Chapter 19

‘What should you talk of dainties then!Of better meat than serveth men?All that is vain; this only good,Which God doth bless and send for food.’

‘What should you talk of dainties then!

Of better meat than serveth men?

All that is vain; this only good,

Which God doth bless and send for food.’

While Walton may have made, it is also possible that he may have found ready made to his hand, this beautiful addition to the poem.

P. 24, No. xxii.—Of this poem Dr. Guest (History of English Rhythms, vol. ii. p. 273) has said, ‘It appears to me extremely beautiful,’ a judgment from which none who are capable of recognizing poetry when they see it will dissent. It is found in Campion’sObservations on the Art of English Poesy, London, 1602. The purpose of the book is mainly to prove that rhyme is altogether an unnecessary appendage to English verse; that this does not require, and indeed is better without it. Had he offered to his readers many lyrics like this, he might have done much more than by all his arguments he has done to bring them to his opinion. As it is, the main value which theObservationspossess consists in this exquisite lyric, and, mediately, in the admirableApology for Rhymeon Daniel’s part which they called out.

Pp.27,28, No. xxv. xxvi.—Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnets may be ‘vain and amatorious,’ as Milton has called his prose romance ofTheArcadia; but they possess grace, fancy, and a passion which makes itself felt even under the artificial forms of a Platonic philosophy. They are addressed to one, who, if the course of true love had run smooth, should have been his wife. When, however, through the misunderstanding of parents, or through some other cause, she had become the wife of another, Platonic as they are, they would far better have remained unwritten.

P. 35, No. xli.—Pope somewhere speaks of ‘a very mediocre poet, one Drayton,’ and it will be remembered that when Goldsmith visited Poets’ Corner, seeing his monument he exclaimed, ‘Drayton, I never heard of him before.’ It must be confessed that Drayton, who wrote far too much, wrote often below himself, and has left not a little to justify the censure of the one, and to excuse the ignorance of the other. At the same time only a poet could describe the sun at his rising,

‘With rosy robes and crown of flaming gold;’

and this heroic ballad has a very genuine and martial tone about it. It is true that every celebration of Agincourt must show pale and faint beside Shakespeare’s epic drama,Henry the Fifth, and this will as little endure as any other to be brought even into remote comparison with that; but for all this it ought not to be forgotten.

P. 39, No. xlii. l. 9: ‘Clarius,’ a surname of Apollo, derived from his famous temple at Claros, in Asia Minor.—l. 27-30: Prometheus was ‘Japhet’s line,’ being the son of Iapetus, whom Jonson has not resisted the temptation of identifying, as others have done, with Japhet the son of Noah, and calling by his name. According to one legend it was by the assistance of Minerva, ‘the issue of Jove’s brain,’ that Prometheus ascended to heaven, and there stole from the chariot of the Sun the fire which he brought down to earth; to all which there is reference here.

P. 40, No. xliii.—It would be difficult not to think that we had here the undeveloped germ ofIl Penserosoof Milton, if this were not shown to be impossible by the fact that Milton’s poem was published two years previously to this.

P. 41, No. xliv.—Hallam thinks that Southwell has been of late praised at least as much as he deserves. This may be so, yet taking into account the finished beauty of such poems as this and No. 1. of this collection, poems which, as far as they go, leave nothing to be desired, he has scarcely been praisedmorethan he deserves. How in earlier times he was rated the fact that there were twenty-four editions of his poems will sufficiently testify; though possibly the creed which he professed, and the death which he died, may have had something to do with this. Robert Southwell was a seminary priest,and was executed at Tyburn in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in conformity with a law, which even the persistent plottings of too many of these at once against the life of the Sovereign and the life of the State must altogether fail to justify or excuse.

P. 44, No. xlvi.—The judgment of one great poet on another his contemporary, must always have a true interest for us, and it was with serious regret that I omitted Ben Jonson’s ever-memorable lines on Shakespeare. Many things a contemporary sees, as none who belong to a later time can see them; knows, as none other can know; and even where he does not tell us much which we greatly care to learn about the other, he is sure to tell us something, whether he means it or not, about himself and about his age. English literature possesses many judgments of this kind. What Ben Jonson did for Shakespeare, Cartwright, a strong-thoughted writer if not an eminent poet, and more briefly Cleveland here, have done in turn for Jonson; Denham for Cowley; Cowley for Crashaw; Carew for Donne; Marvell for Milton; Dryden for Oldham. There is not one of these which may not be read with profit by the careful student of English literature; and certainly Cleveland must be allowed very happily to have seized here some of the main excellences of Jonson.

P. 45, No. xlvii.—Another poem on the same subject, in Byrd’sPsalms, Sonnets, and Songs, is as a whole inferior to this, but yields one stanza which is equal in merit to any here:

‘I wish but what I have at will;I wander not to seek for more;I like the plain; I climb no hill;In greatest storms I sit on shore;And laugh at them that toil in vainTo get what must be lost again.’

‘I wish but what I have at will;

I wander not to seek for more;

I like the plain; I climb no hill;

In greatest storms I sit on shore;

And laugh at them that toil in vain

To get what must be lost again.’

P. 46, No. xlix.—Shakespeare’s Sonnets are so heavily laden with meaning, so double-shotted, if one may so speak, with thought, so penetrated and pervaded with a repressed passion, that, packed as all this is into narrowest limits, it sometimes imparts no little obscurity to them; and they often require to be heard or read not once but many times, in fact to be studied, before they reveal to us all the treasures of thought and feeling which they contain. It is eminently so with this one. The subject, the bitter delusion of all sinful pleasures, the reaction of a swift remorse which inevitably dogs them, Shakespeare must have most deeply felt, as he has expressed himself upon it most profoundly. I know no picture of this at all so terrible in its truth as inThe Rape of Lucrecethe description of Tarquin after he has successfully wrought his deed of shame. But this sonnet on the same theme is worthy to stand by its side.

P. 48, No. lii.—These lines are appended to the second edition of Wastell’sMicrobiblion, 1629; they are not found in the first,published under another title in 1623. I have not disturbed the ascription of them to him, although, considering the general worthlessness of the book, it must be considered very doubtful indeed. On the question of the authorship of these lines see Hannah,Poems and Psalms of Henry King, 1843, p. cxviii.

P. 57, No. lxii.—There are at least half-a-dozen texts of this poem with an infinite variety of readings, these being particularly numerous in the third stanza, which I must needs think corrupt as it now stands. TheReliquiæ Wottonianæ, in which it was first published, appeared in 1651, some twelve years after Wotton’s death; but much earlier MS. copies are in existence; thus one in the handwriting of Edward Alleyn, apparently of date 1616. Ben Jonson visited Drummond of Hawthornden two or three years later, and is reported by him to have had these lines by heart.

P. 58, No. lxiii.—This poem Bishop Percy believes to have been first printed in a volume ofMiscellaneous Poems by different hands, published by David Lewis, 1726. The date and authorship is discussed on several occasions inNotes and Queries, vol. iii. (1st Series) pp. 27, 108, 155, but without much light being thrown upon either.

P. 60, No. lxv.—Carew is commonly grouped with Waller, and subordinated to him. He is indeed immensely his superior. Waller never wrote a love-song in grace and fancy to compare with this; while in many of Carew’s lighter pieces there is an underlying vein of earnestness, which is wholly wanting in the other.

P. 62, No. lxviii.—Waller’s fame has sadly, but not undeservedly, declined since the time when it used to be taken for granted that he had virtually invented English poetry, or one might almost say, the English language; since an editor of his poems (1690) could write that his was ‘a name that carries everything in it that is either great or graceful in poetry. He was indeed the parent of English verse, and the first that showed us our tongue had beauty and numbers in it. 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.’ Compare the twenty-two lines devoted to him in Addison’sAccount of the greatest English Poets, which includes Congreve, but not Shakespeare! For myself, I confess that I did not find it very easy to select from the whole range of his poems one which I much cared to quote. He appears in this to have had in his eye the graceful epigram of Rufinus beginning,

Πἑμπω σοι, Ρυδὁκλεια, τὁδε στἑφος,

and ending with these lines,

ταῦτα στεψαμένη, λῆξον μεγδλαυχος ἐοῦσα,ἀνθεις καἰ λήγεις καἰ σὐ καἰ ό στέφανος.

ταῦτα στεψαμένη, λῆξον μεγδλαυχος ἐοῦσα,

ἀνθεις καἰ λήγεις καἰ σὐ καἰ ό στέφανος.

P. 63, No. lxx.—Castara, to whom these beautiful lines are addressed, was a daughter of William Herbert, first Lord Percy, and either was already, or afterwards became, the wife of the poet. There are no purer and few more graceful records of a noble attachment than that which is contained in the poems to which Habington has given the name of the lady of his happy love. Phillips, writing in 1675, says, ‘His poems are now almost forgotten.’ How little they deserved this, how finished at times his versification was, lines such as the following—they are the first stanza of a poem for which I could not find room—will abundantly prove. It is headed,Against them who lay Unchastity to the sex of Women.

‘They meet with but unwholesome springs,And summers which infectious are,They hear but when the mermaid sings,And only see the falling star,Who ever dareAffirm no woman chaste and fair.’

‘They meet with but unwholesome springs,

And summers which infectious are,

They hear but when the mermaid sings,

And only see the falling star,

Who ever dare

Affirm no woman chaste and fair.’

P. 76, No. lxxviii.—Milton’s English Sonnets are only seventeen in all:

‘Soul-animating strains, alas! too few.’

They are so far beyond all doubt the greatest in the language that it is a matter of curious interest to note the utter incapacity of Johnson to recognize any greatness in them at all. The utmost which he will allow is that ‘three of them are not bad;’ and he and Hannah More once set themselves to investigate the causes of their badness, the badness itself being taken for granted. Johnson’s explanation of this contains an illustration lively enough to be worth quoting: ‘Why, Madam,’ he said, ‘Milton’s was a genius that could hew a Colossus out of a rock, but could not carve heads on cherry-stones.’

P. 76, No. lxxix.—I have obtained room for these lines by excluding another very beautiful poem by the same author, hisSong of the Emigrants in Bermuda. To this I was moved in part by the fact that theSonghas found its way into many modern collections; these lines, so far as I know, into none; in part by my conviction that we have here a poem which, though less popular than theSong, is of a still higher mood. If after this praise, these lines should, at the first perusal, disappoint a thoughtful reader, I would ask him to read them a second time, and, if needful, a third. Sooner or later they will reveal the depth and riches of meaning which under their unpretending forms lie concealed.

P. 78, No. lxxx.—This poem will acquire a profound interest, for those at least who count there is something better in the world than Art, when we read it in the light of the fact mentioned by Lord Clarendon in hisHistory of the Rebellionabout its author,namely, that ‘after fifty years spent with less severity and exactness than it ought to have been, he died with the greatest remorse for that license, and the greatest manifestations of Christianity that his best friends could desire;’ so that in the end the hope which he ventures here timidly to utter was fulfilled, and one thorn ‘from the dry leafless trunk on Golgotha’ did prove to him more precious ‘than all the flourishing wreaths by laureates worn.’

P. 82, No. lxxxiv., l. 8: Campbell has transferred ‘the world’s gray fathers’ into his poem on the Rainbow; but has no more to say for the author of these exquisite lines and of three other poems as perfect in form as in spirit which enrich this volume than this, ‘He is one of the harshest even of the inferior order of the school of conceit, but he has some few scattered thoughts that meet our eye amid his harsh pages, like wild flowers on a barren heath.’

P. 83, No. lxxxv. l. 133, 134: These lines are very perplexing. Milton’s lines on Shakespeare abundantly attest that the true character of the greatness of England’s greatest poet rose distinct and clear before the mind of him who in greatness approached him the nearest. But in this couplet can we trace any sense of the same discernment? ‘Fancy’s child’ may pass, seeing that ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ were not effectually desynonymized when Milton wrote; nay, ‘fancy’ was for him the greater name (seeParadise Lost, v. 100-113). ‘Sweetest’ Shakespeare undoubtedly was, but then the sweetness is so drawn up into the power, that this is about the last epithet one would be disposed to use about him. And then what could Milton possibly have intended by ‘his native woodnotes wild’—the sort of praise which might be bestowed, though with no eminent fulness, upon Clare, or a poet of his rank. TheMidsummer Night’s DreamandAs You Like Itare perhaps the most idyllic of his plays; but the perfect art controlling at every step the prodigality of nature, in these as in all his works, takes away all fitness from language such as this, and I can only wonder that of all the commentators on Milton not one has cared to explain to us what the poet here meant.

P. 87, No. lxxxvi. l. 18: Memnon, king of Ethiopia (nigri Memnonis arma, Virgil), who according to the cyclic poets was slain before the walls of Troy by Achilles, is described in theOdyssey, xi. 522, as the most beautiful of the warriors there. A sister of his might therefore be presumed to be beautiful no less. Milton did not, as some say, invent the sister. Mention is made of her, her name is Hemera (Ήμἑρα), in Dictys Cretensis. It is she who pays the last honours to the ashes of her brother.—l. 19: Cassiopeia, ‘starred’ as having been translated into the heaven, and become a constellation there. She offended the Nereids by contesting the prize of beauty with them. Milton concludes that as an Ethiopian she wasblack, but this is nowhere said.—l. 108-115: Milton does not introduce Chaucer in hisAllegro, but in hisPenseroso; seeing in him something beside ‘the merry bard,’ which is all that Addison can see in the most pathetic poet in the English language.—l. 116-120: Spenser is here alluded to, of course—‘our sage and serious poet, Spenser,’ as Milton loved to call him. Contrast his judgment of Spenser’s allegory, as being something

‘Where more is meant than meets the ear;’

with Addison’s,

‘The long-spun allegories fulsome grow,While the dull moral lies too plain below.’

‘The long-spun allegories fulsome grow,

While the dull moral lies too plain below.’

P. 92, No. lxxvii.—Wordsworth in the Preface to an early edition of his works calls attention to Cotton’s well-nigh forgotten poetry, some of it abundantly deserving the oblivion into which it has fallen, but some of a very rare excellence in its kind. This he does, quoting largely from hisOde to Winter, mainly with the purpose of illustrating the distinction between fancy, of which these poems, in his judgment, have much, and imagination, of which they have little or none. They have a merit which certainly strikes me more than any singular wealth of fancy which I can find in them; and which to Wordsworth also must have constituted their chief attraction, namely, the admirable English in which they are written. They are sometimes prosaic, sometimes blemished by more serious faults; but for homely vigour and purity of language, for the total absence of any attempt to conceal the deficiency of strong and high imagination by a false poetic diction—purple rags torn from other men’s garments, and sewn upon his own—he may take his place among the foremost masters of the tongue. Coleridge has said as much (Biographia Literaria, vol. ii. p. 96): ‘There are not a few poems in that volume [the works of Cotton] replete with every excellence of thought, image, and passion which we expect or desire in the poetry of the milder Muse, and yet so worded that the reader sees no reason either in the selection or the order of the words why he may not have said the very same in an appropriate conversation, and cannot conceive how indeed he could have expressed such thoughts otherwise, without loss or injury to his meaning.’ I will add that this poem is drawn out to too great a length for its own interests, or for my limited space; and several stanzas toward the close have been omitted.

P. 95, No. lxxxviii.—Johnson has justly praised the ‘unequalled fertility of invention’ displayed in this poem, and in its pendant,Against Hope. To estimateallthe wonder of them, they should be read each in the light of the other. In some lines of wretched criticism, which Addison has calledAn Account of the greatest English Poets, there is one exception to the shallowness or falsenessof most of his judgments about them, namely in his estimate of Cowley, which is much higher than that of the present day, though not too high; wherein too he has well seized his merits and defects, both of which this poem exemplifies. These are the first six lines:

‘Great Cowley then (a mighty genius) wrote,O’errun with wit, and lavish of his thought;His turns too closely on the reader press,He more had pleased us, had he pleased us less;One glittering thought no sooner strikes our eyesWith silent wonder but new wonders rise.’

‘Great Cowley then (a mighty genius) wrote,

O’errun with wit, and lavish of his thought;

His turns too closely on the reader press,

He more had pleased us, had he pleased us less;

One glittering thought no sooner strikes our eyes

With silent wonder but new wonders rise.’

P. 96, No. lxxxix.—It is evident that in this Prologue and in that which follows Dryden is on his good behaviour; he has indeed so much respect for his audience that in all the eighty-five lines which compose them he has not one profane, and, still more remarkable, not one indecent allusion. Neither are the compliments which he pays his hearers, as is too often the case, fulsome and from their exaggeration offensive, but such as became him to pay and them to receive, and there is an eminent appropriateness to the time and place in them all. Though no very accurate scholar, he is yet quite scholar enough to talk with scholars on no very unequal footing; while the most eminent of those who heard him must have felt that in strength and opulence of thought, and in power of clothing this thought in appropriate forms, he immeasurably surpassed them all.

P. 99, No. xci.—Barten Holyday, Archdeacon of Oxford, and translator of Juvenal, published in 1661 hisSurvey of the World, which contains a thousand independent distiches, of which these are a favourable sample. Nearly all which I have quoted have more or less point—to my mind the distinction between the two chief historians of Greece has never been more happily drawn—and some of them have poetry as well. Yet for all this the devout prayer of the author in his concluding distich,

‘Father of gifts, who to the dust didst giveLife, say to these my meditations, Live,’

‘Father of gifts, who to the dust didst give

Life, say to these my meditations, Live,’

has not been, and will scarcely now, be fulfilled.

P. 103, No. xcv.—This is nothing more than a broad-sheet ballad published in 1641, the year of Strafford’s execution, with the titleVerses lately written by Thomas Earl of Strafford. Two copies, of different issues, but of the same date, and identical in text, exist in the British Museum, while inThe Topographer, vol. ii. p. 234, there is printed another, and in some respects an improved text. The fall of the great statesman from his pride of place has here kindled one with perhaps but ordinary gifts for ordinary occasions to a truly poetical treatment of his theme; as to a certain extent it has roused another,whose less original ballad in the same year and on the same theme, bearing the title,The Ultimum Vale or Last Farewell of Thomas Earl of Strafford, yields as its second stanza these nervous lines:

‘Farewell, you fading honours which do blindBy your false mists the sharpest-sighted mind;And having raised him to his height of cares,Tumble him headlong down the slippery stairs;How shall I praise or prize your glorious ills,Which are but poison hid in golden pills?’

‘Farewell, you fading honours which do blind

By your false mists the sharpest-sighted mind;

And having raised him to his height of cares,

Tumble him headlong down the slippery stairs;

How shall I praise or prize your glorious ills,

Which are but poison hid in golden pills?’

P. 108, No. xcix.—These spirited lines were found written in an old hand in a copy of Lovelace’sLucasta, 1679. We have in them no doubt a Cavalier Song of our Civil Wars.

P. 108, No. c.—Davenant is scarcely known except by his strong-thoughted but heavy poem ofGondibert; and very little known, I should suppose, by this. But three of his poems, this and Nos. cvii. and clii., show that in another vein, that of graceful half play, half earnest, few have surpassed him. I know nothing in its kind happier than clii., which by an oversight has been placed somewhat too late in this volume.

P. 111, No. ci. l. 43-48: Cicero (De Nat. Deor.3, 28, and elsewhere) refers to the remarkable story of Jason, tyrant of Pheræe, whom one would have stabbed, but did in fact only open a dangerous ulcer in his body.—l. 59: ‘Adamant’ is here used in the sense of loadstone; as in Shakespeare’sMidsummer Night’s Dream, 2, i.

‘You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant,And yet you draw not iron.’

‘You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant,

And yet you draw not iron.’

P. 112, No. cii.—I have dealt somewhat boldly with this poem, of its twenty-four triplets omitting all but ten, these ten seeming to me to constitute a fine poem, which the entire twenty-four altogether fail to do. Few, I think, will agree with Horace Walpole that ‘the poetry is most uncouth and inharmonious;’ so far from this, it has a very solemn and majestic flow. Nor do I doubt that these lines are what they profess to be, the composition of King Charles; their authenticity is stamped on every line. We are indebted to Burnet for their preservation. He gives them in hisMemoirs of the Dukes of Hamilton, saying, ‘A very worthy gentleman who had the honour of waiting on him then [at Carisbrook Castle], and was much trusted by him, copied them out from the original, who avoucheth them to be a true copy.’—l. 2: A word has evidently dropped out here, which is manifestly wanted by the metre, and, as it seems to me, also by the sense. I have enclosed within brackets the ‘earthly’ with which I have ventured to supply the want.

P. 113, No. ciii.—Marvell showed how well he understood what hewas giving to the world in this ode, one of the least known but among the grandest which the English language possesses, when he called it ‘Horatian.’ In its whole treatment it reminds us of the highest to which the greatest Latin Artist in lyrical poetry did, when at his best, attain. To one unacquainted with Horace, this ode, not perhaps so perfect as his are in form, and with occasional obscurities of expression which Horace would not have left, will give a truer notion of the kind of greatness which he achieved than, so far as I know, could from any other poem in the language be obtained.

P. 117, No. cv.—I have taken the liberty of omitting nine out of the twenty-six stanzas of which this fine hymn is composed; I believe that it has gained much by the omission. The sense that a poor stanza is not merely no gain, but a serious injury, to a poem, was not Cowley’s; still less that willingness to sacrifice parts to the effect of the whole, which induced Gray to leave out a stanza, in itself as exquisite as any which remain, from hisElegy; which led Milton to omit from the Spirit’sPrologueinComussixteen glorious lines which may still be seen in his original MSS. at Cambridge, and have been often reprinted in the notes to later editions of his Poems.—l. 45-56: Johnson has said, urging the immense improvement in the mechanism of English verse which we owe to Dryden and the little which had been done before him, ‘if Cowley had sometimes a finished line, he had it by chance.’ Let Dryden have all the honour which is justly his due, but not at the expense of others. There are doubtless a few weak and poor lines in this poem even as now presented, but what a multitude of others, these twelve for example, without a single exception, of perfect grace and beauty, and as satisfying to the ear as to the mind.—l. 68: This line is certainly perplexing. In all the earlier editions of Cowley which I have examined it runs thus,

‘Of colours mingled, Light, a thick and standing lake.’

In the modern, so far as they have come under my eye, it is printed,

‘Of colours mingled light a thick and standing lake.’

The line seems in neither shape to yield any tolerable sense—not in the first, with ‘Light’ regarded as a vocative, which, for the line so pointed, seems the only possible construction; nor yet in the second, which only acquires some sort of meaning when ‘colours’ is treated as a genitive plural. I have marked it as such, but am so little satisfied with the result, that, were this book to print again, I should recur to the earlier reading, which, however unsatisfactory, should not be disturbed, unless for such an emendation as carries conviction with it.

P. 120, No. cvi.—Hallam has said that ‘Cowley upon the whole has had a reputation more above his deserts than any English poet,’ adding, however, that ‘some who wrote better had not so fine a genius.’ This may have been so, but a man’s contemporaries have some opportunities of judging which subsequent generations are without. They judge him not only by what hedoes, but by what heis; and oftentimes a manismore than hedoes; leaves an impression of greatness on those who come in actual contact with him which is only inadequately justified by aught which he leaves behind him, while yet in one sense it is most true. Many a man’s embodiment of himself in his writings is below himself; some men’s, strange to say, is above them, or at all events represents most transient moments of their lives. But I should be disposed to question Mr. Hallam’s assertion, judging Cowley merely by what he has left behind him. With a poem like this before us, so full of thought, so full of imagination, containing so accurate and so masterly a sketch of the past history of natural philosophy, we may well hesitate about jumping to the conclusion that his contemporaries were altogether wrong, rating him so highly as they did. How they did esteem him lines like these of Denham, the fragment of a larger poem, not without a worth of their own, will show:

‘Old mother Wit and Nature gaveShakespeare and Fletcher all they have;In Spenser and in Jonson ArtOf slower Nature got the start;But both in him so equal are,None knows which bears the happiest share.To him no author was unknown,Yet what he wrote was all his own,He melted not the ancient gold,Nor with Ben Jonson did make boldTo plunder all the Roman storesOf poets and of orators.Horace’s wit and Virgil’s stateHe did not steal but emulate!And when he would like them appear,Their garb, but not their clothes did wear.’

‘Old mother Wit and Nature gave

Shakespeare and Fletcher all they have;

In Spenser and in Jonson Art

Of slower Nature got the start;

But both in him so equal are,

None knows which bears the happiest share.

To him no author was unknown,

Yet what he wrote was all his own,

He melted not the ancient gold,

Nor with Ben Jonson did make bold

To plunder all the Roman stores

Of poets and of orators.

Horace’s wit and Virgil’s state

He did not steal but emulate!

And when he would like them appear,

Their garb, but not their clothes did wear.’

l. 19-40: Compare with these the lines, inferior indeed, but themselves remarkable, and showing how strongly Cowley felt on this matter, which occur in hisOde to Dr. Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood:

‘Thus Harvey sought for truth in Truth’s own book,The creatures; which by God Himself was writ,And wisely thought ’twas fitNot to read comments only upon it,But on the original itself to look.Methinks in art’s great circle others stand,Locked up together, hand in hand,Every one leads as he is led,The same bare path they tread,And dance like fairies a fantastic round,But neither change their motion nor their ground.’

‘Thus Harvey sought for truth in Truth’s own book,

The creatures; which by God Himself was writ,

And wisely thought ’twas fit

Not to read comments only upon it,

But on the original itself to look.

Methinks in art’s great circle others stand,

Locked up together, hand in hand,

Every one leads as he is led,

The same bare path they tread,

And dance like fairies a fantastic round,

But neither change their motion nor their ground.’

The same thought reappears, and again remarkably expressed, although under quite different images, in hisOde to Mr. Hobbs. These are a few lines:

‘We break up tombs with sacrilegious hands,Old rubbish we remove.To walk in ruins like vain ghosts we love,And with fond divining wandsWe search among the deadFor treasure burièd,Whilst still the liberal earth does holdSo many virgin mines of undiscovered gold.’

‘We break up tombs with sacrilegious hands,

Old rubbish we remove.

To walk in ruins like vain ghosts we love,

And with fond divining wands

We search among the dead

For treasure burièd,

Whilst still the liberal earth does hold

So many virgin mines of undiscovered gold.’

Dryden in some remarkable lines addressed to Dr. Charleton expresses the same sense of the freedom with which Bacon had set free the study of nature, and the bondage from which he had delivered it:

‘The longest tyranny that ever swayed,Was that wherein our ancestors betrayedTheir freeborn reason to the Stagirite,And made his torch their universal light.So truth, while only one supplied the State,Grew scarce and dear, and yet sophisticate;Still it was bought, like emp’ric wares or charms,Hard words, sealed up with Aristotle’s arms.’

‘The longest tyranny that ever swayed,

Was that wherein our ancestors betrayed

Their freeborn reason to the Stagirite,

And made his torch their universal light.

So truth, while only one supplied the State,

Grew scarce and dear, and yet sophisticate;

Still it was bought, like emp’ric wares or charms,

Hard words, sealed up with Aristotle’s arms.’

l. 164-182: It ought not to be forgotten that this poem appeared first prefixed to Sprat’sHistory of the Royal Society of London, London, 1667. Though not published till the year 1667, the year of Cowley’s death, the book had in great part been printed, as Sprat informs us, two years before, which exactly agrees with Cowley’s statement here. The position which the poem thus occupied should be kept in mind, otherwise the encomium on Sprat’sHistorymight seem dragged in with no sufficient motive, and merely out of motives of private friendship. It may be added that the praise is not at all so exaggerated as those who know Addison’s ‘tuneful prelate’ only by his verse might suppose. The book has considerable merits, and Johnson speaks of it as in his day still keeping its place, and being read with pleasure. I only observed when it was too late to profit by the observation, that after l. 143, three lines occur, on this the first publication of the poem, which, by a strange heedlessness, have dropt out of all subsequent editions. They are as follows:

‘She with much stranger art than his that putAll the Iliads in a nut,The numerous work of life does into atoms shut.’

‘She with much stranger art than his that put

All the Iliads in a nut,

The numerous work of life does into atoms shut.’

P. 129, No. cix.—This chorus, or fragment of a chorus, from theThyestesof Seneca, beginning

Me dulcis saturet quies,

and ending with these remarkable lines,

Illi mors gravis incubat,Qui notus nimis omnibusIgnotus moritur sibi,

Illi mors gravis incubat,

Qui notus nimis omnibus

Ignotus moritur sibi,

seems to have had much attraction for moralists and poets in the seventeenth century. Beside this paraphrase of it by Sir Matthew Hale, prefixed to one of hisContemplations, there is a translation by Cowley, and a third, the best of all, by Marvell, of which these are the concluding lines:

‘Who exposed to others’ eyes,Into his own heart never pries,Death’s to him a strange surprise.’

‘Who exposed to others’ eyes,

Into his own heart never pries,

Death’s to him a strange surprise.’

P. 130, No. cx.—I have detached these two stanzas from a longer poem of which they constitute the only valuable portion. George Wither (‘a most profuse pourer forth of English rhyme’ Phillips calls him) was indeed so intolerable a proser in verse, so overlaid his good with indifferent or bad, that one may easily forget how real a gift he possessed, and sometimes showed that he possessed.

P. 131, No. cxii.—When Phillips, writing in 1675, styles Quarles ‘the darling of our plebeian judgments,’ he intimates the circle in which his popularity was highest, and helps us to understand the extreme contempt into which he afterwards fell, so that he who had a little earlier been hailed as

‘that sweet seraph of our nation, Quarles,’

became a byeword for all that was absurdest and worst in poetry. The reacquaintance which I have made with him, while looking for some specimen of his verse worthy to be cited here, has shown me that his admirers, though they may have admired a good deal too much, had far better right than his despisers.—l. 25: ‘To vie’ is to put down a certain sum upon a card; ‘to revie’ is to cover this with a larger, by which the challenger becomes in turn the challenged.

P. 132, No. cxiii.—Milton’s lines on Shakespeare cannot properly be counted an epitaph. But setting those aside, as not fairly coming into competition, this is, in my judgment, the finest and most affecting epitaph in the English language. Of Pope’s there is not one which deserves to be compared with it. His are of art, artful, which this is no less, but this also of nature and natural. With all this it has grievous shortcomings. Death and eternity raise other issues concerning the departed besides those which are dealt with here.—This epitaph contains two fine allusions to Virgil’sÆneid, with which Dryden was of necessity so familiar. The first, that of l. 7-10 to book v. l. 327-338. At the games with whichÆneas celebrates his father’s funeral, Nisus and his younger friend Euryalus are among the competitors in the foot-race; Nisus, who is winning, slips, and Euryalus arrives the first at the goal, and carries off the prize. In the four concluding lines there is a beautiful allusion to the well-known passage, book vi. l. 860-886, in which the poet deplores the early death of that young Marcellus, with which so many fair expectations of the imperial family and of the Roman people perished.

P. 133, No. cxiv.—Elizabeth, wife of Henry Hastings, fifth Earl of Huntingdon, is the lady commemorated in this fine epitaph, ‘by him who says what he saw’—for this is the attestation to the truth of all that it asserts, which Lord Falkland, mindful of the ordinary untruthfulness of epitaphs, thinks it good to subscribe.

P. 136, No. cxix.—The writer of these lines commanded a vessel sent out in 1631 by some Bristol merchants for the discovery of the North-West passage. Frozen up in the ice, he passed a winter of frightful suffering on those inhospitable shores; many of his company sinking beneath the hardships of the time. The simple and noble manner in which these sufferings were borne he has himself left on record (Harris’sVoyages, vol. i. pp. 600-606); how too, when at length the day of deliverance dawned, and the last evening which they should spend on that cruel coast had arrived—but he shall speak his own words:—‘and now the sun was set, and the boat came ashore for us, whereupon after evening prayer we assembled and went up to take a last view of our dead; where leaning upon my arm on one of their tombs I uttered these lines; which, though perhaps they may procure laughter in the wiser sort, they yet moved my young and tender-hearted companions at that time to some compassion.’ To me they seem to have the pathos, better than any other, of truth.

P. 137, No. cxxi.—A few lines from this exquisite monody have found their way, but even these rarely, into some modern selections. The whole poem, inexpressibly tender and beautiful as it is, is included in Headley’sSelect Beauties, 1810, but in no other that I know. Henry King, afterwards Bishop of Chichester, married Anne, the eldest daughter of Robert Berkeley; she probably died in 1624, and, as we learn from the poem itself (see vv. 28, 29), in or about her twenty-fourth year. It would be interesting to know whether this was the lady, all hope to whose hand he at one time supposed he must for ever renounce, and did renounce in those other lines, hardly less beautiful, which he has calledThe Surrender, and which will be found at p. 65 of this volume. Henry King’sPoemshave been carefully edited by the Rev. T. Hannah, London, 1843.

P. 141, No. cxxiii.—A rough rugged piece of verse, as indeedalmost all Donne’s poetry is imperfect in form and workmanship; but it is the genuine cry of one engaged in that most terrible of all struggles, wherein, as we are winners or losers, we have won all or lost all. There is indeed much in Donne, in the unfolding of his moral and spiritual life, which often reminds us of St. Augustine. I do not mean that, noteworthy as on many accounts he was, and in the language of Carew, one of his contemporaries,

‘A king who ruled as he thought fitThe universal monarchy of wit,’

‘A king who ruled as he thought fit

The universal monarchy of wit,’

he at all approached in intellectual or spiritual stature to the great Doctor of the Western Church. But still there was in Donne the same tumultuous youth, the same entanglement in youthful lusts, the same conflict with these, and the same final deliverance from them; and then the same passionate and personal grasp of the central truths of Christianity, linking itself as this did with all that he had suffered, and all that he had sinned, and all through which by God’s grace he had victoriously struggled.

P. 142, No. cxxv.—There is a certain residue of truth in Johnson’s complaint of the blending of incongruous theologies, or rather of a mythology and a theology, in this poem—Neptune and Phœbus and Panope and the Fury mixed up with St. Peter and a greater than St. Peter, and a fierce assault on the Clergy of the Church. At the same time there is a fusing power in the imagination, when it is in its highest exercise, which can bring together and chemically unite materials the most heterogeneous; and the fault of Johnson’s criticism is that he has no eye for the mighty force of this which inLycidasis displayed, and which has brought all or nearly all of its strange assemblage of materials into harmonious unity—and even where this is not so, hardly allows us to remember the fact, so wondrous is the beauty and splendour of the whole. But in weaker hands the bringing together of all which is here brought together, and the attempt to combine it all in one poem, would have inevitably issued in failure the most ridiculous.—l. 32-49: This and more than one other allusion in this poem implies that King wrote verses, and of an idyllic character, as would seem. In his brother’s Elegy, contained in the same volume in whichLycidasfirst appeared, as much, and indeed a good deal more is said:

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