Desideria Emblematis (1624) of Hermann Hugo, a Jesuit divine. However, in spite of his quaintness, Quarles is not destitute of the feeling of a true poet, and many of his pieces breathe an intense spirit of religious fervour. Towards the end of his life he published a book of pious aphorisms called Enchiridion (1640), which is so full of beauty and religious aspiration that it deserves a place higher than any of his poems. There is a shade of unfairness in mentioning Wither and this distinctly inferior contemporary in the same breath; but, speaking roughly, Quarles may be said to have been, in spirit, the most Roundhead of the Cavaliers, and Wither the most Cavalier of the Roundheads. § 3. A far more reasonable comparison, without doubt, exists between GEORGE HERBERT, the most devout of Anglican writers, and RICHARD CRASHAW, one of the most illustrious Englishmen who have devoted their talents to the service of the Roman faith. Herbert was born at Montgomery Castle; and, at Trinity College, Cambridge, showed himself both courtier and scholar, and filled the! GEORGE' HERBERT office of public orator in the University. His name (1593-1633). is chiefly connected, however, with his life as parish priest of Bemerton, near Salisbury, where he showed himself a living example of the virtue and piety he recommended in his treatise, A Priest to the Temple. He was attached to those great ideals of Churchmanship which excited so strongly the devotion of his age; and he occupies, side by side with Lancelot Andrewes and Thomas Ken, the highest place in the English calendar of post-Reformation saints. His principal, and, indeed, with the exception of A Priest to the Temple, now his sole remembered work, was The Temple Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, published in 1633, very shortly after his death. These poems are mainly short lyrics, full of pious aspiration and admirable pictures of Temple" (1633). nature. They are not devoid of the strange and perverted ingenuity which disfigures Quarles' and Wither's work; but the wonderful piety which reigns throughout them serves as an antidote to the poison of perpetual conceits. In his most successful pieces he has almost attained the perfection of devotional poetry: they glow with the ardent fervour of devotion, and are yet free from that sentimentalism into which religious poets are too often apt to fall. He died before the troubles of the Civil War; and his prose treatise, A Priest to the Temple, was not brought out until 1652. "The Crashaw's short life was passed in a perpetual glow of religious enthusiasm. His father was William Crashaw, preacher at the Inner Temple and prebendary in Ripon and York Minsters, a scholar and poet, but a theologian RICHARD of the Puritan type, whose Protestant prejudice pro- (16137-1649). bably was unbending enough to direct his son in quite the opposite line. The young Crashaw went to Charter CRASHAW house and Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and, in 1637, obtained a fellowship at Peterhouse. At Cambridge his sympathies were very strongly attracted by the saintly character of the High Church party, and in particular by the famous Nicholas Ferrar, whose religious house at Little Gidding formed a rendezvous for spiritually-minded Cambridge men. However, during the troubles of the Civil War and the temporary overclouding of Anglican prospects, he joined the Roman communion, carrying to its service a singularly sensitive mind, considerable learning, and a gentle but intense devotional mysticism. He was a passionate lover of music, very proficient in languages, and possessed among his contemporaries a high reputation for ability. The mystical bent of his mind was increased by his misfortunes and his change of religion; and in his later works we find the heat of his pietism reaching a pitch little short of extravagance. He went to Rome about 1648, joined the household of Cardinal Palotta, and was appointed a sub-canon of Loreto. He died within four months of his appointment. While still an Anglican, he had been an ardent admirer of the writings of St. Teresa, and had written his first hymn to the great Spanish mystic, which, after he had left the Anglican communion, was succeeded by the splendid Flaming Heart; and that union of the sensuous fervour of human affection with the wildest flights of religious ecstasy which we see in St. Teresa is faithfully reproduced in him. He is one of those poets who, in our own day, have been recovered to public estimation, and have served as the idols of a clique; but, with all his exquisite fancy, the great melody of his verse, and that power over the reader which springs from deep earnestness and can be replaced by nothing, he suffers from long intervals of dulness and tortured conceits. However, no reader should certainly ever miss an opportunity of making the acquaintance of Crashaw's poetry. The title of the volume containing most of his religious verse is Steps to the Temple; it was published in 1646 under the editorship of some admirer. A new series (1652), published at Paris under the title of Carmen Deo Nostro, was probably prepared by himself. His secular poems, published in 1648 as a second part of Steps to the Temple, are called Delights of the Muses: the best and most famous is the Wishes to an Unknown Mistress, and another celebrated piece is Music's Duel, borrowed from Famianus Strada's Latin Contention between a Nightingale and a Musician. Another famous imitation of the same thing is to be found in Ford's Lover's Melancholy. § 4. These religious writers are succeeded by a cluster of Court poets. The oldest of these is THOMAS CAREW, son of Sir Matthew Carew, Master in Chancery. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and spent his life in the service of the Court, as gentleman of the privy chamber and Sewer in ordinary to the King. His poems, which are short and chiefly amatory, gained him considerable admiration in his day. His extraordinary sensuality has probably had some influence upon the opinion of later ages, but he deserves to be redeemed in some permanent form THOMAS CAREW from the obloquy into which he has fallen with most (1598-1639?). readers. Campbell's cold and rather pedantic criticism seems to hit the mark as well as anything: "The want of boldness and expansion in Carew's thoughts and subjects excludes him from rivalry with great poetical names; nor is it difficult, even within the narrow pale of his works, to discover some faults of affectation, and of still more objectionable indelicacy. But among the poets who have walked in the same limited path he is pre-eminently beautiful, and deservedly ranks among the first of those who gave a cultivated grace to our lyrical strains." Indeed, his highest lyric flights are a convincing proof of a genius that is closely allied, on one hand, to the great Elizabethans, and, on the other, bridges over the gulf between their splendid song and the more formal notes of the Restoration age. HERRICK The second of this group is the greatest of all the secondary poets of the time. ROBERT HERRICK was born in London, and educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, from which he migrated to Trinity Hall. A large part of ROBERT his youth was spent in the pursuits of a young (1591-1674). literary man about town, and in the company of the young poets who surrounded Ben Jonson. He took Orders in 1629, and was presented to the quiet living of Dean Prior, on the southern edge of Dartmoor. The place was charming, and he has celebrated the beauty of the glen down which the Dean Burn falls in cascades from the moor; but he found no compensation for the society of wits and poets in the unsympathetic companionship of the rural "salvages" among whom he was compelled to live; and, not satisfied with complaining of their "rude and warty incivility," he satirised some of them individually in a few nasty and feeble epigrams. Meanwhile, he continued to write his beautiful lyrics, until, in 1647, he was ejected as a Royalist and came back to London. The bulk of his poems, contained in the Hesperides and Noble Numbers, appeared in 1648. Restored to his living in 1662, he returned, and died there in 1674. His poems are all lyric: the Hesperides are, for the most part, songs of love and wine interspersed with epigrams; while the Noble Numbers are religious. He is a singular example of that union of the earthly and the divine which is so characteristic of a certain class of lyric poets. Yet his religious poetry strikes the most dictions in masculine note which sacred verse touched in his Herrick's work. age; and his Hesperides are not altogether sensual, as anybody who knows the familiar lines to Anthea, one of the most splendid outbursts of lyric love in English, will immediately remember. But words convey very little idea of the grace which Contra SIR JOHN accompanies all Herrick's work: he is an author who must be appreciated at first hand. In Herrick, again, there is clear evidence of a transition in poetry. While he retains that spontaneous gift of expression, the true eloquence of the Elizabethan poets, he manifests that choiceness of finish and attention to form which, in the poetry of the next century, sometimes degenerated into prose. In fancy, in genius, in power over the melody of verse, he is never deficient; and it is easy to see that, in the softness and richness of his imagination, he had been inspired by the lovely pastoral and lyric movements of Fletcher and Heywood. Below Carew and Herrick come two fresh types of the Cavalier poet, SIR JOHN SUCKLING and RICHARD LOVELACE. Both underwent persecution, and both were reduced to poverty. Suckling almost committed suicide; Lovelace was imprisoned long and often for his adherence to the loyal doctrines of his party, and is said to have died in abject distress. Both were men of elegant, if not of profound scholarship, and both give examples of the spirit of loyalty to their king and of gallantry to ladies. Many of Suckling's love-songs are equal, if not superior, to the most beautiful examples of that mixture of gay badinage with tender, if not very deeply felt, devotion which characterises French courtly and erotic poetry of the seventeenth century; and his thoughts are expressed with that cameo-like neatness and refinement of phrase which is the great merit of the minor French poets, from Marot to Béranger. But his most celebrated production is his Ballad upon a Wedding, in which, assuming the character of a rustic, he describes the marriage of a fashionable couple, Roger Boyle, then Lord Broghill and afterwards Earl of Orrery, and Lady Margaret Howard. In this inimitable gem there is a perfect grace and elegance, which is enhanced by the well-assumed naïveté of the style. Lovelace is more serious and earnest than Suckling; his lyrics are songs of devoted loyalty, and have little in common with the half-passionate, half-jesting fancy of his rival. Some of his most charming lyrics were written in prison: the famous lines to Althea, which, with the songs, To Lucasta on Going to the Wars and To Lucasta on Going beyond the Seas, constitute his chief claim to reputation, were written in the gate-house at Westminster. Suckling's poems and three out of his four plays were collected posthumously under the title of Fragmenta Aurea (1646). Lovelace's chief collection is called Lucasta (1649). The gay spirit which runs through the minor poetry of this epoch, may be traced back to a period considerably earlier to the contemporaries of Ben Jonson and the great dramatists. We have already said something of the chief poets and playwrights who belonged to the "Tribe of Ben"; these and their contemporaries, and even a serious poet like Drummond of Influence of the "Tribe of Ben" on this period. Hawthornden, all exhibit a certain tendency to intellectual ingenuity, mixed at first with a certain pedantry which was derived, in Drummond's case, from his models, the masters of the Italian sonnet, and gradually vanished as time went on. BROWNE § 5. WILLIAM BROWNE was born at Tavistock and educated at Exeter College, Oxford. He was the author of several very graceful lyrics and short poems, and of two pastoral works called Britannia's Pastorals (first part pub- WILLIAM lished in 1613) and The Shepherd's Pipe (1614), which (1591-1643?). were undoubtedly suggested by the pastoral school of Sidney and Spenser. They contain, in their descriptions of rural life, much that is very pretty, but are guilty of that ineradicable defect which accompanies all idyllic poetry, however beautiful it may be in detail-namely, the want of probability in the scenes and characters, when the reader tests them by referring to his own experience of the realities of rustic life. Browne's verse is almost uniformly well-knit, easy, and harmonious; and the attentive reader can select many passages from this poet, now so little read, which show great happiness of thought and expression. WILLIAM HABINGTON (1605-1654). WILLIAM HABINGTON is a poet of very much the same order as Browne, although his writings are principally devoted to love. He was, like Crashaw, a Romanist, and was born at Hindlip Hall, near Worcester. He married Lucy Herbert, a daughter of Lord Powis; and it was this lady whom, with an admiration for his wife uncommon among poets, he celebrated in his Castara (1634), a poem of much ingenuity and occasional grace. This, and his tragi-comedy, The Queen of Arragon (1640), are both free from the immorality that stains the most graceful poems of the ageindeed, it is generally agreed that they err in the other direction. Although usually love-songs, Habington's collected works show, some a moral, others a religious tendency. The new poetry. § 6. We now come to those writers who exercised a most important influence, not merely by winning popularity in their own age, but by directing English verse into the channel which it followed during the greater part of the next century. The eldest of these was EDMUND WALLER, who was born at Coleshill in Hertfordshire, was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and entered Parliament at a very early age. His family was ancient and dignified; he had great wealth; his accomplish- EDMUND ments were varied and his manners fascinating; but his character was timid and selfish, and his political principles fluctuated with every change that might threaten his safety or his interest. He sat for many years in Parliament, where the readiness of his repartee and the originality of his speeches made him "the darling of the House of Commons." It was unfortunate that a man whose light talents were fitted only to adorn a court should be obliged to take part in public ENG. LIT. WALLER (1606-1687). 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