He was one of those happily constituted men who can get pleasure from most things, and it is obvious that he got a great deal of pleasure from his life in Devonshire, where he was Vicar of Dean Prior, till he was ejected after the triumph of Cromwell in the Civil War. But his heart was never in Devonshire. There is no mirror of Devonshire in his verse. He was a censorious exile amid beauty of that sort, and could have had all the flowers and country scenes he cared for within an hour’s walk of the shop in Cheapside. He speaks in one of his poems of “this loathed country-life,” and in the verses called Dean-bourn, a rude River in Devon, by which he sometimes dwelt, he bids the river farewell, and expresses the hope that he will never set eyes on its “warty incivility” again:
To my content, I never should behold,
Were thy streams silver, or thy rocks all gold.
Rocky thou art, and rocky we discover
Thy men, and rocky are thy ways all over.
O men, O manners, now and ever known
To be a rocky generation!
A people currish, churlish as the seas,
And rude almost as rudest savages.
There is no missing the sincere unappreciativeness of these lines. The best that he can say of Devon is not that it is beautiful but that he wrote some good verses in it: