expression is preserved throughout along with the forms of speech, as well as of thought, natural to the rustic narrator: I tell thee, Dick, where I have been, At Charing-Cross, hard by the way Amongst the rest, one pestilent fine At course-a-park, withouten doubt, But wot you what? The youth was going The maid-and thereby hangs a tale- b The present Northumberland House, then called Suffolk House, the seat of the lady's father. Could ever yet produce; Her finger was so small, the ring Her feet beneath her petticoat But oh! she dances such a way He would have kissed her once or twice, She would not do 't in sight; And then she looked as who should say, And you shall do 't at night. Her cheeks so rare a white was on, Who sees them is undone; For streaks of red were mingled there Her lips were red, and one was thin Than on the sun in July. It was formerly believed that the sun danced on Easterday. See Brand, Popular Antiquities' (edit. of 1841) I. 95; where the present verse is strangely quoted in illustration of this popular notion from "a rare book entitled ' Recreation for Ingenious Head Pieces,' &c., 8vo. Lon. 1667." Her mouth so small when she does speak, But she so handled still the matter, Passion o' me! how I run on! Just in the nick the cook knocked thrice, Each serving-man with dish in hand When all the meat was on the table, Now hats fly off, and youths carouse; O' the sudden up they rise and dance; By this time all were stolen aside But that he must not know: But yet 'twas thought he guessed her mind, Above an hour or so. When in he came, Dick, there she lay, But, just as heavens would have to cross it, DENHAM. To this date belongs a remarkable poem, the 'Cooper's Hill' of Sir John Denham, first published in 1642. It immediately drew universal attention. Denham, however, had the year before made himself known as a poet by his tragedy of The Sophy, on the appearance of which 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 may be considered as belonging in point of composition to the same school with Sir John Davies's Nosce Teipsum; and, if it has not all the concentration of that poem, 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 the two greatest poems in that style which had been produced down to the date at which we are now arrived. 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 1668, at the age of fifty-three.* CLEVELAND. But, of all the cavalier poets, the one who did his cause the heartiest and stoutest service, and who, notwithstanding much carelessness or ruggedness of execution, possessed perhaps, even considered simply as a poet, the richest and most various faculty, was John Cleveland, the most popular verse-writer of his own day, the most neglected of all his contemporaries ever since. Among the one hundred and sixty-one poets, from Robert of Gloucester to Sir Francis Fane, whose choicest relics *The readers of the Mémoires de Grammont' will remember the figure he makes in that work, where he is described as "Le Chevalier Denham, comblé de richesses, aussi bien que d'années," and as having for the first time entered into the marriage state, at the age of seventy-nine, with Miss Brook, a famous court beauty, then only eighteen. The fact is, that this was a second marriage, and that, whatever was the lady's age, Denham himself was then only about fifty. His load of riches is probably as much exaggerated by the lively historian of the Comte de Grammont as his load of years. |