CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 ENGLISH COLLECTION 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 JAMES MORGAN HART 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGUSH 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PR 541.G67 
 
 From Shakespeare to Pope; an inquiry Into 
 
 3 1924 013 266 584 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 3266584 
 
SHAKESPEARE 
 
 PO PH 
 
 AN INQUIRY INTO THE CAUSES AND PHENOMENA OF ' 
 
 THE RISE OF CLASSICAL POETRY IN ENGLAND /f y/^-— 
 
 CLARK LECTURER IN ENGLISH LITERATURE AT TH^ UNIVERSITY A /? ^ 
 
 OF CAMBRIDGE / /f , // (i T 
 
 Ji^jkLUr^ J ^1885 ^'^ Kr^/M->*^JX 
 
 11 J 1- 
 
A.^gsu^l 
 
 Published by Arrangement with the Author. 
 
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 air. 
 
 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, — 
 
 These still, if shaken, give 
 From their deep hearts a murmur of the dome 
 Where once their soft inhabitants could roam, — 
 Sonorous seas where Indian monsters thrive 
 And strive ; 
 
 iii 
 
IV DEDICA TION. 
 
 Their owners all are dead ; 
 
 The mighty ships that brought them rot on shore ; 
 
 Yet still that murmur lingers at their core. 
 
 And Fanc/s light across their tropic bed 
 
 Is shed. 
 
 I, less than bird or shell, 
 More v olatil e, more fragile far than these, 
 Lighting an hour by these New England seas 
 Leave here my plume, my echo, — ^where it fell 
 To dwell : 
 
 You shook it from my wing. 
 You dived to lift it from my glimmering deeps ; 
 Now, wakened by your voice no more, it sleeps 
 And grows less mine than yours ; here let it cling 
 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, 
 December^ 1884. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The following chapters were written in response 
 to an invitation from the trustees of the Lowell Insti- 
 tute in Boston, and were delivered before that in- 
 stitution in the month of December last. They were 
 also read during the same winter, in whole or in 
 part, before the Johns Hopkins University in Balti- 
 more, before Yale College, before private audiences 
 in New York and elsewhere in America, as well as 
 before my own university audience at Cambridge. 
 
 It has been of no small advantage to me that 
 among the distinguished listeners to whom I 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 
 criticism, I have been able profitably to revise the 
 work, to add evidence where it seemed wanting, to 
 remove rash statements and to re-mould ambiguous 
 sentences. Above all, I have given a great deal of 
 care to the accumulation, in the form of notes and 
 appendices, of historical and critical data of a kind 
 too particular for the purposes of a lecturer, but 
 not, I hope, without genuine importance to the 
 student of the history of literature. The friendly 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 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 has merely been to strengthen on every 
 side my conviction that the theory which I have 
 here laid down for the first time is substantially the 
 true one, and that the opinion hitherto received re- 
 garding 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 evi- 
 dence 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 
 eleventh volume of his history, and in leading me to 
 MS. sources of seventeenth-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 com- 
 plete and accurate than any hitherto published. Prof. 
 Gardiner's volume, for which students of the Caro- 
 line period can hardly command their impatience, 
 will not, I am sorry to say, be in our possession for 
 some years. I suppose that our great historian will 
 not come forward to greet the public again until he 
 can bring the head of Charles I. in his hands. 
 
 Trim. Coll., Cambridge, 
 May, 1885. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Dedication iii 
 
 Preface v 
 
 Poetry at the Death of Shakespeake 3 
 
 Waller and Sacharissa 39 
 
 The Exiles 81 
 
 "Davenant and Cowley 117 
 
 The Reaction 155 
 
 The Restoration 193 
 
 Appendix 1 231 
 
 Appendix II 233 
 
 Appendix III 235 
 
 Appendix IV 237 
 
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, mun- 
 dane, and rhetorical order of poetry which is mainly 
 identified in our minds with the names and prac- 
 tice of Dryden, of Pope, and of Johnson. The 
 school of writers who cultivated this order — and 
 those who emphasize their faults admit that they did 
 institute a school — ^have commonly been described 
 as the classical, because their early leaders claimed 
 to emulate and restore the grace and precision 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.* The prestige of these classical versemen 
 was first attacked, in the middle of the eighteenth 
 century, by Gray and Chatterton ; and their influ- 
 ence received blow upon blow until the close of the 
 century, when the efflorescence of the naturalistic 
 
 ♦ Horace will our superfluous Braaches prune, 
 Give us new rules, and set our Harp in tune, 
 Direct us how to back the winged Horse, 
 FaTour his flight and moderate his force. 
 
 Waller to Roscommon^ 1684. 
 
4 POETRY AT THE DEATH 
 
 yM. 
 
 
 <■ poets, first from within, as in Crabbe, and then 
 much more decisively from without, as in Words- 
 worth 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 en- 
 throned 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 swa/d about upon a rocking-horse, 
 And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-soul'd ! 
 The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roU'd 
 Us 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 ! 
 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, 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 5 
 
 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 ! " * 
 
 In these lines Keats has so admirably summed up 
 the convictions of the first half of the present cent- 
 ury 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 tmder our consideration, but it 
 is written in extreme formal opposition to it : — 
 
 " 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 
 enjambements, 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 pro- 
 nounce the French word as though it were English, 
 enjambments, but this is hideous. My friend, Mr. 
 Austin Dobson, with whom I was talking over the 
 subject of this volume, proposed to me the term 
 
 iij'vM 
 
 * From Sleep and Poetry, 1^^ l8l-So6, published in the 
 Poems of l8l7. ^ . 
 
6 POETRY AT THE DEATH 
 
 overfiow * 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 natural- 
 ly closes ; and I will, if you please, adopt it through- 
 out this course of lectures, as equivalent to the vers 
 enjambd of the French. In its simplest definition, 
 then, the for mula difference between the two classes 
 or orders of English poetry is, that the romanti c 
 class is of a loose and elastic kind, full of these suc- 
 cessive overflows, while the classical is closely con- 
 fined to the use of distich, that is to say, of regular 
 couplets, within the bounds of each of which the 
 sense is rigidly confined. 
 
 It will now be well to show the distinction be- 
 tween 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 ; 
 
 * Milton describes the same peculiarity in The Verse {Para- 
 dise Lost, fifth title-page) as " the sense variously drawn out 
 from one verse into another." 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 7 
 
 And, pondering which of all his sons was fit 
 To reign and wage immortal war with wit, 
 Cried, ' 'Tis resolved, (or Nature pleads that he 
 Should only rule who most resembles me.' " * 
 
 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 mediocrity 
 of poetasters. Our ears will none the less instruct 
 us in a moment that here we have two brilliant 
 artists whose methods, whose ambitions, whose whole 
 conception of style, are at the poles of contrast 
 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 modem En glish ; 
 the romanti c, when poetry revived under the Tudor 
 monarchs; the classical again from the English 
 Commonwealth to the French Revolution ; the ro- 
 mantic again ever since. The subject of our pres- 
 ent investigation is confined 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 un- 
 
 * Mac-Flecknoe (1682), 11. 1-14. 
 
8 POETRY AT THE DEATH 
 
 dertaking it we are confronted by the difficulty 
 which a traveller encounters in attempting minutely 
 to survey a passage of country, part of which is flat 
 and part is hilly. From a distance nothing is 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 time seems to me to have arrived for a just 
 consideration 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 char- 
 acter of the change which took place in English 
 poetry towards the middle of the seventeenth cent- 
 ury, 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 the performance, in pri- 
 ority 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 combination all the endless varie- 
 ties of iambic and trochaic movement (for the dactylic 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 and jmapaestic* movement Was, curiouslj^ enough, 
 entirely u nknow n to the Elizabethans) trammelling 
 themselves by a series 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 inchnations of the 
 poets, they suddenly and wilfully shut themselves 
 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 allu- 
 sions. They no longer mentioned the gilly-flower 
 and the daffodil, but permitted themselves 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, 
 fniits became " the treasures of Pomona," a horse 
 
 * I purposely take no note here of the experiments in tum- 
 bling rimeless measure made by certain Elizabethans. These 
 were purely exotic, and, even in the hands of Campion him- 
 self, neither natural nor successful. I would at the same time 
 guard myself from being supposed to think, though for con- 
 science sake I speak of iambs and dactyls, that we possess 
 real metrical quantity in English. 
 
lO POETRY AT THE DEATH 
 
 became "the impatient courser."* 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 sup- 
 posed that to use one of these genteel t oke ns 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 ex- 
 ercise of his ingenuity by simply introducing the 
 word " caterpillars," whereas the classical poet had 
 to prove that he was a scholar and a gentleman by 
 inventing some circumlocution such as " the crawl- 
 ing scourge that smites the leafy plain." Sh aftesbury^ 
 introduced this exaggerated elegance of diction mto 
 the field of OTose, and his success increased the 
 foppishness oftEe poets. It made their vices in- 
 veterate, and in course of time the desire politely to 
 
 _ * It may be noticed that it is in tlie Cyder of John Philips 
 ' (written in 1699) that this pompous and allusive language is 
 first used witEout stint or shame. Philips united two strains 
 of influence, that of Waller and that of Paradise Lost, and in- 
 troduced 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-gardener. 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. II 
 
 avoid saying what was meant reached a height that 
 was quite ridiculous. In the generation that suc- 
 ceeded 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 un- 
 fairly, — 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, unnatural forms of 
 circumlocution, were not in themselves character- 
 istic 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. Shakes- 
 peare is quite as far removed at times from straight- 
 forward reference to his subject as Armstrong 
 or Darwin, but the difference lies in the presence or 
 absence of liberty of action. Shakespeare says " sore 
 labour'sbath," 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, and strait-laced 
 elegance ; the romantic poet's principle is liberty 
 even though it lead to licence. 
 
12 POETRY AT THE DEATH 
 
 The secret of the enigma that a whole generation 
 meekly and even eagerly consented to clip its own 
 wings and subside into servitude, is primarily to be 
 found in the word we have just used, licence. The 
 people of the seventeenth century were weary of lib- 
 erty, weary of the unmitigated rage of the drama- 
 tists, 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 irresponsible rhjrmster. Litera- 
 ture 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 
 ^y]R)Marini, and Gongora, and the brief vogue of 
 tETs wonderful heresy, with its extravagance, affecta- 
 tion, and preciosity, had but hastened on the certain 
 and necessary reaction. When the leaders of litera- 
 ture began to write as Donne and Crashaw * did, it 
 
 * 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 Magdalene, in 
 which he calls her eyes " parents of silver-footed rills," " heav- 
 ens of ever-falling stars," " Heaven's spangles," "nests of 
 milky doves," "two walking baths," "portable and' compen- 
 dious 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," " simper- 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 1 3 
 
 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 na- 
 tions of Europe. It will perhaps help us to under- 
 stand 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 ex- 
 travagances of Marini, had reduced imaginative lit- 
 erature 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 C hiabrer a, who in disdaining 
 the folly of the Marinists, and in trying to recall his 
 countrjrmen to a Greek simplicity, attained a po- 
 sition somewhat analogous to that of Cowley. But 
 he stood alone until Filicaja came, and Italy pre- 
 sents us wilh tne spectacle of a literature too effete 
 and nerveless to undergo the process of even a clas- 
 sical change. When at last the precise manner of 
 
 ing sons of those fair eyes, your fertile mothers," and as many 
 more unlikely things as the reader's curiosity can wigh for. , 
 
14 POETRY AT THE DEATH 
 
 that school was introduced, it was Parini, who, fresh 
 from the study of Pope, attempted to graft an Eng- 
 lish 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 ex- 
 haustion of the soil, for here modern poetry had not 
 begun to exist. Here we might expect a young lit- 
 erature, fresh in all the colours of the morning, to 
 arise with healing in its wings. But, as though, on 
 the eve of the horrors of the thirty years' war, Prot- 
 estant Europe refused to be glad, nothing more cold 
 or dull or decorous can be imagined than that First 
 Silesian School with which modem German poetry 
 begins. The very year before the great war broke 
 out in Bohemia, Martin Opitz sounded the first note 
 in his treatise De Contemptu 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 classi- 
 cal in taste, alexandrines with alternate male and 
 female rhymes, all about nymphs and satyrs and the 
 didactic Muse.* He took his cue directly from 
 
 * The close of his flat and vapid romance, Zlatna, 1624, is 
 almost pathetic in its aspiration : 
 
 So wttrd' ich meine Vers' auch wol nicht lassen liegen, 
 Gar bald mit Mantua biss an die Wolken fliegen, 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. I? 
 
 Holland and France, while Sweden and Denmark 
 took their cue from him. The three first modem 
 poets of the three countries, Opitz (i 597-1 639), 
 Stjemhjelm (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 genera- 
 tion of Waller. So much we may note in passing. 
 
 Holland was the sole Teutonic country that al- 
 ready 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 melodra- 
 matic* The Dutch had works answering more or 
 
 Bald mit dem Pindarus ; Nasonis Elegie, 
 Doch zuvaraus tenant als meiae Poesie. 
 
 Here is a great flutter of singing-robes, but the hoof peeps 
 out. 
 
 * The Dutch have this year (March 16, 1885) celebrated the 
 ter-centenary of their greatest dramatist, Breder6. The Eng- 
 lish play which approaches nearest to the works of this man is 
 
l6 POETRY AT THE DEATH 
 
 less to those of Marlowe and of Ben Jonson, but 
 nothing that recalls Spenser or Shakespeare. Their 
 principal work therefore was, not to eliminate fan- 
 tastic beauty, but to polish the execution of their 
 verses, and this Vondel did slowly, through an inter- 
 minable life of labour, all down the first three-quar- 
 ters 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 unob- 
 served, and had been outstripped by the like ten- 
 dency 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 influ- 
 ence 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 Eng- 
 land, since every other country was, in one form or 
 another, depressed, subdued, exhausted by rules and 
 colourless ambitions at that very same time. Eng- 
 land and France have occupied more attention than 
 any other countries, but mainly because of their su- 
 perior vitality, and the splendour of their produc- 
 tion. It is, indeed, a strange thing that at the 
 moment when England, under the cloud of her civil 
 
 Jonson's Bartholomew Fair; the humour of Breder6 is the 
 humour of Ostade, or of Plautus read through the eyes of 
 Ostade. 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 17 
 
 war, retired from the notice of Europe, she should 
 be drawn into a species of literary alliance with the 
 nations of the 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 _de- 
 cUne 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 ad- 
 mission 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 
 applauding a change that gave us Cowley in ex- 
 change for Spenser. I do not say that before this 
 inquiry is concluded I may not 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 suspect- 
 ing, that the change to classicism in England was 
 originally started by direct influence from France, 
 any more than from Germany or from Holland or 
 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 
 
l8 POETRY AT THE DEATH 
 
 place it. In my next chapter, I shall show, by irref- 
 ragable proof, that Waller was writing didactic oc- 
 casional 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 issued 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 alrdost 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 circumstance, which I do not recollect 
 to have seen noted by any critic, that this great 
 leader of the precise style of poetry, this harbinger 
 of Boileau and Racine, wrote less in alexandrines 
 than any other French poet on record. Except one 
 solitary fragment,* of no importance, I do not think 
 a single copy of verses in the conventional French 
 distich has been attributed to Malherbe. Of the 
 
 * The lines, addressed to Mme. de Rambouillet, which were 
 inserted in the letter from Malherbe, published in Le RecueU 
 de Lelires nouvelUs by Faret in 1627. 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 19 
 
 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 Revo- 
 lution drove the Royalist English poets to Paris and 
 Rouen, they eagerly studied their French contempo- 
 raries 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 influences 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 arid fifty years before. 
 We return, then, to England, and to our date 1623, 
 the year of the publication of the first folio Shakes- 
 peare, and of the composition of Waller's earliest 
 couplets. An examination of the records of Sta- 
 tioners' Company will help us nothing in forming a 
 notion of the state of English poetry at that date. 
 For some reason or other the publication of verse in 
 the third decade of the seventeenth century was ex- 
 tremely slack, though preceded 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 
 
20 POE TRY AT THE DEA TH 
 
 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 ascendant, 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 himself. From a purely bibliograph- 
 ical 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 tran- 
 sition 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 gentlemen 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 sxit 
 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 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 21 
 
 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 phDosophy, above all, in theology. The great 
 vogue of the Puritan divines was beginning, and al- 
 most the only verse which succeeded was put into 
 the form of plays, cheaply printed, and hawked 
 about in 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 preceding genera- 
 tion 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 whUe. 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 — Ga- 
 briel Harvey, Lodge, Bamfield, 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 untU the thirties. Yet Web- 
 ster's glorious Dutchess of Malfy belongs to our year 
 1623, and Jonson, Middleton, Chapman, and Hey- 
 wood were still at work. Massinger was just emerg- 
 ing, and Ford was about to emerge. A whole troop 
 
22 POETRY AT THE DEATH 
 
 or phalanx of tragic and comic playwrights was pre- 
 paring 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 Cambridge 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,* 
 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.! 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 publi- 
 cation 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 dreadfully amorphous and in- 
 
 * There was no edition of Donne's Poems earlier than 1633, 
 but their impress on the poetry of the preceding generation is 
 strongly marked. 
 
 \ t Henry More, in 1642, ushers in his Cambridge epic, th6 
 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 wavering ray, 
 
 Reflect from fluid glass doth play 
 
 On the white banks. But all are deaf 
 
 Unto my Muse, that is most lief [dear], 
 
 To my own self. 
 
OF.^HAKESPMARE. 23 
 
 vertebrate, and Macaulay'ii' difficulty of b6in^n af 
 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 1 
 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 charm- 
 ing mysterious name, is an allegory in twelve can- 
 tos, 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 Pur- 
 ple /r/a«rf 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 ridicu- 
 lous and unseemly towns and lakes and rivers. 
 
 We know the poets of this early Cardine period 
 almost entirely by extracts, and their ardour, quaint- 
 ness, and sudden flashes of inspiration give them a 
 singular advantage in this form. The sustained 
 elevation which had characterized Shakespeare 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 
 
24 POETRY AT THE DEATH 
 
 their purple patches. That same much over-esti- 
 mated Phineas Fletcher rises in his more natural 
 and more felicitous moments to a rare echo of the 
 luxurious Spenserian sweetness. This was strikingly 
 the case with the lyrists. Carew, Lovelace, and 
 half-a-dozen more are known to all lovers of poetry, 
 not by tlieir books, which are in the hands of but 
 few persons, but by those matchless exceptions 
 which criticism has lifted from their grotesque mis- 
 cellanies, 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 un- 
 wholesome 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 unpardona- 
 ble bathos or swell into equally unpardonable bom- 
 bast. And this inequality goes so far, and pervades 
 the literature of the period so completely, that even 
 the verse-writers who have never taken any rank, in 
 their own day 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 com- 
 mended a word of it. I feel as though John Ma- 
 son's ghost, after a silence of two hundred and fifty 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 25 
 
 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 directions to 
 his confidant : — 
 
 " Thy fears keep in 
 
 My trembling soul ; it does not leave my breast. 
 
 Mount to the flaming girdle of the world, 
 
 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 wfll pledge thee." 
 
 It was this want of sobriety, of propriety, of com- 
 mon 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 
 
26 POETRY AT THE DEATH 
 
 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 ex- 
 perience 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 ground. In estimating this quality of 
 sobriety, of common sense, in poetry, we are some- 
 what 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 indignation. The reaction against the bondage 
 of the eighteenth century still gives us a tender 
 partiality towards what is exaggerated, violent, and 
 bombastic. 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 be- 
 came a kind of watchword of the higher culture, like 
 Botticelli. Now Cyril Tourneur has been reprinted, 
 with admirable care, by a very dis tinguished 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 Tour- 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 27 
 
 neur appears to me to be one little reason more, by 
 the way, why the classical reaction should be re- 
 garded as absolutely inevitable. Cyril Toumeur 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 at- 
 tracted the admiration of Charles Lamb are sudden 
 felicities, such as I have just said can be discovered, 
 though, I allow, in fewer numbers and in less sus- 
 tained brilliance, in a vast number of examples. 
 But the general tenour of his writings is so monstrous, 
 so confused, so obscure, that there are whole pages 
 which might have been written by a Dyak of Borneo 
 who had strayed into the school of Lycophron. I 
 would desire to recommend to anyone who holds 
 that English poetry, at the beginning of the seven- 
 teenth century, was in a quiet, healthy condition, 
 and needed merely to be allowed to go on its course, 
 a chef (Toeuvre of Cyril Toumeur's called The Trans- 
 formed Metamorphosis. I remember the shouts of 
 joy among the elect when this masterpiece was first 
 discovered in a unique copy some twelve years ago. 
 Well, the editor and fondest admirer of Cyril Tour- 
 neur admits that the excessive obscurity of the 
 Transformed Metamorphosis " arises as much from 
 the abnormal and grotesque mould in which the 
 whole poem is cast as from the hideous jargon in 
 which it is written."* These are the words of a 
 
 * Here is a stanza : — 
 
 " From out the lake a bridge ascends thereto, 
 Whereon in female shape a serpent stands. 
 
28 POE TRY AT THE DEA TH 
 
 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.* 
 
 But it was not merely the want of proportion and 
 sustained style, it was not merely the intemperance 
 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 
 
 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 leucrocutanizM sound." 
 
 Leucrocutanizid is good ; but what does it all mean 7 
 * 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 Uie poet's rage to be discreet. 
 Who grows not nauseous while he strives to please, 
 But marks the shelves in our poetic seas." 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 29 
 
 curiosity, which marked the decade before the Civil 
 War, and which Charles, by his unimaginative ob- 
 stinacy, 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 generation of Elizabeth there had been diffused 
 over the people something of the temper and curi- 
 osity 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 Em- 
 pire of Russia from the Kingdom of Peru, some 
 wild strand where the waves cast pearls and amber- 
 gris on the stormy sea-board of Bohemia. Prob- 
 ability, what we call actuality, went for nothing ; 
 like children, the Elizabethans demanded an illu- 
 sion, but were quite indifferent as to the sober basis 
 of that illusion. Perhaps the only sign 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 writ- 
 ten a se rene and lovely poe m, in his leisurely way, 
 on a period of English history. If I mention The 
 Barons' Wars here, it is not with any notion of com- 
 
so POETRY AT THE DEATH 
 
 paring it with the crude epics of the next generation, 
 with the Purple Island and the Levite's 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 Barom' Wars, a stanza taken almost at ran- 
 dom, 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, 
 
 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 
 p ajsionate mus ic runs through it. But you will ob- 
 serve that it is not history, that it would be equally 
 interesting as the 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 inter- 
 est in hearing about a handsome earl who died for 
 love of a fair queen, than in the effect that earl's 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 3 1 
 
 insurrection may have had in improving the condi- 
 tion of the House of Commons, or than in the po- 
 litical results of the Queen's partiality for her father- 
 land. 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 great feature of this 
 change we have not yet indicated. With this desire 
 for more exact knowledge, with this widening of the 
 political s)Tnpathies, with this craving for more sim- 
 pUcity 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 advent- 
 ure. 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 Ralegh. 
 Now all that was over ; the poets would go no more 
 a-roving, and if they were to be soldiers in the fu- 
 ture, it was in a grievous and unrom antic fight with 
 their own flesh and blood, in fields that their fathers 
 had tilled in friendship side by side. The brief 
 period of splendid lawlessness 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 ^schylus, or as the deeds of 
 Icelanders who went a-viking told on their drapas 
 
32 POETRY AT THE DEATH 
 
 and their sagas. But to this brief period of intoxi- 
 cation, a time of depression and collapse was bound 
 to follow. 
 
 Witliout, then, too ingeniously building up what 
 should be, from a knowledge of what was, we can 
 on the whole put ourselves pretty distinctly 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. In much of what has 
 been already said, of course, the view of the suppos- 
 ititious young man, rather than my own view, has 
 been dwelt upon. We can imagine such a young 
 fellow, in some Cambridge College, returning from 
 the company of a circle of friends who had been 
 passing MS. poems of Dean Donne from hand to 
 hand in an ecstasy, — we can imagine him saying to 
 himself, "Are they mad to praise this coarse and 
 obscure Progress of the Soulf Are we doomed for 
 ever to have to endure such verse as this 
 
 " 'Virtue is soiJ, always in all deeds, all.' 
 
 Is this craze for calling heaven and earth to witness 
 the ingenuity of a conceit to spread Uke a canker 
 through every member of our literature?" He 
 would question thus, and we must not blame him 
 if, in his anger, and in his craving aft^ style, 
 after proportion, he should neglect those eminent 
 beauties which we can perceive readily enough, 
 and which have made us of late too tender to 
 the faults of the early portion of the seventeenth 
 century. 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 33 
 
 If it were my duty here to call attention to 
 what is good in those interesting writers of the 
 age of Charles, the task would be an easy and a 
 gratifying one. But I desire to keep close to the 
 question which is before us, the causes which led 
 to the classical reaction. I cannot blind myself to 
 the fact that one of the principal of these causes 
 was what I have indicated, the inequality and alem- 
 bicated character of the poetry in vogue. The 
 young man I have imagined would turn to his Ars 
 Poetica, and would smile to think that the very mon- 
 sters which Horace painted by the light of prophecy 
 were come to the birth at last. The lovely woman 
 ending in a fish, what simile could better describe 
 the beautiful moral monstrosity of Fletcher's Faith- 
 ful Shepherdess i Where does the dolphin gallop 
 through the woods and the wild boar breast the 
 waves, if not in the cantos of the Purple Island? 
 Who so ingenious as Herbert or Carew in painting 
 the c)rpress when it was a shipwreck they were 
 commissioned to paint ? All the commonplaces of 
 that wonderful prelude of Horace would come back 
 to the young man as singularly, as pitifully, charac- 
 teristic of his own age, and he would have little incli- 
 nation to praise the technical beauty in the purple 
 patch itself, be it cypress or dolphin or woman. He 
 would rather be inclined to dream of a strai ghtfo r- 
 war d prosaic p oetry, closely bound down by the 
 unities, by the rules of composition such as Aris- 
 totle_and_iiQia£e have given them ; and would re- 
 ply to ftie ancient question, Is it Nature, is it Art, 
 3 
 
34 POETRY AT THE DEATH 
 
 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 intellectual 
 labour of the seventeenth century. Waller was not a 
 great, or attractive, or inspiring man, but of course 
 he must have had exceptional powers and singular 
 opportunities to have effected what he did effect. 
 But he is the hero of this whole volume. My read- 
 ers will be forced, if they pay me the compliment 
 of listening to me, to hear a very great deal about 
 him, and to become tolerably intimate with his tal- 
 ents and his character. I need not here, at the close 
 of a chapter, say anything more about him, but 
 the last minutes which we spend together now 
 may be devoted to the speculation, Why was it 
 not John Milton, instead of Edmund Waller, to 
 whom it was given to revolutionize poetry in Eng- 
 land? 
 
 Here, again, as everywhere where we look closely 
 into the historic development of literature, we see 
 the value of dates, and the paramount importance 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 35 
 
 of a clear chronological sequence. Broadly speak- 
 ing, it was because Milton was bom three years 
 later than Waller, and did not so rapidly come to 
 maturity, that we did not receive from him a classi- 
 cal bias which would have been something very dif- 
 ferent 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 smoulder. In 1623 Milton 
 was a schoolboy still ; six years passed before the 
 Nativity Ode was written, and there he displayed 
 himself simply as the most brilliant of the Marinists. 
 At Horton, in his famous five years' retirement, he 
 afterwards withdrew from this erroneous school of 
 conceits, and wrote the lovely polished poems which 
 we know. But he was out of the world, whUe the 
 leaders of the new school were in it, and they with 
 their facile prosaic manner gave the public some- 
 thing much more popular, though far less noble, 
 than Milton's withdrawn and solemn 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 dis- 
 putes," 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 disapproving — the restless and 
 
3^ POETRY AT SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH. 
 
 irritable temper of the age through which he lived 
 being, as little as that of the age into which he was 
 bom, sympathetic 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 indispen- 
 sable data, the " Biographia Britannica," as pub- 
 lished in the year 1766, we find the following start- 
 ling sentence: "Edmund Waller, the most cele- 
 brated Lyric Poet that England ever produced." If 
 we remark that this confident judgment was ex- 
 pressed 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 dis- 
 posed to marvel at the duration of a fame that has 
 been thoroughly eclipsed at last. Nay more, we 
 may surely feel a curiosity to discover what it was 
 about this half-forgotten poet which can have im- 
 pressed the public for more than a hundred years 
 with a sense of his magnitude and importance. And, 
 indeed, the inquiry which we are now engaged in 
 making into the phenomena which attended 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 
 
 39 
 
40 WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 
 
 taste declined, and who has been discarded ever 
 since the romantic taste revived. 
 
 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 disorganization 
 and solution of the old forms of romantic poetry, 
 there was needed an astringent which shoyld brace 
 the textures and condense the solids of literature. 
 In the great romance of Rabelais, we find Pono- 
 crates purging Gargantua with the hel lebo re of 
 Anticyra to make him f orget all that his other mas- 
 ters had taught him.* This harsh restorative, this 
 herbal secret of forgetfulness, was presented to Eng- 
 lish poetry in the nick of time by what we must be 
 allowed to call, for want of a better term, the genius 
 of Waller. While the function of most leaders of 
 literature is to refresh and extend the mind, to ex- 
 plore 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 imagination, 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 reducing its resources. Of late years, ever 
 since the beginning of the present century, indeed, 
 it has been customary to disregard entirely the posi- 
 
 * " Lequel le purgea canonicquement avec elebore de 
 Anticyre, et, par ce medicament, luy nettoya toute I'alteration 
 et pemerse habitude de cerveau."— G^a>-^«/««3, L, 23. 
 
WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 4I 
 
 tion claimed and won by this remarkable man. It 
 may easily be conceded that his is not a sympa- 
 thetic 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 syll seemed a commonplace to say that he 
 was the most celebrated lyric poet that England 
 ever produced ; we may reject him as we will, we 
 cannot allow ourselves to deny that his historic posi- 
 tion is of the very highest interest. We must ex- 
 amine his career with attention, that we may dis- 
 cover what there was about the man himself which 
 could subjugate 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.* 
 
 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 ances- 
 tors. The family tree of the Wallers was a flourish- 
 ing and stately vegetable at least as far back as the 
 reign of Henry VI. A very distant progenitor, a 
 
 * " Inter poetas sui temporis facile princeps," says the 
 inscription at Beaconsfield, though Herrick, Milton and Dry- 
 den were " sui temporis." 
 
42 WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 
 
 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 indefatigable 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 
 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 Missboum. 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 before 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 
 
WALLER AND SACHARISSA, 43 
 
 again into Buckinghamshire. As he grew up at this 
 house, the child was within an easy walking distance 
 of all the little boroughs which were to be identified 
 with him in mature life : Amersham, which he was 
 to represent in parliament ; Wycombe, where he was 
 to live and dispense hospitality ; Beaconsfield, 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 ;^3,5oo a year, a property 
 which was nursed by his careful mother all through 
 his childhood and youth. The consequence 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 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 
 
44 WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 
 
 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 pro- 
 ficient 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 dififr- 
 culty. 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 1 6th of January in that year to consult with 
 James I. on the crisis in Bohemia and the general 
 distracted state of Christendom. There is noprmd 
 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 Churchyard, the inscription on which 
 was carefully compiled by Rymer, the historiog- 
 rapher, from documents placed in his hands by the 
 family, states that Waller entered parliament, as 
 member for Amersham, when he was not yet eigh- 
 teen.* 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 phrase of Rymer is precise, " Nondum octodecenalis 
 inter ardua regni tractantes sedem habuit, a burgo de Agmon- 
 desham missus.'' This inscription was made in 1700, at the 
 expense of Mary, the poet's second wife, and Edmund his 
 son. 
 
WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 45 
 
 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 sikntio, 
 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 at- 
 tained by a personage who united precocious talents 
 to unusual social^advantages. On the 30th of De- 
 cember, 162 1, before he had completed his seven- 
 teenth year, Waller was witness to a 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 behind 
 his chair. Still out of temper with the obstinacy of 
 the Commons, the King growled out to the two pre- 
 lates, " My Lords, cannot I take my subjects' money 
 
4JD WALLER AND SACJJAJiJU^iA. 
 
 when I want it, without all this formality in parlia- 
 ment ? " Neale, Bishop of Durham, hastened to re- 
 ply, " God forbid, sire, but you should ; you are the 
 breath of our nostrils." Whereupon King James 
 turned and said to the venerable and stately Lance- 
 lot 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 pres- 
 ently." " 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 politic reply, but the King was in no temper for 
 wit. He brooded over it, and some time afterwards 
 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 lookout for 
 what is beautiful or witty in itself. These verses, 
 which Waller published as his earliest, and which 
 may possibly 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 which our later knowledge can 
 
WALLER AND SACHASISSA. 47, 
 
 scarcely improve, to the main peculiarity of Waller's 
 poetical style. " Rime," he said, "has all the ad- 
 vantages of prose, besides its own. But the excel- 
 lence 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 lines together, that 
 the reader is out of breath to overtake it." Dryden 
 here notes the fact to which I ventured to call your 
 attention in my last lecture, 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 1621 — that is to say, 
 nearly a quarter of a century before any^ae^lse in 
 ' England did so — writing his copy of verses " To the 
 ^^King on his Navy," in distichs as correct and monot- 
 onous as any that he composed to the day of his 
 death ; in thirty-two lines we find but one overflow.* 
 
 * " Where'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 1621, 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 
 
48 WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 
 
 The next poem of Waller's to which we can sup- 
 ply 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 Eng- 
 land, was a proper vehicle for the celebration of 
 facts, public or private, of passing interest. This 
 no one before his time had perceived, 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 voy- 
 age from Spain. The occurrence is well remem- 
 bered : Charles was rowing back by night from San- 
 tander 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 at- 
 tached to them, one of which was caught by a rower 
 on Charles's barge, and the "heroick Prince," as 
 
 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. 
 
WALLEU AND SACHARISSA. 49 
 
 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 had the charm of novelty and 
 reality to the gentlemen and ladies of James's court, 
 among whom the verses were circulated in manu- 
 script. I must be allowed to quote a few lines, as a 
 specimen of the style of this interesting and viva- 
 cious poem. It is supposed that, during the peace- 
 ful 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 
 regarding 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, 
 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 undis- 
 tinguishable from that of the classic school from 
 1660 to the close of the seventeenth century. Dry- 
 4 
 
50 WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 
 
 den proceeded no further than this in the mere exe- 
 cution 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 ser- 
 ried 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 atten- 
 tion 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 rhetori- 
 cal address to Ben Jonson goes far to prove that he 
 was not acquainted with the only writer who is men- 
 tioned 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 Sach- 
 arissa 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 reso- 
 lutely aloof from the contemporary literature of the 
 age, and cultivated those dry distich s of his by some 
 
WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 5 1 
 
 curious unsympathetic inspiration, the exact nature 
 of which we shall never know. His thoughts during 
 these boyish days seem to have been politically am- 
 bitious. His great wealth drew him naturally to 
 court, and in August, 1627, 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 b oyis h Waller, not yet of age, was a sharer, no 
 doubt, in the panic regarding the plague and the 
 grumbling about the noisome lodgings which occu- 
 pied the short course of a session that must have 
 seemed to him like a summer holiday. He little 
 realized, we may be 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 Wy- 
 combe at Westminster, in Charles's second parlia- 
 ment, 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 hus- 
 band 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. 
 
52 WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 
 
 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 Beaconsfield, 
 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 Bucki7igham' 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. Buckingham, 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, remained 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 tenderness. 
 " Such huge extremes inhabit thy great mind, 
 God-like unmoved and yet like Woman kind." 
 
WALLER AND SACHARJSSA. 53 
 
 Contarini, as quoted by Mr. Gardiner, says that 
 Charles did in fact show panic on his countenance, 
 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 identified 
 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 the 
 members saw a young man being arrested by bailiffs. 
 They were told it was " a son of Ben Jonson," this be- 
 ing the name given to themselves by a group of young 
 University wits who affected to be the poetical off- 
 spring 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 Christchurch, 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 Wallers 
 and with the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon. He 
 lived to be a very old man, and under the Restora- 
 tion rose in the Church to those episcopal dignities 
 
54 WALLER AND SACHARJSSA. 
 
 by which he is best known. But in these early days 
 he was secular and humanistic 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 Hallbam. 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 com- 
 panion, 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 retire- 
 ment by his public passion, if I may be allowed to 
 use such a term, for the lady he addressed as Sach- 
 arissa, and whom he believed that he had made as 
 famous as Petrarch made his Laura.* 
 
 Sacharissa was an after-thought for Dorothea, the 
 
 * Exactly a hundred years later, we find Sacharissa still 
 named among the immortal ladies of poetic history. Elijah 
 Fenton, in 1730, confidently sings : — 
 
 *' Secure beneath the wing of ■witherinff time, 
 Her beauties flourish in ambrosial prime ; 
 Still kindling rapture, see I she moves in state^ 
 Gods, nymphs, and heroes on her triumph wait." 
 
WALLER AND SACHARISSA. S5 
 
 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 1615, and 
 that when Waller began to address her about 1632, 
 she was still quite young. 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. The lady is cruel, the bard is de- 
 spairing, and after the pompous suit had 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 abandon- 
 ing 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 ex- 
 ample of the truth of their position. It is quite ex- 
 
$6 WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 
 
 traordinary 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 testimonies 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 that look sadly as though they were manu- 
 factured 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 straightforward 
 and manly statement of devotion, after its kind, but 
 they are as far from passion as from indiscre- 
 tion. The lover addressess 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 Prdcieuses 
 Ridicules wishes her suitor to be, and we have an 
 
WALLER AND SACffARISSA. 57 
 
 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 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 mejaow 
 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 ; 
 Leaves the untasted spring behind. 
 And, wing'd with fear, outflies the wind." 
 
58 WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 
 
 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 ex- 
 amine the very curious piece entitled The Story of 
 Fhcebus and Daphne applied. Here Waller calls 
 himself Thirsis : 
 
 " Thirsis, a youth of the inspirM 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 re- 
 markable. He positively ventures to say that he, 
 Mr. Edmund Waller, is pursuing the flying Nymph 
 " with numbers such as Phoebus' self might use," 
 and with an eye turned directly to the auditorium, 
 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 
 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-aggrandizement, too 
 nobly bom to seem vulgar or fatuous, must be taken 
 into consideration as a factor in Waller's poetical 
 
WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 59 
 
 success.* From the summit of a position to which 
 his wealth, his social graces, his wit and his adroit- 
 ness had raised him, he gravely announces himself 
 to the world as Phxii 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 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 arque- 
 busade of wit, each cunning attack upon this battle- 
 mented 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 appearance of having been intended 
 
 * Malherbe, his French prototype, had possessed the same 
 sacerdotal dignity. In his Sonnet to the King he had re- 
 marked : — 
 
 Les ouvrages communs vivent quelques ann^s ; 
 Ce que Malherbe toit dure tomellement 
 
6o WALLER AND SACHARl'SSA. 
 
 for publication, and which in fact were never pub- 
 lished 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, WaUer is silent as 
 a lover. 
 
 And yet the Sacharissa poems contain some ex- 
 quisite 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 
 Song to a Rose is well known, but deserves repeti- 
 tion : — 
 
 " 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,* 
 
 That had'st thou sprung 
 In deserts, where no men abide. 
 Thou must have uncommended dy'd. 
 
 * 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 
 
WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 6 1 
 
 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 ! " 
 
 Less known, but almost as perfect, is " On a Gir- 
 dle." 
 
 " 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 * 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." \ 
 
 "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." 
 
 * " Is," in the edition of 1645, where the present tense is 
 kept up through the poem. 
 t In 1645 : — 
 
 " Give me but what this riband tied. 
 Take all the sun goes round beside." 
 
62 WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 
 
 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 pre-eminence of Pope, 
 it may almost be said to have disappeared ; but 
 throughout the remainder of the seventeenth cent- 
 ury the gift of song-writing was present among the 
 English poets. It is in the non-lyrical departments 
 of poetic art, especially in didactic, descriptive, 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 Batik of the 
 Summer Islands, throws more light upon the develop- 
 ment of this change than the love-songs to Sacha- 
 rissa. 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 Adventurers, or landlords, into 
 whose plantations the archipelago was divided. But 
 Major-General Lefroy, 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 
 
WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 63 
 
 could make ; he takes the low cedars which covered 
 the islands to be cedars of Lebanon, and talks of 
 " the lofty 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. Major-General Lefroy, however, seems to 
 have overlooked the fact 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.* 
 
 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 by no 
 means de rigueur. Half a century later, when the 
 
 * His words are : — 
 
 " O how I long my careless limbs to lay 
 Under the Flantan'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 quit- 
 ted them soon and eagerly. 
 
64 WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 
 
 classical transformation was almost complete, Hobbes 
 in his essay Concerning the Vertues 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 instance, — had possessed j 
 various brilliant and touching 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 Wal- 
 ler'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 fulsomeness of 
 which irritates the historian of the Bermudas, of the 
 commercial and natural advantages 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 more definitely in the key 
 of common-sense. We are 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 ; 
 
WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 65 
 
 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 realize 
 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, the year 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 Spenser, who was 
 presently created Earl of Sunderland. However 
 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 ex- 
 tant to the effect that when they were both very old 
 the Dowager Duchess of Sunderland rallied her 
 s 
 
66 WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 
 
 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 therefore 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-bom be none of 
 her own sex ! nor so like her, but that he may resemble her 
 Lord as much as her self! 
 
 ' ' 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 
 
WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 67 
 
 marriage ; that being there divorced, we may all have an equal 
 interest in her again ! My revenge being immortal, I wish all 
 this may also befall their posterity to the world's end, and 
 afterwards ! 
 
 " To you. Madam, I wish all good things ; and that this loss 
 may in good 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 Sacharissa 
 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 Wal- 
 ler'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 pre- 
 ceded by three years the publication of the lines re- 
 ferred 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 
 
 " Paul's, the late theme of such a Muse whose flight 
 Has bravely reached and soared above thy height ; 
 
68 WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 
 
 Now shah 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 re- 
 duced 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 footsteps, and who, though ten 
 years his junior, had outstripped him in the date of" 
 publication. We must reserve consideration of Den- 
 ham, 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 commissioners had met 
 to discuss the question of rebuilding 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 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. 
 
WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 69 
 
 " 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 con- 
 veniently helps us to the date, 1635; that the west- 
 em 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 have been for one of the roman- 
 tic poets, his predecessors, to have proceeded with 
 a theme like this, to feel the importance of the 
 change in favour of grace, common-sense, and pre- 
 cision.* The Muse of the romantic period was like 
 the fleet and lovely Atalanta, who is conquered by 
 
 * It was very seldom that they would allow themselves to be 
 entrapped into the treatment of public recent events, but ob- 
 serve the agonies and contortions of Carew in attempting to 
 obey Aurelian Townsend, who had bidden him describe the 
 death of the King of Sweden ! 
 
70 WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 
 
 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 to lit- 
 erature, but we may close our present examina^ 
 tion 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 pubhc 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 after- 
 wards in France. When the breach widened be- 
 tween 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 
 
WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 7 1 
 
 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 con- 
 temned 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, dow- 
 ered, like all poets, with a mixture of 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 ; " * 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 
 
 * " Speech in the Painted Chamber," delivered July 6, 1641. 
 
^2, WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 
 
 debate of February 8, 1642 , on the ecclesiastical 
 petitions, that Waller seems to have made up his 
 mind to quit the party which was presently to be- 
 come that of Root and Branch. In company with 
 Falkland and Digby, he took his place in the Epis- 
 copalian group which that debate created. Two 
 months later his pungent questionings brought down 
 on him a rough reply from Maynard, who 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 he 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 commissioners, to 
 propose terms of peace to the King at Oxford. 
 They found Charles walking in the garden of Christ- 
 church, and all his companions 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 
 
WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 73 
 
 that before Waller left Oxford he was pledged to 
 treason against the Houses of Parliament. 
 
 Lord Clarendon's account of the plot is confused 
 and scanty,* 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 Alexan- 
 der Hampden, a royalist, although of the popular 
 family, actively espoused the same cause. The Earl 
 of Portland was doubtless with them,t and Lord 
 Conway too ; whether the great Earl of Northum- 
 berland 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 mal- 
 contents 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 special pass, and carrying innocently in her bosom a 
 commission from the King to various persons in Lon- 
 
 * There can be little doubt that his lelations with Portland 
 induced Clarendon to be purposely vague in dealing with this 
 portion of his subject. 
 
 f 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. 
 
74 WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 
 
 don, 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 parliamenta- 
 rians were collected at morning-prayers on a solemn 
 fast-day, August the 31st, in the church of St. Mar- 
 garet's, Westminster^ A message was brought in 
 from the Speaker, summoning 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 not go. But rumours of the most ex- 
 aggerated description spread at once through Lon- 
 don ; Waller and Tompkins were arrested before 
 nightfall, and a sketch of their plot was published 
 by the House of Commons to allay popular alarm.* 
 
 * 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. 75 
 
 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 acquaintance 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 pol- 
 troon 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 Holbom ; 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 Waller, and the luxuri- 
 ous poet felt a terrible 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 clever- 
 ness and duplicity dragged him through. He pro- 
 fessed to be so overwhelmed with remorse, that 
 his judges allowed his case to be postponed till 
 his frantic paroxysms of grief should have sub- 
 sided. When at last he did appear, July 4th, he 
 claimed his right to be heard in the House of Com- 
 mons.* He appeared in Westminster in a costume 
 
 * I am able to print, for the first time, an account of this 
 extraordinary scene from an eye-witness. In the MS. Diary 
 
76 WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 
 
 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 de- 
 livered a speech to the eloquence of which, as 
 Clarendon has aptly said, he owed the keeping of 
 
 of Sir Symeon D'Ewes, under the date "July 4, Tuesday, 
 1643," I find this account of Waller's appearance at the Bat 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 despair- 
 ing dejectedness, and when he came to the Bar he koeeled 
 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 his conspiracy (which 
 he much more deserved than Mr. Tompkins his brotfier-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 North- 
 umberland, to have been privy to his 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 ap- 
 plause, could not forbear shedding of tears. One thing was 
 most remarkable, that he did look exceeding well, the reason 
 of which was easily guessed at by those who had heard of his 
 secret actions, for having 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 
 
WALLER AND SACHARISSA. TJ 
 
 his head as much as Cataline owed the loss of his 
 to that of Cicero. He urged on the parliament the 
 unwisdom of allowing the soldiers to try any mem- 
 ber 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 credita- 
 ble to human nature ; the miserable Waller, crawl- 
 ing and fawning for his life, is a loathsome subject 
 of contemplation, and we cannot wonder at the in- 
 dignation 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 blafk, whined before his col- 
 leagues, "bewailing his offence, and thanking God 
 that so mischievous and bloody a conspiracy was 
 discovered before it could take efEect." 
 
 The House, however, proved implacable. Waller 
 was expelled from parliament and handed over to 
 
 that his aunt, Lady Scudamore, took the oppcfrtunity 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 weU, 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. Whereupoii she warned him that 
 calamity would fall upon him, and when the plot was dis- 
 covered, she did not fail to visit him in prison and to point the 
 moral. Waller's character does not improve as we turn upon it 
 more and more the bull's eye of history. The reference, to 
 D'Ewes' words is Harl. MSS. 165, fol. 144. 
 
78 WALLER AND SACHARISSA. 
 
 the army to be court-martialed. He was con- 
 demned to death, but after long pleading and parley- 
 ing, Essex consented to pardon him, with a fine of 
 ;^io,ooo. 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 Den- 
 ham as the Castor and Pollux, the divine twin 
 brethren, who first refined the art of verse and taught 
 us Englishmen the graces. In dedicating his trag- 
 edy 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 followed 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 writ- 
 ing." With the sweetness of Waller we are already 
 acquainted. We must now introduce ourselves to 
 this majesty of Denham, who demands our consider- 
 ation all the more because it happened that a book 
 of his was the first poetry published by the English 
 classicists.* Waller's Poetns were widely circulated 
 from hand to hand, but they remained in MS. until 
 1645. Denham's Sophy was published in 1642, and 
 his Cooper's Hill later in the same year. 
 
 John Denham was ten years younger than Ed- 
 
 * Appendix I. 
 6 81 
 
82 THE EXILES. 
 
 mund Waller, towards whom, in spite of all his liter- 
 ary 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 in Dublin in 
 1615 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 Ex- 
 chequer, and Denham's early education was acquired 
 in London. At the age of sixteen he was entered 
 a gentleman-commoner in Trinity College, Oxford, 
 and remained there until 1634. Anthony k 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 afterwards did." 
 
 There are no youthful verses of Denham's exist- 
 ing, 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 Sacha- 
 rissawere being handed about, and possibly Denham 
 saw these ; but it is Waller's exercises in the heroic 
 
THE EXILES. 83 
 
 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 ap- 
 parently 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 
 HUl which he was to make so famous. Young 
 Denham was bitten with the rage for gambling 
 which infected so many clever youths in the seven- 
 teenth 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 imless 
 he amended, he wrote a Uttle Essay against Gaming, 
 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, how- 
 ever, seems to have been pacified. In 1636, at the 
 age of twenty-one, he 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 ^neid. Denham 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,* which is much more mature than the 
 
 * Appendix IL 
 
84 THE EXILES. 
 
 poem itself, and is probably of a much later date. 
 The Destruction 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.* The preface, about 
 the mode of translating, is much more valuable, and 
 if a collection be ever made of the first breathings 
 of poetical criticism in England, this should cer- 
 tainly be included in it. The main point which 
 Denham brings forward is the importance of secur- 
 ing the spirit, grace, and movement of the original 
 writer, even at the risk-of-'iSSng some of the exact 
 expressions. 
 
 In January, 1638, the elder Denham died, and 
 was buried at Egham. The poet, thanks to that 
 smart little Essay against Gaming, inherited a for- 
 tune, and spent the next two or three years in squan- 
 dering several thousand pounds. It is much to be 
 regretted that we possess no record of these years, 
 
 * Even here, in occasional passages, the new prosody as- 
 serts itself. The last lines, however, I feel convinced, were 
 added in 1656 : — 
 
 " Thus fell the Kin^, 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 ; 
 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. 
 
THE EXILES. 8S 
 
 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 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 experi- 
 ment, an attempt to enchain English drama as 
 French drama is enchained, to relinquish all those 
 privileges, those capacities for licence, which had 
 made English tragedy the beautiful and bewilder- 
 ing thing we know. When it was published, the 
 great dramatic school was just closing. Ford and 
 Massinger 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.* 
 
 * The plot is borrowed from Sir W. Herbert's Travels. 
 The same story was dramatized 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, entitled The Sophy j but it may be said of me as Te- 
 rence makes his Prologue to his Eunnchus speak of him 
 (though in a cause somewhat different), 
 
 ' sed eas f abulas factas priu& 
 Latinas scisse sese, id vero pemegat.' 
 
86 THE EXILES. 
 
 It is very brief and brisk ; delayed by no 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 ques- 
 tion 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 
 Montchristian, Hardy, or Rotrou ; while the great 
 Comeille, to whose tragedies The Sophy does bear a 
 distinct affinity, was so exactly Denham's contem- 
 porary, that it is very difficult to admit the notion 
 of his influence. Until the production of the Cid, 
 ComeiUe had published nothing that Denham could 
 possibly copy ; is it or is it not within the range of 
 credibility that between 1636 and 1642 Denham 
 could have seen the Cid? There is, however, prac- 
 tically no resemblance between the two plays, and 
 
 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 atten- 
 tion its cleverness demands, is full of good poetical passages 
 in the old .blood-and-thunder style, and is noticeable, more- 
 over, for what appears to me to be very early imitation of 
 Milton. 
 
THE EXILES. S^ 
 
 if Denham imitited Comeijie at allj it mus/have 
 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 specim en of the Seneca trag edy 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 experiment in ro- 
 mantic 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 per-- 
 ceiving that this was a spiritual comrade of his own. 
 We have already observed with how much tact Wal- 
 ler 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, 1641, and it is fuU 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 party of peace. When 
 he puts into the mouth of his Turkish lord these 
 sentiments, 
 
 " It is the fate of princes, that no knowle^e 
 Comes pure to them, bnt passing through the eyes 
 And eais of other men it takes a tincture 
 From eveiy channel ; and still bears a lelish 
 Of flattery or private ends ; " 
 
88 THE EXILES. 
 
 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-comer.'' 
 
 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 pub- 
 lished his celebrated poem of Cooper's Hill, a piece 
 conceived in a mood as calm and philosophical as 
 if the halcyons had been brooding over the placid 
 ocean of English politics. This poem was so deci- 
 sive 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 romanticists with their 
 ranks of serried couplets. In spite of all successive 
 attempts in the same style, — and they have been 
 myriad, — Cooper's Hill still remains the most cele- 
 brated, though perhaps the least read of topographi- 
 cal poems. It is not quite true, as all the Augustan 
 critics used to aver, that no topographical poetry 
 
THE EXILES. 89 
 
 had been written in England before Denham. Dray- 
 ton's Poholbion and BroT\Tie's Britannia s Pastorals 
 belong, no doubt, to altogether a different order ; 
 but it is very extraordinarj- if Denham had never 
 read the Perishurst 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 Penshurst belonged to the old 
 political dispensation, Cooper's Hill to the new. As 
 before, Denham showed himseK extremely dexterous 
 in calling public attention to his verses ; they were 
 full of actualit)-. He opens by rejecting the habit- 
 ual appeal to Parnassus and Helicon. To this green 
 hill on the south side of the Thames he cries : — 
 
 '■ If I can be to thee 
 A Poet, thon Pamsssus art to me," 
 
 and the stately winding river shall take a nobler 
 place than HeUcon. 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 Coopers Hill 
 is rigidly Royalist But a glance at the very rare 
 first edition of 1642,* shows that the author revised 
 almost every other line, and omitted whole passages 
 which proved him to lean towards the Neuters. At 
 
 *" Cooper's Hai. A Poeme. London. Printed for Tho. 
 Walklej-, and are to be sold at his shop at the Sigae of The 
 Flying Hoise between York House and Britain's Bnise. 
 1642. " ' Tha WaDdey was the printer of Waller's first genoine 
 edition. 
 
90 THE EXILES. 
 
 present the sudden reference to St. Paul's, and the 
 eulogy of Waller, follow the invocation very ab- 
 ruptly. 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 ; 
 Blinded with 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 noth- 
 ing ; 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. 
 
tHE EXILES. 91 
 
 consists of four lines which I cannot resist the pleas- 
 ure 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 ! 
 Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, 
 Strong without r^e, 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 exemplary 
 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 
 
92 THE EXILES. 
 
 Cooper's Hill, which so little respond to it in the 
 eyes of a modem reader* 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. Poge and Garth, who rep- 
 resented 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 Claremon t of the other were direct imitations 
 of Cooper's Hill, written no less than seventy years 
 after its publication.! "On Cooper's HiU," 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 Den- 
 ham's rugged poem. There is sound thought in it, 
 carefully expressed, without adornment or choice of 
 
 * 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. 
 
 f Perhaps the latest tribute of unmitigated praise, is Somer- 
 ville's, in the third book of The Chace, 1735 : — 
 
 " tread, with respectful awe, 
 Windsor's green glades, where Denliam, tuneful bard, 
 Charm'd once the list'ning Dryads with his song, 
 Sublimely sweet." 
 
THE EXILES. 93 
 
 melody, in successive blows of the sledge-hammer. 
 After once this sort of writing had 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 invented, or at 
 least having been the first to employ in a sustained 
 efifort, a new form of English poetry must always 
 insure Denham a niche in the history of our litera- 
 ture. , 
 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 h andsom e and gallant young fellow, 
 riding down the dee p-leave d 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 p arty of R oundheads at the entrance of the town, 
 and was cu t 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 
 search in vain for the Poems of Sidney Godol- 
 phin. Waller, who had been his friend and master 
 in the art of verse, preserved a few of them, and 
 others are to be picked up here and there by ac- 
 cident ; 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 pre- 
 cious sacrifice laid on the vast altar of Charles I.'s 
 stupid and obstinate pride. But if he had lived he 
 
94 THE EXILES. 
 
 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 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 
 
THM EXILES. 95 
 
 remainder is sustained at a far more even height of 
 eloquence, and in neater couplets that 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 pre- 
 sumed 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 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 Godol- 
 phin's death, of Denham's publication of his Cooper's 
 .^///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, and Denham, 
 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 talents had spontane- 
 ously taken. The Revolution swept them over to 
 France, and there there was much for them to learn ; 
 
96 THE EXILES. 
 
 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 movements 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 n ew-born Princess of Wa les 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. Lady 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 y oung DMj^ of Newcastle, fly- 
 ing 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, 
 
THE EXILES. 97 
 
 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 consistent patron. 
 
 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. But at worst, the poets in exile, with all 
 their poverty and discomfort, fared better than the 
 poets at home.* The first great loss which letters 
 and statecraft suffered was when Lord Falkland fell, 
 on the zoth 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 that he should be out of it all 
 
 * 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." 
 
98 THE EXILES. 
 
 ere night. He was ; and with him fell the greatest 
 ornament of the Royalist party, the man from 
 whom more might have been expected than from 
 any other soldier or civilian in all the King's party, 
 that almost fabulous Gary, 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 sweet- 
 ness 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 re- 
 sided was small and feeble ; those who knew him 
 noted the brightness of his black eyes. Mr. Mat- 
 thew 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 sym- 
 pathetic character, to be with them in their literary 
 revolution. But, on the contrary, the existing poems 
 of Lord Falkland belong entirely to the old school, 
 with frequent use of overflow, and with the accent 
 shifting from place to place in successive lines. If 
 we had time for such comparisons, 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 
 
THE EXILES. 99 
 
 distinction between the two styles ; but we may re- 
 mark, in passing, that the men who showed the 
 truest aptitude for the new manner of writing ap- 
 peared 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 Cambridge clergy- 
 man, 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. Fan- 
 shawe 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, perhaps, 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 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 Yarmouth, 
 where he languished for years, until Oliver Crom- 
 well 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. 
 
lOO THE EXILES. 
 
 We may read in the M^moires of Madame de Motte- 
 ville 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 Louis XIV. and 
 of Anne of Austria, of the "balls, comedies, and 
 promenades" with which the English exiles were 
 regaled, and in reading of all this we must in- 
 terpolate for our present entertainment that among 
 those exUes were some of the brightest Englishmen 
 then living — probably Waller and 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 Fontainebleau ? 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, published in 1647, his li ttle epi c of 
 Dido and JEneas in the Spenserian stanza, his odes 
 and sonnets, his epistles and addresses, are all of 
 them in the full-blown Marinist manner of the pre- 
 ceding generation. Here is an example of a pretty 
 stanza in praise of peace : — 
 
THE EXILES. 10 1 
 
 "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 have 
 rejected. It was precisely these dislocated construc- 
 tions, these languid broken rhythms, these harsh 
 clusters of consonants, that it was their function to 
 rebel against. And yet, for a Marinist 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 MaUierbe, could they be without interest 
 to Waller ? Is it credible that the relation of Chape- 
 Iain's odes and St. Amant's anacreontics to the an- 
 acreontics and odes of Cowley is purely accidental ? 
 I think not. The condition of French literature was 
 precisely that which was likely to discourage the ro- 
 mantic 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 mar- 
 riages, 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 
 
I02 THE EXILES. 
 
 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 the 
 lady from the north could learn much by the expe- 
 rience of her slightly older sister. But, to descend 
 from this too oriental region of simile, the parallel- 
 ism between the history of French and English po- 
 etry 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 ver- 
 sification of Malherbe was first of all emulated by 
 his pupil Maynard, whose slightly provincial vein of 
 reflection 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 singu- 
 larly like Maynard, even if it were not the case that 
 the principal poems of them both — the Cooper's 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 versd j 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 we encouraged the growth of that par- 
 ticular branch of it which was in sympathy with 
 France. 
 
THE EXILES. I03 
 
 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 Metiteur of Corneille be- 
 longs 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 alexandrine, 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. Den- 
 ham had caught the notion of this clean, self-sus- 
 taining verse in his CorneiUe-like 
 
 " Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full," 
 
 and Dryden was to carry on the discovery with a 
 s ullen majesty that was all his own. 
 
 " Like a wedge in a block, ringed to the bar," 
 
 had seemed a sufficiently forcible example of five- 
 foot iambic verse to Donne and the Marinists. It 
 still seemed good enough to Fanshawe and Shir- 
 ley. It had never seemed good enough to Waller 
 and Denham. Cowley and Davenant first awoke to 
 a sense of its insufficiency on their arrival in France. 
 In this summary we may say that we hold the theme 
 of our inquiry in a nutshell. 
 
 We saw in our last chapter that Waller, detected 
 in a serious plot, contrived by the exercise of great 
 adroitness, and, I am afraid we must add, great hy- 
 
104 THE EXILES. 
 
 pocrisy, to escape to France alive in 1643. To buy 
 his release he had to sell estates which produced a 
 rental of ;^i,ooo 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 remittan- 
 ces. 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 Eng- 
 lish exile except Lord Jermyn, Henrietta Maria's 
 second husband, who could afford to do so, and as 
 he certainly was in much more luxurious circum- 
 stances 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 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 predic- 
 tions 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 
 
THE EXILES. lOj 
 
 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 the conse- 
 quences of Waller's plot. We saw that he freely de- 
 nounced everybody he could think of as an accom- 
 plice ; even the great Selden was one of his victims. 
 Nevertheless, 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 Technogamia, was 
 rancorously attacked by his own party, and never for- 
 given. I suspect that the accusations of Waller were 
 chiefly against persons wholly out of the 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 avoided 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 164s, while he was in Rouen, he published his 
 poems. The bibliography of Waller is rather ob- 
 scure, but it seems that of the three editions which 
 appeared, under the names of three different book- 
 sellers in that year, the first was a mere piracy, the 
 second published with the author's consent, and the 
 
I06 THE EXILES. 
 
 third a theft emboldened by the poet's enforced 
 absence from home.* The instant success of all 
 three editions testifies to the interest that Waller's 
 reputation had excited, and the readiness with which 
 his experiments in versification were received. He 
 was forty years of age when this first issue of his 
 poems was published,! and we may remember that 
 it was also in 1645, ^i^d 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 Fen- 
 ton's edition ; it represents him in a heavy, dark 
 perriwig, 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, dis- 
 creet lips, the handsome but somewhat furtive eyes, 
 and the ill-shapen nose, there is more individuality 
 than a flattering painter would affect. 
 
 * The editions may thus be distinguished : — 
 
 a. "Printedfor 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. Wal- 
 ler's Speeches in Parliament,'' after which, in the copy which 
 I possess, is 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. 
 
 t Appendix III. 
 
THE EXILES. lO/ 
 
 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 
 in the coach below, while Evelyn took leave of the 
 dying Earl of Arundel, and then the four gentlemen 
 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 peep- 
 ing 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 arrived, 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 
 
I08 THE EXILES. 
 
 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's viciously 
 rearing with him against the wall. Next day they 
 hastened to be 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 the next morning when the English 
 party started they were set upon by the inhabitants, 
 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 them closely in 
 their travels, especially as Waller seems to have 
 done nothing remarkable, not even by maiing him- 
 self 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 an army. At Geneva the 
 other three waited for Evelyn to sicken of the small- 
 
THE EXILES. IO9 
 
 pox, and to recover of it. Waller would seem to 
 have beguiled the tedium of nearly two months' 
 idleness by conversing with the famous Genevese 
 scholar, Dr. Diodati. 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 char- 
 tered 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 com- 
 posing verses ; for had we not the great poet, Mr. 
 WaUer, in our company." 
 
 Waller now seems to have settled at Paris. In 
 1647 he was at St. VaWry, probably for some 
 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 posi- 
 
no THE EXILES. 
 
 tion and of his antecedents, contains some inter- 
 esting writing. Here is a passage in which, when 
 we take into account the exaggerated strain of 
 panegyric then universally indulged 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 versifica- 
 tion 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, 
 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. 
 
THE EXILES. Ill 
 
 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 Famham 
 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 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 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 Den- 
 ham'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 
 
"2 THE EXILES. 
 
 person who informed the world of this royal repri- 
 mand ; the reason possibly being that he might remind 
 Charles II., to whom he addressed these remarks in 
 1667, of the "serious employment" he had been en- 
 trusted 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, untU in November the latter made his escape 
 from Hampton Court. Denham remained in Lon- 
 don, 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 Middleburg without discovery, 
 that Denham's share in effecting his escape v/as less 
 than the poet afterwards reported 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 extra- 
 ordinary success that he brought ;^io,ooo back with 
 him. He made a doggerel poem about this expe- 
 dition, 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 so much to heart that he never felt any 
 inclination to write again ; but that, of course, is 
 
THE EXILES II3 
 
 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 
 constituted the main part of lyrical literature in the 
 preceding generation. I will close the present 
 chapter by printing a few of these stanzas, the versifi- 
 cation of which appears to me to be particularly 
 forcible and graceful : — 
 
 "AGAINST LOVE. 
 
 Love making all things else his foes, 
 Lilce 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. 
 
 Her father, not her son, art thou ; 
 From our desires our actions grow. 
 And from the cause the effect must flow. 
 
 lx)ve is as old as place or time ; 
 'Twas he the fatal tree did climb, 
 Grandsire of Father Adam's crime. 
 
 * 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 consist- 
 ent, which made him omit this poeifi in 1667? 
 
114 THE EXILES. 
 
 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 litera- 
 ture, 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 prod- 
 uct. 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 Shakes- 
 peare 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 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 obser- 
 vation of literary history, we must go no further. 
 
 117 
 
1 1 8 DA VENANT AND CO WLE Y. 
 
 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 Quarles, express an utter con- 
 tempt for Gray, and another whose taste lay in 
 Occleve confound his own judgment by confessing 
 that be 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 recommended as an escape. 
 
 In this delightful inquiry, — and one of the few 
 sensible things that Bishop Warburton said, was his 
 remark that the history of literature was the most 
 charming exercise of the human mind, — we are re- 
 leased 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 en- 
 dure without feeling a strain, and we are permitted 
 to indulge the 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 
 
DAVENANT AND COWLEY. II9 
 
 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 you in the whole course of the present 
 inquiry. 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 
 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 cent- 
 ury, 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. 
 
120 DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 
 
 perverts from the older romantic school. Waller, as 
 we have seen, was bom with a curious gift for dis- 
 tich, 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 criticism, was be- 
 cause he was felt to be a prize, no common soldier 
 or townsman, but a princeling bom 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 embroider- 
 ing upon it a scandalous story, which is not true. 
 The legend which makes Shakespeare the actual 
 father of William Davenant,* obscures the really 
 charming relations which existed between that hero's 
 parents and the greatest of poets. This legend re- 
 curs so frequently, and is so often rather attacked 
 from its unpleasantness than confuted as history, 
 
 * I see no reason for retaining the spelling " D'Avenant " 
 or "D'avanant," which the poet occasionally affected. The 
 ancient family from which he claimed to spring, the Daven- 
 ants of Sible- Hedingham, knew no such refinement, nor did 
 the illustrious Bishop of Salisbury. His father, the vintner 
 signs his will "John Davenentt." 
 
DA VENANT AND CO WLE Y. 121 
 
 that we may spare a few minutes for its examination. 
 In France it is so much dehghted in, that no ac- 
 count 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 Lon- 
 don 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. 
 
 In coming up to London from Stratford, Shakes- 
 peare was accustomed to call at the Crown Tavern, 
 in Oxford, which was kept by Mr. John Davenant, 
 vintner, a respectable and wealthy citizen, who after- 
 wards rose to be Mayor of Oxford, and who pos- 
 sessed 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 hand- 
 some.* 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 Shakespeare. " Ay," he answered, " and 
 
 * Anthony & 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. col. 411. 
 
122 DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 
 
 he hath kissed me a hundred times." * Curious to 
 think of this old clerical gentleman whose only 
 interest to us or to anyone is that, when he was a 
 child, Shakespeare had kissed him. On such inti- 
 mate 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 3d of March, 1606, this interest- 
 ing ceremonial took place, in the church of St. Mar- 
 tin's, at Oxford. It seems that Shakespeare remained 
 on a familiar footing with the family until his death 
 in 1 6 16, and there can be no doubt that he had in- 
 stilled a love of poetry into the mind of his god- 
 child, 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 Mada- 
 gascar. This ode is of no use to us ; it is crammed 
 with effete and monstrous conceits, but contains 
 no single crumb of autobiographical 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 Ox- 
 ford 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 
 
 * 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. 1 23 
 
 Pope at the dinner-table of the Earl 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 where he was posting in that heat and 
 hurry. " To see my godfather. Master Shakespeare." 
 "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 inti- 
 mately, had told him the story, and himself believed 
 it. It was then noticed that the gossipy and delight- 
 ful 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 ap- 
 pealing 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 Ran- 
 dolph, Herrick, and Cartwright claimed with Ben 
 Jonson. 
 
 We may therefore dismiss the legend ; but we 
 must remember that it was no legend that young 
 
124 DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 
 
 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, 
 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 the pall at the 
 funeral of that beloved and immortal poet. In the 
 person of Fulke Greville, poet, statesman, and sol- 
 dier, and eminent in all three professions, the 
 chivalry of the era of the Maiden Queen found its 
 last harbour. He was the Sir_ Bediv ere 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." 
 
DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 125 
 
 That Davenant should be received under the per- 
 sonal patronage of such a man, was tantamount to 
 saying that he was received into the penetralia of 
 what remained of the great romantic school.* In 
 his own abstruse, but weighty and dignified poetry, 
 Lord Brooke combined, with the old Sidneian sweet- 
 ness, an ingenuity of phrase, an intellectual and~ 
 fanciful, rather than a sensuaJ, and imaginative ele- 
 ment, which really stepped over the Marinists, and 
 linked the Elizabethans with the classical school-.^ 
 In other words, his poetry strongly affected Dave- 
 nant, and, through him, the school itself. We shall 
 presently see how important a place the poem of 
 Gondibert holds in the history of this classical tran- 
 sition ; 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 
 
 * So Edward Hyde, afterwards Lord Clarendon, reminds him 
 in the childish verses prefixed to Albomne in 1629 : 
 
 " Thy wit hath purchas'd such a Patron's name 
 To deck thy front," etc. 
 
126 DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 
 
 in January, 1627, that is to say, nearly two years be- 
 fore 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 person- 
 age, took place on the ist of September, 1628. 
 Lord Brooke, who was seventy-four years of age, 
 lived in considerable state at Brooke House in Lon- 
 don, with a little court of retainers around him. He 
 had lately made a -will, one of the witnesses to which 
 had been a gentleman- servant, Ralph Haywood by 
 name, who had waited on him for many years. This 
 man, who expected his Lordship to leave him some- 
 thing, 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 ist 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 
 Davenant appears to have been one, hurried to the 
 spot. The murderer, still grasping the knife, rushed 
 
DA VENA NT AND CO WLE Y. 12/ 
 
 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 profession. 
 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,* 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 
 
 * The dedication of Madagascar, pretty in itself, and 
 throwing a curious sidelight 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. 
 
128 DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 
 
 preceded them, and they might almost be suspected 
 of being written to disgust the age with the loose 
 romantic prosody, and to force the classical distich 
 on the literature of the country. If Lord Brooke 
 read The Cruel Brother or Albovine, as it is possible 
 that he did, there could be nothing in either the 
 one or the other to please his severe and superex- 
 quisite taste, and this may perhaps account for the 
 petulance of Davenant in referring to the care with 
 which his master poHshed and re-polished his own 
 stately periods. 
 
 In the year after his appointment to the Laureate- 
 ship, 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 White- 
 hall, ushered in Madagascar with copies of laudatory 
 verses. This piece, which is written in heroic 
 couplets of the old-fashioned kind, is chiefly inter- 
 esting because it seems written in emulation of Wal- 
 ler's Battle of the Summer Islands, which had prob- 
 ably 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," 
 
 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 
 
DA VENANT AND CO WLE Y. 1 29 
 
 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 intolera- 
 ble lack of style.* 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 ad- 
 dress to Lady Olivia Porter, his friend's wife, which 
 possesses a certain glow and declamatory vigour, 
 not quite unworthy of the page of Fulke Greville 
 and godson of Shakespeare : — 
 
 " Go ! hunt the whiter ermine, and present 
 His wealthy slcin 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. 
 
 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. 
 
 * 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." 
 
 9 
 
130 DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 
 
 Thus poets, like to kings, by trust deceived, 
 Give oftener v?hat is lieard of than received." 
 
 We may notice throughout this piece the presence 
 of the oldhr oken pro sody, although the verse is 
 particularly good for Davenant. There is as yet in 
 his work no trace of intelligent interest in the inno- 
 vations of Waller. He was the associate of the 
 Whitehall group of poets, whose work was pecu- 
 liarly unsympathetic to Waller, and which was des- 
 tined to be swept away by the first tides of the clas- 
 sical innovation. It would, therefore, have been 
 difficult to find a poet apparently less fit than Dave- 
 nant 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 companionship with one after 
 another of the leaders of the romantic party, while, in 
 his own poetry, he had hitherto shown no sign of dis- 
 satisfaction 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 renova- 
 tors 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, diplo- 
 macy, and fighting took up a great part of the next 
 twelve years of his life, and when he reappears as a 
 poet, in 1650, the transformation is complete. He 
 put 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 
 
DAVENANT AND COWLEY. I31 
 
 it off to press, and himself proceeded in a vessel, 
 manned by destitute Englishmen in France, to found 
 a new colony for the Queen in Virginia, He set sail 
 from Normandy, but before he left the English Chan- 
 nel his vessel was captured by one of the Parliament 
 cruisers, 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 ap- 
 pend to it a dejected postscript, dated from his 
 island prison, October 22, 1650, in which he said 
 that no second volume of the poem must be ex- 
 pected. 
 
 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 aU the rest were 
 there. The author himself, in a very long and inter- 
 esting preface to Hobbes, discoursed on heroic poe- 
 try 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 pre- 
 cision 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. Wal- 
 ler's eulogy was expressed in admirable couplets, 
 polished to the highest pitch, as though on so great 
 an occasion he was bound to show how smooth and 
 
132 DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 
 
 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 ; 
 Mars nor Bellona are not namSd here. 
 But such a Gondibert as both might fear. 
 Venus had here, and Hebe, been outshin'd 
 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 enthu- 
 siasm in founding a new school in poetry.* 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 literary history is so analogous to 
 that of Davenant, that when the idea has once oc- 
 curred to us, we see the parallel in numberless in- 
 stances. This is Southey, a learned, ingenious, and 
 fertile writer to whom it is with the greatest hesita- 
 tion, and more for compliment than merit, that we 
 
 * " 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. 
 
DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 1 33 
 
 can allow the title of poet. Like Southey, Dave- 
 nant imposed himself upon his own generation 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 popu- 
 larity in the immediate future. As Southey fore- 
 saw that Wordsworth and Coleridge, though in 1806 
 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 
 predecessors ; 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 his 
 " 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 sentences 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 the public, even posthumously, that 
 the true judgment 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 
 
134 DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 
 
 Davenant as for Southey. They were singularly in- 
 teresting figures, they took a very leading part in the 
 intellectual movement of this time, their mental 
 vigour and their desire to excel in verse combined 
 to give them a prominence in current poetry. More- 
 over, they both contrived to shelter themselves so 
 snugly under the friendship 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 venerable and admired Sir Henry 
 Taylor, to say that Southey was no poet in the true 
 sense. It shows the wonderful force and cleverness 
 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 
 h)Tnns, is dead at the root, and the wind rustles in 
 its dry leaves. It will stand there in the wood, 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 seven- 
 teenth 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 mid- 
 dle of the seventeenth century, we have to remind 
 
DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 1 35 
 
 ourselves of the reception which our grandfathers 
 and grandmothers gave to Thalaba and to the Curse 
 of Kehama. As in the case of those shapeless In- 
 dian epics, so in that of Davenant'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 gorg eous and exo tic 
 imagery with which the improbable, and, indeed, 
 uninteresting tales were adorned, impressed the ma- 
 jority of readers, and secured the elder, as the later 
 poet, a large audience, recruited even from the lit- 
 erary class itself. Gondibert 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 Gondibert 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 iight went on, in the long and hope- 
 
136 DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 
 
 less battle of the romantic against the classical influ- 
 ence. The allusions to Gondibert 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, published in 1653, is entitled 
 Certain Verses written by several of the Author's 
 friends, to be reprinted with the second edition of Gon- 
 dibert. The verses are certainly by four several 
 hands ; I believe that I d etect Denham, Cleveland, 
 the younger Donne, and Jasper Mayne as the wicked 
 anonymous quartet* 
 
 Like most satiric fooling, much of the stinging 
 wit has evaporated out of the rhymes ; they are tol- 
 erably flat now. But plainly they were calculated 
 to hurt the sensitive and conceited Davenant, who is 
 mercilessly chaffed, under the pseudonym of Dafne, 
 about his name, his personal appearance, his mis- 
 fortunes 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 
 
 * After forming this conjecture, I d iscov ered, 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. 137 
 
 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." 
 
 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, ethnick, and the 
 like. One bard picks out the following bundle of 
 adjectives, which he says will serve for any substan- 
 tive under any circumstances, and he arranges them 
 in a couple of hexameters : — 
 
 ' Nice, wise, important, eager, grave, busy, recorded. 
 Ancient, abstersive, shy, experienced, Roman." 
 
 A Still rarer pamphlet, The Incomparable Poem Gon- 
 dibert vindicated from the Wit Combats of Four Es- 
 quires 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 curi- 
 ous 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 
 
138 DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 
 
 and young Donne have no right to be laughing at 
 Davenant, for that they and he, and Waller and 
 Cowley as well, are all tarred with the same brush,* 
 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 incom- 
 parable Lombard hero, Gondibert ; an old king, 
 Aribert ; and his renowned daughter, Rhodolind. 
 The virtuous Prince Gondibert 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 Bertha. There are also " busy Goltho " 
 and " wise Astragon," and " distempered Ulfinere," 
 to discover whose relation to the pre-named char- 
 
 * *' You think they feign, that is, they lie 
 That spake 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. 1 39 
 
 acters 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 longs 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 wear^d to a Bay. 
 
 The jewel. Life, he most surrender here ; 
 
 Which the world's mistress. Nature, does not give. 
 But like dropp'd favours suffers us to wear. 
 
 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 Region Race such fury shows 
 As their last blood some unreveng'd forsake. 
 
 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. 
 
 For single strife makes us in numbers £ght ; 
 And by snch art this loyal Stag did fall. 
 
I40 DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 
 
 Now weeps till grief does even his Murd'rers pierce, — 
 Grief which so nobly through his anger strove, 
 ' That it deserv'd 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 ruled 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 alter- 
 nate 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 by Sir John 
 Davies, an Elizabethan isdio 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 rhetoric, was admired by reading men 
 all through the eighteenth century. When I had to 
 examine the commonplace-books of Gray, preserved 
 at Pembroke 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 ;* 
 
 * Davenant's attention may possibly have been called to the 
 metre from the fact that Robert Ellice had used it in his pref- 
 atory verses to Albovine in 1629. 
 
DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 14I 
 
 Hobbes immediately adopted it for his transla- 
 tion of Homer,* and this wa s followed a dozen 
 years later by Dryden's Annus Mirabilis. It was 
 n ot again employed, so far as I remember, all through 
 the Restoration of the Augustan age, nor again until, 
 in 1743, the Earl of Chesterfield brought out tiie 
 posthumous Lme Elegies of his young cousin Ham- 
 mond, which were almost entirely couched in these 
 solemn quatrains. 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 un- 
 doubtedly is the most sonorous and dignified measure 
 in English verse, its incapacity for passion, even for 
 the passion of grief, narrows the ground within which 
 it can be employed. Of the three long seventeenth- 
 century poems which I hav:e mentioned as written in 
 it, there is not one that is not too copious and long- 
 winded for a modem 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. Gotidibert, which, to the monotony of this 
 
 * This is how Hobbes opens his Iliad : — 
 
 ** O Goddess, sing what woe the discontent 
 
 Of Thetis' son brought to the Gieeks, what souls 
 Of heroes down to Erebus it sent, 
 Leaving their bodies unto dogs and fowls." 
 
142 DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 
 
 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.* 
 
 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 commission, 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 influence with Cromwell, and 
 that his life was saved in this way. What makes 
 this legend extremely pleasant and interesting is 
 that tradition confidently declares that the person 
 through whose final interposition Davenant's life was 
 
 * It even superseded, for the moment, the French romances 
 which were the darling reading of the ladies. A contemporary 
 ballad says, addressing Gondibert : — 
 
 ** Thou art the public Icon morum^ 
 The ladies lay the book before 'em, 
 And Polexander's not o' the quorum. 
 
 Before they treat a Lord, a part 
 Of thee is read, or got by heart 
 They're catecbind in Gondiiert." 
 
DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 143 
 
 given him was Milton, and that the Royalist writer 
 recollected this at the Restoration, and pleaded suc- 
 cessfully for the safety of the great Puritan. This 
 is one of those stories which are so charming in 
 themselves, 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 Lon- 
 don 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,* with, however, a prologue 
 and an epilogue in the heroic couplet, neither of 
 which showed 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 be- 
 come so like Waller's verse as to be indistinguishable 
 from it. The following passage from The Siege of 
 Rlwdes is typical of the rest, and contains no single 
 
 * The Entertainment is really a polemical treatise, in dia- 
 logue foim, on behalf of the drama. It is difficult to know 
 what Davenant meant by styling it an " opera." 
 
144 DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 
 
 tone or ring of the versification 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 kingp ? 
 Whose lillies 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 romantic 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 showed herself in sight ; " - 
 
 who but Shakespeare : — 
 
 " Rough winds do shade jhe darling buds of May ;" 
 
 and who but Milton : — 
 
 " Busiris and his Memphian chivalry ?" 
 
DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 145 
 
 These instances I give at random, the memory 
 of my readers will recall others at least as co- 
 gent. 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 in- 
 tuition of Spenser's long-drawn, perfumed sweetness, 
 of the versatility and manly tenderness of Shakes- 
 peare, 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 it- 
 self, to detect this individuality in any single line of 
 the classical poets from Waller to Darwin. With 
 them the effort was towards a composite 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, al- 
 ways sharpening their burning arrows, but acting 
 in concert, and in obedience to certain set rules of 
 warfare. 
 
 I proposed, however, at the outset of this lecture, 
 to devote it to Cowley as well as to Davenant ; and 
 I find that already three-fourths of my space has 
 been occupied. I am the less concerned at this, 
 partly because I have already, in my volume of Seven- 
 teenth Century Studies, given a minute examination to 
 the life and writings of Cowley, and partly because the 
 position he holds in the history of the classical move- 
 ment is much less influential than that of Davenant. 
 
146 BAVENANT AND COWLEY. 
 
 I consider him to have been 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 innova- 
 tors 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, Davenant, and, by-and-by, 
 such followers as Lower, Katharine Philips, and 
 Lord Orrery, fade into one entity, and are, as we 
 have seen, almost undistinguishable, Cowley was 
 much too strong to relinquish his individuality even 
 for the sake of endowing his country with a school 
 of correct writers. 
 
 Cowley, like Davenant, had begun to write among 
 the romantic poets. He was a precocious Cam- 
 bridge verseman, the author of three successful vol- 
 umes of poetry, before he ceased to be an under- 
 graduate, and the influences of the university clung 
 to him strongly through life. What those influences 
 were in the second quarter of the seventeenth cent- 
 ury we may see in such highly-coloured, elaborate, 
 and hyper-intellectual poems as the Psyche of Joseph 
 Beaumont and the Psychozoia of Henry More, dis- 
 tinguished members of the university 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 
 
DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 147 
 
 Nativity Ode, in another, — the thing was a Cam- 
 bridge fashion.* 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 
 writers, Cowley emerged, the last and the most ex- 
 hausted 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, — ^appear 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 bom with gifts in the way of 
 poetic rhetoric which have seldom been excelled. He 
 is so extremely unequal that he almost eludes criti- 
 cism, but at his very best he possesses, more perhaps 
 than any other English writer except Milton, that 
 peculiar Latin magnificence of phrase which is so 
 characteristic of Victor Hugo. I am ready to with- 
 draw the suggestion, the moment that I have made it, 
 so absurd does it seem to compare the author of Les 
 Chdtiments with the author of Davideis. But if I am 
 
 * " Meanwhile the roicd ditties 'were not mate, 
 Temper"d to th' oaten Ante." 
 
 See, also, the lines in which Dr. Lany, Master of Pembroke, 
 is congratulated by Crashaw on being sanoiinded by " a Pierian 
 flock " of pious young poets, in 1631. 
 
148 DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 
 
 distinctly understood to mean no more than this, 
 that in the rare .passages where Cowley excels, 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 Crashaw, which I 
 will now give, has this quality of Hugo ; the 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 Waller's 
 new rules for the conduct of the heroic couplet : — 
 
 " Pardon, my Mother Church^ if I consent 
 That Angels led him when from thee he went, 
 For even in Error sure no Danger is 
 When joyn'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 weali Reason were ev'en weaker yet, 
 Rather then 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 my self a Catholick 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'ed by our old Enemy, adverse Chance, 
 Attacked by Envy, and by Ignorance, 
 Enchain'd by Beauty, tortur'ed 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. 
 
 * 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. 
 
DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 149 
 
 Elisha-X^^ (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 ex- 
 ample of classical writing. The principal contri- 
 bution 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 Cow- 
 ley'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 
 narrajiye 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 become the normal epic form with us, 
 as it had 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 Da- 
 videis. 
 
ISO DAVENANT AND COWLEY. 
 
 " 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 thyself, thy God's awake. 
 
 Above the subtle foldings of the Sky, 
 Above the well-set Oris' 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 itself behind, 
 Is stretcht out far, nor its own bounds can find : 
 "Rtie peaceful flames swell up the sacred place, 
 Nor can the glory contain itself in th' endless space. 
 For there no twilight of the Sun's dull ray, 
 Glimmers upon the pure and native day ; 
 No pale-fac'ed moon does in stoln 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 Fast, 
 But an Eternal Now does always last. 
 There sits th' Almighty, First of all, and End ; 
 Whom nothing but Himself can comprehend. 
 A^o with his Word commanded all to be. 
 And all obey'd him, for that Word was He." 
 
 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 
 
DAVENANT AND COWLEY. I Si 
 
 those of Waller, and after having at least as much to 
 do with forming Dryden's style as that writer had, 
 Cowley sank into the second rank. Pope, while 
 bending respectfully to Waller and Denham, could 
 sneer at Cowley, and treat him as a dethroned mon- 
 arch of literature. 
 
 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 influence 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 variations 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. 
 
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 contrary," 
 in which, as we know, there were " silver bells and 
 cockle-shells and cowslips 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, 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 
 
 155 
 
156 THE REACTION. 
 
 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 P16iade or in the England of the dis- 
 ciples of Donne ; but in the latter instance every- 
 thing conspired to make the process of decay par- 
 ticularly 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 per- 
 ceive it, to understand what he was talking about, to 
 follow him like sheep.* He piped his shrill monot- 
 onous 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 repre- 
 sent 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 
 
 * " Such tributes are, like tenures, only fit 
 
 To show from whom we hold our right to wit," 
 
 says Aphara Behn, in referring to the imitations of Waller 
 which were becoming universal. In another place, absolutely 
 intoxicated with the new form of writing, she declares, address- 
 ing 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. 157 
 
 through the dam, simply gains in volume as it pro- 
 ceeds, 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 vehemence 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, and to strengthen verse without abandoning 
 the overflow. The aim so laid down, more or less 
 consciously, by Cl eveland fir st and the n by Wild, 
 was one with which it is possible for a modem critic 
 to sympathize. It was, in fact, an admirable notion 
 bom out of due time, and one which, if it could 
 have been carried out, might have obviated all 
 succeeding 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 
 
158 THE REACTION. 
 
 middle of the seventeenth century. There was a 
 craving after elegance, directness, lucidity, and to 
 secure these qualities the public was prepared to 
 surrender everything else without a sigh. 
 
 Neither Cleveland nor Wild has contrived to keep 
 a place for himself in the history of English litera- 
 ture. 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 determined 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 in- 
 telligible love-poems, the Sensed Festival and the 
 Fuscara.* Having sown his poetical wild oats in 
 
 * 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 CEiDnibals would spare, 
 Where lilies in a lovely brown 
 Inoculate carnation ; " 
 (that is to say, the wrist is freclcled,) 
 
 " He[r] argent skin with or so streamed 
 As 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, 
 
THE REACTION^ 1 59 
 
 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 met- 
 rical tirades, until, in 1655, he was seized at Nor- 
 wich, 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' Spikenard, we think of the siege of Newark, 
 the desperate flight at 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 ink- 
 ling of several remarkable things. Not only did he 
 
 That runs division on the tree 
 Like a thick-branching pedigree," 
 and so on. 
 
l6o THE REACTION. 
 
 lead the way for Hudibras, about which much might 
 be said if we were here considering the history of 
 humoristic literature in England, but 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 at all. 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 themslves to the 
 loose ballad-rhythms that they approached it near- 
 est. Shakespeare, of course, in such songs as 
 " Come away, come away, Death ! " glides into the 
 triple cadence, and so, as my friend Mr. Coventry 
 Patmore points out, does the early Elizabethan 
 Phaer, in his version of the /Eneid. I have re- 
 marked another instance in a ballad of Bishop Cor- 
 bet'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, I believe, no in- 
 stances of the deliberate use of English dactyls until 
 the period we are examining. It would be a very re- 
 markable thing if we should discover that we owe 
 not merely our serried couplet without overflow, but 
 our dancing and tripping cadence also to Waller. 
 
THE heact/on: i6i 
 
 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 oi Poems ih&c& is 
 a copy of verses called Chloris and Hilas, which is 
 written in faltering, but unmistakable dactyls. Wal- 
 ler long afterwards said that it was composed to 
 imitate the motion of a saraband. 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 I 
 
 ***** 4f * 
 
 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 | slackenSd | Srings 8f 3iy | lute," 
 
 exactly on the plan, though not with the agility and 
 skill, of the cadences in Moore's Lalla Rookh : — 
 "Who has not | heard of fhe | vale of C^sh | mere?" 
 
 And this was a discovery, which, if we may attribute 
 it to Waller, raises him to the dignity of a poetical 
 Columbus. But this is in itself a dubious and appar- 
 ently accidental thing ; Waller attained it almost by 
 chance, through his surprising quickness of ear in 
 
l62 THE REACTION. 
 
 imitation, but he does not seem to have known what 
 he had found, nor to have tried to repeat his experi- 
 ment. Cleveland, on the other hand, deliberately 
 studied, not once, but repeatedly, anapaestic effects 
 of a really very delicate kind. The first edition of 
 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 Cleve- 
 land, 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, 
 Venus invited me in th' evening whispers 
 Unto a fragrant field with roses crowned." 
 
 This drags a little ; but the intention is incontesta- 
 ble. 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 : — 
 
THE REACTION. 1 63 
 
 " Come hither Apollo's bouncing girl. 
 
 And in a whole Hippocrene of Sneny, 
 Let's drink a round till our brains do whirl, 
 
 Tuiiing our pipes to make ourselves merry ; 
 A Cambridge lass, Venus-like, botn of the froth 
 Of an ild half-filled jtg of baHey-bnJth, 
 
 She, she is my mistress, her suitors are many, . 
 
 But shffll have a square-cap, if e er she have atiy.'' 
 
 There is quite a ring of John Byrom or of Shen- 
 stone in these last lines, the precursors of so much 
 that has pleased the ears of the eighteenth and nine- 
 teenth centuries.* 
 
 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 bom 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, ex- 
 
 * The cantering measure, in its prettiest form, however, 
 first appears in our literature in one of the " terrestrial hymns 
 and carnal 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 leam'd and facetious, 
 They quote only Dugdale and Oates." 
 
 This sounds like a far-away premonition of Praed. 
 
164 THE REACTION. 
 
 tremely little is known. He was a Nonconfonnist 
 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 Cleve- 
 land, 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 de- 
 light to attack them. Indeed, it seems to have been 
 a couplet of Cleveland's : — 
 
 " Had Cain been Scot God would have changed his doom. 
 Not forc'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 Crom- 
 well, Wild was certainly the most popular living 
 English poet. His verse, full of local and momen- 
 tary 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 manifesto 
 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 Monkf upon the English na- 
 
 * From The Rebel Scot. The influence of this and other 
 satires of Cleveland upon the style of Dryden deserves close 
 attention. " Lord ! what a goodly thing is want of shirts ! " 
 is an example of pure pre-Drydenic Dryden. But Marvell 
 was Cleveland's direct pupil in satire. 
 
 t " Monk ! the great Monk I that syllable outshines 
 Plantagenets bright name, or Cansiantine's." 
 
 Iter Boreale, ii. 21, 32. 
 
THE REACTION. 165 
 
 tion as a successor to Oliver Cromwell, perhaps as a 
 successor to Charles I., with a happy side-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 Restoration. 
 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 transposi- 
 tions of accent.* 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, Cow- 
 ley, and Davenant in terms of surly respect, and 
 acknowledges their poetic supremacy, even while he 
 satirizes them, while for Waller, — " 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, how- 
 ever, is a lyrical record of his early failure in life, 
 
 * These peculiarities are easily exemplified. For in- 
 stance : — 
 
 " 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 bums 
 But to light kings or kingdoms to their urns." 
 
 Wild: OntheDeatho/Mr.Calamy. 
 
1 66 THE REACTION. 
 
 his education at Cambridge serving only, in the ab- 
 sence of patronage and preferment, to accentuate 
 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 meas- 
 ure,* with great earnestness of feeling ; among the 
 literature of the age I know nothing that quite re- 
 sembles 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 learnM 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 ? 
 
 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 common places, 
 
 * Imitated twenty years afterwards by Cleland in his ingen- 
 ious lyric Hallo my Fancy, 
 
THE REACTION iS/ 
 
 And those that scholars are 
 Must have handsome faces : 
 Alas ! poor scholar ! whither wilt thou go ? 
 
 I have boVd, 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 vrinds do shake me : 
 Would I had been upright 
 For bowing now will break me ; 
 Alas ! poor scholar ! whither wilt thou go ? 
 
 Into some country Village 
 
 Now I must go. 
 Where neither tithe nor tillage 
 The greedy patron 
 And parchM 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 7 
 
 Ships, ships, ships I discover. 
 
 Crossing the main ; 
 Shall I go in and go over. 
 
 Turn Jew or Atheist, 
 
 Turk or Papist, 
 
l68 THE REACTION. 
 
 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 ? " 
 
 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 beg- 
 garly 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 161 9, 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 un- 
 derstand why I compare it to the career of its poet, 
 and find in it a fit emblem of Chamberlayne's po- 
 sition. 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 
 
THE REACTION. 1 69 
 
 terrace of this mimic fastness, the isolation of which 
 may be gathered from the fact that, to this day, no 
 railway has attempted to approach its outposts. 
 What Shaftesbury is among the gentle and acces- 
 sible market-towns of Dorsetshire, that Chamber- 
 layne 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 further 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 in- 
 tervals of his professional work, in writing his great 
 heroic poem of Pharonnida, which is one of the 
 longest works in verse in the English language, 
 extending to 13,000 lines, or very considerably 
 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 
 
 "if in 
 This rising storm of blood, which doth begin 
 To drop already, I'm not washed into 
 
I70 THE REACTION. 
 
 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 Octo- 
 ber, and, happily for us, returned safe and sound to 
 Shaftesbury to take up the history of the fair Pha- 
 ronnida 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 versification is 
 exactly of the same order ; Chamberlayne leaps from 
 rhyme to rhyme, treating them like mere stepping- 
 stones in the stream of his song, exactly as Keats 
 does, and Campbell's simile that the heroic couplet 
 wandered at its own free will through a wilderness 
 of sweets, is equally applicable to one poet or to the 
 other. This characteristic, of course, gives Cham- 
 berlayne a unique position among the writers of his 
 time, all the rest of whom, even if they had not ab- 
 solutely followed Waller into the enclosure of the 
 
THE REACTION. 1 7" 
 
 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 circum- 
 stance 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 modem 
 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 through with no excessive weariness. 
 The versification 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 continuous, and 
 ultimately in one visible direction, but its deviations 
 are excessive, and in its less strenuous moments it 
 
172 THE REACTION. 
 
 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 Pharonnida. 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 
 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 e'er 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 tlood, 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." 
 
THE REACTION. 173 
 
 Chamberlayne was altogether too remote as a 
 country practitioner to attract any notice, or to ex- 
 ercise any influence. He had no acquaintances 
 among the Hterary 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." 
 Had he possessed thrice the genius that he had, he 
 must have remained obscure to his own contem- 
 poraries. His opposition, therefore, to the classi- 
 cal 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, i^i ^^ middle of the Common- 
 wealth, there appeared a very small volume of 
 poems,* now extremely rare, which should have pre- 
 pared readers for a poet of quite a different order 
 from what was then in the ascendant. It was a Uttle 
 collection of idyllic pieces from the latest Greek and 
 Latin writers, the Europa of Moschus, the Cupido 
 Cruciaffixus of Ausonius, the Pervigilium Veneris of 
 an unknown but probably African poet. Now, if it 
 is true that you may know a man by the company he 
 keeps, it is no less true that you may know a person 
 of letters by the books that he likes. Thomas Stan- 
 ley, who was then a young man of four-and-twenty, 
 revealed his taste beyond all manner of doubt when 
 
 * " Europa, Cupid Crucified. Venus Vigils. With annota- 
 tions. By Tho. Stanley, Esq. London. Printed by W. W. 
 for Humphrey Moseley. 1649." 
 
174 THE REACTION. 
 
 he chose Moschus and Ausonius from all the Greek 
 and Roman curriculum to be the . darlings of his 
 Muse. We shall presently find how characteristic 
 of the man was such a choice. In the meantime, let 
 us see 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 edu- 
 cational body in the nation. His tutor was, more- 
 over, 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 Earl- 
 dom 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 modem languages of Europe 
 for which he became distinguished. Anthony k 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 
 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. 
 
THE REACTION. 175 
 
 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 con- 
 sequent 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 httle 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 recrudes- 
 cence 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 ob- 
 ject of study. In the age of the Commonwealth 
 culture was less broad than it now is, though per- 
 haps 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 I 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 
 
176 THE REACTION. 
 
 colouring that he desired. His Cupid Crucified is 
 perhaps the prettiest piece of translated work done 
 in that age. Ausonius' original is excessively pretty, 
 and Stanley loses very little in putting the soft hex- 
 ameters 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 volumne in 
 which they were printed is almost inaccessible : — 
 
 " In the aery fields by Maro's muse display'd, 
 Where myrtle^oves 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 REACTION. ^77 
 
 the Vigil of Venus, with its delicious recurrent re- 
 frain — 
 
 " Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit eras amet " — 
 perhaps the most modern, the most unclassical touch 
 that antique literature has bequeathed to us.* 
 
 It is characteristic of a too obstinate pleasure in 
 literature of this sort, that it deprives its votaries 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 Philosophy ; 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 disappointing. 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 saga- 
 cious 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 elaborate 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 
 
 * 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 frivo- 
 lous to wish that our learned and exquisite Stanley could have 
 enjoyed these ingenious volumes. 
 
 12 
 
178 THE REACTION. 
 
 and Suckling, but they possess a sort of cold refine- 
 ment which those brocaded lyrists would have dis- 
 dained. 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 Stan- 
 ley, 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 shepherds, who hung garlands of flowers on 
 votive urns, or took hands in stately, pensive 
 dances.* 
 
 As the century declined, the efforts at a poetical 
 reaction became rapidly fewer, less sincere, and less 
 apparent, t We need not stop to examine the work 
 
 *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 Sahnacis, Lyrian and Sylvia, For- 
 saken Lydia, and The Rape of Helen, ai Edward Sherburne. 
 From Sherburne, who dedicates his volume to Stanley, we 
 learn that the latter was equally fluent in Greek, Latin, Italian, 
 French and Spanish. 
 
 t To enter into any discussion here of the vexed question 
 of the authorship of Thealma 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 Chalk- 
 hill " a half -myth, that is to say, a real person dead and for- 
 gotten so long before as not to endanger Walton's harmless 
 mystification. At the same time, it was certainly not in May, 
 1678, 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. 
 
THE REACTION. 179 
 
 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 
 imitator of the Marinists, designed nothing less than 
 a revolution when, so late as i6^ 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 ad- 
 vantage 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, 
 however, was made in 1687, the year that Waller 
 died, by a certain Philip Ayres, who pubHshed 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, 
 
l80 THE REACTION 
 
 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 writ- 
 ing indulged in by " the famous Mr. Spenser, Sir 
 Philip Sidney, and Mr. Milton." Ayres is remark- 
 able as almost the only English sonneteer between 
 Milton and Gray, but his sonnets, though some- 
 times singularly learned and precise in form, are 
 seldom otherwise interesting. His book enjoyed 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 illus- 
 trious 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 incon- 
 sistent 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 brain and heart engaged with 
 
THE REACTION. l8l 
 
 rustic visions at Nunappleton and with the anger of 
 statecraft at Westminster. 
 
 Dr. Grosart discovered that Andrew Marvell was 
 born at Winestead in Yorkshire on the 3 ist of March, 
 162 1. 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 Par- 
 ker, 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 copious 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 Emanuel, 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, 
 inveigled him over to Rome, and actually, it would 
 appear, smuggled the boy up to one of their secret 
 seminaries 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 
 
1 82 THE REACTION. 
 
 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 circum- 
 stances 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 wed- 
 ded." 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 
 party were only half way across the estuary, when 
 a sudden storm arose, upset the boat, and utterly de- 
 stroyed 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 untimely drowned consoled herself by a whim- 
 sical act of generosity, and that Marvell being left 
 an 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 prot^gd after her death. 
 At all events we find him in 1650 earning his 
 
THE REACTION. 1 83 
 
 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 roman- 
 tically 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 let- 
 ter called him, as by the blast of a trumpet. The 
 neighbourhood of Nunappleton was all given up to 
 
 " 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- 
 
1 84 THE REACTION. 
 
 duce him to posterity as a poet. In ages of general 
 political disorder, and of civic and personal insecur- 
 ity, 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, Nunappleton was to Marvell, 
 it made a lyrical poet of him. 
 
 This series of verses was carefully preserved by 
 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 pubHcations 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 without 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 
 
THE REACTION. 1 8$ 
 
 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 
 pair of compasses,* are often quoted as examples 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 ingen- 
 iously 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. Something 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 praise- 
 
 " 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. 
 
1 86 THE REACTION. 
 
 worthy in the student, but it is a proof of extraor- 
 dinary felicity, mingled with sincerity, in the style of 
 the writer so dismissed 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 bums 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 mihtary 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 : — 
 
 " 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. 
 
THE REACTION. I87 
 
 Then in some flower's belovM 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 haunless, 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 col- 
 lections of English poetry. The Garden, we find a 
 personal sympathy with nature, and particularly with 
 vegetation, which was quite a novel thing, and which 
 found no second exponent until Wordsworth came 
 forward with his still wider and more philosophical 
 commerce with the inanimate world. For flowers, 
 trees, and grasses, Marvell expresses a sort of per- 
 sonal passion. They stand between him and hu- 
 manity, they are to him " forms more real than living 
 man." He calls upon the woodlands of Nunapple- 
 ton to save him from the noisy world : — 
 
188 THE REACTION. 
 
 " 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 nat- 
 ural 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 hes hid in the series of 
 poems in which Marvell writes as a 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 mom her dew distils 
 Before her darling daffodils." 
 
 He declares a profound passion for a possible Ju- 
 liana, 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 po- 
 etical affections. He is the last of the English ro- 
 
THE REACTION. 1 89 
 
 mantic poets for several generations, and no one of 
 them all, early or late, has regarded nature with a 
 quicker or a more loving attention than he. He is 
 an alien indeed among the men of perriwigs 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 liter- 
 ature 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 wel- 
 comed 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 Matchless Orinda, with 
 every desire to be writing in the good old Royalist 
 way as Donne and Herrick wrote, snatches her lyre 
 13 193 
 
194 THE RESTORATION. 
 
 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 aE her poison'd arrows here, or hence." * 
 
 We need no more ; we see that Waller has bewitched 
 her, that she is totally ensnared. 
 
 It may be that my readers have been awaiting the 
 introduction of a great name into this discourse, 
 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 in- 
 ventor or a primal force in the new 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 bom in 1631, more than a 
 quarter of a century later than Waller ; he was but a 
 child when the epoch-making volumes of the school 
 
 • To the Queen Mothet's Majesty, U. r-4. Jan. I, 1661. 
 
THE RESTORATION. 195 
 
 were published, and when at last he began himself 
 to be a poet, — for he was slow and laborious in de- 
 velopment, — 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 offen- 
 sive beyond measure. Here is a less hackneyed frag- 
 ment, in which Dryden plays with the notion that 
 Lord Hastings' death was premature : — 
 
 " Thus fades the oak in the spring, in the blade the com, 
 Thus, without young, this phoenix dies, new-bom ! 
 Must then old three-legged grey-beards, with their gout, 
 Catarrhs, rheums, aches, live three ages out? 
 Time's offals, 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 centurj' ; it is 
 almost Elizabethan. Dryden's next departure was 
 in the direction of Davenant, whose Gondibert 
 affected him to the exclusion of almost every other 
 influence in the Heroic Stanzas of 1659,* and in the 
 Annus Mirabilis of 1666. In his Astrma 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, 
 
 * It is noticeable that in this, his earliest publication, 
 Dryden was associated with Sprat and with the veteran Waller. 
 
196 THE RESTORATION. 
 
 " 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, awak- 
 ening 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 be excluded from 
 our attention in this place, for us to turn to those 
 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 Pro- 
 tector, to a point where the throwing of a napkin 
 over her head at the dinner-table seemed scarcely 
 chastisement enough. Oliver Cromwell lost his tem- 
 per 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, be- 
 came 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 RESTORATION. 1 97 
 
 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 con- 
 fidence 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 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 Vemey, 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 worth- 
 lessness 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 Vemey, is also perhaps worthy of 
 citation as throwing hght 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 
 
198 THE RESTORATION. 
 
 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 treason- 
 able fickleness as history 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 pacific, at heart a little sceptical 
 about the merits of tweedledum and tweedledee, it 
 is diiBcult for this class of man to take a firm posi- 
 tion between two virulent and hostile camps. He 
 loves the individuals 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 
 friendship of Henrietta Maria to the friendship of 
 Oliver Cromwell without a twinge of conscience. It 
 must be admitted that he 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 expedient to cut off the 
 head of this paragon, and rule England in his place. 
 Waller obtained pardon, and returned home with a 
 panegyric to the Protector, in which he remarks that 
 
 " With such a chief the meanest nation blest 
 Might hope to lift her head above the rest." 
 
 Cromwell dies, and Waller immediately indites a 
 
THE RESTORATION. I99 
 
 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 pub- 
 lishing the four successive poems in the same volume 
 of his acknowledged verse. Even in those days, so 
 broad a sympathy could not escape without com- 
 ment, and when Waller presented the fourth of these 
 panegyrics to Charles II. the King made the awk- 
 ward remark that he thought it much inferior to his 
 panegyric on Cromwell. This double thrust, attack- 
 ing 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 
 
200 THE RESTORATION. 
 
 should and whose head should not remain upon 
 rebellious but repentant shoulders. 
 
 The King was perfectly right. The poem on 
 Cromwell is far superior to that on Charles II., and 
 bears all the signs of a superior sincerity. It con- 
 tains 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 ; 
 Heaven, that has placed this island to give law. 
 To bala nce Eu rope, 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, 
 
THE RESTORATION. 201 
 
 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^ 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, ascend- 
 ing by steady strides and not by irregular leaps.* 
 In Pope's best satires we see this art carried 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 some one 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 alexandrine, which 
 he is so fond of introducing. If so, he attempted 
 to redeem a small error by committing a greater one. 
 The life of WaUer has not been attempted since 
 the art of biography has been understood in its mod- 
 em sense. It would not be impossible to write it, 
 for a great number of allusions to him, anecdotes 
 and ajia illustrating his position, exist in various 
 memoirs of the times. He was popular at court 
 
 * Any one who will venture to read Oldham's disagreeable 
 Satire upon the Jesuits, written in 1679, will see the truth of 
 this remark, and note the effect that its versification had upon 
 that series of Diyden's satires which immediately followed it. 
 
2d2 THE RESTORATION. 
 
 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 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 per- 
 sonal 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. 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." Ge orge Savile. Lord Hal ifax, 
 the famou s viveur, and a pu pil of Waller's in ver se, 
 said that ttere was only one man in England he 
 would allow to stay in the same room with him un- 
 less 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 Clarendon, 
 as Lord Chancellor, refused to seal it, the statutes of 
 
THE RESTORATION. 203 
 
 the college then absolutely excluding 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 pleas- 
 ure 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 for Dr. Zachary 
 Cradock. Waller would not sit down under his de- 
 feat. He wearied the King with his complaints, tUl 
 Charles II. consented to bring the matter before 
 Privy Council For three days the most noted law- 
 yers of the age argued in Star Chamber on the point 
 whether the King had the power to alter the statutes 
 
204 THE RESTORATION. 
 
 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 private 
 life. In 167 1 he was nominated one of the original 
 lords commissioners of plantations, thus leading off 
 the long list of men of letters who from that time to 
 this 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 II. 's 
 only parliament. Altogether, he sat in the House 
 of Commons for five-and-forty years ; I suppose 
 that there is no other prominent English writer, ex- 
 cept Mr. Gladstone, of whom the same can be said. 
 Waller's views of his duties as a representative, how- 
 ever, 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.* 
 
 * Thomas Rymer says of him, in his Elegy : — 
 
 " From James to James they count him o'er and o'er, 
 In four successiye reigns a senator ; 
 On him, amidst the legislative throng. 
 Their eyes and ears and every heart they hung ; 
 
THE RESTORATION. 20$ 
 
 Whether we must attribute it to the water-drink- 
 ing 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." This must have 
 been in the very last months of his life, and he did 
 not live to see his prediction verified. In 1686, how- 
 ever, when he was eighty-one, he showed an intel- 
 lectual vitality,* or rejuvenescence, 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 lan- 
 guor of age. Marvellous to record, he completed 
 
 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." 
 * I do not know whether Saint-Evremond's epigram on Wal- 
 ler's old age has ever been reprinted. It was written in 1684, 
 and appeared in 16S8 in Poems to the Memory of that Incom- 
 parable Poet Edmund Waller : — 
 
 Waller, qui ne sent rien des maux de la vieillesse, 
 Dont la vivacity fait honte aux jeunes gens, 
 S*attache & la beauts pour vivre plus long temps, 
 Kt ce qu'on nommerait dans un autre faiblesse. 
 Est en ce rare esprit une sage tendresse, 
 Qui le fait resister i. I'injure des ans. 
 
206 THE RESTORATION. 
 
 the poem, and when he could write no more, dic- 
 tated, 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. 
 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 from our younger eyes 
 Conceal that emptiness which age descries ; 
 The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and deca/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 Waller's 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, 
 approached the confines of eternity with all the so- 
 lemnity and decorum that such a step demanded. 
 A little while before this event, he had the whim to 
 buy a small estate at Coleshill, where he was bom ; 
 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, where he was roused. But his fatal 
 dropsy happened to seize him at one of his other 
 
THE RESTORATION. 207 
 
 mansions, that at Beaconsfield. The King's surgeon 
 was called in, and told him that he must die, where- 
 upon, as it is said, the old man composed those 
 verses of adieu to life which I have just read. He 
 was spared a long illness, and died very composedly, 
 with all his children and his retainers around him, 
 on the 2ist of October, 1687, being half-way across 
 his eighty-third year. 
 
 The serenity of the close of Waller's life contrasts 
 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 protectorate. 
 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 Pem- 
 broke, for a year. He lived, very modestly, by the 
 practice of architecture, until the Restoration, keep- 
 ing his eye upon the ofl&ce 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 
 the post in posse. What claims he had as an artist 
 I have been unable to discover ;* he is said to have 
 
 * Evelyn disagreed with him about the site for Greenwich 
 Palace, and after an interview on the 19th of October, 1661, 
 came away, "knowing Sir John to be a better poet than ar- 
 chitect, though he had Mr. Webb (Inigo Jones's man) to assist 
 him." This was John Webb (1611-1672), who designed the 
 
208 THE RESTORATION. 
 
 designed part of Burlington House, but in associ- 
 ation 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 Res- 
 toration, when, after a long period of poverty, he 
 felt the warmth of prosperity again. At the coro- 
 nation of Charles II. he was knighted. The last 
 twenty years of his life, as far as we can perceive, 
 were darkened by domestic sufiFering. He had 
 married a young and pretty wife, who had the mis- 
 fortune to attract the Duke of York's admiration, 
 and not virtue enough to resist it.* This preyed so 
 much upon the poet's senses that he became insane, 
 and continued in this condition tUl near the end of 
 his life. He recovered, however, and continued to 
 be the King's Surveyor till his death on March 19, 
 i668.f Denham was a most unpopular man. Many 
 
 scenery for the Siege of Rhodes, and built a good many of the 
 buildings often carelessly attributed to Inigo Jones. 
 
 * Lady Denham died suddenly on the 6th of January, 1667, 
 while under the protection of the Duke of York. It was sup- 
 posed that she was poisoned, and Marvell sa}rs, in The Last 
 Instructions to a Painter : — 
 
 " What frosts to fruits, what arsenic to a rat. 
 Was to fair Denham mortal chocolate." 
 
 t In ma ny text- books the date of Denham's death is given as 
 1688. But for reasons given below this seems highly improb- 
 able, 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. From 1664 Denham and Wren were en- 
 
THE RESTORATION. 20g 
 
 of his contemporaries speak of him personally with 
 contempt or aversion. He was accused of violence 
 and discourtesy in his manner to ladies ; of stinginess 
 anti 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 dis- 
 miss ; the others, it is to be hoped, are no better 
 founded ; but Denham leaves upon us the impression 
 of an unamiable man. He died worth ;^7,ooo, and 
 this in spite of the interval of his insanity. His 
 last verses were pronounced at Poets' Comer, when 
 Cowley was buried at Westminster Abbey in 1667, 
 so that, if he died early in the next year, his mad- 
 ness must have lasted a very little while. Waller 
 
 trusted with the repairing of St. Paul's. On the 21st of Feb- 
 ruary, 1665, Pepys dined with Denham, who was evidently 
 perfectly well, at the Lord Chancellor's new house. The poet- 
 architect's own 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 i663 1 
 Pepys hears a rumour of his death, which rumour may or may : 
 not be true, but has no doubt introduced that date int o the ta ct- J 
 books. On the other hand, the well-informed writer in the 
 Biographia Britannica, after speaking of Denham's madness, 
 goes on to say that " recovering from that disorder, he con- 
 tinued 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, for Wren 
 seems to have stepped into Denham's office in 1668. 
 
 14 
 
2IO THE RESTORATION. 
 
 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 bom. 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 celebrated 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 urbm manner of writing, so precise, colourless, 
 and impersonal, what was the secret of its fascina- 
 tion ? To us, as a poetical form, it is apt to seem 
 as insipid as a letter written by a child whose nur- 
 sery-governess has directed the pen and suggested 
 the expressions. In the earlier of these chapters I 
 have partly answered these questions. The fascina- 
 tion lay to a great degree in contrast. The child 
 had so long run wild in 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 
 
THE RESTORATION. 211 
 
 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* to a leader in the opposite camp, to 
 Denham ; and fo r once i n his life, merely because he 
 has been reading Cooper's 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, even in 
 works where they were accustomed to it, are nu- 
 merous. There were complaints of the unreadable- 
 ness 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 per- 
 haps 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 
 
 * " Or looked I back unto the times hence flown 
 To praise those muses, and dislike our own ? 
 Or did I walk those pean 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 nnc y^^iilH giispert that these lines were written by the 
 song-bird of the ffesperidts. 
 
212 THE RESTORATION. 
 
 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 doth take, 
 Not mingling waters, through Geneva's lake. 
 So, having here the different stiles 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 
 LHudibras, positively rewrote so me 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 vigour of 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 in- 
 troduction of needless adjectives. This preference 
 of the new form 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 pen- 
 chant for smooth blank verse, and was the earliest 
 of the myriad imitators of Milton. But this spirit 
 
THE RESTORATION. 21 3 
 
 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 exaggerate 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 Roches- 
 ter, for the first edition of Waller's Posthumous 
 Poems in 1690.* It will be observed that the writer 
 uses the epithet " Augustan " for the new school of 
 poetry ; and this is, I believe, the original occur- 
 rence of that phrase ; at least, I have met with none 
 earlier : — 
 
 "Mr. Waller was indeed the parent of EngUsh 
 verse, and the first that showed us our tongue had 
 numbers and beauty in it." 
 
 This calmly disposes of Spenser and Shakespeare. 
 
 "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 
 
 * " The Second Part of Mr. Waller's Poems, containing his 
 Alteration of the Maid's Tragedy. Together with some other 
 poems . . . never put into the First Collection of his Poems. 
 London. Printed for Tho. Bennet, MDCXC." The little 
 volume iwas licensed Sept. 26, 1&89. ■ 
 
214 THE RESTORATION. 
 
 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 : — 
 
 " We are no less beholden to Mr. Waller for the 
 new turn of verse which he brought in, and the im- 
 provement he made in our numbers. Before his time 
 men rhymed 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 certainly 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, in- 
 cessantly ; 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 rhymes. Mr. Waller remov'd all these 
 faults, brought in more polysyllables, and smoother 
 measures ; bound up his thoughts better, and in a 
 
THE RESTORATION. 215 
 
 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 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." * 
 
 I have allowed the forgotten and anonymous critic 
 of 1690 to speak thus at length because his lan- 
 guage is direct and perspicuous, and because he 
 shows himself here and elsewhere, throughout his 
 discourse, an admirable spokesman for his contem- 
 poraries. It cannot but be interesting for us to 
 observe how the whirligig of taste brings in its re- 
 venges, and to see how quietly and positively Atter- 
 bury condemns those very things which have now 
 come to be again considered beauties, the irregu- 
 larity 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 flexi- 
 bility, that he leads me easily to the next point that 
 we have to consider, namely, what excuse there 
 was for the zeal and satisfaction with which the 
 age accepted the bondage which Waller imposed 
 upon poetry ? 
 
 The reaction has now lasted so long and has be- 
 
 * See Appendix IV. for the remainder of this preface. 
 
2l6 THE RESTORATION. 
 
 come 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 aU that the attraction of his wit can 
 do to drag the ordinary reader over the barrier of 
 his verse. From 1660 onward 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 ; * 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 rhymed and rattled, all was well." 
 
 That monstrous play, the Empress of Morocco, suc- 
 ceeded in 1673 solely because, in spite of its inepti- 
 tudes, the young gentlemen of Cambridge were 
 delighted with the smoothness of the couplets \ in 
 which it was written. For in the first ardour for 
 the form, its admirers had gone so far as to introduce 
 
 / * Milton would stand absolutely alone in his preference 
 [ of another form, if Roscommon also, in 1 684, in emulation of 
 \ Paradise Lost, had not chosen to throw off what he calls "the' 
 Nconstraint of Rhyme " in his Art of Poetry. ^. (jujijjj (jU^ 
 ■" ( t The glibness of Elkanah Settle's verse was certainly re- 
 markable. His early plays trip on their foolish course with a 
 smoothness that must have enraged Dryden. This is the sort 
 of thing : — 
 
Hhe restoration. 217 
 
 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 hjere, because I regard it 
 as but an episode in the general change of prosody, 
 and also because, in my volume of Seventeenth Cent- 
 ury Studies, in the chapter dedicated to Sir George 
 Etheredge, I have already given it minute considera- 
 tion. 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 rim- 
 ing." Was there any exciise, I ask, for a taste so 
 entirely 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 grea^t_writers had been edu- 
 cated at all points up to the p itch of their genius. 
 But it was not so. It seems to me that the sudden 
 efflorescence of poetry at the close of the sixteenth 
 
 " 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, [damned ; 
 
 She moved, stared, walked, stormed, raged, cursed, raved and 
 With a distorted look she tore her hair. 
 Unsheathed her dagger, and gave wounds to air ; 
 Her face discoloured gr^w 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 0/ Morocco^ 
 
2l8 THE RESTORATION. 
 
 century came too soon, into a language and a lit- 
 erature 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 Shakes- 
 peare, Spenser, Bacon, and Jonson ; but their man- 
 ner 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 fragmentary 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 Italian types, and wrote as if these 
 great men had never existed. The romantic writ- 
 ing 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 Cymbeline 
 reads like the undigested 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 uncultured 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 
 
THE RESTORATION. 2ig 
 
 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. Their 
 excuse 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 in- 
 terests of the moment. They brought it up from its 
 country seclusion, and gave it a gay house in Soho 
 Square. I possess, in my own library, a poem which 
 has never been printed, by the famous Lady Win- 
 chelsea, 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 post- 
 ures of a dancing-master. This was a Phcebus* 
 
 * In some sort Waller was this Apollo. Lord Lansdowne 
 (George Granville) says, in 1688, 
 
 " The Father of so many gods is he, 
 He must himself be sure some deity, 
 
220 THE RESTORATION. 
 
 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, 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 Knowledge 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 re- 
 turned from the particular to the general, from ro- 
 mantic examples to those disquisitions on the norm 
 which were thought to display a classical taste. Ex- 
 haustion, preference of the form to the matter, crav- 
 ing for a higher standard of elegance in general 
 literature, these were the most prominent of the im- 
 pulses 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 
 
 Minerva and Apollo shall submit, 
 And Waller be the only God of Wit." 
 
THE RESTORATION. 221 
 
 whom we have just lost, one of the broadest students 
 of poetry that we have ever possessed, the late Rec- 
 tor of Lincoln College. Mark Pattison says : " To 
 give clearness and plainness to the language, to 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 busi- 
 ness 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 cent- 
 ury, gradually expired, lasting longer, indeed, than 
 we are generally inclined to suppose, but disappear- 
 ing before the century was out. Dryden's songs, 
 which have been unduly neglected, give us the high- 
 est lyrical water-mark of the age. " Farewell, un- 
 grateful traitor," in the Spanish Fryer, and the song 
 in Cleomenes, 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 al- 
 most 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. 
 
222 THE RESTORATION. 
 
 " 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 exe- 
 cution is uniform^ the verse is not heightened to a 
 pitch at one point, and allowed to run down like an 
 alarum at another. 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 con- 
 ventional ornaments, " gold," or "roses," "amorous 
 nightingales," and " fresh-quilted colours of Auro- 
 ra," without which a Marinist poet could hardly 
 
THE RESTORATION. 223 
 
 venture to address a woman. It has no unusual 
 words, no far-fetched conceits, no superfluous turns 
 of thought, but — considering the tension and extrav- 
 agance 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 chapters that the movement 
 in this direction was begun in England before there 
 was any opportunity 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 English classicism. 
 The exiles who returned at the Restoration brought 
 back with them the sentimental jargon of the heroic 
 novelists, the Phdbus as it was called, and this eclec- 
 tic 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 Resto- 
 ration. Its masterpieces were industriously circu- 
 lated in English translations during the last years of 
 the Commonwealth. In old country-houses we may 
 
224 THE RESTORATION. 
 
 Still come across these enormous folios, the Clelia of 
 Mademoiselle de Scuddry, in particular, dedicated 
 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 monstrous provinces of the country of Tender- 
 ness, 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 Calpren^de'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 him- 
 self with material for what was called a heroic play, 
 was to turn the pages of these vast and vapid ro- 
 mances. 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 illuminated class, but to the general 
 public. The heroes of these extraordinary books 
 of Scuddry and her friends were lifted to a ridicu- 
 lous height of virtue above ordinary men, their love 
 
THE RESTORATION. 22$ 
 
 "made summer at the Arctic pole," their honour was 
 like the diamond and would not endure a micro- 
 scopical flaw, their courage was enough to discom- 
 pose 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, 
 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 any one had perceived the tendency 
 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 gentle- 
 men when they sat down to a pipe before the kitchen 
 fire, and had hung their perriwigs on the backs 
 of their chairs. There was a constant rivalry be- 
 tween 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, 
 15 
 
226 THE RESTORATION. 
 
 and rose to the grace of Congreve, the manly ele- 
 gance of Farquhar. Dryden had never quite suc- 
 ceeded in attaining this sobriety ; his best pieces 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 per- 
 ceived 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 con- 
 summate 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 time fails me, and 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 classical movement was not, as has been 
 the habit to suppose, a meaningless and stupid 
 
THE RESTORATION. 22/ 
 
 decline into dulness, Hyperion wilfully making a 
 satyr of himself, but that it was a reaction of com- 
 mon-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 litera- 
 ture that was superseded, or with instances of vul- 
 garity 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 brill- 
 iant fabrics of the imagination. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
APPENDIX I. 
 
 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. Pauls Church-yard . 
 MDCXXXVill . (Licenced Nov . 1637.) " 
 
 To this charming little folio, specially sought after by col- 
 lectors because it contains Henry Lawes' music to the Psalms, 
 both Sidney Godolphin and Waller contributed prefatory eu- 
 logies, 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 suc- 
 ceeding collections of his work. Sidney Godolphin's long 
 and courtly poem of compliment has great merit, and in con- 
 sideration 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-tunM lays. 
 
 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 travailed, dispossessed. 
 
232 APPENDIX I. 
 
 This work had been proportioned to our sight, 
 Had you but known with some alloy to write, 
 And not preserv'd your authors' 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 brains collect 
 
 Of your inspirM authors, and reflect 
 
 Those heavenly rays with new and strong effect. 
 
 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. 
 
APPENDIX II. 
 
 denham's essay on translated verse. 
 
 There are so few translations whicli 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 : 
 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) my self alto- 
 gether 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 bet- 
 ter fortune make fitter for such undertakings. 
 
 I conceive it a vulgar error in translating poets, to affect 
 being fidus interpres ; let that care be with them 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 langu^e 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 
 
234 APPENDIX II. 
 
 happinesses peculiar to every language, which give life and 
 energy to the words ; and whosoever offers at verbal transla- 
 tion, 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 
 Sermonem temporis istius auribus accommodatum ; 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 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.) 
 Keither 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 myself ;) 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 some- 
 times to make him speak better ; I hope it will be judged an 
 error on the right hand, and such an one as may deserve par- 
 don, if not imitation. 
 
APPENDIX III. 
 
 The following address to Queen Henrietta Maria, under a 
 slight concealment, was issued with some copies of the gen- 
 uine edition of Waller's Poems in 1645, but immediately sup- 
 pressed. 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, instead of the triple crown, 
 wore sometimes the poet's ivy, as an ornament, perhaps of 
 lesser weight, and 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 pos- 
 ture 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 style 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 amongst the Romans) was once sick of this 
 
236 APPENDIX III. 
 
 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 : the 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 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 won- 
 der 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 Rich- 
 lieu, and the whole Academy. A poet cannot think of him, 
 without being in the same rapture Lucretius is in, when Epi- 
 curus comes in his way. 
 
 Tu pater £?* rerum inventor, Tu patria nobis 
 Suppeditas praecepta : Tuesque ex inclyte, chartis 
 Florif eris ut Apes in sallibus omnia libant 
 Omnia Nos itidem depascimur aureadicta : 
 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. Suckling and Carew, I must confess, wrote some few things 
 smoothly enough, but as all they did in this kind was not very 
 considerable, so 'twas a little later than the earliest pieces of 
 Mr. Waller. He undoubtedly stands first in the list of re- 
 finers, 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 Augustan 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 says 
 
 237 
 
238 APPENDIX IV. 
 
 of their menstruums, to be quite sated with the infusion. But 
 posterity will best judge of this. In the mean time, 'tis a sur- 
 prizing 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 pic- 
 ture shall still bear a resemblance. This art was Mr. Wal- 
 ler'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'erflows whate're 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 enough to confute it self. For though English be mould- 
 ring stone, as he tells us there, yet he has certainly pick'd the 
 best out of a bad quarry. 
 
 We are no less beholding to him for the new turn of verse, 
 which he brought in, and the improvement he made in our 
 numbers. Before his time, men rhym'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 clus- 
 ter, 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 hook't atoms, that compose a body in 
 
APPENDIX IV. 239 
 
 Des Cartes. 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, tagg'd with rhymes. 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 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 
 rhymes. 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 mas- 
 ter of writing. Quae sunt ampla et pulchra, diu placere pos- 
 sunt ; quae lepida et concinna, (amongst which rhyme must, 
 whether it will or no, take its place,) cito satietate afficiunt 
 aurium sensum fastidiosissimum. 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 coutinu'd an obstinate lover of rhyme to 
 the very last : 'Twas a mistress, that never appear'd unhand- 
 some in his eyes, and was courted by him long after Sacba- 
 rissa 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 
 
240 APPENDIX IV. 
 
 slight a thing, he had taken so much pains to adorn. My 
 Lord Roscommon was more impartial : no man ever rhym'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, the 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 agen. In other kinds of writing it continues 
 still ; and will do so, tiU some excellent spirit arises, that has 
 leisure enough, and resolution to break the charm, and free us 
 from the troublesome bondage of rhyming. 
 
 As Mr. Milton very well calls it, and has proVd 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 war- 
 like : it may perhaps furnish out matter for a good poem in 
 the next, but 'twill hardly encourage one now : without proph- 
 esying, a man may easily know, what sort of laurels are like 
 to be in request ? 
 
 AVhilst I am talking of verse, I find myself, I don't know 
 how, betra/d into a great deal of prose. 1 intended 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 we can say of 'em. He is there Jam 
 Senior : Sed cruda Deo viridisque Senectus. The same censure 
 perhaps will be past 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 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 
 
APPENDIX IV. 241 
 
 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 ex- 
 presses it ; but whether it be so agreeable to the nature of 
 tragedy itself, 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 every thing of Mr. Waller's, that's not put into 
 the former collection ; so that between both, the reader may 
 make the set complete. 
 
 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, &=c. 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 
 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 mille 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 waive 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 
 
 16 
 
242 APPENDIX IV. 
 
 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 cor- 
 rupted extremely, 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 un- 
 mix'd ; and such, as he himself, were he alive might own. 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 IN VERSE. 
 On Viol and Flute. Lyrical Poems. 1873. 
 King Erik. A Tragedy. 1876. 
 
 New Poems. 1879. 
 
 Firdausi in Exile, and other Poems. 1885. 
 
 IN PROSE. 
 
 studies in the Literature of Northern Europe. 
 1879. 
 
 Gray. (English Men of Letters.) 1882. 
 
 Seventeenth Century Studies. A Contribution 
 to the History of English Poetry. 1883. 
 
 The Works of Thomas Gray. Edited in Four 
 Volumes. 1884.