but he survived almost till the Revolution, and did not rise to his greatest celebrity till after the Restoration, so that he will more fitly fall to be noticed in a subsequent page. The other three all belong exclusively to the times of Charles I. and of the Commonwealth.

Thomas Carew, styled on the title-page "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. In 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 in ease, lucidity, and directness rivalling the language of ordinary life, Carew's poetry is not inferior to Waller's; and, while his expression is as correct and natural, and his numbers as harmonious, the music of his verse is richer, and his imagination is warmer and more florid. But the texture of his composition is in general extremely slight; the substance of most of his pieces consists merely of the elaboration of some single idea; and, if he has more tenderness than Waller, he is far from having so much dignity, variety, or power of sustained effort. His songs beginning "He that loves a rosy cheek," and "Ask me no more where Jove bestows, when June is past, the fading rose," are in all the collections of extracts; the following is less hackneyed :

Amongst the myrtles as I walked,

Love and my sighs thus intertalked :
'Tell me,' said Ï, in deep distress,
'Where may I find my shepherdess?"

"Thou fool,' said Love, 'know'st thou not this,
In every thing that's good she is?

In yonder tulip go and seek;

There thou may'st find her lip, her cheek.

In yon enamoured pansy by;

There thou shalt have her curious eye.
In bloom of peach, in rosy bud;
There wave the streamers of her blood.

In brightest lilies that there stand,
The emblems of her whiter hand.
In yonder rising hill there smell
Such sweets as in her bosom dwell.'
''Tis true,' said I: and thereupon
I went to pluck them one by one,
To make of parts a union;
But on a sudden all was gone.

These be,

With that I stopt: said Love,
Fond man, resemblancies of thee;

And, as these flowers, thy joys shall die,
Even in the twinkling of an eye;

And all thy hopes of her shall wither,

Like these short sweets thus knit together.''

This may seem sufficiently artificial, and no doubt is so; and, when the reader comes to the streamers of the fair lady's blood waving in the peach and the rose-bud, he may be disposed to demur to the claim.of Carew to be reputed above the seductions of a striking metaphor, however violent or eccentric. But the distinction of this French school of poetry is certainly not that it altogether eschews conceits and false thoughts; on the contrary, it is decidedly addicted to what is brilliant in preference to what is true and deep, and its system of composition is essentially one of point and artifice; but all this is still to a certain extent in subordination to the principles and laws of good writing; the conceit is always reduced at least to fair rhetorical sound and shape; it is not made alone the substitute for every other attraction, the аро

logy and compensation for every other vice of style, the prime ingredient and almost only thing needful in the composition; when the thought is false and absurd it is not tortured into still greater absurdity and grotesqueness by the perpetration of all sorts of violence upon the words.

There is more quaintness, however, in the poetry of Lovelace than in that of Carew. The poems of

Colonel Richard Lovelace are contained in two small

volumes, one entitled ' Lucasta,' published in 1649; the other entitled 'Posthume Poems,' published by his brother in 1659, the year after the author's death.* They consist principally of songs and other short pieces. Lovelace's songs, which are mostly amatory, are many of them carelessly enough written, and there are very few of them not defaced by some harshness or deformity; but a few of his best pieces are as sweetly versified as Carew's, with perhaps greater variety of fancy as well as more of vital force; and a tone of chivalrous gentleness and honour gives to some of them a pathos beyond the reach of any mere poetic art. He has written nothing else, however, nearly so exquisite as his well-known lines to Althea in prison; and therefore, familiar as that song is likely to be to most of our readers, it would be unfair to substitute any other specimen of his poetry :—

"When love with unconfined wings

Hovers within my gates,

And my divine Althea brings

To whisper at the grates;

* Reprints of both have been produced by Mr. Singer; 12mo. Chiswick, 1817, and 1818.

When I lie tangled in her hair,
And fettered to her eye;

The birds that wanton in the air
Know no such liberty.

When flowing cups run swiftly round,
With no allaying Thames,

Our careless heads with roses bound,
Our hearts with loyal flames;
When thirsty grief in wine we steep,
When healths and draughts go free,
Fishes that tipple in the deep
Know no such liberty.

When, like committed linnets, I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetness, mercy, majesty,
And glories of my King;
When I shall voice aloud how good
He is, how great should be;
Enlarged winds that curl the flood
Know no such liberty.

Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage:
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above
Enjoy such liberty.

Scattered over Lovelace's poetry are a good many single expressions struck out by a true poetical feeling. Campbell has borrowed from him the line in his Dream of the Exile,

"The sentinel stars set their watch in the sky;"

which in Lovelace is, in one of his addresses to Lucasta,

"Like to the sentinel stars, I watch all night."

a

Misprinted "Gods" in the original edition.

Lovelace's days, darkened in their close by the loss of every thing except honour, were cut short at the age of forty; his contemporary, Sir John Suckling, who moved. gaily and thoughtlessly through his short life as through a dance or a merry game, died in 1641, at that of thirtytwo. Suckling, who is the author of a small collection of poems, as well as of four plays, has none of the pathos of Lovelace or Carew; but he equals them in fluency and natural grace of manner, and he has besides a sprightliness and buoyancy which is all his own. His poetry has a more impulsive air than theirs; and though, in reference to the greater part of what he has produced, he must be classed along with them and Waller as an adherent to the French school of propriety and precision, some of the happiest of his effusions are remarkable for a cordiality and impetuosity of manner which has nothing foreign about it, but is altogether English, although there is not much resembling it in any of his predecessors any more than of his contemporaries, unless perhaps in some of Skelton's pieces. His famous ballad of The Wedding is the very perfection of gaiety and archness in verse; and his Session of the Poets, in which he scatters about his wit and humour in a more careless style, may be considered as constituting him the founder of a species of satire, which Cleveland and Marvel and other subsequent writers carried into new applications, and which only expired among us with Swift. We cannot but give the Ballad, often as it has been printed. The subject is the marriage of Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill (afterwards Earl of Orrery), with the Lady Margaret Howard, daughter of the Earl of Suffolk; and the reader will admire the art with which grace and even poetry of

VOL. IV.

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