides, and who would 
 fain be friends with both. No one could be further 
 removed from such treasonable fickleness as history
 
 The Restoration. 231 
 
 attributes to Waller than the late Dean Stanley. 
 Yet his known character may help us to realize a 
 character like Waller's. Very intelligent and pa- 
 cific, at heart a little sceptical about the merits of 
 tweedledum and tweedledee, it is difficult for this 
 class of man to take a firm position between two 
 virulent and hostile camps. He loves the indiv- 
 iduals in both, he sees much to hallow a sacrifice 
 of prejudice on the one hand and on the other. 
 Waller, at all events, could move from the friend- 
 ship of Henrietta Maria to the friendship of Oliver 
 Cromwell without a twinge of conscience. 
 
 It must be admitted that Waller carries that 
 breadth of view, that power of seeing both sides of 
 a question, which Sir Arthur Helps so ingeniously 
 defended, to a bold extreme. His boldness, indeed, 
 is his best excuse. During the Civil War, he had 
 extolled Charles I. as " a mixture of divinity and 
 love," and a chain " on which the fabric of our 
 world depends." Oliver Cromwell found it ex- 
 pedient to cut off the head of this paragon, and 
 rule England in his place. Waller obtains pardon, 
 and returns home with a panegyric to the Pro- 
 tector, in which he remarks that 
 
 " With such a chief the meanest nation blest 
 Might hope to lift her head above the rest."
 
 232 The Restoration. 
 
 Cromwell dies, and Waller immediately indites a 
 third poem, to his son Richard, the new Protector, 
 in which he says : — 
 
 " Ungrateful we, if we no tears allow 
 To him that gave us peace and empire too." 
 
 A few months later the Stuarts are reinstated, 
 and Waller's Muse this fourth time sings out in 
 equally clear and unmistakable notes of welcome 
 to Charles II. : — 
 
 " Faith, Law and Piety, that banished train, 
 Justice and Truth, with you return again." 
 
 This seems, perhaps, mere cowardly shiftiness, like 
 that of 
 
 "A peach that's got the yallers 
 With the meanness busting out," 
 
 as Mr Lowell would say ; but our scorn turns into 
 astonishment when we find the unabashed poet 
 publishing the four successive poems in the same 
 volume of his acknowledged verse. Even in those 
 days, so broad a sympathy could not escape without 
 comment, and when Waller presented the fourth 
 of these panegyrics to Charles II. the King made 
 the awkward remark that he thought it much 
 inferior to his panegyric on Cromwell. This double
 
 The Restoration. 233 
 
 thrust, attacking his loyalty and his poetry at 
 once, would have silenced most men, but Waller 
 extricated himself from the trying position with 
 his habitual coolness. " Sir ! " he replied, " we 
 poets never succeed so well in writing truth as 
 fiction." The retort is one of the most nimble in 
 all the history of wit, if we remember the terrible 
 occasion upon which it was made, and the still- 
 existing doubt as to whose head should and whose 
 head should not remain upon rebellious but re- 
 pentant shoulders. 
 
 The King was perfectly right. The poem on 
 Cromwell is far superior to that on Charles II., al- 
 though it bears all the signs of a superior sincerity. 
 It contains some beautiful passages, as eloquent as 
 any which Dryden was able to compose twenty 
 years later, smooth sometimes with the suavity of 
 Pope himself. Let us remember that these graceful 
 couplets were composed as early as 1654 : — 
 
 " Your drooping country, torn with civil hate, 
 Restored by you, is made a glorious state, 
 The seat of empire, where the Irish come, 
 And the unwilling Scot, to fetch their doom; 
 The sea's our own, and now all nations greet 
 With bending sails each vessel of our fleet ; 
 Our power extends as far as winds can blow, 
 Or swelling sails around the globe may go;
 
 234 The Restoration. 
 
 Heaven, that has placed this island to give law, 
 To balance Europe, and her states to awe, 
 In this conjunction does on Britain smile, 
 The greatest leader, and the greatest isle. 
 Whether this portion of the world were rent 
 By the rude ocean from the continent, 
 Or, thus created, — sure it was designed 
 To be the second refuge of mankind." 
 
 The execution of these verses is nearly perfect ; 
 the only point at which criticism can detect their 
 immaturity being the tendency which they have to 
 form themselves into groups of four lines. This is 
 the haunting echo of the old stanzaic form, which 
 Dryden himself was very slow to lose. The secret, 
 as it appears to me, of that apparently extravagant 
 eulogy which Dryden paid to Oldham at his early 
 death, in 1684, greeting him as "the Marcellus of 
 our tongue," a tribute which has been a stumbling- 
 block to many readers of Oldham's particularly 
 uninspired verses, rests in this, that Oldham was 
 the first to liberate himself, in the use of the 
 distich, from this under-current of a stanza, and to 
 write heroic verse straight on, couplet by couplet, 
 ascending by steady strides and not by irregular 
 leaps 1 . In Pope's best satires we see this art carried 
 
 1 Any one who will venture to read Oldham's disagreeable 
 Satire upon the Jesuits, written in 1679, w iU see tne truth of this
 
 The Restoration. 235 
 
 to its final perfection ; after his time the connecting 
 link between couplet and couplet became lost, and 
 at last in the decline poems became, as someone 
 has said, mere cases of lancets lying side by side. 
 But in Dryden's day the connection was still only 
 too obvious, and it strikes me that it may have 
 been from a consciousness of this defect, that 
 Dryden adopted that triplet, with a final alexan- 
 drine, which he is so fond of introducing. If so, 
 he attempted to cure a small error by committing 
 a greater one. 
 
 The life of Waller has not been attempted 
 since the art of biography has been understood in 
 its modern sense. It would not be impossible to 
 write it, for a great number of allusions to him, 
 anecdotes and ana illustrating his position, exist in 
 various memoirs of the times. He was popular at 
 court during the reign of Charles II., petted by 
 the King and by the great ladies, and as he slowly 
 grew an old man in that atmosphere of polite 
 diversion, his position increased in dignity. He 
 was, without a peer, the reigning wit at Charles's 
 court, and various stories are told in illustration of 
 his vivacity. 
 
 It was noted as a thing almost unique in those 
 
 remark, and note the effect that its versification had upon that series 
 of Dryden's satires which immediately followed it.
 
 236 The Restoration. 
 
 days, that Mr Waller was a water-drinker. We 
 
 cannot easily realize how perilous was the position 
 
 of a man who refused to drink with his friends 
 
 in the seventeenth century. He was liable to 
 
 insult, and even to personal attack, for to refuse to 
 
 share a bottle of wine was to inflict a wound upon 
 
 the honour of the man who offered it. Waller had 
 
 the courage to stick to water, merely, I imagine, 
 
 because he had observed that wine disagreed with 
 
 him 1 . It is recorded that the King did not on 
 
 this account exclude him from his company, since 
 
 Waller " had the dexterity to accommodate his 
 
 discourse to the pitch of the others' as it sunk." 
 
 George Savile, Lord Halifax, the famous viveur, 
 
 and a pupil of Waller's in verse, said that there 
 
 was only one man in England he would allow to 
 
 stay in the same room with him unless he drank, 
 
 and that was Ned Waller. 
 
 The poet's universal popularity led him to 
 
 imagine that there was nothing which he could 
 
 not get for the asking, and so when the Provostship 
 
 of Eton fell vacant in 1665 he begged for that, 
 
 with some effrontery. The easy monarch had no 
 
 objection, and gave him the grant, but the Earl of 
 
 1 "Waller had but a tender, weak body, but was always very 
 temperate. Made him damnable drunk at Somerset House, when 
 at the water stairs he fell down and had a cruel fall. 'Twas a pity 
 to use such a sweet swan so inhumanly."' Aubrey.
 
 The Restoration. 237 
 
 Clarendon, as Lord Chancellor, refused to seal it, 
 the statutes of the college then absolutely ex- 
 cluding laymen from the office of provost. Waller 
 considered that his old friend should have waived 
 this difficulty, and he had the meanness to lie in 
 wait for an opportunity for revenge. In the course 
 of two years it came. Waller sat in Parliament, 
 as member for Hastings, from 1661 to 1678, and 
 when, in 1667, the Duke of Buckingham brought 
 forward the prosecution of the Earl of Clarendon, 
 Waller supported his motion in the House of 
 Commons, and both voted and spoke for the 
 impeachment of the great historian. It is not to 
 be wondered at that the portrait Clarendon gives 
 of Waller, — and this portrait is that by which 
 posterity knows him best, — should be painted in 
 none of the brightest colours. 
 
 It appears that as Waller grew older all the 
 pleasure which he might reasonably have extracted 
 from his wealth, honours, and influence was soured 
 and spoiled for him by this craving desire to be 
 made Provost of Eton. Having removed Lord 
 Clarendon out of the way, he thought that he might 
 be more successful in grasping the prize when Dr 
 Allestre died in 1668. Accordingly he moved 
 heaven and earth to be elected, but again without 
 effect, for the fellows unanimously gave their votes
 
 ■o 
 
 8 The Restoration. 
 
 for Dr Zachary Cradock. Waller would not sit 
 down under his defeat. He wearied the King 
 with his complaints, till Charles II. consented to 
 bring the matter before Privy Council. For three 
 days the most noted lawyers of the age argued in 
 Star Chamber on the point whether the King had the 
 power to alter the statutes of Eton College in such 
 a way as to indulge Mr Waller's whim. The Bishop 
 of Lincoln had to be called in to negative the poet's 
 pretensions, and at last it was decided that it was 
 impossible to allow the King to stultify his own laws. 
 Waller sulked a little, but finally determined 
 not to retire into country life. For more than a 
 quarter of a century he was one of the fashionable 
 figures of London, inhabiting a fine town-house 
 on the west side of St James's Street, where he 
 entertained a good deal, and received the homage 
 of men of letters. In 1671 he was nominated one of 
 the original lords commissioners of plantations, thus 
 leading off the long list of men of letters who have 
 been officially connected with the Board of Trade. 
 His parliamentary career was broken only by his 
 death, for when the House was dissolved in 1678, he 
 was immediately returned for Chipping Wycombe, 
 which he represented until, in 1685, he was returned 
 for Saltash in Cornwall in James IL's only parlia- 
 ment. Altogether, he sat in the House of Com-
 
 The Restoration. 239 
 
 mons for five-and-forty years ; I suppose that there 
 is no other prominent English writer, except Mr 
 Gladstone, of whom the same can be said. Waller's 
 views of his duties as a representative, however, 
 were by no means those of to-day ; he spoke 
 frequently, and on a wide range of subjects, but 
 although his delivery was singularly good, and his 
 speeches eloquent, it was remarked that he delighted 
 the House more by the grace of his discourse than 
 by the weight of his argument 1 . 
 
 Whether we must attribute it to the water- 
 drinking or no is not for me to decide, but it is 
 certain that Waller showed a rare elasticity of body 
 and mind to a great old age. As a politician it is 
 claimed that he was privy to the intrigues of the 
 Revolution, and that he sent his son as an envoy 
 with valuable help to the Prince of Orange. James 
 II.'s policy disgusted him, and he urged those 
 about him not to prop up the Stuarts, but let the 
 King " be left high and dry like a stranded whale." 
 
 1 Thomas Rymer says of him, in his Elegy : — 
 
 "From James to James they count him o'er and o'er 
 In four successive reigns a senator ; 
 On him, amidst the legislative throng, 
 Their eyes and ears and every heart they hung ; 
 Within those walls if we Apollo knew, 
 Less could he warm, nor throw a shaft so true ; 
 What life, what lightning, blanched around the Chair ! 
 It was no House, if Waller was not there."
 
 240 Flic Restoration. 
 
 This must have been in the very last months of his 
 life, and he did not live to see his prediction 
 verified. In 1686, however, when he was eighty- 
 one, he showed an intellectual vitality 1 , or rejuven- 
 escence, which, in its kind, is almost unparalleled. 
 He sat down to write a long poem, in the couplet 
 he had invented, on the subject of Divine Love. 
 This work yields to none of his younger productions 
 in grace, thoughtfulness, or melody, though perhaps 
 it has a touch of the languor of age. Marvellous to 
 record, he completed the poem, and when he could 
 write no more, dictated, just before he died, these 
 beautiful lines as an appendix to his aged labours : — 
 
 " When I for age could neither read nor write, 
 The subject made me able to indite ; 
 The soul, with nobler resolutions decked, 
 The body stooping, does herself erect : 
 No mortal parts are requisite to raise 
 Her, that unbodied can her Maker praise. 
 
 1 I do not know whether Saint-Evremond's epigram on Waller's 
 old age has ever been reprinted. It was written in 1684, and 
 appeared in 1688 in Poems to the Memory of that Incomparable Poet 
 Edmund Waller. 
 
 "Waller, qui ne sait rien des maux de la vieillesse, 
 Dont la vivacite fait honte aux jeunes gens, 
 S'attache a la beaute pour vivre plus long temps, 
 Et ce qu'on nommerait dans un autre faiblesse, 
 Est en ce rare esprit une sage tendresse, 
 Qui le fait resister a l'injure des ans."
 
 The Restoration. 241 
 
 The seas are quiet, when the winds give o'er! 
 So calm are we, when passions are no more ! 
 For then we know how vain it was to boast 
 Of fleeting things, so certain to be lost. 
 Clouds of affection l from our younger eyes 
 Conceal that emptiness which age descries ; 
 The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd, 
 Lets in new light, thro' chinks that time has made; 
 Stronger by weakness, wiser, men become, 
 As they draw near to their eternal home; 
 Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, 
 That stand upon the threshold of the new." 
 
 These were his last lines, composed, tradition 
 declares, when he was already on his death-bed ; 
 and all that cynicism itself can object against them 
 is, that the aged courtier, who had never failed in 
 tact, approaches the confines of eternity with all 
 the solemnity and decorum that such a step de- 
 manded. A little while before this event, he had 
 the whim to buy a small estate at Coleshill, where 
 he was born ; he liked to go over there to dine, and 
 once being carried to it, he said he should be glad 
 to die there, like the stag, when he was roused. 
 But his fatal dropsy happened to seize him at one 
 of his other mansions, that at Beaconsfield. The 
 King's surgeon was called in, and told him that he 
 must die, whereupon, as it is said, the old man 
 
 1 That is to say, of prejudice. 
 G. l6
 
 242 The Restoration. 
 
 composed those verses of adieu to life which I have 
 just quoted. He was spared a long illness, and 
 died very composedly, with all his children and 
 his retainers around him, on the 21st of October, 
 1687, being half-way across his eighty-third year. 
 
 The serenity of the close of Waller's life con- 
 trasts in a singular degree with the pain and 
 agitation which marked the last years of his first 
 pupil and fellow-labourer, Sir John Denham. The 
 poet of Cooper s Hill was among those who crept 
 back to England unobserved during Cromwell's pro- 
 tectorate. As early as 1652 he returned, and having 
 lost all his fortune by gaming and the wars, he was 
 entertained as a guest at Wilton House, by the Earl 
 of Pembroke, for a year. He lived, very modestly, 
 by the practice of architecture, until the Restora- 
 tion, keeping his eye upon the office of Surveyor- 
 General of His Majesty's Buildings, which Charles I. 
 had promised him in succession to Inigo Jones. 
 When that famous architect died, in 1652, Denham 
 was with Charles II. at St Germains, and he received 
 a nominal appointment to the post. What claims 
 he had as an artist I have been unable to discover 1 ; 
 
 1 Evelyn disagreed with him about the site for Greenwich Palace, 
 and after an interview on the 19th of October 1661 cameaway, "know- 
 ing Sir John to be a better poet than architect, though he had Mr 
 Webb (Inigo Jones's man) to assist him. " This was John Webb ( 161 1 
 — 1672), who designed the scenery for the Siege of Rhodes, and built a 
 good many of the buildings often carelessly attributed to Inigo Jones.
 
 The Restoration. 243 
 
 he is said to have designed part of Burlington 
 House, but in association with Sir Christopher 
 Wren, and the front of Greenwich Hospital, but 
 from the designs of Inigo Jones. 
 
 All this, however, came to pass at the Restora- 
 tion, when after a long period of poverty, Denham 
 felt the warmth of prosperity again. At the 
 coronation of Charles II. he was knighted. The 
 last twenty years of his life, as far as we can per- 
 ceive, were darkened by domestic suffering. He 
 had married a young and pretty wife, who had the 
 misfortune to attract the Duke of York's admiration, 
 and not virtue enough to resist it 1 . This preyed so 
 much upon the poet's senses, that he became insane, 
 and continued in this condition till near the end of 
 his life. He recovered, however, and continued to 
 be the King's Surveyor till his death on March 19, 
 1668 2 . Denham was a most unpopular man. 
 
 1 Lady Denham died suddenly on the 6th of January, 1667, 
 while under the protection of the Duke of York. It was supposed 
 that she was poisoned, and Marvell says, in The Last Instructions 
 to a Painter : — 
 
 "What frosts to fruits, what arsenic to a rat, 
 Was to fair Denham mortal chocolate." 
 
 2 In many text-books the date of Denham's death is given as 
 1688. But for reasons given below this seems highly improbable, 
 although by far the most accurate account of him, that in the 
 Biographia Britannica, gives the latter year. From contemporary 
 records I have collected a few dates which help us to follow the 
 course of Denham's life. Wren was made his associate in 1662. 
 
 16 — 2
 
 244 The Restoration. 
 
 Many of his contemporaries speak of him person- 
 ally with contempt or aversion. He was accused 
 of violence and discourtesy in his manner to ladies; 
 of stinginess and trickery in business ; of robbing 
 the King in the practice of his profession, and even of 
 stealing or buying from others the poems to which he 
 owed his fame. The last accusation we may lightly 
 dismiss ; the others, it is to be hoped, are no better 
 founded ; but Denham leaves upon us the impres- 
 sion of an unamiable man. He died worth ,£7,000, 
 and this in spite of the interval of his insanity. 
 
 Denham's last verses were pronounced at Poets' 
 Corner, when Cowley was buried in Westminster 
 Abbey in August 1667, so that, if he died early in 
 
 From 1664 Denham and Wren were entrusted with the repairing of 
 St Paul's. On the 21st February 1665 Pepys dined with Denham, 
 who was evidently perfectly well, at the Lord Chancellor's new 
 house. The poet-architect's house was in Scotland Yard, whither 
 he took his bride, Margaret Brook, when he married her on the 25th 
 of May 1665. In the early part of 1666 the Duke of York's 
 attentions to Lady Denham became marked ; in the summer she 
 yields to them, and Denham becomes mad. In 1668 Pepys hears a 
 rumour of his death, which rumour may or may not be true, but 
 has no doubt introduced that date into the text-books. On the 
 other hand, the well-informed writer in the Biographia Britannica, 
 after speaking of Denham's madness, goes on to say that "recover- 
 ing from that disorder, he continued in great esteem at court, and 
 with all persons of taste, until he died at his office near Whitehall, 
 in March 1688." His long-continued madness might account for 
 the absence of his name after 1667 from memoirs of the Times, but 
 Wren seems to have stepped into Denham's office in 1668.
 
 The Restoration. 245 
 
 the next year, his madness must have lasted a very 
 little while. Waller survived him nearly twenty 
 years, and it is curious that if he had but lived a 
 month or two longer he might have been alive with 
 Pope, and have linked his generation with the 
 generation of Shakespeare, into which Waller was 
 born. This extraordinary extension of Waller's 
 life had another consequence, namely, that he 
 survived a number of poets much younger than 
 himself, who had grown up, as it were, at his feet, 
 and who cannot be thought of except as supporters 
 of his poetical system. Among these the most cele- 
 brated names are those of Oldham, Roscommon, 
 Otway, Rochester, and Buckingham. 
 
 Having thus wound up the threads of the 
 purely historical part of our inquiry, let us turn to 
 the critical part. What was the new gift in poetry, 
 what was its force, and what its attraction ? This 
 dry and urban manner of writing, so precise, 
 colourless, and impersonal, what was the secret of 
 its fascination ? To us, as a poetical form, it is 
 apt to seem as insipid as a letter written by a 
 child whose nursery-governess has directed the pen 
 and suggested the expressions. In the earlier of 
 these chapters I have partly answered these 
 questions. The fascination lay to a great degree 
 in contrast. The child had so long run wild in
 
 246 The Restoration. 
 
 garden and orchard that to be brushed and cleaned, 
 
 and to sit up to table at its lessons, had all the 
 
 attraction of a new kind of play. When a mortal, 
 
 now and then in the course of the centuries, lights 
 
 upon a new form of writing, the charm of it is 
 
 irresistible. The trouble is but to be inspired with 
 
 something truly original, and then all the world 
 
 troops to it like a flight of moths. 
 
 Some curious facts may be observed to show 
 
 how difficult it was to resist the new distich, and 
 
 how right and proper it seemed that it should be 
 
 adopted. Herrick, the most romantic of poets, with 
 
 a throat like a mocking-bird's, capable of all the 
 
 ingenuities of metre and measure, writes a few lines 
 
 of personal compliment 1 to a leader in the opposite 
 
 camp, to Denham ; and for once in his life, merely 
 
 because he has been reading Coopers Hill, and the 
 
 invisible bird-lime has caught him, he writes those 
 
 lines in excellent distich. Instances of the fact that 
 
 people began, soon after the introduction of the 
 
 new form, to be unable to endure the old prosody, 
 
 1 "Or looked I back unto the times hence flown 
 To praise those muses, and dislike our own ? 
 Or did I walk those paean gardens through, 
 To kick the flowers, or scorn their odours too? 
 I might, and justly, be reputed here, 
 One nicely mad or peevishly sincere." 
 No one would suspect that these lines were written by the song- 
 bird of the Hesperides.
 
 The Restoration. 247 
 
 even in works where they were accustomed 
 to it, are numerous. There were complaints of 
 the unreadableness of The Faery Queen, and an 
 anonymous hand re-wrote it in 1687, "with the 
 obsolete language, and manner of verse completely 
 laid aside, and delivered in heroick numbers" for 
 polite readers. But perhaps even more odd than 
 this is a feat which Waller himself performed, the 
 alteration of the close of Beaumont and Fletcher's 
 Maid's Tragedy, which all the world knew in blank 
 verse, into distich. It was no longer tolerable to 
 indite such a vulgar thing as blank verse, and so 
 the adapter complacently says : — 
 
 " In this old play, what's new we have expressed 
 In rhyming verse, distinguished from the rest; 
 That, as the Rhone its hasty way does take, 
 Not mingling waters, through Geneva's lake, 
 So, having here the different styles in view, 
 You may compare the former with the new." 
 
 Nor was this merely the insolence of a painter 
 who wipes out the work of an older artist before he 
 begins his own. Samuel Butler, the author of 
 Hudibras, positively re-wrote some of his own most 
 characteristic pieces, which had been composed in 
 the older prosody, to conform them to the taste 
 which he had acquired. The difference between
 
 248 The Restoration. 
 
 the terse and crisp versification of his original 
 Elephant in the Moon, did not enable him to prefer 
 it to his later version into what was called " long 
 verse," although the alteration chiefly consisted 
 in the introduction of needless adjectives. 
 
 This preference of the newform and complacency 
 in its use grew year by year. We may trace it in 
 the prologues and prefatory dissertations which it 
 became more and more the fashion to prefix to 
 poetry. We find it strongly marked in the initial 
 attempts at versified literary criticism, the Essay 
 on Poetry by the Earl of Mulgrave, and the verse- 
 pamphlets of the Earl of Roscommon, although 
 the latter had a certain penchant for smooth blank 
 verse, and was the earliest of the myriad imitators 
 of Milton. But this spirit of self-gratulation reached 
 its pitch when the death of the leaders of the 
 movement, at a great age and almost simultaneously, 
 drew the attention of the critics to what they had 
 performed. Lest I should be supposed to exagger- 
 ate or to misrepresent the tone of the age, I will 
 quote from the remarkable preface, unsigned, but 
 written, I believe, by Francis Atterbury, afterwards 
 the famous Bishop of Rochester, for the first edition 
 of Waller's Posthumous Poems in 1690 1 . It will be 
 
 1 " The Second Part of Mr Waller's Poems, containing his 
 Alteration of the Maid's Tragedy. Together with some other
 
 The Restoration. 249 
 
 observed that the writer uses the epithet "Augus- 
 tan" for the new school of poetry; and this is, I 
 believe, the original occurrence of that phrase ; at 
 least, I have met with none earlier : — 
 
 " Mr Waller was indeed the parent of English 
 verse, and the first that showed us our tongue had 
 numbers and beauty in it." 
 
 This calmly disposes of Spenser and Shake- 
 speare. 
 
 " Our language owes more to him than the 
 French does to Cardinal Richelieu, and the whole 
 Academy... .The tongue came into his hands like a 
 rough diamond ; he polished it first, and to that 
 degree that all artists since him have admired the 
 workmanship, without pretending to mend it.... He 
 undoubtedly stands first in the list of refiners, and, 
 for aught I know, last too ; for I question whether, 
 in Charles II.'s reign, English did not come to its 
 full perfection, and whether it has not had its 
 Augustan age, as well as the Latin ; but posterity 
 will best judge of this." 
 
 The critic proceeds to examine the language of 
 Waller, and then we come upon this very notable 
 passage upon his versification : — 
 
 poems... never put into the first Collection of his Poems. London. 
 Printed for Tho. Bennet, MDCXC." The little volume was 
 licensed Sept. 16, 1689.
 
 250 Tlie Restoration. 
 
 " We are no less beholden to Mr Waller for the 
 new turn of verse which he brought in, and the 
 improvement he made in our numbers. Before 
 his time men rimed indeed, and that was all : as 
 for the harmony of measure, and that dance of 
 words, which good ears are so much pleas'd with, 
 they knew nothing of it. Their poetry was then 
 made up almost entirely of monosyllables, which, 
 when they come together in any cluster, are certain- 
 ly the most harsh untuneable things in the world. 
 If any man doubts of this, let him read ten lines in 
 Donne, and he'll quickly be convinced. Besides 
 their verses ran all into one another, and hung 
 together, throughout a whole copy, like the hooked 
 atoms that compose a body in Descartes. 
 
 " There was no distinction of parts, no regular 
 stops, nothing for the ear to rest upon. But as 
 soon as the copy began, down it went, like a larum, 
 incessantly ; and the reader was sure to be out of 
 breath, before he got to the end of it. So that 
 really verse in those days was but down-right prose, 
 tagged with rimes. Mr Waller remov'd all these 
 faults, brought in more polysyllables, and smoother 
 measures ; bound up his thoughts better, and in a 
 cadence more agreeable to the nature of the verse 
 he wrote in ; so that where-ever the natural stops 
 of that were, he contriv'd the little breakings of his
 
 The Restoration. 251 
 
 sense so as to fall in with 'em. And for that 
 reason, since the stress of our Verse lies commonly 
 upon the last syllable, you'll hardly ever find him 
 using a word of no force there. I would say it if I 
 were not afraid the reader would think me too 
 nice, that he commonly closes with verbs, in which 
 we know the life of language consists 1 ." 
 
 I have allowed the forgotten and anonymous 
 critic of 1690 to speak thus at length because 
 his language is direct and perspicuous, and 
 because he shows himself here and elsewhere, 
 throughout his discourse, an admirable spokesman 
 for his contemporaries. It cannot but be interest- 
 ing for us to observe how the whirligig of taste 
 brings in its revenges, and to see how quietly and 
 positively Atterbury condemns those very things 
 which have now come to be again considered 
 beauties, the irregularity of structure in a poem, 
 the use of short Saxon words, the rhythm running 
 down like an alarum. He grasps, too, so very 
 firmly the central notion of the new prosody, its 
 grace, intelligibility, and flexibility, that he leads 
 me easily to the next point that I have to consider 
 with you, namely, what excuse there was for the 
 zeal and satisfaction with which the age. accepted 
 the bondage which Waller imposed upon poetry ? 
 
 1 See Appendix IV. for the remainder of this preface.
 
 252 The Restoration. 
 
 The reaction has now lasted so long and has 
 become so complete, that it is very hard for us to 
 give a just reply to this question. We have been 
 taught, our fathers before us were taught, to loathe 
 the Augustan distich. Among the greatest English 
 poets the one which is most neglected, by far, is 
 Dryden, and mainly because of our prejudice 
 against his couplets. Pope has lately come again 
 more into favour, but it is all that the attraction of 
 his wit can do to drag the ordinary reader over the 
 barrier of his verse. From 1660 onwards to about 
 1760 the exact opposite was the case. A poet of 
 decent abilities was sure of readers if he would 
 write in the couplet 1 ; he had to conquer them if 
 he presumed to stray from it. Like Settle, in 
 Dryden's satire, the poets 
 
 " fagotted their fancies as they fell, 
 And if they rimed and rattled, all was well." 
 
 That monstrous play, the Empress of Marocco, 
 succeeded in 1673 solely because, in spite of its 
 ineptitudes, the young gentlemen of Cambridge 
 were delighted with the smoothness of the couplets' 2 
 
 1 Milton would stand absolutely alone in his preference of 
 another form, if Roscommon also, in 1684, in emulation of Paradise 
 Lost, had not chosen to throw off what he calls "the constraint of 
 Rime " in his Art of Poetry. 
 
 2 The glibness of Elkanah Settle's verse was certainly remark-
 
 The Restoration. 253 
 
 in which it was written. For in the first ardour 
 
 for the form, its admirers had gone so far as to 
 
 introduce it into the drama itself, and through 
 
 some fourteen years rimed plays were the fashion 
 
 in England. Into this question of the history of 
 
 dramatic rime I will not, however, enter here, 
 
 because I regard it as but an episode in the 
 
 general change of prosody, and also because, in my 
 
 volume of Seventeenth Century Studies, in the 
 
 chapter dedicated to Sir George Etheredge, I have 
 
 already given it minute consideration. Here I 
 
 need refer to it solely as giving us further evidence 
 
 of the overwhelming partiality of the reading 
 
 public for what the critic I just now quoted calls, 
 
 in another place, "true and even riming." Was 
 
 able. His early plays trip on their foolish course with a smoothness 
 that must have enraged Dryden. This is the sort of thing : — 
 " This is no news to that which she has done, 
 She was distracted ere the masque begun ; 
 Alone I saw her in a posture set, 
 As if she thought of something high and great ; 
 Straight with a more than common rage enflamed, 
 She moved, stared, walked, stormed, raged, cursed, raved and 
 
 damned ; 
 "With a distorted look she tore her hair, 
 Unsheathed her dagger, and gave wounds to air ; 
 Her face discoloured grew to a deep red, 
 As if her looks presaged the blood she shed ; 
 Then with an infant rage, more soft, more mild, 
 She played with madness, leaped, sung, danced and smiled." 
 Empress of Marocco, IV., 3.
 
 254 The Restoration. 
 
 there any excuse, I ask, for a taste so entires- 
 foreign to our own at present ? 
 
 There would, I think, have been no excuse if 
 the great manner of writing in Elizabeth's reign 
 had been sustained, or if— I will venture to state 
 my paradox boldly — if the great writers had been 
 educated at all points up to the pitch of their 
 genius. But it was not so. It seems to me that 
 the sudden efflorescence of poetry at the close of the 
 sixteenth century came too soon, into a language and 
 a literature still too crude, to be supported. There 
 was, certainly, no depth of cultivation, no broad 
 and wide literary civilization, in the age of Elizabeth. 
 We have a few giants and demigods, we have 
 Shakespeare, Spenser, Bacon, and Jonson ; but 
 their manner of writing is peculiar to each, strongly 
 individual, and raised high above the average of 
 their age. I may, perhaps, explain what I mean 
 when I say that if we could totally exclude these 
 authors from our memories, and regard the age 
 without them, it would seem, with certain frag- 
 mentary exceptions, more or less an age of barbaric 
 literature. These giants, with the great men who 
 walked beside them, passed away, and left English 
 style strangely unaffected by the glories of their 
 genius. The mediocrities of the age of Charles I. 
 did not model their prose on Bacon or their verse 
 on Shakespeare. They imitated bad Spanish and
 
 The Restoration. 255 
 
 Italian types, and wrote as if these great men had 
 never existed. 
 
 The romantic writing of the middle of the 
 century is not only weak, it is flaccid, crude, and 
 vicious. A tragic drama printed forty years after 
 the publication of Cymbcline reads like the un- 
 digested stuff out of which such a perfect growth as 
 Shakespeare's might proceed, not like the product 
 of a stock exhausted by genius. It was this uncul- 
 tured and barbaric basis to the national literature 
 which made the reformers so anxious for a new order 
 of writing. Not romantic in temper, not ready to be 
 fired by enthusiasm, we do not find the critics of the 
 Restoration warmly praising the masterpieces of the 
 greatest poets. They keep their approbation for 
 such writers as Fairfax, with his Italian sweetness, for 
 Sandys and Randolph, who foresaw the strong plain 
 verse that was about to become fashionable, and they 
 speak of these poets as of forerunners of their own. 
 
 The excuse of the classic writers was that 
 they opened a better field for poetry. They would 
 no longer abandon it to the expression of the 
 passions, to a violent ecstasy of feeling; they 
 chained it down to civic uses, made it the vehicle 
 of politics, of morals, of history, of all the fleeting 
 interests of the moment. They brought it up 
 from its country seclusion, and gave it a gay house
 
 256 TJic Restoration. 
 
 in Soho Square. I possess, in my own library, a 
 poem which has never been printed, by the famous 
 Lad}- Winchelsea, in which — the poem was written 
 about 1690 — she describes Apollo as presiding at a 
 conference of the Muses : — 
 
 "As now he was going to make an oration 
 He threw by one lock, with a delicate fashion, 
 Upon the left foot most genteely did stand, 
 Had drawn back the other, and waved his white hand." 
 
 That seems to me to describe the Song-God of the 
 Restoration with the utmost exactitude, a graceful 
 deity, as proud as Sir Fopling Flutter himself of 
 his white hand, and "amber-dropping hair," and 
 postures of a dancing-master. This was a Phoebus 1 
 whose oration anybody could understand, who 
 would be the patron of vigorous verses if they 
 were also elegant and polite, who would tolerate 
 nothing but common-sense, who did not wish his 
 votaries to sing like birds or waters, but like the 
 chorus in the opera. 
 
 The aim was now no longer the expression of 
 passion or fancy ; this had been followed to excess, 
 
 : In some sort Waller was this Apollo. Lord Lansdowne 
 (George "Granville, the polite") says, in 16SS, 
 
 "The Father of so many gods is he, 
 He must himself be sure some deity, 
 Minerva and Apollo shall submit, 
 And Waller be the only God of Wit."
 
 The Restoration. 257 
 
 with the result of a miserable licence of style. A 
 new thing now should be attempted, and poetry 
 should be set to work steadily on the foundations 
 of literature. Many changes had come with the 
 political crisis in the reign of Charles I. Know- 
 ledge had increased, curiosity had become more 
 keenly excited, gnomic questions, — questions of 
 theology and morals, — had taken the place in 
 men's minds which had previously been held by 
 mere chivalrous fancies. With all this, a great 
 intellectual weariness settled upon the race, upon 
 all the races of Europe. As the last waves of the 
 Renaissance died away, a deathly calm settled 
 down upon the pools of thought. Man returned 
 from the particular to the general, from romantic 
 examples to those disquisitions on the norm which 
 were thought to display a classical taste. Exhaus- 
 tion, preference of the form to the matter, craving 
 for a higher standard of elegance in general litera- 
 ture, these were the most prominent of the impulses 
 which led to the wide adoption of the new system 
 of writing. What that system was has been very 
 happily summed up by that admirable critic whom 
 we have just lost, one of the broadest students of 
 poetry that we have ever possessed, the late Rector 
 of Lincoln College. Mark Pattison says : " To 
 give clearness and plainness to the language, to 
 G. 17
 
 258 The Restoration. 
 
 file and finish the lines, to reject superfluity, to 
 diffuse a subdued colour over the whole, to regulate 
 the just subordination of the parts, — these became 
 the business of the poet, and every writer who 
 aspired to be read was a poet." 
 
 In other words, the seer disappeared, and the 
 artificer took his place. For a whole century the 
 singer that only sang because he must, and as the 
 linnets do, was entirely absent from English litera- 
 ture. He came back at the close of the eighteenth 
 century with Burns in Scotland and with Blake in 
 England. The lyrical gift, which had overpowered 
 every other through the second quarter of the 
 century, gradually expired, lasting longer, indeed, 
 than we are generally inclined to suppose, but 
 disappearing before the century was out. Dryden's 
 songs, which have been unduly neglected, give us 
 the highest lyrical water-mark of the age. " Fare- 
 well, ungrateful traitor," in the Spanish Fryer, and 
 the song in Clcomenes, are examples of very fine 
 poetry of this species ; the latter, which is one of 
 the jewels of the new classical literature, I will now 
 quote, with almost an assurance that it will be 
 new to most of my readers, since no compiler of 
 anthologies has ever searched the tragedies of 
 Dryden for gems, and even the editors of his 
 poetical works have usually omitted his songs.
 
 The Restoration. 259 
 
 " No, no, poor suffering heart, no change endeavour ! 
 Choose to sustain the smart, rather than leave her ; 
 My ravished eyes behold such charms about her, 
 I can die with her, but not live without her ; 
 One tender sigh of hers to see me languish, 
 Will more than pay the price of my past anguish, 
 Beware, oh cruel fair, how you smile on me, 
 'Twas a kind look of yours that has undone me. 
 
 " Love has in store for me one happy minute, 
 And she will end my pain, that did begin it; 
 Then no day void of bliss, or pleasure, leaving, 
 Ages shall slide away without perceiving; 
 Cupid shall guard the door, the more to please us, 
 And keep out Time and Death, when they would 
 
 seize us, 
 Till Time and Death depart, and say, in flying, 
 Love has found out a way to live by dying." 
 
 Here Dryden adopts that very falsetto key of 
 passion which had been habitual with the love- 
 poets of the earlier age. It is therefore a crucial 
 test to apply to this poem the formula of Mark 
 Pattison. It endures it with success ; it belongs, 
 in spite of its theme and temper, essentially to the 
 new system. The execution is uniform, the verse 
 is not heightened to a pitch at one point, and 
 allowed to run down like an alarum at another. 
 
 17 — 2
 
 260 The Restoration. 
 
 There is an equable force, a general smoothness of 
 expression, all through the song. Then the diction 
 is in every respect other than what Lovelace or 
 Herrick would have made it. It is without local 
 colour, it bears none of the conventional ornaments, 
 " gold," or " roses," " amorous nightingales," and 
 " fresh-quilted' colours of Aurora," without which a 
 Marinist poet could hardly venture to address a 
 woman. It has no unusual words, no far-fetched 
 conceits, no superfluous turns of thought, but — 
 considering the tension and extravagance of the 
 feeling described — accomplishes its purpose with 
 the utmost simplicity and common-sense. 
 
 It was thoroughly consistent with this desire 
 for smoothness and gentility, that the English 
 writers of the new school should look to France 
 and to French literature, where sentiment and 
 elegance had so long been made the subjects of 
 deliberate study. I have, I hope, shown in earlier 
 lectures that the movement in this direction was 
 begun in England before there was any oppor- 
 tunity for influence from France, and that it was 
 the result of an instinct for form and grace, for 
 intellectual repose, which affected all the races of 
 the west of Europe simultaneously. 
 
 But I should be sorry to seem to underrate 
 the part taken by France in the development of
 
 The Restoration. 261 
 
 English classicism. The exiles who returned at 
 the Restoration brought back with them the senti- 
 mental jargon of the heroic novelists, the Phcbus 
 as it was called, and this eclectic mode of talking, 
 this simpering style, exercised an overweening 
 influence on polite speech in English. I think 
 that if we ourselves had not forgotten this language, 
 and if the English imitations of it were not more 
 familiar to us than the original, we should be 
 amazed at its effect on the style of the Restoration. 
 Its masterpieces were industriously circulated in 
 English translations during the last years of the 
 Commonwealth. In old country-houses we may 
 still come across these enormous folios, the Clelia 
 of Mademoiselle de Scudery, in particular, dedi- 
 cated to amorous English maidens, in five huge 
 volumes. I remember that when I was myself a 
 child I got hold of a novel of this class called 
 Polexander — I suppose a version of the romance 
 by Gomberville — and read its tedious pages day 
 after day as a sort of religious exercise, tilting the 
 elephantine tome against the wall of the garret 
 where I found it, and really having to enter the 
 book, as if it were a little temple, every time I 
 wanted to proceed with it. The ladies of two 
 centuries ago did much the same, no doubt ; they 
 wandered at will for weeks at a time through the
 
 262 77/ c Restoration. 
 
 monstrous provinces of the country of Tenderness, 
 and lodged in the pretty hamlet of Assiduity by 
 the banks of the river of Inclination; or listened, 
 in the translation of Dr Loveday, to the heroical 
 adventures of La Calprenede's Cleopatra. 
 
 All the dramatists, from Dryden downwards, 
 borrowed their tragic plots from these French 
 romances, and the easiest way for a Settle or a 
 Banks to provide himself with material for what 
 was called a heroic play, was to turn the pages of 
 these vast and vapid romances. They were not 
 merely good to steal from, but they supplied matter 
 which was sure to be in sympathy with the tastes 
 of the ordinary play-goer, and thus more and more 
 the appeal was made, not to poets or the illu- 
 minated class, but to the general public. The 
 heroes of these extraordinary books of Scudery 
 and her friends were lifted to a ridiculous height 
 of virtue above ordinary men, their love "made 
 summer at the Arctic pole," their honour was like 
 the diamond and would not endure a microscopical 
 flaw, their courage was enough to discompose the 
 elements and daunt the gods themselves. The 
 consequence of this high ideal was that language 
 was obliged to conform to it, and tragedy became 
 that wonderful thing which we find it in Lee and 
 Crowne. Comedy, on the other hand, and satire,
 
 The Restoration. 26 
 
 3 
 
 being released from this lofty extravagance, became 
 excessively mundane and vulgar in style, without 
 elevation of any kind, and literature, instead of 
 mingling wit and imagination as the Elizabethans 
 had done, divided the one from the other to the 
 great detriment of both. There was, accordingly, 
 instituted, before anyone had perceived the ten- 
 dency, a distinction between the language of 
 poetry, which was only to be used by gods and 
 queens and stately gentlemen in full-bottomed 
 wigs, and the language of prose, which was free for 
 the use of these gentlemen when they sat down to 
 a pipe before the kitchen fire, and had hung their 
 periwigs on the backs of their chairs. 
 
 There was a constant rivalry between these two 
 styles, tragedy holding its chin high in the air, and 
 comedy laughing at it as Butler laughs in his Cat 
 and Puss at a Caterwauling. At last, and this 
 marked the final stage of classical development, 
 the difference between these two classes became 
 slowly extinct. Tragedy lowered its pretensions, 
 and descended from its ranting and roaring fustian 
 down to sober speech ; comedy abandoned the in- 
 tolerable roughness and coarseness of its language, 
 and rose to the grace of Congreve, the manly 
 elegance of Farquhar. Dryden had never quite 
 succeeded in attaining this sobriety ; his best pieces
 
 264 The Restoration. 
 
 are marked by inequalities, he leaps too high and 
 sinks too low. 
 
 It was William Walsh, himself a very graceful 
 and sedate writer, who first clearly perceived what 
 was needed. He lacked the force to carry it out, 
 but he pointed the way to Pope. As Pope said to 
 Spence, "Walsh used to tell me that there was 'one 
 way left of excelling ; for though we had several 
 great poets, we never had any one great poet who 
 was correct, and he desired me to make that my 
 study and aim." Pope took the advice, and reduced 
 this kind of writing to perfection ; in no other 
 country of Europe was there an artist so consum- 
 mate as he, nowhere one in whom the qualities 
 which Waller and Malherbe and Opitz had imposed 
 upon taste were developed with so much delicacy, 
 variety and harmony. Pope completed the change 
 which had been silently progressing almost from 
 the death of Shakespeare. When Pope's career 
 was finished, it was time to desist, and to prepare 
 for another reaction. 
 
 Here I must leave the subject, with a feeling 
 that I have scarcely touched it, so wide is it, so 
 burdened with documents, so set about with the 
 pitfalls of human inconsistency. I hope, however, 
 that I have been able to make a few points clear ; 
 in particular, that I have been able to show that
 
 The Restoration. 265 
 
 the classical movement was not, as has been the 
 habit to suppose, a meaningless and stupid decline 
 into dulness, Hyperion wilfully making a satyr of 
 himself, but that it was a reaction of common-sense 
 from barbarism, a return to rule after licence, an 
 act of self-preservation on the part of literature 
 and language. I shall not be convinced that I am 
 in error in this view by being confronted with a 
 few rainbow-coloured passages from the literature 
 that was superseded, or with instances of vulgarity 
 in the literature that took its place. I hold that it 
 was an absolute necessity, if English poetry was 
 to exist, that a period of executive severity and 
 attention to form should succeed the hysterical 
 riot of the Jacobeans. 
 
 The classic movement supplied that basis of 
 style, in prose and verse, upon which all more 
 recent literature has been elevated, and if we have 
 chosen to cover it up and forget it, and to return 
 in our poetical architecture to selected models from 
 earlier schools, it is none the less due to the 
 labours of Waller, Dryden, and Pope, that we 
 have solid groundwork on which to support these 
 brilliant fabrics of the imagination.
 
 APPENDICES.
 
 APPENDIX I. 
 
 Sidney Godolphin and Sandys. 
 
 The very first appearance of the new school of poets 
 in print was, so far as I am able to discover, in George 
 Sandys' Poems : — 
 
 " A Paraphrase upon the Divine Poems. By George 
 Sandys. London. At the Bell in St Paul's Church- 
 yard, mdcxxxviii. (Licenced Nov. 1637.)" 
 
 To this charming little folio, specially sought after by 
 collectors because it contains Henry Lawes' music to the 
 Psalms, both Sidney Godolphin and Waller contributed 
 prefatory eulogies, in company with Lord Falkland, 
 Henry King, Carew, Dudley Digges, and others less 
 eminent. Waller, whose Christian name is misprinted 
 Edward, appears with the verses "How bold a work 
 attempts that pen," reprinted in all succeeding collec- 
 tions of his work. Sidney Godolphin's long and courtly 
 poem of compliment has great merit, and in consideration 
 of the entire obscurity which has fallen upon this name, 
 an obscurity from which I hope to be the means in some 
 degree of lifting it, I quote a few stanzas : — 
 
 " Music, the universal language, sways 
 In every mind ; the world this power obeys, 
 And Nature's self is charmed by well-tun'd lays.
 
 270 Appendix I. 
 
 All disproportioned, harsh, disordered cares, 
 Unequal thoughts, vain hopes and low despairs 
 Fly the soft breath of these harmonious airs. 
 
 Here is that harp, whose charms uncharm'd the breast 
 Of troubled Saul, and that unquiet guest 
 With which his passions travail'd, dispossess. 
 ******* 
 
 This work had been proportioned to our sight, 
 Had you but known with some allay to write, 
 And not preserv'd your author's strength and light. 
 
 But you so crush those odours, so dispense 
 Those rich perfumes, you make them too intense 
 And such, alas ! as too much please our sense. 
 
 We fitter are for sorrows than such love ; 
 Josiah falls, and by his fall doth move 
 Tears from the people, mourning from above. 
 
 Judah, in her Josiah's death, doth die ; 
 All springs of grief are opened to supply 
 Streams to the torrent of this elegy. 
 
 Others break forth in everlasting praise, 
 
 Having their wish, and wishing they might raise 
 
 Some monument of thanks to after-days. 
 
 These are the pictures which your happy art 
 Gives us, and which so well you do impart, 
 As if these passions sprang in your own heart. 
 
 Others translate, but you the beams collect 
 
 Of your inspired authors, and reflect 
 
 Those heavenly rays with new and strong effect.
 
 Appendix I. 271 
 
 Yet human language only can restore 
 What human language had impaired before, 
 And when that once is done, can give no more. 
 
 Sir, I forbear to add to what is said, 
 
 Lest to your burnished gold I bring my lead, 
 
 And with what is immortal mix the dead." 
 
 Sandys, himself, though with an ear imperfectly 
 trained, is found making a direct effort to reform the 
 lax versification of his day. The volume is, in various 
 ways, one of considerable importance in the history of 
 English poetry. 
 
 In view of the curious solidarity of the earliest 
 classical English school, it is not uninteresting to find 
 Hobbes, in his Leviathan, incidentally mentioning in 
 these terms of respect a man at least a quarter of a 
 century younger than himself: — "Mr Sidney Godolphin, 
 when he lived, was pleased to think my studies some- 
 thing, and otherwise to oblige me with real testimonies 
 of his good opinion, great in themselves, and the greater 
 for the worthiness of his person."
 
 APPENDIX II. 
 
 Denham's Essay on Translated Verse. 
 
 There are so few translations which deserve praise, 
 that I scarce ever saw any which deserv'd pardon; those 
 who travel in that kind, being for the most part so 
 unhappy, as to rob others, without enriching themselves, 
 pulling down the same good authors, without raising their 
 own : neither hath any author been more hardly dealt 
 withall, than this our master [Virgil] : and the reason 
 is evident ; for, what is most excellent, is most inimitable, 
 and if even the worst authors are yet made worse by 
 their translators, how impossible is it not to do great 
 injury to the best? And therefore I have not the vanity 
 to think my copy equal to the original, nor (consequently) 
 myself altogether guiltless of what I accuse others ; but 
 if I can do Virgil less injury than others have done, 
 it will be, in some degree to do him right ; and indeed, 
 the hope of doing him more right is the only scope 
 of this Essay, by opening this new way of translating this 
 author, to those whom youth, leisure, and better fortune 
 make fitter for such undertakings. 
 
 1 conceive it a vulgar error in translating poets, to 
 affect being fidus interpres ; let that care be with them
 
 Appendix II. 273 
 
 who deal in matters of fact, or matters of faith : but 
 whosoever aims at it in poetry, as he attempts what is 
 not required, so he shall never perform what he 
 attempts; for it is not his business alone to translate 
 language into language, but poesie into poesie; and 
 poesie is of so subtle a spirit, that in pouring out 
 of one language into another, it will all evaporate ; and 
 if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will 
 remain nothing but a caput mortuum, there being certain 
 graces and happinesses peculiar to every language, which 
 gives life and energy to the words ; and whosoever offers 
 at verbal translation, shall have the misfortune of that 
 young traveller, who lost his own language abroad, and 
 brought home no other instead of it: for the grace of the 
 Latin will be lost by being turned into English words ; 
 and the grace of the English, by being turned into the 
 Latin phrase. And as speech is the apparel of our 
 thoughts, so are there certain garbs and modes of 
 speaking, which vary with the times ; the fashion of 
 our clothes being not more subject to alteration, than 
 that of our speech : and this I think Tacitus means, 
 by that which he calls Sermouem temporis istius auribus 
 acccumno datum ; the delight of change being as due to the 
 curiosity of the ear, as of the eye ; and therefore if Virgil 
 must needs speak English, it were fit he should speak 
 not only as a man of this Nation, but as a man of this 
 Age ; and if this disguise I have put upon him (I wish I 
 could give it a better name) sit not naturally and easily 
 on so grave a person, yet it may become him better than 
 that fools-coat, wherein the French and Italian have of 
 late presented him; at least, I hope, it will not make 
 G. 18
 
 274 Appendix II. 
 
 him appear deformed, by making any part enormously 
 bigger or less than the life, (I having made it my 
 principal care to follow him, as he made it his to follow 
 nature in all his proportions). Neither have I anywhere 
 offered such violence to his sense, as to make it seem 
 mine, and not his. Where my expressions are not so 
 full as his, either our language, or my art were defective 
 (but I rather suspect my self) ; but where mine are 
 fuller than his, they are but the impressions which the 
 often reading of him, hath left upon my thoughts ; so 
 that if they are not his own conceptions, they are at least 
 the results of them ; and if (being conscious of making 
 him speak worse than he did almost in every line) I err 
 in endeavouring sometimes to make him speak better; I 
 hope it will be judged an error on the right hand, and 
 such an one as may deserve pardon, if not imitation.
 
 APPENDIX III. 
 
 Waller's Address to the Queen. 
 
 The following address to Queen Henrietta Maria, 
 under a slight concealment, was issued with some copies 
 of the genuine edition of Waller's Poems in 1645, but 
 immediately suppressed. It seems to me worthy of 
 revival. 
 
 To my Lady. 
 Madam, 
 
 Your commands for the gathering of these 
 sticks into a faggot, had sooner been obeyed, but, 
 intending to present you with my whole vintage, I 
 stayed till the latest grapes were ripe, for here your 
 Ladyship hath not only all I have done, but all I ever 
 mean to do in this kind : not but that I may defend the 
 attempt I have made upon poetry, by the examples 
 (not to trouble you with history) of many wise and 
 worthy persons of our own times, as Sir Philip Sydney, 
 Sir Fra. Bacon, Cardinal Perron, the ablest of his 
 country-men ; and the former Pope, who they say, 
 in stead of the triple crown, wore sometimes the poet's 
 ivy, as an ornament, perhaps of lesser weight and 
 
 18—2
 
 276 Appendix III. 
 
 trouble, but Madam, these nightingales sung only in the 
 spring, it was the diversion of their youth. As ladies 
 learn to sing and play when they are children, what they 
 forget when they are women ; the resemblance holds 
 further : for as you quit the lute the sooner, because 
 the posture is suspected to draw the body awry, so this 
 is not always practised without some villany to the mind, 
 wresting it from present occasions, and accustoming us 
 to a still somewhat removed from common use. But 
 that you may not think his case deplorable, who had 
 made verses, we are told, that Tully (the greatest wit 
 among the Romans) was once sick of this disease, and 
 yet recovered so well ; that of almost as bad a poet 
 as your servant, he became the most perfect orator in 
 the world. So that not so much to have made verses, as 
 not to give over in time, leaves a man without excuse : 
 fh& former presenting us with an opportunity at least 
 of doing wisely : that is to conceal those we have made, 
 which I shall yet do, if my humble request may be of 
 as much force with your Ladyship, as your commands 
 have been with me. Madam, I only whisper these in 
 your ears ; if you publish them, they are your own, and 
 therefore as you apprehend the reproach of a wit, and 
 a poet, cast them into the fire, or if they come where 
 green boughs are in the chimney, with the help of your 
 fair friends, (for thus bound, it will be too hard a task 
 for your hands alone) to tear them in pieces, wherein 
 you shall honour me with the fate of Orpheus, for so his 
 poems, whereof we only hear the form (not his limbs 
 as the story will have it) I suppose were scattered by 
 the Thracian dames. Here, Madam, I might take an
 
 Appendix III. 277 
 
 opportunity to celebrate your virtues, and to instruct 
 you how unhappy you are, in that you know not who 
 you are: how much you excel the most excellent of 
 your own : and how much you amaze the least inclined 
 to wonder of your sex. But as they will be apt to take 
 your Ladyship for a Roman name : so would they believe 
 that I endeavoured the character of a perfect nymph, 
 worshipt an image of my own making, and dedicated 
 this to the Lady of the brain, not of the heart of your 
 Ladyships most humble servant. 
 
 E. W.
 
 APPENDIX IV. 
 
 The Preface to Waller's Posthumous Poems, 1690. 
 
 The Reader need be told no more in commendation 
 of these Poems, than that they are Mr Waller's : A 
 name that carries every thing in it, that's either great or 
 graceful in poetry. He was indeed the parent of 
 English verse, and the first that shew'd us our tongue 
 had beauty and numbers in it. Our language owes more 
 to him than the French to Cardinal Richlieu, and the 
 whole Academy. A poet cannot think of him, without 
 being in the same rapture Lucretius is in, when Epicurus 
 comes in his way : — 
 
 Tu pater et rerum inventor, Tu patria nobis 
 Suppeditas praecepta : Tuisque ex inclyte, chartis 
 Floriferis ut apes in saltibus omnia libant 
 Omnia nos itidem depascimur aurea dicta : 
 Aurea, perpetua semper dignissima vita. 
 
 The tongue came into his hands, like a rough 
 diamond ; he polish'd it first, and to that degree that 
 all artists since him have admired the workmanship, 
 without pretending to mend it. Sucklyn and Carew, 
 I must confess, wrote some few things smoothly enough, 
 but as all they did in this kind was not very considerable,
 
 Appendix IV. 279 
 
 so 'twas a little later than the earliest pieces of Mr 
 Waller. He undoubtedly stands first in the list of 
 refiners, and for ought I know, last too ; for I question 
 whether in Charles the Second's reign, English did 
 not come to its full perfection ; and whether it has 
 not had its Augustean Age, as well as the Latin. It 
 seems to be already mix'd with foreign languages, as 
 far as its purity will bear ; and, as chymists say of their 
 menstruums, to be quite sated with the infusion. But 
 
 posterity will best judge of this In the mean time, 
 
 'tis a surprizing reflection, that between what Spenser 
 wrote last, and Waller first, there should not be much 
 above twenty years distance : and yet the one's language, 
 like the money of that time, is as currant now as ever ; 
 whilst the other's words are like old coins, one must 
 go to an antiquary to understand their true meaning and 
 value. Such advances may a great genius make, when it 
 undertakes any thing in earnest ! 
 
 Some painters will hit the chief lines, and master 
 strokes of a face so truly, that through all the differences 
 of age, the picture shall still bear a resemblance. This 
 art was Mr Waller's ; he sought out, in this flowing 
 tongue of ours, what parts would last, and be of standing 
 use and ornament ; and this he did so successfully, that 
 his language is now as fresh as it was at first setting out. 
 Were we to judge barely by the wording, we could not 
 know what was wrote at twenty, and what at fourscore. 
 He complains indeed of a tide of words that comes in 
 upon the English poet, o'reflows whatever he builds : but 
 this was less his case than any man's, that ever wrote ; 
 and the mischief on't is, this very complaint will last long
 
 280 Appendix IV. 
 
 enough to confute it self. For though English be 
 mouldring stone, as he tells us there, yet he has certainly 
 pick'd the best out of a bad quarry. 
 
 We are no less beholden to him for the new turn of 
 verse, which he brought in, and the improvement he 
 made in our numbers. Before his time, men rim'd 
 indeed, and that was all : as for the harmony of measure, 
 and that dance of words, which good ears are so much 
 pleas'd with, they knew nothing of it. Their Poetry 
 then was made up almost entirely of monosyllables ; 
 which, when they come together in any cluster, are 
 certainly the most harsh untunable things in the world. 
 If any man doubts of this, let him read ten lines in 
 Donne, and he'll be quickly convinc'd. Besides, their 
 verses ran all into one another, and hung together, 
 throughout a whole copy, like the JiookH atoms, that 
 compose a body in Des Cartes. There was no dis- 
 tinction of parts, no regular stops, nothing for the ear to 
 
 rest upon But as soon as the copy began, down it 
 
 went like a larum, incessantly ; and the reader was sure 
 to be out of breath, before he got to the end of it. So 
 that really verse in those days was but down-right prose, 
 tagg'd with rimes. Mr Waller remov'd all these faults, 
 brought in more polysyllables, and smoother measures ; 
 bound up his thoughts better, and in a cadence more 
 agreeable to the nature of the verse he wrote in : so that 
 where-ever the natural stops of that were, he contriv'd 
 the little breakings of his sense so as to fall in with 'em. 
 And for that reason, since the stress of our verse lies 
 commonly upon the last syllable, you'll hardly ever find 
 him using word of no force there. I would say if I were
 
 Appendix IV. 281 
 
 not afraid the reader would think me too nice, that he 
 commonly closes with verbs, in which we know the life 
 of language consists. 
 
 Among other improvements, we may reckon that 
 of his rimes. Which are always good, and very often 
 the better for being new. He had a fine ear, and knew 
 how quickly that sense was cloy'd by the same round of 
 chiming words still returning upon it. 'Tis a decided 
 case by the great master of writing. Quae sunt ampla et 
 pulchra, diu placere possunt ; quae lepida et concinna, 
 (amongst which rhyme must, whether it will or no, take 
 its place) cito satietate affichint aurium sensum fastidiosis- 
 simum. This he understood very well, and therefore, to 
 take off the danger of a surfeit that way, strove to 
 please by variety, and new sounds. Had he carried this 
 observation (among others) as far as it would go, it must, 
 methinks, have shown him the incurable fault of this 
 jingling kind of poetry, and have led his later judgment 
 to blank verse. But he continu'd an obstinate lover of 
 rime to the very last. 'Twas a mistress, that never 
 appear' d unhandsome in his eyes, and was courted by 
 him long after Sacharissa was forsaken. He had rais'd 
 it, and brought it to that perfection we now enjoy it in : 
 and the Poet's temper (which has always a little vanity 
 in it) would not suffer him ever to slight a thing, he had 
 taken so much pains to adorn. My Lord Roscommon 
 was more impartial : no man ever rim'd truer and 
 evener than he, yet he is so just as to confess, that 'tis 
 but a trifle, and to wish the tyrant dethron'd, and blank 
 verse set up in its room. There is a third person 1 , the 
 1 Dryden.
 
 282 Appendix IV. 
 
 living glory of our English poetry, who has disclaim'd 
 the use of it upon the stage, tho no man ever employ'd 
 it there so happily as he. 'Twas the strength of his 
 genius that first brought it into credit in plays ; and 'tis 
 the force of his example that has thrown it out again. 
 In other kinds of writing it continues still ; and will do 
 so, till some excellent spirit arises, that has leisure enough, 
 and resolution to break the charm, and free us from the 
 troublesome bondage of riming. 
 
 As Mr Milton very well calls it, and has prov'd it as 
 well, by what he has wrote in another way. But this is 
 a thought for times at some distance ; the present age is 
 a little too warlike : it may perhaps furnish out matter 
 for a good poem in the next, but 'twill hardly encourage 
 one now : without prophesying, a man may easily know, 
 what sort of laurels are like to be in request. 
 
 Whilst I am talking of verse, I find my self, I don't 
 know how, betray' d into a great deal of prose. I in- 
 tended no more than to put the reader in mind, what 
 respect was due to any thing that fell from the pen of 
 Mr Waller. I have heard his last printed copies, which 
 are added in the several editions of his poems, very 
 slightly spoken of; but certainly they don't deserve it. 
 They do indeed discover themselves to be his last, and 
 that's the worst Ave can say of 'em. He is there Jam 
 senior : sed cruda deo viridisque senectus. The same 
 censure perhaps will be passed on the pieces of this second 
 part. I shall not so far engage for 'em, as to pretend 
 they are all equal to whatever he wrote in the vigour of 
 his youth. Yet they are so much of a piece with the 
 rest, that any man will at first sight know 'em to be
 
 Appendix IV. 28 
 
 j 
 
 Mr Waller's. Some of 'em were wrote very early, but 
 not put in former collections, for reasons obvious enough, 
 but which are now ceas'd. The Play was alter' d, to 
 please the Court. Tis not to be doubted who sat for 
 the two brothers characters. 'Twas agreeable to the 
 sweetness of Mr Waller's temper, to soften the rigour 
 of the tragedy, as he expresses it ; but whether it be so 
 agreeable to the nature of tragedy it self, to make every 
 thing come off easily, I leave to the critics. In the 
 prologue, and epilogue, there are a few verses that he 
 has made use of upon another occasion. But the reader 
 may be pleased to allow that in him, that has been 
 allowed so long in Homer and Lucretius. Exact writers 
 dress up their thoughts so very well always, that when 
 they have need of the same sense, they can't put it into 
 other words, but it must be to its prejudice. Care has 
 been taken in this book to get together everything of 
 Mr Waller's, that's not put into the former collection ; so 
 that between both, the reader may make the set com- 
 plete. 
 
 It will perhaps be contended after all, that some of 
 these ought not to have been publish'd : and Mr Cowley's 
 decision will be urg'd, that a neat tomb of marble is a 
 better monument, than a great pile of rubbish, etc. It 
 might be answer'd to this, that the pictures and poems 
 of great masters have been always valu'd, tho the last 
 hand weren't put to 'em. And I believe none of those 
 gentlemen that will make the objection would refuse a 
 sketch of Raphael's or one of Titian's draughts of the 
 first sitting. 
 
 I might tell 'em too, what care has been taken by the
 
 284 Appendix IV. 
 
 learned, to preserve the fragments of the ancient Greek 
 and Latin poets : There has been thought to be a 
 Divinity in what they said, and therefore the least pieces 
 of it have been kept up and reverenc'd, like religious 
 reliques. And I am sure, take away the milk anni, and 
 impartial reasoning will tell us, there is as much due to 
 the memory of Mr Waller, as to the most celebrated 
 names of antiquity. 
 
 But to wave the dispute now of what ought to have 
 been done ; I can assure the reader, what would have 
 been had this edition been delay'd. The following 
 poems were got abroad, and in a great many hands : It 
 were vain to expect that amongst so many admirers of 
 Mr Waller, they should not meet with one fond enough 
 to publish 'em. They might have staid indeed, till by 
 frequent transcriptions they had been corrupted ex- 
 treamly, and jumbled together with things of another 
 kind : But then they would have found their way into 
 the world. So 'twas thought a greater piece of kindness 
 to the author, to put 'em out ; whilst they continue 
 genuine and unmix'd ; and such, as he himself, were he 
 alive might own.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Addison, Joseph, versification of 
 his school of poetry, 55 n. 
 
 Adventure, spirit of, its decline 
 after the Elizabethans, 35, 6 
 
 ALneid, Thos. Phaer's transla- 
 tion of, 187 
 
 Against Love, passage from Den- 
 ham's, 133, 4 
 
 Akenside, Mark, 45 
 
 Albion's England, by William 
 Warner, 75 
 
 Albovine, by Sir W. Davenant, 
 146 n., 150, 165 n. 1 
 
 Alcippe of Francois Maynard, its 
 resemblance to Denham's 
 Cooper's Hill, 120 
 
 "Alexandrian" literature, arti- 
 ficial nature of, 181, 205 
 
 Alexandrine verse, little used by 
 Malherbe, 20, 1 ; how handled 
 by Corneille and in England, 
 121 
 
 Anapaestic cadence, neglected 
 in English verse from Chaucer 
 to Waller, 9, 187, 8 
 
 Andrewes, Lancelot, Bp of Win- 
 chester, 53 
 
 Anne of Austria, her sympathy 
 with Queen Henrietta Maria, 
 113, 117; French poetry in 
 her time, 119 
 
 Annus Mirabilis, one of the few 
 great poems composed in the 
 four-line heroic stanza, 165 ; 
 
 influence of Gondibert on its 
 style, 228 
 
 Arcadia, its languid and difficult 
 style, 25, 75 
 
 Aristotle's rules of composition, 
 38 
 
 Armstrong, John, obscurity of 
 his figures of speech, 12 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, his essay on 
 Falkland, 115 
 
 Arrebo, first modern Danish 
 poet, 16 
 
 Ars Poetica, Horace's warnings 
 in, justified by the extrava- 
 gance of the early Caroline 
 writings, 37 — 9 
 
 Art of Poetry, by Wentworth 
 Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, 
 252 n. 1 
 
 Astraea Redux, Dryden's style 
 in the, 228 
 
 Atterbury, Francis, Bp of Ro- 
 chester, his criticism of Waller, 
 248-251 
 
 Aubrey, John, 142 n. 2, 144, 
 167, 23611. 
 
 'Augustan,' the epithet, first ap- 
 plied by Francis Atterbury, 
 249 
 
 Augustan critics, 104 
 
 ,, distich, 252; its earlier 
 and later character, as shewn 
 in Chamberlayne's Pharon- 
 nida and Keats' Endym ion, 201
 
 2 So 
 
 Index. 
 
 Ayres, Philip, tries to restore 
 romantic poetry, 210; his son- 
 nets, 21 1 
 
 Bacon, Lord Francis, his writings 
 in advance of his age, 254 
 
 Banks, Ann, marries Waller, 60 
 
 Barnfield, Richard, 24 
 
 Baron, Robert, his tragedy of 
 Mirza, and reference to Den- 
 ham's Sophy, 100 n. 
 
 Barons' Wars, by Michael Dray- 
 ton, 34, 5, 75 _ 
 
 Bartholomew Fair, by Ben Jon- 
 son, resembles the works of 
 the Dutch dramatist, Bredero, 
 17 n. 
 
 Battle of the Summer Islands, 
 by Ed. Waller, 65, 73 — 6; 
 imitated in Davenant's Mada- 
 gascar, 150 
 
 Beaumont, Joseph, his Psyche, 
 172 
 
 Behn, Aphara, her eulogy on 
 Waller, 182 n. 
 
 Bermuda Islands, the scene of 
 Waller's Battle of the Summer 
 Islands, 73, 4 a 
 
 Bermudas, The, of Andrew 
 Marvell, 220 
 
 Betterton, Thos., the actor, 144 
 
 Biographia Britannica, its 
 opinion of Waller in 1766, 45 ; 
 reference to Denham in, 243 
 n. 2 
 
 Blake, Wm., his place in English 
 poetry corresponds with that 
 of Burns in Scotch, 258 
 
 Boileau. Nicholas, 20 
 
 Botticelli, 30 
 
 Boyle, Roger, see Lord Orrery 
 
 Bredero, the greatest Dutch 
 dramatist, 17 n. 
 
 Britannia 's Pastorals, by Wm. 
 Browne, 104 
 
 Brooke, Lord, Fulke Greville, 
 
 his patronage of and influence 
 upon Wm. Davenant, 145 — 8, 
 151, 166 
 
 Browne, Wm., 104, 137 
 
 Buckingham, (First) Duke of, 
 George Villiers, reception of 
 the news of his death by 
 Charles I., and Waller's verses 
 on the occasion, 61, 2 
 
 „ (Second) Duke of, 
 
 George Villiers, 245 
 
 Burne-Jones, Edward, his paint- 
 ing compared to Thomas 
 Stanley's poetry, 206 
 
 Burns, Robert, as the reviver 
 of romantic poetryin Scotland, 
 corresponds to Blake in Eng- 
 land, 258 
 
 Butler, Samuel, his Hudibras, 
 116, 184, 186; conforms to 
 the classical style, 247, 8; 
 ridicules the vapid and high- 
 flown style of tragedy borrow- 
 ed from France, 263 
 
 Byron, Lord, in his Greek ro- 
 mances a successor of Wm. 
 Chamberlayne, 200 
 
 Calamy, Dr Edmund, extract 
 from Wild's poem on his 
 death, 193 n. 
 
 Cambridge, a 'hotbed of poetry' 
 in the early Caroline period, 
 2 4i 5' 37 > Waller a scholar at 
 King's, 51; relics of Gray at 
 Pembroke, 165; Cowley, a 
 precocious Cambridge verse- 
 man, 172 ; the Marinist school 
 there, 172 ; Cleveland sows 
 his poetical wild oats there, 
 185, 190; Robert Wild's pic- 
 ture of life there under the 
 Commonwealth, 194 — 6 ; Tho- 
 mas Stanley at Pembroke, 
 204 ; Henry Vaughan, the Si- 
 lurist, the last survivor of
 
 Index. 
 
 287 
 
 Herbert's school there, 209 ; 
 Andrew Marvell, kidnapped 
 from Trinity by the Jesuits, 
 212, 3; popularity of Settle's 
 Empress of ' Marocco at, 252 
 
 Campbell, Thomas, one of the 
 first of the critics to resusci- 
 tate Chamberlayne's Pharon- 
 nida, 200 
 
 Campion, Thomas, his tumbling, 
 rimeless measure, 9 n. 
 
 Carew, Thomas, 22, 27, 38, 
 82 n., 150, 208 
 
 Chacc, The, passage from Somer- 
 ville's, 108 n. 2 
 
 "Chalkhill, John,'' the pseud- 
 onym under which Izaak 
 Walton published Thealma 
 and Clearchus, 209 n. 2 
 
 Chamberlayne, William, 197 — 
 203 ; Keats' indebtedness to 
 him, 199; his Greek romance 
 Pharonnida a forerunner of 
 Byron's writings, 200 
 
 Chapelain, Jean, relation of his 
 writings to Cowley's, 119 
 
 Chapman, George, 24, 56, 75 
 
 Charles I., discourages the writing 
 of poetry, 22 ; Waller's poem 
 on his escape from shipwreck 
 at Santander, 56 — 8; fosters 
 by his stupidity the new mental 
 and political ideas of his time, 
 33 ; his reception of the news 
 of Buckingham's death, 61, 2; 
 referred to in Waller's poem 
 on the rebuilding of St Paul's, 
 80, 1 ; his treatment of Waller 
 at Oxford, 85 ; warning refer- 
 ence to him in Denham's 
 Sophy, 102, 3; his qualified 
 praise of Cooper's Hill, and 
 unsympathetic advice to Den- 
 ham, 130, 1 
 
 Charles II., 113, 116, 131, 232, 
 
 Charles' Spikenard, by John 
 Cleveland, 186 
 
 Chatterton, Thomas, an oppo- 
 nent of the classical school, 4 
 
 Chetwood, Knightly, Dean of 
 Gloucester, his criticism of 
 English poetry, 32 n. 2 
 
 Chiabrera, his position in Italy 
 analogous to our Cowley, 15 
 
 Chloris and Hilas, by Waller, 
 one of the earliest dactylic 
 poems, 188 
 
 Christ's Victory and Triumph, 
 by Giles Fletcher, 75 
 
 Cid, Corneille's, 10 1 
 
 Cinna, Corneille's, 102 
 
 Claremont, by Samuel Garth, a 
 direct imitation of Cooper's 
 Hill, 108 
 
 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl 
 of, 60, 61, 63, 83, 86 and 
 n. 1, 90, 115, 123, 146 n., 237 
 
 Classical reaction, the mental 
 condition which rendered it 
 possible, 35 — 9 
 
 Classical school, the language 
 and peculiarities of, 10 — 13, 
 169; Denham's Sophy its first 
 published representative, 95, 
 6 ; its triumph in Cooper's 
 Hill, 103, 4 ; not due to French 
 influence, 111, 12; the final 
 stage of its development, 263 
 
 Classicism in Dutch literature, 
 18 
 
 Cleland, William, 19411. 
 
 Cleopatra, of Samuel Daniel, 
 102 n. 
 
 Cleveland, John, released by 
 Oliver Cromwell, 116, 7; has 
 secured no place in the history 
 of English poetry, 184; at 
 first a Marinist, 185 ; his under- 
 graduate days at Cambridge, 
 185, 190; a disappointment 
 in both politics and poetry,
 
 288 
 
 Jlldc.Y. 
 
 1 86; his use of the triple 
 cadence in lyrics, 187 — 90 
 
 Cockaine, Sir Aston, might have 
 been the Boswell of the early 
 Caroline period, -24 
 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, assists 
 to revolutionize the taste for 
 classical poetry, 4, 178; his 
 triumph foreseen by Southey, 
 156; his criticism of Donne, 
 217; the self-reserve necessary 
 in reading some of his poems, 
 
 Congreve, William, his refining 
 influence upon Comedy, -263 
 
 Contarini, 61 
 
 Coopers Hill, Denham's praise 
 of Waller in his poem of, 79, 
 80; Dryden's opinion of, 95; 
 date of its publication, 96, 
 103; a decisive victory for the 
 classical school, 104; its place 
 among topographical poems, 
 104; subsequent alterations of 
 the first edition, 105 — 7 ; 
 reasons for the poem's great 
 and enduringreputation, 107 — 
 9; imitated in Pope's Windsor 
 Forest and Garth's Claremont, 
 108; its resemblance to May- 
 nard's Alcippe, 120; its in- 
 fluence on Herrick, 246 
 
 Corbet, Richard, Bishop of Nor- 
 wich, 187 
 
 Corneille, Pierre, doubtful 
 whether he had any influence 
 upon Denham's writings, 101. 
 2 ; brings the Alexandrine 
 verse to perfection, 121 
 
 Coronation Panegyric, of John 
 Dryden, 228 
 
 Cowley, Abraham, 135 — 78 pas- 
 sim ; his position analogous to 
 that of Chiabrera in Italy, 15, 
 19, 108; attached to Queen 
 Henrietta Maria during the 
 
 Exile, 113; meets Crashaw in 
 poverty in Paris, 114, 118; 
 French influence upon him, 
 119, I2i ; his desertion from 
 the romantic to the classical 
 school, 140; his place among 
 the classicists, 171, 177: his 
 undergraduate life at Cam- 
 bridge, 172; comparison be- 
 tween him and Victor Hugo, 
 173; passage from his Elegy 
 on Crashaw, 173 — 175; his 
 Davideis, 175, 6; Pope's sneer 
 at him, 177 and n. ; revival of 
 his influence, 177, 8; Denham's 
 last verses written for his fune- 
 ral, 244 
 Crabbe, George, his effect on 
 the fame of classical poetry, 
 
 4 
 Crashaw, Richard, style of his 
 Weeping of the Magdalen, 
 1 4 n. ; starving in Paris during 
 the Exile, 114; character of 
 his verse while at Cambridge, 
 172 and n. ; passage from 
 Cowley's Elegy on him, 1 73 — 
 
 175 
 
 Crawley, Sir Francis, Judge, 
 impeached by Waller on the 
 ship-money question, 84 
 
 Cromwell, Oliver, related to 
 Edmund Waller, 49, 83; re- 
 leases John Cleveland from 
 prison at Yarmouth, 117; 
 Mrs Waller makes capital of 
 ' her relationship with him, but 
 is eventually silenced, 122, 
 229; Marvell's Horatian ode 
 on him, 216; Waller's Pane- 
 gyric to him, 129, 30, 231, 2 
 
 Crowne, John, dramatist, 262 
 
 Cruel Brother, by William Dave- 
 nant, 147 
 
 Cupid Crucified, by Thomas 
 Stanley, 206, 7
 
 Index. 
 
 289 
 
 Curse of Kehama, by Robert 
 
 Southey, 158 
 Cyder ; of John Philips, its 
 
 pompous diction, 1 1 n. 
 
 Dactylic movement unknown to 
 the Elizabethans, 9, 10, 187; 
 introduced by Waller and 
 Cleveland, ^88, 9 
 
 Daniel, Samuel, his tragi-come- 
 dies Cleopatra and Philotas, 
 102 n. 
 
 Darwin, Erasmus, pomposity of 
 his figures of speech, 12, 170 
 
 Daubigny, Lady, shares in the 
 plot of 1643 against the 
 Parliament, 86 
 
 Davenant, Sir William, 1 35 — 78 
 passim; 108, 113, 118, 12 1; 
 a pervert from the romantic 
 school, 1 40; the legendary 
 son of Shakespeare, 144, 5 ; 
 his friendship with Fulke 
 Greville, Lord Brooke, 145 — 
 8; in 1637 succeeds Ben Jon- 
 son as poet laureate, 149; his 
 place among the renovators 
 of English verse, 152, 3 ; com- 
 pared with Southey, 155 — 9; 
 his life saved by Milton's inter- 
 position, 167 
 
 Davideis, a sacred epic by Abra- 
 ham Cowley, 173, 175; pas- 
 sage quoted from, 176 
 
 Davies, Sir John, one of the 
 first to employ the four-line 
 heroic stanza, 165 
 
 Dekker, Thomas, dramatist, 17 
 
 Denham, Sir John, not affected 
 by French classicism, 21 ; 
 Waller's earliest pupil in 
 poetry, 63 ; his criticism of 
 Waller, 79, 80; Dryden's 
 opinion of his Cooper's Hill, 
 95 ; his Sophy the first publi- 
 cation of the classical school, 
 
 G. 
 
 95»- 6, 99 — 103; his youth, 
 96, 7 ; his Essay against 
 Gaming, 97, 8; his Destruc- 
 tion of Troy, 98 ; was he in- 
 fluenced by Corneille? 101, 
 2 ; his Cooper's Hill, 103 — 9, 
 121 ; Charles I.'s unsympa- 
 thetic advice to him, 131 ; de- 
 scribes the life of the cavaliers 
 during the Exile, H4n.; 118; 
 his career during the Com- 
 monwealth, 130 — 3; passage 
 from his poem Against Love, 
 133, 4; his essay on the art of 
 translating, 98, 9, 272 — 4 
 Destruction of Troy, by Sir John 
 
 Denham, 98 
 D'Ewes, Sir Symeon, 87; ex- 
 tract from his diary describing 
 Waller's appearance at the bar 
 of the House of Commons, 89 n. 
 Dido and sEneas, by Sir Richard 
 
 Fanshawe, 118 
 Digby, Lord George, an oppo- 
 nent of the ' Root and Branch ' 
 party, 84 
 Digges, Sir Dudley, 269 
 Diodati, Dr John, visited at 
 
 Geneva by Waller, 128 
 Divine Love, by Waller, passage 
 
 from, 240, 1 
 Dobson, Austin, his suggestion 
 of an English term for the 
 French enjambement, 6 
 Donne, John, a leader in litera- 
 ture, 14, 182; has a literary 
 acquaintance with Constantine 
 Huyghens, 17; popularity of 
 his poems at Cambridge, 25 
 and n. 1, 37; 67, 121, 151 n. ; 
 Marvell the last of his school, 
 216; Coleridge's criticism of 
 him, 217; passage from his 
 Valediction forbidding Mourn - 
 ing, 217 ; Francis Atterbury's 
 opinion of his verse, 250 
 
 19
 
 290 
 
 Index. 
 
 Dramatists of the early Caroline 
 period prepare the way for 
 the prosaic reaction, 29 
 ,, French, their influence 
 upon England, 262 
 
 Drayton, Michael, his Barons' 
 Wars, 34, 5, 75; 56, 67; his 
 Pelyolbion, 104 
 
 Dryden, John, class of poetry 
 identified with, 3 ; effect of the 
 naturalistic poets on his fame, 
 4 ; specimen of his verse 
 from Mac-Flecknoe, 7 ; Waller's 
 verse compared with his, 20, 
 58, 210, 233; at one time 
 reckoned inferior to Waller, 
 48 n.; his opinion of Waller's 
 verse, 54, 5, 95, 153; nis 
 Hind and the Panther, 75; 
 his opinion of Denham's 
 Cooper's Hill, 95 ; his treat- 
 ment of the Alexandrine, 121, 
 234, 5; in the first rank of 
 seventeenth century writers, 
 137; employs in his Anntis 
 Mirabilis the four-line heroic 
 stanza, 165, 228; Cowley's in- 
 fluence upon him, 177, 227; 
 influence of Cleveland's satires 
 on his style, 192 n. 1 ; a friend 
 of Philip Ayres, 211; had no 
 share in the early development 
 of the classical movement, 
 226 — 8; at first a Marinist, 
 227; influence of Davenant's 
 Gondibert seen in his Heroic 
 Stanzas and Annus Mirabilis, 
 228; Oldham's influence upon 
 his satires, 234 and n. ; reason 
 for the present neglect of his 
 writings, 252; his opinion of 
 Elkanah Settle's verse, 252 
 and n. 2 ; character of his 
 songs, 258 — 60 ; his dramas, 
 263 ; a pillar of classical poetry, 
 265 
 
 Duchess of Malfy, by John 
 
 Webster, 24 
 Dunciad, by Alexander Pope, 
 
 Dutch poetry during the seven- 
 teenth century, 17, 8 
 
 Dyer, Sir Edward, a friend of 
 Lord Brooke and Sir Philip 
 Sidney, 145 , 
 
 Elegy in a Country Churchyard, 
 use of the four-line heroic 
 stanza by Thomas Gray in 
 his, 164 — 6 
 
 Elephant in the Moon, by Samuel 
 Butler, 248 
 
 Elizabethan poetry, its spirit and 
 characteristics, 13, 33, 35, 6, 
 
 75 
 Ellice, Robert, 165 n. 1 
 Empress of Morocco, passage 
 
 from Elkanah Settle's, 252 n. 2 
 Endymion, by John Keats, its 
 
 connexion with William Cham- 
 
 berlayne's Pharonnida, 199, 
 
 200, 201 
 Enjambement, specimen of the 
 
 French, 6; English term of 
 
 'overflow' proposed for it, 6, 
 
 55 
 Entertainment at Rutland House, 
 
 by Sir William Davenant, 168 
 Essay against Gaming, by Sir 
 
 John Denham, 97, 99 
 Eusden, Lawrence, 228 
 Evelyn, John, travels with Waller 
 
 during the Exile, 125 — 8; 
 
 thinks Sir John Denham "a 
 
 better poet than architect," 
 
 242 n 
 
 Faery Queen, of Edmund 
 
 Spenser, 26, 247 
 Fairfax, Edward, 255 
 Faithful Shepherdess, by John 
 
 Fletcher, 38
 
 Index. 
 
 291 
 
 Falconer, William, 45 
 
 Falkland, Viscount, Lucius Cary, 
 Waller a member of his club, 
 62; an opponent of the 'Root 
 and Branch' party, 84; falls 
 at the (first) battle of New- 
 bury, 114; Clarendon's opinion 
 of him, 115 
 
 Fanshawe, Sir Richard, in 1646 
 carries the Prince of Wales 
 (Charles II.) safely to Paris, 
 116; not influenced by French 
 literature during the Exile, 
 118; a full-blown Marinist, 
 118, 9 ; 121; his Pastor Fido, 
 118, 131 
 
 Farquhar, George, his refining 
 influence upon Comedy, 263 
 
 Fenton, Elijah, lines on Waller's 
 Sacharissa, 64 n. 1 ; editor of 
 Waller's poems, no, 125 
 
 Ferrarius, Dr Franciscus, visited 
 by Waller and Evelyn at 
 Milan, 126 
 
 Filicaja, reference to his effect 
 on Italian poetry, 15 
 
 Flatman, Thomas, 209 n. 2 
 
 Fletcher, John, dramatist, his 
 Faithful Shepherdess, 38, 100, 
 
 137 
 Fletcher, Phineas, 22; his Pur- 
 ple Island, 16, 27, 34, 38, 
 
 159 
 
 Fletcher, Giles (brother of Phi- 
 neas F.), 75 
 Ford, John, dramatist, 24, 100 
 France, had very little share in 
 originating the classical move- 
 ment in England, 18 — 21, in, 
 112, 260; but influenced its 
 development very consider- 
 ably, 112, 119, 120, 260, 261; 
 connexion of its drama with 
 that of England, 100 — 102, 
 262; its literature at the time 
 of the Exile, 119 — 122 
 
 Fuseara, passage from John 
 Cleveland's, 185 n. 
 
 Garden, The, by Andrew Mar- 
 veil, 219, 220 
 
 Gardiner, Prof. S. R., 86 n. 2, 
 88 n., 123 
 
 Gargantua, by Rabelais, referred 
 to, 46 and n. 
 
 Garth, .Sir Samuel, imitates 
 Cooper's Hill in his Clare- 
 mont, 108 
 
 German poetry, beginning of 
 modern, 16 
 
 Godolphin, Sidney, unaffected 
 by the French classical revolt, 
 21; killed in the Civil War, 
 109; passages from his writ- 
 ings, no, 269; his skill in the 
 treatment of the couplet, in, 
 116; a friend of Lord Falkland, 
 115; his poem to G. Sandys, 
 269, 270; Hobbes' mention of 
 him in his Leviathan, 271 
 
 Gondibert, by Sir Wil ,; am Dave- 
 nant, 139; il ...^urtant place 
 in the history of the classical 
 transition, 146, 155, 158, 159; 
 time of its publication, 153 — 
 5; allusions to it in contem- 
 porary literature, 159 — 162; 
 plot of the poem, 162; pas- 
 sage quoted from it, 163; its 
 metre, 164 — 6; its effect on 
 Dry den, 228 
 
 Gongora, Luis, Spanish poet, 
 13, 22 
 
 Granville, George, Lord Lans- 
 downe, his estimate of Waller, 
 256 n. 
 
 Gray, Thomas, opposed to the 
 classical school of verse, 4, 
 50; his use of the four-line 
 heroic stanza, 164 — 6; revives 
 Cowley's prosody, 177 
 
 Greene, Robert, 23 
 
 19 — 2
 
 292 
 
 Index. 
 
 Greville, Fulke, see Brooke, 
 Lord 
 
 Habington, William, 22, 150, 
 208 
 
 Halifax, Lord, George Savile, a 
 pupil of Waller's in verse, 236 
 
 Hallo my Fancy, by William 
 Cleland, 194 n. 
 
 Hammond, James, his Love 
 Elegies, 165, 166 
 
 Hampden, John, his sister the 
 mother of Edmund Waller, 
 49, 122; 83, 84 
 
 Hardy, Alexandre, French dra- 
 matist, 101 
 
 Harvey, Gabriel, 24 
 
 Hausted, Peter, 116 
 
 Henrietta Maria, Queen of 
 Charles I., attended in her 
 exile by men of letters, 113; 
 well received in France, 117, 
 121; marries Lord Jermyn 
 after Charles I.'s death, 122 
 4 Herbert, George, 22, 38, 209 
 ,, Sir William, 100 n. 1 
 
 Heroic Stanzas, by John Dryden, 
 228 
 
 Herrick, Robert, 22, 4811., 137, 
 260; momentary influence 
 upon him of Cooper's Hill, 246 
 
 Heywood, Thomas, dramatist, 
 
 Hind and the Panther, by John 
 Dryden, 75 
 
 Hobbes, Thomas, his rule for 
 the composition of an heroic 
 poem, 75 ; in Paris during the 
 Exile, 113, 118; replies to 
 Davenant's preface to Gondi- 
 bert, 154; his translation of 
 Homer, 165 and n. 2; his 
 criticism of Sidney Godolphin, 
 271 
 
 Holiday, Barton, 123 
 
 Holland, character of its litera- 
 
 ture during the seventeenth 
 century, 17, 18 
 
 Homer, Thomas Hobbes' trans- 
 lation of, 165 and n. 2 
 
 Hope, Anastatius, 200 
 
 Horace, his style described by 
 Waller, 3 ; his warnings in the 
 Ars Poetica justified by the 
 grotesqueness of the early 
 Caroline writers, 38 
 
 Hudibras, by Samuel Butler, 
 116, 184, 186, 247 
 
 Hugo, Victor, in some points 
 resembles Cowley, 173 
 
 Huyghens, Constantine, a literary 
 friend of John Donne, 17 
 
 Iliad, Thomas Hobbes' transla- 
 tion of the, 165 n. 2 
 
 Italy, condition of poetry at 
 close of the sixteenth century, 
 
 14. 15 
 Iter Bo?'eale, by Robert Wild, 
 161, 191, 192, 197 
 
 Jermyn, Henry, Lord, marries 
 Queen Henrietta Maria, 122; 
 introduces Davenant to her 
 notice, 149 
 
 Jodelle, Etienne, French drama- 
 tist, 102 n. 
 
 Johnson, Samuel, class of poetry 
 identified with, 3 ; his criticism 
 ofDenham, 108 n. 1; 216 
 
 Jones, Inigo, 242, 243 
 
 Jonson, Ben, resemblance of his 
 works to those of the Dutch 
 Bredero, 17 and 11.; 24, 56, 
 58, 62, 137, 254; place of his 
 Penshurst among topographi- 
 cal poems, 104 
 
 Keats, John, quotation from his 
 Sleep and Poetry on the pre- 
 ceding period of classical 
 poetry, 4, 5 ; the passage a
 
 Index. 
 
 29; 
 
 specimen of the romantic 
 order, 7, 199; his contrast to 
 Dryden, 7 ; his generation not 
 qualified as critics of classical 
 poetry, 9 ; indebted in Endy- 
 niion to Chamberlayne's Pha- 
 ronnida, 199; his treatment 
 of the heroic couplet, 199, 200 
 
 KiUigrew, Thomas, 114 and n. 
 
 King, Henry (Bishop of Chi- 
 chester), 269 
 
 Lalla Rookh, by Thomas Moore, 
 189 
 
 Lamartine, Alphonse, 83 
 
 Lamb, Charles, his admiration 
 of Cyril Tourneur's plays, 31 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage, his esti- 
 mate of Southey as a poet, 
 
 157 
 Lansdowne, Lord, George Gran- 
 ville, his estimate of Waller, 
 256 n. 
 Last Instructions to a Painter, 
 by Andrew Marvell, 243 n. 1 
 Lee, Nathaniel, dramatist, 262 
 Levite's Revenge, by Robert 
 
 Gomershall, 34 
 Lodge, Thomas, 23, 24, 36 
 Love Elegies, by James Ham- 
 mond, 165 
 Lovers Victory, by William Cham- 
 ber lay ne, 198 
 Lovelace, Richard, 27, 208, 260 
 Lower, Sir William, 171 
 Lucas, Margaret, Duchess of 
 
 Newcastle, 113 
 Lyly, John, reference to, 13 
 
 Macaulay, Lord, 25 
 
 Mac-Flecknoe, passage from Dry- 
 den's, 7 
 
 Madagascar, by William Dave- 
 nant, 139, 149 n., 150, 151 
 
 Maid's Tragedy, by Beaumont 
 and Fletcher, originally in 
 
 blank verse, re-written in 
 rimed couplets by Waller, 247 
 
 Malherbe, Francois de, the first 
 to introduce polish and cor- 
 rectness into poetry, 19, 20, 
 21, 69 n., 119, 120, 264 
 
 Marini, Gianbattista, referred 
 to, 13, 22, 24, 40, 118, 131, 
 150, 216; folly of his school, 
 
 T 5' 2 7> 1 T i i 2IO > 20 ° 
 
 Marias the Epicurean, by Walter 
 Pater, 207 n. 
 
 Mark Anthony, by John Cleve- 
 land, an example of the early 
 use of the triple cadence, 189 
 
 Marlowe, Christopher, 17 
 
 Marvell, Andrew, 137, 243 n. 1 ; 
 a pupil of Cleveland in satire, 
 192; sketch of his life and 
 work, 211 — 221 
 
 Mason, John, 28 
 
 Massinger, Philip, 24, 100 
 
 May, Thomas, tragic poet, 91 
 
 Maynard, Francois, pupil of Mal- 
 herbe, his Alcippe compared 
 with Cooper's Hill, 120 
 
 Menteur, Le, by Pierre Cor- 
 neille, 121 
 
 'Metaphysical,' the name given 
 by Dr Johnson to the Mari- 
 nists, 23, 27, 216 
 
 Middleton, Thomas, 24 
 
 Milton, John, his description of 
 metrical ' enjambement,' 6 n. ; 
 his relation to the Dutch 
 poet Vondel, 17; at first a 
 Marinist, as in his Nativity 
 Ode, 40, 172; his retirement 
 to Horton, 40, 41, 50, 139; 
 at one time reckoned inferior 
 to Waller, 48 and n.; his 
 lyrics imitated in Robert 
 Baron's Mirza, 100 n.; 125, 
 137, 140; pleads successfully 
 with Cromwell for Davenant's 
 life, a service which Davenant
 
 294 
 
 Index. 
 
 repaid at the Restoration, 167, 
 170; at Cambridge, 172, 175, 
 228; his preference for blank 
 verse, 248, 252 n. 1 
 
 Mirza, by Robert Baron, 100 
 n. 1 
 
 Monk, George (Duke of Albe- 
 marle), 192 and n. 2 
 
 Montchrestien, Antoine, 101 
 
 Moore, Thomas, 74 n., 189 
 
 More, Henry, his Psychozoia, 
 25m 2, 172 
 
 Morley, George, Bp of Win- 
 chester, his friendship with 
 Waller, 62, 63, 70; his effect 
 upon Denham, 97, 99 ; a 
 member of Lord Falkland's 
 club, 62, 115 
 
 Motteville, Francoise Bertaut de, 
 her Memoirs of Anne of 
 Austria quoted, 113, 117 
 
 Mnleasses the Turk, by John 
 Mason, quoted as a specimen 
 of the bombast of the romantic 
 school, 28, 29 
 
 Mulgrave, Earl of, John Shef- 
 field, his Essay on Poetry, 
 248 
 
 Murray, William, 114 n. 
 
 Nash, Thomas, 23 
 
 Nativity Ode, by John Milton, 
 
 40, 172 
 Newcastle, Duchess of, Margaret 
 
 Lucas, 113 
 Norris, John, 209, 210 
 Nosce Teipsum, of Sir John 
 
 Davies, the first poem of any 
 
 length in the four-line heroic 
 
 stanza, 165 
 
 Occleve, Thomas, 138 
 
 Oceana, by James Harrington, 
 
 26 
 Ode on the Nativity, by John 
 
 Milton, 40, 172 
 
 Oldham, John, Dryden's eulogy 
 of him explained, 234; the 
 first to write heroic verse in 
 complete couplets, 234; effect 
 of his Satire upon the Jesuits 
 upon Dryden's verse, 23411., 
 
 On a Girdle, by Waller, 7 2 
 Opitz, Martin, his De Contemplu 
 Linguae Teutonicae, 16; his 
 style, 16; specimen from his 
 Zlatna, 16 n. ; his aim and 
 influence, 19, 264 
 Orrery, Lord, Roger Boyle, 95, 
 
 171 
 
 Ostade, i7n. 
 
 Otway, Thomas, 137, 245 
 
 'Overflow' (term proposed by 
 Austin Dobson to translate 
 the French 'enjambement'), 
 the principle of the structure 
 of romantic poetry, 6, 55 
 
 Ovid's Banquet of Sense, by 
 George Chapman, 75 
 
 Panegyric on Oliver Cromwell, 
 by Edmund Waller, 162 n., 
 
 231 
 Parini, Giuseppe, his connexion 
 
 between Italian and English 
 
 verse, 15 
 Pastor Fido, by Sir Richard 
 
 Fanshawe, 118, 131 
 Pater, Walter, his Marius the 
 
 Epicurean, 207 n. 
 Patmore, Coventry, 187 
 Pattison, Mark, his definition 
 
 of the classical movement, 
 
 Penshurst, by Ben Jonson, its 
 
 place among topographical 
 
 poems, 104 
 Pepys, Samuel, 244 n. 
 Phaer, Thomas, employs the 
 
 triple cadence in his version 
 
 of the ALneid, 187
 
 Index. 
 
 295 
 
 Pharonnida, by William Cham- 
 berlayne, 198 — 202 
 
 Philips, John, pompous language 
 of his Cyder, nn. ; his in- 
 fluence on poetry, 1 1 n. 
 
 Philips, Katharine ('Orinda'), 
 171, 226 
 
 Philotas, tragi-comedy by Samuel 
 Daniel, 102 n. 
 
 Poetry, difference between the 
 romantic and classical, 6, 19, 
 55 ; examples, 7 ; periods of 
 precise and of romantic, 8; 
 an art, 9 ; tumbling rimeless 
 measure of Campion, 10; 
 change from particular to gene- 
 ral language, 10, 11, 25; its 
 eclectic character in the time 
 of Donne, 25 
 
 Polexander, French romance by 
 Marin le Roy Gomberville, 
 166 n., 261 
 
 Polyolbion, by Michael Drayton, 
 104 
 
 Pope, Alexander, class of poetry 
 identical with, 3 ; effect of the 
 naturalistic poets on his fame, 
 4, 177; the culmination of 
 classical poetry, 8, 58, 108, 
 233, 234, 264, 265; his con- 
 nexion with the story about 
 Shakespeare and the Dave- 
 nants, 143, 144; sneers at 
 Cowley, 177 and n. ; lately 
 come into favour again, 252 
 
 Porter, Endymion, 149, 150 
 
 Prior, Matthew, 108 
 
 Progress of the Soul, by John 
 Donne, 37 
 
 Psyche, by Joseph Beaumont, 172 
 
 Psychozoia, by Henry More, 25, 
 172 
 
 Purple Island, by Phineas 
 Fletcher, 26, 34, 38, 159 
 
 Quarles, Francis, 26, 138 
 
 Rabelais, Francois, quotation 
 from his Gargantua, 46 and n. 
 
 Racine, Louis, 21, 101 
 
 Radcliffe, Alexander, 190 n. 
 
 Ralegh, Sir Walter, 36 
 
 Randolph, Thomas, 255 
 
 Rebel Scot, The, by John Cleve- 
 land, 192 and n. 1 
 
 Rich, Lady Anne, passage from 
 Sidney Godolphin's verses on 
 her death, 1 10 
 
 Rimed plays, 253 
 
 Rival Friends, by Peter Hau- 
 sted, 116 
 
 Rival Ladies, by John Dryden, 
 
 54> 95 
 Rochester, Earl of, John Wilmot, 
 
 245 
 
 Roscommon, Earl of, Went- 
 worth Dillon, quotation from 
 Waller's epistle to him, 3 n., 
 245 ; imitates Milton in his 
 preference for blank verse, 
 248, 252 n. 1 
 
 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 20 
 
 Rotrou, Jean de, 101 
 
 Rupei-tismus, quotation from 
 John Cleveland's, 186 
 
 Rymer, Thomas, writes Waller's 
 epitaph, 51, 52 n. ; passage 
 from his Elegy on him, 239 
 
 Sacharissa, see Lady Dorothy 
 Sidney 
 
 Saintsbury, George, his note on 
 Tyr et Sidon, 102 
 
 Sandys, George, 255, 269, 271 
 
 Satire upon the Jesuits, by John 
 Oldham, 234 n. 
 
 Selclen, John, denounced as a 
 conspirator by Waller, 123 
 
 Seneca, style of his tragedies, 
 102 and n. 
 
 Senses' Festival, by John Cleve- 
 land, 185
 
 296 
 
 Index. 
 
 Settle, Elkanah, passage from 
 his Em 'press of i\Iarocco, 252 
 and n. 2 
 
 Shaftesbury, Ashley Cooper, first 
 Earl of, his exaggerated dic- 
 tion, 1 2 
 
 Shakespeare, William, state of 
 English poetry at his death, 
 3 — 41 passim ; not always 
 clear in metaphor, 12, 13; re- 
 ferred to, 17, 23, 24, 27, 29, 
 4S, 76, 137, 170, 245, 249, 
 254, 255; the legend that he 
 was the actual father of Wil- 
 liam Davenant, 141 — 145; 
 glides sometimes into the triple 
 cadence, 187; feeling of re- 
 serve due in reading some of 
 his Sounds, 217 
 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 178 
 
 Sherburne, Edward, 209 n. 1 
 
 Shirley, James, 100, 119, 121; 
 attends his patron, Queen 
 Henrietta Maria, during the 
 Exile, 113, 118 ' 
 
 Sidney, Lady Dorothy, Waller's 
 ' Sacharissa,' 63 — 73, 76 — 79 
 „ Lady Lucy, Waller's 
 
 letter to her on Sacharissa's 
 marriage, 77 
 
 „ Sir Philip, 36, 64, 145 ; 
 his Arcadia, 25, 26, 75 
 
 Siege of Rhodes, by William 
 Davenant, 168, 169, 242 n. 
 
 Sleep and Poetry, quotation from 
 John Keats', 4. 5 
 
 Somerville, William, praises 
 Denham in his poem The 
 Chace, 108 n. 2 
 
 Song to a Rose, by Waller, 70 
 
 Song-writing, English, 72; Dry- 
 den's songs, 258, 259 
 
 Sonnets, of Philip Ayres, 211; 
 of William Shakespeare, 217 
 
 Sophy, The, by Sir John Den- 
 ham, 96, 99 — 103 
 
 Southey, Robert, his position 
 analogous to that of William 
 Davenant, 155 — 158 
 
 Spain, character of, its litera- 
 ture, 177 
 
 Spence, Joseph, 264 
 
 Spencer, Henry, Earl of Sunder- 
 land, marries Lady Dorothy 
 Sidney, 'Sacharissa,' 76; kill- 
 ed at the battle of Newbury, 
 
 77 
 
 Spenser, Edmund, 17, 19, 24, 
 27, 48, 169, 170, 249, 254 
 
 Sprat, Thomas (Bishop of Ro- 
 chester), associated with Dry- 
 den in his Heroic Stanzas, 
 228 n. 
 
 Square Cap, a Cambridge poem 
 by John Cleveland, 190 
 
 St Amant, Marc Antoine Ge- 
 rard, question of his influence 
 on English poetry, 21, 119 
 
 St Evremond, Charles, his epi- 
 gram on Waller, 240 n. 
 
 Stanley, Thomas, 203 — 209 
 
 Stanza, the four-line heroic, the 
 chief poems written in it, and 
 its character, 164 — 166 
 
 Starter, Dutch poet, his relation 
 to Thomas Dekker, 17 
 
 Stjernhjelm, Georg, first modern 
 Swedish poet, 16 
 
 Suckling, Sir John, 22, 59, 150, 
 151 n., 208 
 
 Sunderland, Earl of, see Spencer, 
 Henry 
 
 Swinburne, A. C, 178' 
 
 Taylor, John, the Water poet, 
 56 
 ,, Sir Henry, 157 
 
 Technogamia, by Barton Holi- 
 day, 123 
 
 Teutonic nations, state of poetry 
 at the close of the sixteenth 
 century among, 15 — 21
 
 Index. 
 
 297 
 
 Thalaba, by Robert Southey, 
 158 
 
 Theahna and Clearchus, its dis- 
 puted authorship, 209 n. 2 
 
 To the King on his Navy, pas- 
 sage from Waller's, 55 and n. 
 
 Topographical poetry, 104 
 
 Tourneur, Cyril, 30 — 32 
 
 Transformed Metamorphosis, by 
 Cyril Tourneur, 31, 32 
 
 Translating, Denham's Essay on 
 the art of, 98, 99, 272 — 274 
 
 Tyr et Sidon, a French romantic 
 tragedy of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, 102 
 
 Upon his Majesty's repairing of 
 Paul's, by Edmund Waller, 
 79—82 
 
 Vaughan, Henry, the Silurist, 
 the last of George Herbert's 
 sacred school of Cambridge 
 poets, 209 
 
 Vigil of Venus, by Thomas 
 Stanley, 207 
 
 Voltaire, 166 
 
 Vondel, Justus vanden, in re- 
 lation to John Milton, 1 7 ; 
 his influence on Dutch poetry, 
 17, 18 
 
 Waller, Edmund, his family, 
 birth, and early Kfe (1605 — ■ 
 1621), 48 — 51; in 1621, mem- 
 ber of Parliament for Amer- 
 sham, 5 1 ; member for Chip- 
 ping Wycombe in Charles I. 's 
 first Parliament (August, 1625), 
 59; and in the second (Feb. 
 1626), 60; for Amersham in 
 the third (March, 1628), 60; 
 in 1627 marries Ann Banks, 
 and (1628) retires to Beacons- 
 field, 60, 61; 1629, his wife 
 dies at Hallbarn, 03; Sacha- 
 
 rissa, and the poems addressed 
 to her, 63 — 73, 76 — 79 ; his 
 political career till his banish- 
 ment (1643), 82—91; 1641, 
 impeaches Sir Francis Crawley 
 on the ship-money question, 
 84; 1642, quits the 'Root and 
 Branch' party, 84; joins the 
 King, plots against Parlia- 
 ment, his arrest, and narrow 
 escape, 87 — 91; his life in 
 France during his exile ( 1 643 — 
 1653) : meets the Royalist 
 Exiles, 117, 122; joined by 
 Evelyn on a tour in Italy, 
 125 — 128; 1653, Cromwell 
 allows him to return to, 129, 
 229, 231; his life at Court 
 after the Restoration (1660 — 
 1687), 232—242 : 
 his description of the style 
 of Horace, 311.; his purifica- 
 tion of verse, 14 ; his use and 
 treatment of the couplet, 20, 
 55) 58, 59> 7°i 104, 140, 200, 
 2 33> 2 34! question of French 
 influence upon him, 21, 119; 
 the opinion of him expressed 
 in the Biographia Britannica 
 (1766), 45; his relations with 
 Dryden, 54, 95, 153, 228 n.; 
 his influence and its reasons, 
 56, 69, 82, 95, 102, 162, 182 — 
 184, 245, 264, 265; his rela- 
 tions with George Morley, 62, 
 63, 70; his Battle of 'the Summer 
 Islands, 65, 73 — 76, 150; Up- 
 on his Majesty's repairing of 
 Paul's, 79 — 8 1 ; his connection 
 with Denham, 63, 79, 80, 96, 
 102, 105, 120, 140, 156, 177, 
 183, 219, 228; with Sidney 
 Godolphin, 109, no, 269; 
 editions of his poems, 124 and 
 n. ; his Panegyric on Crom- 
 well, 129, 231, 232; Dave-
 
 298 
 
 Index. 
 
 nant's estimate of his poetry, 
 150; his relations with Cowley, 
 171, 174, 177; his use of the 
 triple cadence, 187 — 189; 
 Wild's eulogy of him, 193, 
 194; his Divine Love, 240, 
 241; Saint Evremond's epi- 
 gram on him, 24011.; rewrites 
 the Maid's Tragedy in rimed 
 couplets, 247 ; Bishop Atter- 
 buiy's criticism of him, 249 — 
 251 ; his letter to Queen 
 Henrietta Maria, 275 — 277; 
 Preface to his posthumous 
 poems, 27S — 284; various al- 
 lusions to him, 22, 39, 40, 47, 
 98, 108, 118, 119, 121, 152, 
 168— 171, 173, 174, 187, 203, 
 208, 210, 211, 226, 229 
 
 Walsh, William, his advice to 
 Pope, 264 
 
 Walton, Izaak, the probable 
 author of Thealma and Cle- 
 archns, 209 n. 2 
 
 Warburton, William, Bishop of 
 Gloucester, his remark on the 
 study of literature, 138, 139 
 
 Warner, William, his Albiorfs 
 England, 75 
 
 Webb, John, 242 n. 
 
 Webster, John, 24, 100, 137 
 
 Weeping of the Magdalen, 
 
 Richard Crashaw's style in, 
 14 n. 
 
 Wild, Robert, 161, 184, 191 — 
 197; his Iter Boreale, 161, 
 192, 193; quotation from his 
 verses on the death of Dr 
 Edmund Calamy, I93n. 
 
 Winchelsea, Countess of, Anne 
 Finch, passage from an un- 
 published poem of, 256 
 
 Windsor Forest, by Alexander 
 Pope, prompted by Denham's 
 Cooper 's Hill, 108 
 
 Wood, Anthony a, his picture 
 of Denham as an under- 
 graduate, 96 ; reference in 
 his writings to Davenant, 
 142 n. 1; to Thomas Stanley, 
 204 
 
 Wordsworth, William, assists to 
 revolutionize the taste for clas- 
 sical poetry, 4, 220; his ulti- 
 mate triumph foreseen by 
 Robert Southey, 156 
 
 Wren, Sir Christopher, associ- 
 ated with Sir John Denham 
 in architectural work, 243 
 and n. 
 
 Zlatna, specimen from Martin 
 Opitz's, 16 n. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BV C. J. CLAY, M.A. & SON, AT THE UNIVERSITY fRE^S.
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 IN VERSE. 
 
 On Viol and Flute. Lyrical Poems. 1873. 
 
 King Erik. A tragedy. 1 876. 
 
 New Poems. 1 879. 
 
 Firdausi in Exile, and other Poems. 1885. 
 
 IN PROSE. 
 
 Studies in the Literature of NortJiem Europe. 
 1879. 
 
 Gray. English Men of Letters Series. 1882. 
 
 Seventeenth Century Studies. 1883. 
 
 The Works of Thomas Gray. Edited in four 
 volumes. 1884.
 
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