40Contracted be into a span of dust.
On the Earl of Essex.] This and the next two may be called King's chief, if not his only, political poems: that they were kept back till after the Restoration is not surprising. Of Essex—one of the most unfortunate of men, the son of an unlucky father, the husband of one of the worst of women, and of another not much better, a half-hearted rebel, a soldier not less brave than blundering—not much is to be said here. King had some interest in the first and universally known divorce (the second, much less notorious, was from Elizabeth Paulet), for his father had been uncourtly and honest enough to oppose it strongly.
10 This rather vigorous line was to be prophetic as well as true at the time, for when, after the Restoration, the title of Essex was revived it was for the Capels, who still hold it, not for any Devereux. The vigour just referred to is by no means absent from the whole poem, and in an ante-Drydenian piece is really remarkable.
32 temple-robbing tyrant's fall] side-note in orig.: Belshasar, Dan. 5.
An Elegy on Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle.
[Murdered August 28, 1648.]
In measures solemn as the groans that fall
From the hoarse trumpet at some funeral;
With trailing Elegy and mournful verse,