“Our Faith and troth
All time and space controls,
Above the highest sphere we meet,
Unseen, unknown, and greet as angels greet.”
How comes it that in the fierce fighting days the soldiers were so tuneful, and such scholars? In the first edition of Lovelace’s “Lucasta” there is a flock of recommendatory verses, English, Latin, even Greek, by the gallant Colonel’s mess-mates and comrades. What guardsman now writes like Lovelace, and how many of his friends could applaud him in Greek? You, my Gifted, are happily of a pacific disposition, and tune a gentle lyre. Is it not lucky for swains like you that the soldiers have quite forsworn sonneting? When a man was a rake, a poet, a warrior, all in one, what chance had a peaceful minor poet like you or me, Gifted, against his charms? Sedley, when sober, must have been an invincible rival—invincible, above all, when he pretended constancy:
“Why then should I seek further store,
And still make love anew?
When change itself can give no more
’Tis easy to be true.”
How infinitely more delightful, musical, and captivating are those Cavalier singers—their numbers flowing fair, like their scented lovelocks—than the prudish society poets of Pope’s day. “The Rape of the Lock” is very witty, but through it all don’t you mark the sneer of the contemptuous, unmanly little wit, the crooked dandy? He jibes among his compliments; and I do not wonder that Mistress Arabella Fermor was not conciliated by his long-drawn cleverness and polished lines. I prefer Sackville’s verses “written at sea the night before an engagement”:
“To all you ladies now on land
We men at sea indite.”
They are all alike, the wits of Queen Anne; and even Matt Prior, when he writes of ladies occasionally, writes down to them, or at least glances up very saucily from his position on his knees. But Prior is the best of them, and the most candid:
“I court others in verse—but I love thee in prose;
And they have my whimsies, but thou hast my heart.”
Yes, Prior is probably the greatest of all who dally with the light lyre which thrills to the wings of fleeting Loves—the greatest English writer of vers de société; the most gay, frank, good-humoured, tuneful and engaging.
Landor is great, too, but in another kind; the bees that hummed over Plato’s cradle have left their honey on his lips; none but Landor, or a Greek, could have written this on Catullus:
“Tell me not what too well I know
About the Bard of Sirmio—
Yes, in Thalia’s son
Such stains there are as when a Grace
Sprinkles another’s laughing face
With nectar, and runs on!”