been so happily defined. The poem may be compared with the magnificent lines at the opening of Dryden's Religio Laici.

From Emblem xiv. Book i.

CIV

CV

Robert Gomersal (1600-1646) was a student of Christ Church and a distinguished preacher at Oxford. He became subsequently Vicar of Thorncombe in Devonshire. He was the author of a volume of sermons, of some meditations in verse on the nineteenth and twentieth chapters of Judges, of a tragedy entitled Lodowick Sforza, and of some occasional poems printed in 1633-from which the extract given is taken. I have freely excised without marking the excisions. Readers will be reminded of Dryden's famous lines in Aurengzebe, Act iv. Scene 1, "When I consider life,” etc.

CVI

From the Silex Scintillans, Part i. Vaughan has never been so popular as Herbert, and yet, as a poet, he is greatly superior to him. How noble is his lyric commencing "Thou that know'st for whom I mourn"; how really sublime his poem The World; how pregnant the eloquence of his Constellation, which anticipates, though with an infusion of lofty piety, Matthew Arnold's Self-dependence.

CVII

From Wit's Recreations, ed. 1650. It is not unlikely, but it is by no means certain, that those verses were written by Herrick. They appear with poems which are unquestionably his, and are very much in his style. They were first included among Herrick's poems by Mr. Carew Hazlitt.

CVIII

Poor Flecknoe's chief claim to immortality is his association with Dryden's satire on Shadwell-Mac Flecknoe. He was for upwards of half a century an industrious scribbler. His first poem is dated 1626, and he is supposed to have died about 1678. There are, however, one or two real gems to be found among his rubbish, and this is one of them.

CIX

To the harsh and uncouth style of this noble Platonist is probably to be attributed the fact that his works are so completely forgotten. Never perhaps has rapt mysticism found more intense expression than in his poems and prose dis

courses.

CX

From Gondibert, Canto vi. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Davenant is the gravity and stateliness of his paradoxes and conceits, but this poem is really fine.

CXI

From the Sacred Poems. This is Crashaw's note at perfection. In the expression of rapt enthusiasm he has no rival among English religious poets.

CXII

From the Ode to the Memory of Charles Morwent. John Oldham (1653-1683) whose premature death was lamented by Dryden, is chiefly known by his Satires on the Jesuits, but it is in Pindarics or irregular Odes, in the one from which this extract is taken, and particularly in those on Ben Jonson and Homer, and in his Dithyramb, that his genius, which had a touch of nobility in it, is discernible.

CXIII

From the Fourth Emblem of Book v.

From the Sacred Poems.

CXIV

CXV

From the Elegy On the Death of Mr. William Hervey. I have considerably shortened this poem; the original consists of nineteen stanzas; it has not, I venture to think, suffered from curtailment.

CXVI

The date of this Epitaph is 1666, but I cannot remember where I found it. The second couplet is to be found slightly altered in Sir H. Wotton's poems.

CXVIII

This passage is the one good thing in Garth's once famous mock-heroic poem, The Dispensary (1696); it is in the third canto. Cowper has borrowed and inserted the second line in his Lines on the Receipt of his Mother's Picture.

CXIX

These beautiful verses were written by Waller after he had completed his eightieth year, if not even later. They conclude his Divine Poems. I omit the six introductory

verses.

CXX

It is impossible to settle with certainty the authorship of this poem. It is printed in Bishop King's Poems, and is attributed to King by Headley, Hazlitt, Campbell, Johnstone, and Cattermole. But it has also been attributed to Francis Beaumont, though not on equally satisfactory evidence.

CXXI

This is the one poem in Herbert which is not marred by

his characteristic defects, affected quaintness, extravagance, prosaic baldness, and discordant rhythm.

CXXII

From the Religio Medici, Part ii. Sect. 12. "This," says Browne, "is the dormitive I take to bedward. I need no other laudanum than this to make me sleep; after which I close mine eyes in security, content to take my leave of the sun, and sleep unto the resurrection.”

CXXIII

From her Poems and Fancies, 1653, p. 135. There are beautiful little fragments to be found in the wilderness of the Duchess's poetry and prose.

CXXIV

These are the last three stanzas of the concluding poem. of Castara.

CXXV

From Carew's Calum Britannicum.

CXXVI

From Microcosmus, a moral masque, 1637. Of Thomas Nabbes nothing is certainly known beyond the facts that he was born in 1605, was matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1621, and contributed somewhat extensively to the drama during the reign of Charles I.

CXXVII

Epitaph on Eleanor Freeman, who died in 1650, aged 21, and was buried in Tewkesbury Church, Gloucestershire. It is printed in Headley's Specimens, vol. ii. p. 74.

BOOK III

(1700-1798)

CXXVIII

From Miscellany Poems by a Lady, 1713. Anne Kingsmill, born about 1660, married Heneage Finch, fourth Earl

of Winchilsea, and died in August 1720. This poetess is

chiefly known from Wordsworth's remark, that her Nocturnal Reverie is one of the few poems, in the interval intervening between the publication of Paradise Lost and the Seasons, which contain a new image of external nature. In a letter to Dyce, Wordsworth says, "There is one poetess to whose writings I am especially partial, the Countess of Winchilsea. I have perused her poems frequently, and should be happy to name such passages as I think most characteristic of her genius," and in a subsequent letter (see Wordsworth's Memoirs, vol. ii. pp. 228, 229) he names them. I have, however, ventured to select a poem not noted by Wordsworth, as the object of these selections is not so much to illustrate the genius of particular poets, as to give poems interesting in themselves.

CXXIX

Born at Peas

Poor Pattison's story is a very sad one. marsh, near Rye, in 1706, he was educated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. But quitting Cambridge, before taking his degree, he became involved in many troubles and difficulties, being at one time on the point of starvation. He died in London, July 1727, in his twenty-first year. His