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:—
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.
As for Charles Cotton, his "Virgil Travesty" is deader than Scarron's, and deserves to be so. The famous lines which Lamb has made known to every one in the essay on "New Year's Day" are the best thing he did. But there are many excellent things scattered about his work, despite a strong taint of the mere coarseness and nastiness which have been spoken of. And though he was also much tainted with the hopeless indifference to prosody which distinguished all these belated cavaliers, it is noteworthy that he was one of the few Englishmen for centuries to adopt the strict French forms and write rondeaux and the like. On the whole his poetical power has been a little undervalued, while he was also dexterous in prose.
Thomas Stanley has been classed above as a translator because he would probably have liked to have his scholarship thus brought into prominence. It was, both in ancient and modern tongues, very considerable. His History of Philosophy was a classic for a very long time; and his edition of Æschylus had the honour of revision within the nineteenth century by Porson and by Butler. It is not certain that Bentley did not borrow from him; and his versions of Anacreon, of various other Greek lyrists, of the later Latins, and of modern writers in Spanish and Italian are most remarkable. But he was also an original poet in the best Caroline style of lyric; and his combination of family (for he was of the great Stanley stock), learning, and genius gave him a high position with men of letters of his day. Sidney Godolphin, who died very young fighting for the King in Hopton's army, had no time to do much; but he has been magnificently celebrated by no less authorities than Clarendon and Hobbes, and fragments of his work, which has only recently been collected, have long been known. None of it, except a commendatory poem or two, was printed in his own time, and very little later; while the MSS. are not in very accomplished form, and show few or no signs of revision by the author. Some, however, of Godolphin's lyrics are of great beauty, and a couplet translation of the Fourth Æneid has as much firmness as Sandys or Waller. Another precocious poet whose life also was cut short, though less heroically, and on the other side of politics, was John Hall, a Cambridge man, who at barely twenty (1645-6) issued a volume of poems and another, Horæ Vacivæ, of prose essays, translated Longinus, did hack-work on the Cromwellian side, and died, it is said, of loose and lazy living. Hall's poems are of mixed kinds—sacred and profane, serious and comic—and the best of them, such as "The Call" and "The Lure," have a slender but most attractive vein of fantastic charm. Patrick Carey, again, a Royalist and brother of the famous Lord Falkland, brought up as a Roman Catholic but afterwards a convert to the Church of England, left manuscript pieces, human and divine, which were printed by Sir Walter Scott in 1819, and are extremely pleasant; while Bishop King, though not often at the height of his well-known "Tell me no more how fair she is," never falls below a level much above the average. The satirist John Cleveland, whose poems were extremely popular and exist in numerous editions (much blended with other men's work and hard to disentangle), was made a sort of "metaphysical helot" by a reference in Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy and quotations in Johnson's Life of Cowley. He partly deserves this, though he has real originality of thought and phrase; but much of his work is political or occasional, and he does not often rise to the quintessential exquisiteness of some of those who have been mentioned. A few examples of this class may be given:—
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"Through a low Dark vale, where shade-affecting walks did grow Eternal strangers to the sun, did lie The narrow path frequented only by The forest tyrants when they bore their prey From open dangers of discovering day. Passed through this desert valley, they were now Climbing an easy hill, whose every bough Maintained a feathered chorister to sing Soft panegyrics, and the rude winds bring Into a murmuring slumber; whilst the calm Morn on each leaf did hang the liquid balm With an intent, before the next sun's birth To drop it in those wounds which the cleft earth Received from's last day's beams. The hill's ascent Wound up by action, in a large extent Of leafy plains, shows them the canopy Beneath whose shadow their large way did lie." |
| Chamberlayne, Pharonnida, iv. 1. 199-216. |
It will be observed that of these eighteen lines all but four are overrun; and the resemblance to the couplet of Keats's Endymion should not be missed.
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"Be conquer'd by such charms; there shall Not always such enticements fall. What know we whether that rich spring of light Will staunch his streams Of golden beams Ere the approach of night? "How know we whether't shall not be The last to either thee or me? He can at will his ancient brightness gain, But thou and I When we shall die Shall still in dust remain." |
| John Hall. |
This group of poets seems to demand a little general criticism. They stand more by themselves than almost any other group in English literary history, marked off in most cases with equal sharpness from predecessors, followers, and contemporaries. The best of them, Herrick and Carew, with Crashaw as a great thirdsman, called themselves "sons" of Ben Jonson, and so in a way they were; but they were even more sons of Donne. That great writer's burning passion, his strange and labyrinthine conceits, the union in him of spiritual and sensual fire, influenced the idiosyncrasies of each as hardly any other writer's influence has done in other times; while his technical shortcomings had unquestionably a fatal effect on the weaker members of the school. But there is also noticeable in them a separate and hardly definable influence which circumscribes their class even more distinctly. They were, as I take it, the last set of poets anywhere in Europe to exhibit, in that most fertile department of poetry which seeks its inspiration in the love of man for woman, the frank expression of physical affection united with the spirit of chivalry, tempered by the consciousness of the fading of all natural delights, and foreshadowed by that intellectual introspection which has since developed itself in such great measure—some think out of all measure—in poetry. In the best of them there is no cynicism at all. Herrick and Carew are only sorry that the amatory fashion of this world passeth; they do not in the least undervalue it while it lasts, or sneer at it when it is gone. There is, at least to my thinking, little coarseness in them (I must perpetually except Herrick's epigrams), though there is, according to modern standards, a great deal of very plain speaking. They have as much frank enjoyment of physical pleasures as any classic or any mediævalist; but they have what no classic except Catullus and perhaps Sappho had,—the fine rapture, the passing but transforming madness which brings merely physical passion sub specie æternitatis; and they have in addition a faint preliminary touch of that analytic and self-questioning spirit which refines even further upon the chivalric rapture and the classical-renaissance mysticism of the shadow of death, but which since their time has eaten up the simpler and franker moods of passion itself. With them, as a necessary consequence, the physical is (to anticipate a famous word of which more presently) always blended with the metaphysical. It is curious that, as one result of the change of manner, this should have even been made a reproach to them—that the ecstasy of their ecstasies should apparently have become not an excuse but an additional crime. Yet if any grave and precise person will read Carew's Rapture, the most audacious, and of course wilfully audacious expression of the style, and then turn to the archangel's colloquy with Adam in Paradise Lost, I should like to ask him on which side, according to his honour and conscience, the coarseness lies. I have myself no hesitation in saying that it lies with the husband of Mary Powell and the author of Tetrachordon, not with the lover of Celia and the author of the lines to "A. L."