much an age of song as the preceding-but the number of names might probably be raised to perhaps, between two and three hundred might be classed as belonging to the period between the accession of James I. and the restoration of Charles II. Of course, out of so numerous a throng, we can here select for notice only a very few of those of the greatest eminence. The three authors of the poems of most pretension that appeared within the present period, or only a few years before its commencement, are, Warner, Drayton, and Daniel. William Warner is supposed to have been born about the year 1558; he died in 1609. His only known poetical work is his Albion's England, first published in part in 1586, but not in a complete form till 1606. This is, in fact, a legendary history of England from the Deluge to the reign of Elizabeth, written in the old verse of fourteen syllables, and comprised in thirteen books. It was one of the most popular poetical works of its day; and its author was by his contemporaries considered to be as great a poet as Spenser. The form and subject of the poem would account for its popularity, which was perhaps, after all, no greater than that of the Mirror for Magistrates, a work of somewhat the same description, though certainly constructed on a less ambitious plan; but the high admiration that was felt for Warner's poetical powers seems to have been excited principally by his style, which was thought a model of elegance. He is a very unequal writer; but in his happiest passages the expression is certainly wonderfully easy and lucid for that age. Some of his verses, too, without the rudeness, have much of the simplicity and tenderness of the old ballad. On the whole, however, he is but a tame and prosaic writer, and the poetry of the greater part of his work consists chiefly in its rhymes. Michael Drayton, who was born in 1563, and died in 1631, is one of the most voluminous of our old poets, being the author, besides many minor productions, of three works of great length: his Mortimeriados, commonly called his Barons' Wars, on the subject of the civil wars of the reign of Edward II., first printed in 1596; his England's Heroical Epistles, 1598; and his Polyolbion, the first eighteen books of which appeared in 1612, and the whole, consisting of thirty books, and extending to about as many thousand lines, in 1622. This last is the work on which his fame principally rests. It is a most elaborate and minute topographical description of England, written in Alexandrine rhymes; and is a very remarkable work for the varied learning it displays, as well as its poetic merits. The genius of Drayton is neither very imaginative nor very pathetic; but he is an equable and weighty writer, with a sparkling, if not a very warm, fancy. His most graceful poetry, however, is perhaps to be found in some of his shorter pieces-in his Pastorals, his very elegant and lively little poem entitled Nymphidia, or The Court of Fairy, and his verses On Poets and Poesy, in which occur the lines on Marlow that have been quoted above. The great work of Samuel Daniel, who was born in 1562, and died in 1619, is his "Civil Wars between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York," in eight books, the first four published in 1595, the fifth in 1599, the sixth in 1602, and the two last in 1609. He is also the author of various minor poetical productions, of which the principal are a collection of sonnets entitled Delia, a philosophical poem in dialogue entitled Musophilus, and several tragedies and other dramatic pieces, which last are of very small estimation. The language of Daniel has more of a modern air than even that of the best passages of Warner, and he is by much the more equable and generally careful of the two. It must be admitted, too, that, notwithstanding the occasional charm of simple and natural feeling in Warner, Daniel's poetry is altogether of a higher tone and more vigorous animation. The imagination of the one as well as of the other keeps to a very humble flight: but there is often a quiet dignity and easy strength in Daniel's verse to which that of Warner scarcely ever rises. On the whole, of these three contemporaries, while the first rank decidedly belongs to Drayton, Daniel must be placed next to him, and Warner last in order, though perhaps nearer to Daniel than the latter is to Drayton.* Along with these names, though of somewhat later date, may be mentioned those of the two brothers, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, cousins of the dramatist, and both clergymen. Giles, who died in 1623, is the author of a poem entitled Christ's Victory and Triumph in Heaven and Earth over and after Death, which was published in a quarto volume in 1610. It is divided into four parts, and is written in stanzas somewhat like those of Spenser, only containing eight lines each instead of nine; both the Fletchers, indeed, were professed disciples and imitators of the great author of the Fairy Queen. Phineas, who survived till 1650, published in 1633, along with a small collection of Piscatory Eclogues and other Poetical Miscellanies, a long allegorical poem, entitled The Purple Island, in twelve books or cantos, written in a stanza of seven lines. The idea upon which this performance is founded is one of the most singular that ever took possession of the brain even of an allegorist: the purple island is nothing else than the human body, and the poem is, in fact, for the greater part, a system of anatomy, nearly as minute in its details as if it were a scientific treatise, but wrapping up everything in a fantastic guise of double meaning, so as to produce a languid sing-song of laborious riddles, which are mostly unintelligible without the very • Some notion of the manner of each of these poets may be ob tained from the specimens Percy has inserted in his Reliques, of the pastoral or eclogue of Dowsabel, by Drayton (i. 320), the poem of Ulysses and the Syren, by Daniel (i. 398), and the tales of the Patient Countess (i. 311), and Argentile and Curan (ii. 328), by Warner. The extracts from Warner and Daniel, however, are more favourable specimens than that from Drayton, of whose poetry, in either its variety or its highest range, the eclogue of Dowsabel conveys no impression. knowledge they make a pretence of conveying. After he has finished his anatomical course, the author takes up the subject of psychology, which he treats in the same luminous and interesting manner. Such a work as this has no claim to be considered a poem even of the same sort with the Fairy Queen. In Spenser, the allegory, whether historical or moral, is little more than formal: the poem, taken in its natural and obvious import, as a tale of "knights' and ladies' gentle deeds"-a song of their " fierce wars and faithful loves"has meaning and interest enough, without the allegory at all, which, indeed, except in a very few passages, is so completely concealed behind the direct narrative, that we may well suppose it to have been nearly as much lost sight of and forgotten by the poet himself as it is by his readers: here, the allegory is the soul of every stanza and of every line-that which gives to the whole work whatever meaning, and consequently whatever * poetry, it possesses-with which, indeed, it is sometimes hard enough to be understood, but without which it would be absolute inanity and nonsense. The Purple Island is rather a production of the same species with Dr. Darwin's Botanic Garden; but, forced and false enough as Darwin's style is in many respects, it would be doing an injustice to his poem to compare it with Phineas Fletcher's, either in regard to the degree in which nature and propriety are violated in the principle and manner of the composition, or in regard to the spirit and general success of the execution. Of course, there is a good deal of ingenuity shown in Fletcher's poem; and it is not unimpregnated by poetic feeling, nor without some passages of considerable merit. But in many other parts it is quite grotesque; and, on the whole, it is fantastic, puerile, and wearisome. Mr. Hallam thinks that Giles Fletcher, in his poem of Christ's Victory and Triumph, has shown more vigour than Phineas,* "but less sweetness, less smoothness, and more affectation in his style."+ It ought to be added, to the honour of these two writers, that the works of both of them appear to have been studied by Milton, and that imitations of some passages in each are to be traced in his poetry. Milton was undoubtedly a diligent reader of the English poetry of the age preceding his own; and his predecessors of all degrees, Ben Jonson and Fletcher the dramatists, as well as the two cousins of the latter, and, as we have seen above, the earlier dramatic writer, George Peele, had contributed something to the awakening or directing of his feeling for the grand and beautiful, and to the forming of his melodious and lofty note. Another of his favourites among the poets of this date is supposed to have been Joshua Sylvester, the translator of the Divine Weeks and Works of the French poet, Du Bartas. Sylvester, who in one • Called, by mistake, his elder brother. Milton's obligations to Sylvester were first pointed out in "Considerations on Milton's early Reading, and the prima stamina of his Paradise Lost, together with Extracts from a Poet of the Sixteenth Century;" by the Rev. Charles Dunster. 1800. of his publications styles himself a MerchantAdventurer, seems to have belonged to the Puritan party, which may have had some share in influencing Milton's regard. Nothing can be more uninspired than the general run of Joshua's verse, or more fantastic and absurd than the greater number of its more ambitious passages; for he had no taste or judgment, and, provided the stream of sound and the jingle of the rhyme were kept up, all was right in his notion. His poetry consists chiefly of translations from the French; but he is also the author of some original pieces, the title of one of which, a courtly offering from the poetical Puritan to the prejudices of King James, may be quoted as a lively specimen of his style and genius: :- "Tobacco battered, and the pipes shattered, about their ears, that idly idolize so base and barbarous a weed, or at leastwise overlove so loathsome a vanity, by a volley of holy shot thundered from Mount Helicon."* But, with all his general flatness and frequent absurdity, Sylvester has an uncommon flow of harmonious, words at times, and occasionally even some fine lines and felicitous expressions. His contemporaries called him the "Silver-tongued Sylvester," for what they considered the sweetness of his versificationand some of his best passages justify the title. Indeed, even when the substance of what he writes approaches nearest to nonsense, the sound is often very graceful, soothing the ear with something like the swing and ring of Dryden's heroics. But, after a few lines, is always sure to come in some ludicrous image or expression which destroys the effect of the whole. The translation of Du Bartas is inscribed to King James in a most adulatory and elaborate dedication, consisting of a string of sonnet-shaped stanzas, ten in all, of which the two first are a very fair sample of the mingled good and bad of Sylvester's poetry: "To England's, Scotland's, France, and Ireland's king; Whose faith him Champion of the Faith enstyles; The Daphnean crown to crown him laureate; And with their crown their kingdom's arms they yield, "Our sun did set, and yet no night ensued; Our woeful loss so joyful gain did bring.' Of our dead Phenix, dear Elizabeth, So much, O King, thy sacred worth presume-I-on. It is not to be denied that there is considerable skill in versification here, and also some ingenious 8vo. Lond. 1615. rhetoric but, not to notice the pervading extravagance of the sentiment, some of the best-sounding of the lines and phrases have next to no meaning; and the close of each stanza, that of the last in particular, is in the manner of a ludicrous travesty. Of the translators of ancient and foreign poetry in this age, besides Sylvester, Chapman has been already mentioned. Another very eminent name in this line is that of Edward Fairfax, whose translation of Tasso's great epic was first published under the title of "Godfrey of Bulloigne, or the Recoverie of Jerusalem," in 1600. This is a work of true genius, full of passages of great beauty; and although by no means a perfectly exact or servile version of the Italian original, is throughout executed with as much care as taste and spirit. Another poetical translator of this period, less celebrated than Fairfax, but in some things still superior to him, is Sir Richard Fanshawe, the author of versions of Camoens's Lusiad, of Guarini's Pastor Fido, of the Fourth Book of the Eneid, of the Odes of Horace, and of the "Querer por Solo Querer," (To love for love's sake,) of the Spanish dramatist Mendoza. Some passages from the last-mentioned work, which was published in 1649, may be found in Lamb's Specimens, the ease and flowing gaiety of which never have been excelled even in original writing. The Pastor Fido is also rendered with much spirit and elegance. Fanshawe is, besides, the author of a Latin translation of Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, and of some original poetry. His genius, however, was sprightly and elegant rather than lofty, and perhaps he does not succeed so well in translating poetry of a more serious style: at least Mickle, the modern translator of Camoens, in the discourse prefixed to his own version, speaks with great contempt of that of his predecessor; affirming not only that it is exceedingly unfaithful, but that Fanshawe had not "the least idea of the dignity of the epic style, or of the true spirit of poetical translation." He seems also to sneer at Fanshawe's Lusiad, because it was "published during the usurpation of Cromwell,❞—as if even the poets and translators of that time must have been a sort of illegitimates and usurpers in their way. But Fanshawe was all his life a steady royalist, and served both Charles I. and his son in a succession of high employments. Mickle, in truth, was not the man to appreciate either Fanshawe or Cromwell. One of the most graceful poetical writers of the reign of James I. is William Drummond, of Hawthornden, near Edinburgh; and he is further deserving of notice as the first of his countrymen, at least of any eminence, who aspired to write in English. He has left us a quantity of prose as well as verse; the former very much resembling the style of Sir Philip Sydney in his Arcadia,the latter, in manner and spirit, formed more upon the model of Surrey, or rather upon that of Petrarch and the other Italian poets, whom Surrey Vol. ii. pp. 242-253, and many of his English successors imitated. No English imitator of the Italian poetry, however, has excelled Drummond, either in the sustained melody of his verse, or the chaste fancy that decorates his song, or the rich vein of thoughtful tenderness that modulates its cadences. We will transcribe one of his sonnets as a specimen of the fine moral painting, tinged with the colouring of scholarly recollections, in which he delights to indulge: Trust not, sweet soul, those curled waves of gold Nor voice whose sounds more strange effects do show, Dark hyacinth, of late whose blushing beams Shall once, ay me, not spare that spring of yours. One of the most remarkable poems of this age, as it may be considered, for it was four or five times reprinted in the reign of James, although first published, in 1599, is the "Nosce Teipsum" of Sir John Davies, who was successively James's solicitor and attorney general, and had been ap pointed to the place of chief justice of the King's Bench, when he died, before he could enter upon its duties, in 1626. Davies is also the author of a poem on dancing entitled "Orchestra," and of some minor pieces, all distinguished by vivacity as well as precision of style; but he is only now remembered for his philosophical poem, the earliest of the kind in the language. It is written in rhyme, in the common heroic ten-syllable verse, but disposed in quatrains, like the early play of Misogonus already mentioned,† and other poetry of the same era, or like Sir Thomas Overbury's poem of the Wife, the Gondibert of Sir William Davenant, and the Annus Mirabilis of Dryden, at a later period. No one of these writers has managed this difficult stanza so successfully as Davies: it has the disadvantage of requiring the sense to be in general closed at certain regularly and quickly recurring turns, which yet are very ill adapted for an effec tive pause; and even all the skill of Dryden has been unable to free it from a certain air of monotony and languor,—a circumstance of which that poet may be supposed to have been himself sensible, since he wholly abandoned it after one of two early attempts. Davies, however, has conquered its difficulties; and, as has been observed, "perhaps no language can produce a poem, extending to so great a length, of more condensation of thought, or in which fewer languid verses will be found." In fact, it is by this condensation and sententious brevity, so carefully filed and elaborated, however, as to involve no sacrifice of perspicuity or fulness of expression, that he has The full title is "Nosce Teipsum. This oracle expounded in two elegies:-1. Of human knowledge.-2. Of the soul of man and the immortality thereof." + See ante, p. 580. Hallam, Lit, of Europe, ii. 314. attained his end. Every quatrain is a pointed expression of a separate thought, like one of Rochefoucault's Maxims; each thought being, by great skill and painstaking in the packing, made exactly to fit and to fill the same case. It may be doubted, however, whether Davies would not have produced a still better poem if he had chosen a measure which would have allowed him greater freedom and real variety; unless, indeed, his poetical talent was of a sort that required the suggestive aid and guidance of such artificial restraints as he had to cope with in this, and what would have been a bondage to a more fiery and teeming imagination. was rather a support to his. He wrote, among other things, a number of acrostics upon the name of Queen Elizabeth; which, says Ellis, "are probably the best acrostics ever written, and all equally good; but they seem to prove that their author was too fond of struggling with useless difficulties."* Perhaps he found the limitations of the acrostic, too, a help rather than a hindrance. Along with Sir John Davies's poem may be noticed the "Cooper's Hill" of Sir John Denham, first published in 1643. When this poem appeared it was at once hailed as a most remarkable production, and the more so, as coming from a young man (Denham was then only twenty-seven) nearly unknown till now as a writer of verse. Waller remarked that he had broken out like the Irish rebellion, threescore thousand strong, when nobody was aware or in the least suspected it. Cooper's Hill has not quite all the concentration of Davies's Nosce Teipsum, but it is equally pointed, correct, and stately, with, partly owing to the subject, a warmer tone of imagination and feeling, and a fuller swell of verse. The spirit of the same classical style pervades both; and they are certainly the two greatest poems in that style which had been produced down to the close of the present period. Denham is the author of a number of other compositions in verse, and especially of some songs and other shorter pieces, several of which are very spirited; but the fame of his principal poem has thrown everything else he has written into the shade. It is remarkable that many biographical notices of this poet make him to have survived nearly till the Revolution, and relate various stories of the miseries of his protracted old age; when, the fact is, that he died in 1667, at the age of fifty two. The title of the metaphysical school of poetry, which in one sense of the words might have been given to Davies and his imitators, has been conferred by Dryden upon another race of writers whose founder was a contemporary of Davies,the famous Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's. Donne, who died at the age of fifty-eight in 1631, is said to have written most of his poetry before the end of the sixteenth century, but none of it was published till late in the reign of James. It consists of lyrical pieces entitled songs and sonnets, epithalamions or marriage songs, funeral and other • Spec. of Early Eng. Poets, ii. 370. elegies, satires, epistles, and divine poems. On a superficial inspection Donne's verses look like so many riddles. They seem to be written upon the principle of making the meaning as difficult to be found out as possible-of using all the resources of language not to express thought, but to conceal it. Nothing is said in a direct, natural manner; conceit follows conceit without intermission; the most remote analogies, the most far-fetched images, the most unexpected turns, one after another, surprise and often puzzle the understanding; while things of the most opposite kinds-the harsh and the harmonious, the graceful and the grotesque, the grave and the gay, the pious and the profane -meet and mingle in the strangest of dances. But, running through all this bewilderment, a deeper insight detects not only a vein of the most exuberant wit, but often the sunniest and most delicate fancy, and the truest tenderness and depth of feeling. Donne, though in the latter part of his life he became a very serious and devout poet as well as man, began by writing amatory lyrics, the strain of which is anything rather than devout; and in this kind of writing he seems to have formed his poetic style, which for such compositions would, to a mind like his, be the most natural and expressive of any. The species of lunacy which quickens and exalts the imagination of a lover would, in one of so seething a brain as he was, strive to expend itself in all sorts of novel and wayward combinations,-just as Shakspeare has made it do in his Romeo and Juliet, whose rich intoxication of spirit he has by nothing else set so livingly before us as by making them thus exhaust all the eccentricities of language in their struggle to give expression to that inexpressible passion which had taken captive the whole heart and being of both. Donne's later poetry, in addition to the same abundance and originality of thought, often running into a wildness and extravagance not so excusable here as in his erotic verses, is famous for the singular movement of the versification, which has been usually described as the extreme degree of the rugged and tuneless. Pope has given us a translation of his four Satires into modern language, which he calls "The Satires of Dr. Donne Versified." Their harshness, as contrasted with the music of his lyrics, has also been referred to as proving that the English language, at the time when Donne wrote, had not been brought to a sufficiently advanced state for the writing of heroic verse in perfection.* That this last notion is wholly unfounded numerous examples sufficiently testify; not to speak of the blank verse of the dramatists, the rhymed heroics of Shakspeare, of Fletcher, of Jonson, of Spenser, and of other writers contemporary with and of earlier date than Donne, are for the most part as perfectly smooth and regular as any that have since been written; at all events, whatever irregularity may be detected in them, if they be tested by Pope's narrow gamut, is clearly not to be im • See an article on Doane in Penny Cyclopædia, vol, ix. p. 85. puted to any immaturity in the language. These writers evidently preferred and cultivated, deliberately and on principle, a wider compass, and freer and more varied flow of melody, than Pope had a taste or an ear for. Nor can it be questioned, we think, that the peculiar construction of Donne's verse in his satires and many of his other later poems was also adopted by choice and on system. His lines, though they will not suit the see-saw style of reading verse,-to which he probably intended that they should be invincibly impracticable, are not without a deep and subtle music of their own, in which the cadences respond to the sentiment, when enunciated with a true feeling of all that they convey. They are not smooth or luscious verses, certainly; nor is it contended that the endeavour to raise them to as vigorous and impressive a tone as possible, by depriving them of all over-sweetness or liquidity, has not been carried too far; but we cannot doubt that whatever harshness they have was designedly given to them, and was conceived to infuse into them an essential part of their relish. Cowley, the most celebrated follower of Donne, as he has been commonly considered, published some of his poems within the present period; but as he survived the Restoration, and obtained his greatest fame as a poet after that date, we shall reserve our notice of him till we have all that he wrote before us. For the same reasons the poetry of Milton, of Waller, and of Dryden, although all of them had published some of their pieces before the expiration of the present period, will be most conveniently considered in the next Book. 66 A few more of the minor poets of this age, the most distinguished for the originality, the fancy, or the grace of their poetry, can be only very briefly enumerated. Robert Herrick, who, like Donne, was a clergyman, is the author of a large volume published in 1648, under the title of Hesperides." It consists, like the poetry of Donne, partly of love-verses, partly of pieces of a devotional character, or, as they are styled in the title-page, "Works Human and Divine." The same singular license which even the most reverend personages and the purest and most religious minds in that age allowed themselves to take in light and amatory poetry is found in Herrick as well as in Donne; a good deal of whose quaintness and fondness for conceit Herrick has also caught. Yet some both of his hymns and of his anacreontics-for of such strange intermixture, in truth, does his poetry consist-are beautifully simple and natural. Herrick survived the Restoration, but it is not known in what year he died. Along with his poetry may be mentioned that of another clergyman, George Herbert, a younger brother of the celebrated Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, whose volume, entitled "The Temple," was published immediately after his death, in 1633, and was at least six or seven times reprinted in the course of the present period. His biographer, Izaak Walton, tells us that when he wrote, in the reign of Charles II., twenty thousand copies of it had been sold. Herbert was an intimate friend of Donne, and no doubt a great admirer of his poetry; but his own has been to a great extent preserved from the imitation of Donne's style, into which it might in other circumstances have fallen, in all probability by its having been composed with little effort or elaboration, and chiefly to relieve and amuse his own mind by the melodious expression of his favourite fancies and contemplations. His quaintness lies in his thoughts rather than in their expression, which is in general sufficiently simple and luminous. Herbert has considerable fancy and pathos, and, on the whole, may be considered one of the most poetical of our religious lyrical writers. To a different class belong three other eminently graceful and spirited minor poets of this period-Carew, Suckling, and Lovelace. Thomas Carew, styled one of the gentlemen of the privy chamber, and sewer in ordinary to his majesty," is the author of a small volume of poetry first printed in 1640, the year after his death. Carew is, perhaps, the earliest of our English lyrical poets whose verses exhibit a perfect polish and evenness of movement combined with a diction, elevated, indeed, in its tone, as it must needs be by the very necessities of verse, above that of mere good conversation, but yet having all the ease, nature, and directness of the language of ordinary life. The art which consists in concealing art had scarcely before been exemplified in our lighter poetry: the songs and other short lyrical compositions of preceding writers, however elegant or beautiful, had usually aimed at attracting attention by some brilliant quaintness or other artifice of thought or style, the more curious and obviously elaborate the more admired. Carew preceded Waller in substituting for all this the truer charm of merely natural thoughts in harmonious numbers: he has, indeed, even fewer conceits than Waller; and, while his verse is equally correct, its music is richer, and the tone of his poetry altogether much warmer and more imaginative. Sir John Suckling, who died in 1641, at the age of thirty-two, has none of the pathos of Carew, but all his fluency and natural elegance, with a sprightliness and buoyancy of his own, in which he has scarcely ever been matched. His famous ballad on the wedding of Lord Broghill and Lady Margaret Howard, is the very perfection of poetical gaiety, archness, and grace; not without a smack of rough cordiality, which improves its spirit, and of which he has more on other occasions. Another most elegant writer of songs and other short pieces in the reign of Charles I. was Colonel Richard Lovelace, whose poems are to be found in two small volumes, one entitled "Lucasta," published in 1649; the other entitled "Posthume Poems," published by his brother in 1659, the year after his death. Lovelace's songs, which are mostly amatory, and the produce of a genuine passion, are as exquisitely versified as Carew's, with greater liveliness of expression, and |