[501] Ellis’s Specimens of Early English Poets, iii. 96.
Habington. 55. The poetry of Habington is that of a pure and amiable mind, turned to versification by the custom of the age, during a real passion for a lady of birth and virtue, the Castara whom he afterwards married; but it displays no great original power, nor is it by any means exempt from the ordinary blemishes of hyperbolical compliment and far-fetched imagery. |Earl of Pembroke.| The poems of William Earl of Pembroke, long known by the character drawn for him by Clarendon, and now as the object of Shakspeare’s doting friendship, were ushered into the world after his death, with a letter of extravagant flattery addressed by Donne to Christiana Countess of Devonshire.[502] But there is little reliance to be placed on the freedom from interpolation of these posthumous editions. Among these poems attributed to Lord Pembroke, we find one of the best known of Carew’s,[503] and even the famous lines addressed to the Soul, which some have given to Silvester. The poems, in general, are of little merit; some are grossly indecent; nor would they be mentioned here except for the interest recently attached to the author’s name. But they throw no light whatever on the sonnets of Shakspeare.
[502] The only edition that I have seen, or that I find mentioned, of Lord Pembroke’s poems is in 1660. But as Donne died in 1631, I conceive that there must be one of earlier date. The Countess of Devonshire is not called dowager; her husband died in 1643.
[503] Ask me no more whither do stray
The golden atoms of the day.
Suckling. 56. Sir John Suckling is acknowledged to have left far behind him all former writers of song in gaiety and ease; it is not equally clear that he has ever since been surpassed. His poetry aims at no higher praise; he shows no sentiment or imagination, either because he had them not, or because he did not require either in the style he chose. Perhaps the Italians may have poetry in that style equal to Suckling’s; I do not know that they have, nor do I believe that there is any in French; that there is none in Latin I know.[504] |Lovelace.| Lovelace is chiefly known by a single song; his other poetry is much inferior; and indeed it may be generally remarked that the flowers of our early verse, both in the Elizabethan and the subsequent age, have been well culled by good taste and a friendly spirit of selection. We must not judge of them, or shall judge of them very favourably, by the extracts of Headley or Ellis.
[504] Suckling’s Epithalamium, though not written for those “Qui Musas colitis severiores,” has been read by almost all the world, and is a matchless piece of liveliness and facility.
Herrick. 57. The most amorous, and among the best of our amorous poets was Robert Herrick, a clergyman ejected from his living in Devonshire by the long parliament, whose “Hesperides, or Poems Human and Divine,” were published in 1648. Herrick’s divine poems are of course such as might be presumed by their title and by his calling; of his human, which are poetically much superior, and probably written in early life, the greater portion is light and voluptuous, while some border on the licentious and indecent. A selection was published in 1815, by which, as commonly happens, the poetical fame of Herrick does not suffer; a number of dull epigrams are omitted, and the editor has a manifest preference for what must be owned to be the most elegant and attractive part of his author’s rhymes. He has much of the lively grace that distinguishes Anacreon and Catullus, and approaches also, with a less cloying monotony, to the Basia of Joannes Secundus. Herrick has as much variety as the poetry of kisses can well have; but his love is in a very slight degree that of sentiment, or even any intense passion; his mistresses have little to recommend them, even in his own eyes, save their beauties, and none of these are omitted in his catalogues. Yet he is abundant in the resources of verse; without the exuberant gaiety of Suckling, or perhaps the delicacy of Carew, he is sportive, fanciful, and generally of polished language. The faults of his age are sometimes apparent; though he is not often obscure, he runs, more perhaps for the sake of variety than any other cause, into occasional pedantry; he has his conceits and false thoughts, but these are more than redeemed by the numerous very little poems (for those of Herrick are frequently not longer than epigrams) which may be praised without much more qualification than belongs to such poetry.
Milton. 58. John Milton was born in 1609. Few are ignorant of his life, in recovering and recording every circumstance of which no diligence has been spared, nor has it often been unsuccessful. Of his Latin poetry some was written at the age of seventeen; in English we have nothing, I believe, the date of which is known to be earlier than the sonnet on entering his twenty-third year. In 1634, he wrote Comus, which was published in 1637. Lycidas was written in the latter year, and most of his shorter pieces soon afterwards, except the sonnets, some of which do not come within the first half of the century.
His Comus. 59. Comus was sufficient to convince any one of taste and feeling that a great poet had arisen in England, and one partly formed in a different school from his contemporaries. Many of them had produced highly beautiful and imaginative passages; but none had evinced so classical a judgment, none had aspired to so regular a perfection Jonson had learned much from the ancients; but there was a grace in their best models which he did not quite attain. Neither his Sad Shepherd nor the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher have the elegance or dignity of Comus. A noble virgin and her young brothers, by whom this masque was originally represented, required an elevation, a purity, a sort of severity of sentiment which no one in that age could have given but Milton. He avoided, and nothing loth, the more festive notes which dramatic poetry was wont to mingle with its serious strain. But for this he compensated by the brightest hues of fancy and the sweetest melody of song. In Comus we find nothing prosaic or feeble, no false taste in the incidents and not much in the language, nothing over which we should desire to pass on a second perusal. The want of what we may call personality, none of the characters having names, except Comus himself, who is a very indefinite being, and the absence of all positive attributes of time and place, enhance the ideality of the fiction by a certain indistinctness not unpleasing to the imagination.
Lycidas. 60. It has been said, I think very fairly, that Lycidas is a good test of a real feeling for what is peculiarly called poetry. Many, or perhaps we might say most readers do not taste its excellence; nor does it follow that they may not greatly admire Pope and Dryden, or even Virgil and Homer. It is, however, somewhat remarkable that Johnson, who has committed his critical reputation by the most contemptuous depreciation of this poem, had in an earlier part of his life selected the tenth eclogue of Virgil for peculiar praise;[505] the tenth eclogue, which, beautiful as it is, belongs to the same class of pastoral and personal allegory, and requires the same sacrifice of reasoning criticism as the Lycidas itself. In the age of Milton, the poetical world had been accustomed by the Italian and Spanish writers to a more abundant use of allegory than has been pleasing to their posterity; but Lycidas is not so much in the nature of an allegory as of a masque; the characters passed before our eyes in imagination, as on the stage; they are chiefly mythological, but not creations of the poet. Our sympathy with the fate of Lycidas may not be much stronger than for the desertion of Gallus by his mistress; but many poems will yield an exquisite pleasure to the imagination that produce no emotion in the heart; nor none at least, except through associations independent of the subject.