‘that sweet seraph of our nation, Quarles,’
became a byeword for all that was absurdest and worst in poetry. The reacquaintance which I have made with him, while looking for some specimen of his verse worthy to be cited here, has shown me that his admirers, though they may have admired a good deal too much, had far better right than his despisers.—l. 25: ‘To vie’ is to put down a certain sum upon a card; ‘to revie’ is to cover this with a larger, by which the challenger becomes in turn the challenged.
[P. 132], No. cxiii.—Milton’s lines on Shakespeare cannot properly be counted an epitaph. But setting those aside, as not fairly coming into competition, this is, in my judgment, the finest and most affecting epitaph in the English language. Of Pope’s there is not one which deserves to be compared with it. His are of art, artful, which this is no less, but this also of nature and natural. With all this it has grievous shortcomings. Death and eternity raise other issues concerning the departed besides those which are dealt with here.—This epitaph contains two fine allusions to Virgil’s Æneid, with which Dryden was of necessity so familiar. The first, that of l. 7-10 to book v. l. 327-338. At the games with which Æneas celebrates his father’s funeral, Nisus and his younger friend Euryalus are among the competitors in the foot-race; Nisus, who is winning, slips, and Euryalus arrives the first at the goal, and carries off the prize. In the four concluding lines there is a beautiful allusion to the well-known passage, book vi. l. 860-886, in which the poet deplores the early death of that young Marcellus, with which so many fair expectations of the imperial family and of the Roman people perished.
[P. 133], No. cxiv.—Elizabeth, wife of Henry Hastings, fifth Earl of Huntingdon, is the lady commemorated in this fine epitaph, ‘by him who says what he saw’—for this is the attestation to the truth of all that it asserts, which Lord Falkland, mindful of the ordinary untruthfulness of epitaphs, thinks it good to subscribe.
[P. 136], No. cxix.—The writer of these lines commanded a vessel sent out in 1631 by some Bristol merchants for the discovery of the North-West passage. Frozen up in the ice, he passed a winter of frightful suffering on those inhospitable shores; many of his company sinking beneath the hardships of the time. The simple and noble manner in which these sufferings were borne he has himself left on record (Harris’s Voyages, vol. i. pp. 600-606); how too, when at length the day of deliverance dawned, and the last evening which they should spend on that cruel coast had arrived—but he shall speak his own words:—‘and now the sun was set, and the boat came ashore for us, whereupon after evening prayer we assembled and went up to take a last view of our dead; where leaning upon my arm on one of their tombs I uttered these lines; which, though perhaps they may procure laughter in the wiser sort, they yet moved my young and tender-hearted companions at that time to some compassion.’ To me they seem to have the pathos, better than any other, of truth.
[P. 137], No. cxxi.—A few lines from this exquisite monody have found their way, but even these rarely, into some modern selections. The whole poem, inexpressibly tender and beautiful as it is, is included in Headley’s Select Beauties, 1810, but in no other that I know. Henry King, afterwards Bishop of Chichester, married Anne, the eldest daughter of Robert Berkeley; she probably died in 1624, and, as we learn from the poem itself (see vv. 28, 29), in or about her twenty-fourth year. It would be interesting to know whether this was the lady, all hope to whose hand he at one time supposed he must for ever renounce, and did renounce in those other lines, hardly less beautiful, which he has called The Surrender, and which will be found at p. 65 of this volume. Henry King’s Poems have been carefully edited by the Rev. T. Hannah, London, 1843.
[P. 141], No. cxxiii.—A rough rugged piece of verse, as indeed almost all Donne’s poetry is imperfect in form and workmanship; but it is the genuine cry of one engaged in that most terrible of all struggles, wherein, as we are winners or losers, we have won all or lost all. There is indeed much in Donne, in the unfolding of his moral and spiritual life, which often reminds us of St. Augustine. I do not mean that, noteworthy as on many accounts he was, and in the language of Carew, one of his contemporaries,
‘A king who ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit,’
he at all approached in intellectual or spiritual stature to the great Doctor of the Western Church. But still there was in Donne the same tumultuous youth, the same entanglement in youthful lusts, the same conflict with these, and the same final deliverance from them; and then the same passionate and personal grasp of the central truths of Christianity, linking itself as this did with all that he had suffered, and all that he had sinned, and all through which by God’s grace he had victoriously struggled.