in his element, and the chief object of his admiration there was "Ben Jonson;" and to this "best of the poets," whom he calls "Saint Ben," he addresses the following characteristic lines: "Ah, Ben! Say how or when Shall we thy guests Meet at those lyric feasts Made at the Sun, The Dog, the Triple Tun? Where we such clusters had, As made us nobly wild, not mad, And yet each verse of thine Out-did the meat, out-did the frolic wine." "We know," writes Mr. Palgrave, "that he shone with Ben Jonson and the wits at the nights and suppers of those gods of our glorious early literature. We may fancy him at Beaumanor or Houghton, with his uncle and cousins keeping a Leicestershire Christmas in the Manor-house; or again in some sweet southern county, with Julia and Anthea, Corinna and Dianeme, by his side (familiar then by other names, now never to be remembered), sitting merry, but with just the sadness of one who heard sweet music in some meadow among his favourite flowers of springtime-there, or 'where the rose lingers latest.' . . . But 'the dream, the fancy,' is all that Time has spared us. And if it be curious that his contemporaries should have left so little record of this delightful poet and (as we should infer from the book) genial-hearted man, it is not less so that the single first edition should have satisfied the seventeenth century, and that, before the present, notices of Herrick should be of the rarest occurrence." Herrick, we may add, stands alone among the poets of his time. He took his own path, and while winning, as every poet must, some grace of thought or manner from his predecessors, he belongs to no school and owns no master, unless it be Ben Jonson. He is never great, but he is always genuine, singing of what he feels, not of what, as a poet, he might be expected to feel. His music is sweet, and even when he seems to be least careful, his indifference is but apparent; indeed, throughout his poems he works in the true spirit of the artist. Truly does Mr. Palgrave say that sanity, sincerity, simplicity, lucidity, are everywhere the characteristics of Herrick. At the same time, he has grievous faults. He tells us that though his muse was jocund his life was chaste, thinking to excuse his coarseness by the statement, and forgets too often the lines written "On Himself," in which he recognizes the true end of life "Who by his gray hairs doth his lustres tell, Lives not those years, but he that lives them well : Of all those threescore has not lived half three : *These pithy couplets may remind readers of the finer lines written on the same subject by Ben Jonson "It is not growing like a tree In bulk doth make man better be; Herrick, like his contemporary John Donne, is so coarse a poet that his works are not fit to be read indiscriminately. The least worthy 1573-1631. of Donne's poems, however, according John Donne, to Izaak Walton, were written before. the twentieth year of his age.* Herrick's period of verse-making covered a wider period-how wide we cannot say, nor as far as concerns our present point does it much signify; for we know that, artistlike, Herrick kept his poems by him for careful revision, and we know also that he was in his fiftyeighth year when he published the "Hesperides." His "unbaptized rhymes " may have been written Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, Is fairer far in May, Although it fall and die that night- Waller, too, writes more briefly in the same strain "Circles are praised, not that abound Not in much time, but acting well." * Donne, as you may read in Walton's biography, lived to become a wise and good man. He took holy orders, and became eventually Dean of St. Paul's. His learning was great, his popularity as a poet immense; so, too, was his fame as a preacher. Between him and George Herbert, a man of kindred spirit, "there was a long and dear friendship." Donne, a poet by nature, was 'spoilt by art. His conceits, which pleased his own age, are intolerable in ours. In reading Dr. Johnson's life of Cowley, you will find some curious illustrations of Donne's "metaphysic style." in youth, but they were printed at a very mature age, and with his full consent.* 66 [Mr. Palgrave's exquisite selection from the poems of this fine 'pagan poet" (Macmillan and Co.) contains all that is most worthy in the "Hesperides," and the young student of our poetry need perhaps look no further. If, however, the subject attracts him, he will do well to read an essay on the poet by Mr. Gosse, in the Cornhill Magazine for August, 1875.] *No poet was ever more careful of his fame than Herrick, and it is impossible to agree with Mr. Grosart, that in the publication of so much that had been better omitted he was 66 over-persuaded" by his publisher. The man who could say— "Better 'twere my book were dead was not likely to leave to indifferent hands the arrangement of its contents. CHAPTER VI. POETS OF THE COMMONWEALTH. ABRAHAM COWLEY-JOHN MILTON-ANDREW MARVELL. DR. JOHNSON begins his famous work, "The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets," with the life of Abraham Cowley. The meagre facts he has to tell of that poet are gleaned from a biography, or, as Johnson appropriately styles it, a funeral oration, written by Abraham Cowley, 1618-1667. Bishop Sprat, a small versifier, who is himself honoured with a place in Johnson's gallery of poets. Cowley, the son of a London tradesman, was born in 1618, ten years after the birth of Milton. His mother, early left a widow, is said to have struggled hard to give her son a literary education, and it is pleasant to know that she lived to see him fortunate and famous. "In the window of his mother's apartment lay Spenser's 'Faerie Queene,' in which he very early took delight to read, till, by feeling the charms of verse, he became, as he relates, irrecoverably a poet." His |