but his "Noble Numbers," or poems on sacred themes, show an almost unregenerate happiness.
The Child of his "Ode on the Birth of our Saviour" is, first of all, a human child to Herrick, and he was in love with children as with roses. His "Litany to the Holy Spirit" is extremely human in its foresight of death,
When the artless doctor sees
No one hope but of his fees.
His "Grace for a Child" is a miniature of the pathos of a child's devotion.
Of Herrick's epigrams, as of Ben Jonson's, there is no good to be said: we can only marvel how the poets stooped to imitate the worst faults of Martial, their Latin model.
Carew.
Thomas Carew was one of the famous Carews or Careys of the West: his family was settled in Gloucestershire. He was probably born about 1598: Clarendon says that he died about the age of 50; and his death was in 1638 or 1639. His life "was spent with less severity or exactness than it ought to have been," but he made a good end. He seems to have been at Corpus, Oxford, where he took no degree; he was Sewer (a Court office of value), to Charles I, and was among those of "the tribe of Ben Jonson". His poems were published (1640-1642) after his decease.
Suckling, in his Sessions of the Poets declares that Carew's poems, were "seldom brought forth but with trouble and pain," in fact he did take trouble, and it is a pity that most of his contemporaries took none. His "Persuasions to Love" is a most musical version of that old lesson of the brief-lived rose which is taught by the Greek lyrists of the Anthology and by Ronsard and Herrick so sweetly, and so often. "Give me more love or more disdain," "When thou, poor excommunicate," "He that loves a rosy cheek," the poems "In Absence," "Mark how the bashful morn in vain," the "Elegy on Maria Wentworth," "Ask me no more where Jove bestows," and many other pieces by the lover of Celia, are admirable in versification, and in their own philosophy, which is not remarkable for "severity and exactness". Carew never approaches the elevation of Lovelace at his best, but he perhaps never falls to the pitch of Lovelace when uninspired. There are graceful turns and songs in his Masque "Coelum Britannicum" (1634). Carew's verse is a moment in the development from careless speed towards the less varied and more "correct" style that passed from Waller to Dry den and onwards.
Lovelace.