A History of Elizabethan Literature

About the steadfast centre of the world;
Against whose rapid course the restless sun,
And wandering flames in varied motions run.
Which heat, light, life infuse; time, night, and day
Distinguish; in our human bodies sway:
That hung'st the solid earth in fleeting air
Veined with clear springs which ambient seas repair.
In clouds the mountains wrap their hoary heads;
Luxurious valleys clothed with flowery meads;
Her trees yield fruit and shade; with liberal breasts
All creatures she, their common mother, feasts."

Henry Vaughan was born in 1622, published Poems in 1646 (for some of which he afterwards expressed a not wholly necessary repentance), Olor Iscanus (from Isca Silurum) in 1651, and Silex Scintillans, his best-known book, in 1650 and 1655. He also published verses much later, and did not die till 1695, being the latest lived of any man who has a claim to appear in this book, but his aftergrowths were not happy. To say that Vaughan is a poet of one poem would not be true. But the universally known

"They are all gone into the world of light"

is so very much better than anything else that he has done that it would be hardly fair to quote anything else, unless we could quote a great deal. Like Herbert, and in pretty obvious imitation of him, he set himself to bend the prevailing fancy for quips and quaintnesses into sacred uses, to see that the Devil should not have all the best conceits. But he is not so uniformly successful, though he has greater depth and greater originality of thought.

Lovelace and Suckling are inextricably connected together, not merely by their style of poetry, but by their advocacy of the same cause, their date, and their melancholy end. Both (Suckling in 1609, Lovelace nine years later) were born to large fortunes, both spent them, at least partially, in the King's cause, and both died miserably, – Suckling, in 1642, by his own hand, his mind, according to a legend, unhinged by the tortures of the Inquisition; Lovelace, two years before the Restoration, a needy though not an exiled cavalier, in London purlieus. Both have written songs of quite marvellous and unparalleled exquisiteness, and both have left doggerel which would disgrace a schoolboy. Both, it may be suspected, held the doctrine which Suckling openly champions, that a gentleman should not take too much trouble about his verses. The result, however, was in Lovelace's case more disastrous than in Suckling's. It is not quite true that Lovelace left nothing worth reading but the two immortal songs, "To Lucasta on going to the Wars" and "To Althea from Prison;" and it is only fair to say that the corrupt condition of his text is evidently due, at least in part, to incompetent printing and the absence of revision. "The Grasshopper" is almost worthy of the two better-known pieces, and there are others not far below it. But on the whole any one who knows those two (and who does not?) may neglect Lovelace with safety. Suckling, even putting his dramatic work aside, is not to be thus treated. True, he is often careless in the bad sense as well as in the good, though the doggerel of the "Sessions" and some other pieces is probably intentional. But in his own vein, that of coxcombry that is not quite cynical, and is quite intelligent, he is marvellously happy. The famous song in Aglaura, the Allegro to Lovelace's Penseroso, "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" is scarcely better than "'Tis now since I sat down before That foolish fort a heart," or "Out upon it! I have loved Three whole days together." Nor in more serious veins is the author to be slighted, as in "The Dance;" while as for the "Ballad on a Wedding," the best parts of this are by common consent incomparable. Side by side by these are to be found, as in Lovelace, pieces that will not even scan, and, as not in Lovelace (who is not seldom loose but never nasty), pieces of a dull and disgusting obscenity. But we do not go to Suckling for these; we go to him for his easy grace, his agreeable impudence, his scandalous mock-disloyalty (for it is only mock-disloyalty after all) to the "Lord of Terrible Aspect," whom all his elder contemporaries worshipped so piously. Suckling's inconstancy and Lovelace's constancy may or may not be equally poetical, – there is some reason for thinking that the lover of Althea was actually driven to something like despair by the loss of his mistress. But that matters to us very little. The songs remain, and remain yet unsurpassed, as the most perfect celebrations, in one case of chivalrous devotion, in the other of the coxcomb side of gallantry, that literature contains or is likely ever to contain. The songwriting faculty of the English, which had broken out some half century before, and had produced so many masterpieces, was near its death, or at least near the trance from which Burns and Blake revived it more than a century later, which even Dryden's superhuman faculty of verse could only galvanise. But at the last it threw off by the mouths of men, who otherwise seem to have had very ordinary poetical powers, this little group of triumphs in song, to which have to be added the raptures – equally strange and sweet, equally unmatched of their kind, but nobler and more masculine – of the "Great Marquis," the few and wonderful lines of Montrose. To quote "My dear and only love, I pray," or "Great, good, and just, could I but rate," would be almost as much an insult to the reader as to quote the above-mentioned little masterpieces of the two less heroic English cavaliers.

Quarles, More, and Joseph Beaumont form, as it were, a kind of appendix to the poetry of Herbert and Vaughan – an appendix very much less distinguished by poetical power, but very interesting as displaying the character of the time and the fashion (strange enough to us moderns) in which almost every interest of that time found its natural way into verse. The enormous popularity of Francis Quarles's Emblems and Enchiridion accounts to some extent for the very unjust ridicule which has been lavished on him by men of letters of his own and later times. But the silly antithesis of Pope, a writer who, great as he was, was almost as ignorant of literary history as his model, Boileau, ought to prejudice no one, and it is strictly true that Quarles's enormous volume hides, to some extent, his merits. Born in 1592 at Romford, of a gentle though not very distinguished family, which enters into that curious literary genealogy of Swift, Dryden, and Herrick, he was educated at Cambridge, became cup-bearer to the ill-fated and romantically renowned "Goody Palsgrave," held the post which Middleton and Jonson had held, of chronologer to the city of London, followed the King to Oxford to his loss, having previously had losses in Ireland, and died early in 1644, leaving his memory to be defended in a rather affecting document by his widow, Ursula. Quarles was a kind of journalist to whom the vehicle of verse came more easily than the vehicle of prose, and the dangers of that state of things are well known. A mere list of his work (the Enchiridion is in prose, and a good thing too) would far exceed any space that can be given to him here. All Quarles's work is journey-work, but it is only fair to note the frequent wealth of fancy, the occasional felicity of expression, which illustrate this wilderness.

More and Beaumont were not, like Quarles, poetical miscellanists and periodical writers; but they seem to have shared with him the delusion that poetry is an instrument of all work. Henry More, a man well connected and who might have risen, but who preferred to pass the greater part of a long and studious life as a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, is best known as a member of the theological school, indifferently called the Cambridge Platonists and the Cambridge Latitudinarians. His chief work in verse is a great philosophical poem, entitled the Song of the Soul, with such engaging sub-titles as Psychozoia, Psychathanasia, Antipsychopannychia, and Antimonopsychia. I shall not, I hope, be suspected of being ignorant of Greek, or disinclined to metaphysics, if I say that the Song of the Soul appears to me a venerable mistake. A philosophical controversy carried on in this fashion —

"But contradiction, can that have place
In any soul? Plato affirms ideas;
But Aristotle, with his pugnacious race,
As idle figments stiffly them denies,"

seems to me to be a signal instance of the wrong thing in the wrong place. It is quite true that More has, as Southey says, "lines and passages of sublime beauty." A man of his time, actuated by its noble thought, trained as we know More to have been in the severest school of Spenser, and thus habituated to the heavenly harmonies of that perfect poet, could hardly fail to produce such. But his muse is a chaotic not a cosmic one.

Something the same may be said of Joseph Beaumont, a friend of Crashaw, and like him ejected from Peterhouse, son-in-law of Bishop Wren, and, later, head of Jesus College. Beaumont, a strong cavalier and an orthodox churchman, was a kind of adversary of More's, whose length and quaintness he has exceeded, while he has almost rivalled his learning in Psyche or Love's Mystery, a religious poem of huge dimensions, first published in 1648 and later in 1702. Beaumont, as both fragments of this vast thing and his minor poems show, had fancy, taste, and almost genius on opportunity; but the prevailing mistake of his school, the idea that poetry is a fit vehicle for merely prosaic expression, is painfully apparent in him.

First, for various reasons, among the nondescripts of the Caroline school, deserves to be mentioned William Habington, a Roman Catholic gentleman of good upper middle-class station, whose father was himself a man of letters, and had some trouble in the Gunpowder Plot. He was born at Hindlip Hall, near Worcester, in the year of the plot itself, courted and married Lucy Herbert, daughter of his neighbour, Lord Powis, and published her charms and virtues in the collection called Castara, first issued in 1634. Habington also wrote a tragic comedy, The Queen of Aragon, and some other work, but died in middle life. It is upon Castara that his fame rests. To tell the truth it is, though, as had been said, an estimable, yet a rather irritating work. That Habington was a true lover every line of it shows; that he had a strong infusion of the abundant poetical inspiration then abroad is shown by line after line, though hardly by poem after poem, among its pieces. His series of poems on the death of his friend Talbot is full of beauty. His religion is sincere, fervent, and often finely expressed; though he never rose to Herbert's pure devotion, or to Crashaw's flaming poetry. One of the later Castara poems may be given: —

"We saw and woo'd each other's eyes,
My soul contracted then with thine,
And both burnt in one sacrifice,
By which our marriage grew divine.

"Let wilder youths, whose soul is sense,
Profane the temple of delight,
And purchase endless penitence,
With the stolen pleasure of one night.

"Time's ever ours, while we despise
The sensual idol of our clay,
For though the sun do set and rise,
We joy one everlasting day.

"Whose light no jealous clouds obscure,
While each of us shine innocent,
The troubled stream is still impure;
With virtue flies away content.

"And though opinions often err,
We'll court the modest smile of fame,
For sin's black danger circles her,
Who hath infection in her name.

"Thus when to one dark silent room
Death shall our loving coffins thrust:
Fame will build columns on our tomb,
And add a perfume to our dust."

But Castara is a real instance of what some foreign critics very unjustly charge on English literature as a whole – a foolish and almost canting prudery. The poet dins the chastity of his mistress into his readers' heads until the readers in self-defence are driven to say, "Sir, did any one doubt it?" He protests the freedom of his own passion from any admixture of fleshly influence, till half a suspicion of hypocrisy and more than half a feeling of contempt force themselves on the hearer. A relentless critic might connect these unpleasant features with the uncharitable and more than orthodox bigotry of his religious poems. Yet Habington, besides contributing much agreeable verse to the literature of the period, is invaluable as showing the counterside to Milton, the Catholic Puritanism which is no doubt inherent in the English nature, and which, had it not been for the Reformation, would probably have transformed Catholicism in a very strange fashion.

There is no Puritanism of any kind in a group – it would hardly be fair to call them a school – of "Heroic" poets to whom very little attention has been paid in histories of literature hitherto, but who lead up not merely to Davenant's Gondibert and Cowley's Davideis, but to Paradise Lost itself. The "Heroic" poem was a kind generated partly by the precepts of the Italian criticism, including Tasso, partly by the practice of Tasso himself, and endeavouring to combine something of the unity of Epic with something and more of the variety of Romance. It may be represented here by the work of Chalkhill, Chamberlayne, Marmion, and Kynaston. John Chalkhill, the author of Thealma and Clearchus, was, with his work, introduced to the public in 1683 by Izaak Walton, who styles him "an acquaintant and friend of Edmund Spenser." If so, he must have been one of the first of English poets to adopt the very loose enjambed decasyllabic couplet in which his work, like that of Marmion and still more Chamberlayne, is written. His poem is unfinished, and the construction and working-up of the story are looser even than the metre; but it contains a great deal of charming description and some very poetical phrase.

Much the same may be said of the Cupid and Psyche (1637) of the dramatist Shakerley Marmion (v. inf.), which follows the original of Apuleius with alternate closeness and liberty, but is always best when it is most original. The Leoline and Sydanis (1642) of Sir Francis Kynaston is not in couplets but in rhyme royal – a metre of which the author was so fond that he even translated the Troilus and Cressida of Chaucer into Latin, retaining the seven-line stanza and its rhymes. Kynaston, who was a member of both universities and at one time proctor at Cambridge, was a man interested in various kinds of learning, and even started an Academy or Museum Minervæ of his own. In Leoline and Sydanis he sometimes comes near to the mock heroic, but in his lyrics called Cynthiades he comes nearer still to the best Caroline cry. One or two of his pieces have found their way into anthologies, but until the present writer reprinted his works[59 - In Minor Caroline Poets, vols. i. and ii. (Oxford, 1905-6). An important addition to the religious verse of the time was made by Mr. Dobell with the Poems (London, 1903) of Thomas Traherne, a follower of Herbert, with some strange anticipations of Blake.] he was almost unknown.

The most important by far, however, of this group is William Chamberlayne, a physician of Shaftesbury, who, before or during the Civil War, began and afterwards finished (publishing it in 1659) the very long heroic romance of Pharonnida, a story of the most involved and confused character but with episodes of great vividness and even sustained power: a piece of versification straining the liberties of enjambement in line and want of connection in syntax to the utmost; but a very mine of poetical expression and imagery. Jewels are to be picked up on every page by those who will take the trouble to do so, and who are not offended by the extraordinary nonchalance of the composition.

The Theophila of Edward Benlowes (1603? -1676) was printed in 1652 with elaborate and numerous engravings by Hollar, which have made it rare, and usually imperfect when met with. Benlowes was a Cambridge man (of St. John's College) by education, but lived latterly and died at Oxford, having been reduced from wealth to poverty by the liberality which made his friends anagrammatise his name into "Benevolus." His work was abused as an awful example of the extravagant style by Butler (Character of a Small Poet), and by Warburton in the next century; but it was never reprinted till the date of the collection just noted. It is a really curious book, displaying the extraordinary diffusion of poetical spirit still existing, but in a hectic and decadent condition. Benlowes – a Cleveland with more poetry and less cleverness, or a very much weaker Crashaw – uses a monorhymed triplet made up of a heroic, an octosyllable, and an Alexandrine which is as wilfully odd as the rest of him.

Randolph, the youngest and not the least gifted of the tribe of Ben, died before he was thirty, after writing some noteworthy plays, and a certain number of minor poems, which, as it has been well observed, rather show that he might have done anything, than that he did actually do something. Corbet was Bishop first of Oxford and then of Norwich, and died in 1635. Corbet's work is of that peculiar class which is usually, though not always, due to "University Wits," and which only appeals to people with a considerable appreciation of humour, and a large stock of general information. It is always occasional in character, and rarely succeeds so well as when the treatment is one of distinct persiflage. Thus the elegy on Donne is infinitely inferior to Carew's, and the mortuary epitaph on Arabella Stuart is, for such a subject and from the pen of a man of great talent, extraordinarily feeble. The burlesque epistle to Lord Mordaunt on his journey to the North is great fun, and the "Journey into France," though, to borrow one of its own jokes, rather "strong," is as good. The "Exhortation to Mr. John Hammond," a ferocious satire on the Puritans, distinguishes itself from almost all precedent work of the kind by the force and directness of its attack, which almost anticipates Dryden. And Corbet had both pathetic and imaginative touches on occasion, as here: —

"What I shall leave thee none can tell,
But all shall say I wish thee well,
I wish thee, Vin, before all wealth,
Both bodily and ghostly health;
Nor too much wealth, nor wit, come to thee,
So much of either may undo thee.
I wish thee learning, not for show,
Enough for to instruct and know;
Not such as gentlemen require
To prate at table, or at fire.
I wish thee all thy mother's graces,
Thy father's fortunes, and his places.
I wish thee friends, and one at court,
Not to build on, but support
To keep thee, not in doing many
Oppressions, but from suffering any.
I wish thee peace in all thy ways,
Nor lazy nor contentious days;
And when thy soul and body part
As innocent as now those art."

Cartwright, a short-lived man but a hard student, shows best in his dramas. In his occasional poems, strongly influenced by Donne, he is best at panegyric, worst at burlesque and epigram. In "On a Gentlewoman's Silk Hood" and some other pieces he may challenge comparison with the most futile of the metaphysicals; but no one who has read his noble elegy on Sir Bevil Grenvil, unequal as it is, will think lightly of Cartwright. Sir Edward Sherburne was chiefly a translator in the fashionable style. His original poems were those of a very inferior Carew (he even copies the name Celia), but they are often pretty. Alexander Brome, of whom very little is known, and who must not be confounded with the dramatist, was a lawyer and a cavalier song-writer, who too frequently wrote mere doggerel; but on the other hand, he sometimes did not, and when he escaped the evil influence, as in the stanzas "Come, come, let us drink," "The Trooper," and not a few others, he has the right anacreontic vein.