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BOOK II

(1625-1700)

LXXIII

To his son Vincent on his birthday, November 1630, being then three years old. Corbet (1582-1635) was successively Bishop of Oxford and Norwich, and no more jovial Bishop ever adorned or astonished the Episcopal bench. The poems by which he is best known are his Faeries Farewell and his Iter Boreale, but Corbet had as little of the touch of the poet as Swift.

LXXIV

From Silex Scintillans, part i. In this beautiful poem is undoubtedly to be found the germ of Wordsworth's great Ode.

LXXV

Instead of selecting

From The Mistress of Philarete. from Wither poems which are now somewhat hackneyed, viz. the lyrics "Shall I wasting in despair," and "Hence away thou siren leave me," and the fine passage about the power of poetry in the Fourth Eclogue of the Shepherd's Hunting, I have chosen this which Charles Lamb marked as "of preeminent merit," a judgment in which every one must concur.

LXXVI

From the Miscellaneous Thoughts in his Remains, vol. i. pp. 244, 245. I have connected the two fragments by omitting some verses which intervene. It is difficult to associate with the author of Hudibras sentiment so noble and refined as these verses express. No critic, so far as I know, has

noticed that underlying the wit, worldliness, and cynicism of Butler was a fine, if thin, vein of poetic sensibility which peeps out timidly even in Hudibras.

LXXVII

From Hesperides. Herrick's best lyrics are among the commonplaces of every anthology, and are therefore excluded from this. If I cannot give his diamonds I have endeavoured to give two or three of his pearls.

From Castara.

LXXVIII

LXXIX

From Castara. Love has rarely found so pure and lofty a laureate as Habington. His Laura was Lucy Herbert. I have ventured to curtail this poem by the omission of the four stanzas which intervene in the original between the second and the last.

LXXX

From Hesperides. This pretty poem is in rhythm an echo of the second song in Ben Jonson's Masque The Gipsies Metamorphosed.

LXXXI

William Cartwright, born, according to one account, in 1615, to another in 1611, passed most of his life at Oxford, as a lecturer and preacher, dying prematurely in 1643. His Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, and poems were published posthumously in 1651. Ben Jonson is reported to have said of him, "My son Cartwright writes all like a man,” a compliment which Cartwright rewarded by an eloquent poem to Jonson's memory. As a lyrical poet he belongs to the Metaphysical School.

LXXXII

I have been told that this poem was a great favourite with Tennyson, who was fond of quoting the lines beginning "But at my back." He has himself borrowed from it.

LXXXV

From the Masque of Semele. Act ii. Scene i.

LXXXVI

Cotton's masterpiece is Winter, but it is much too long for introduction here, and it is impossible to shorten it without injury. In originality, vigour, and verve Cotton has no superior in that brilliant school of poets to which he belongs; and yet it is remarkable that his miserable travesty of the first and second books of the Eneid should have gone through upwards of fifteen editions, while the poems printed in 1689, in which his genius displays itself, should never have been reprinted till 1810.

LXXXVII

From Abdelazar: or The Moor's Revenge. Mrs. Behn's lyrics are at their best among the best of their kind.

XC

Dr. Walter Pope was a well-known figure among wits and men of science between about 1658, when he was proctor at Oxford, and 1714 when he died. In 1660 he succeeded Sir Christopher Wren as Gresham Professor of Astronomy. This poem was first published in 1693. It was reprinted in Nichols's Select Collection, vol. i. p. 173; and in Songs and Ballads, chiefly collected by Robert, Earl of Oxford, vol. ii. There are two versions, the shorter one, which I give, being the best. A charming Latin paraphrase of the longer version will be found in Vincent Bourne's Poemata. It is gratifying to know that fortune allowed Dr. Pope to realise his ideal. In his quaint and delightful Life of Seth Ward he says, "I thank God that I am arrived at a good old age without gout or stone, with my intellectual senses but little decayed and my intellectuals, though none of the best, yet as good as ever they were." In the last stanza but one the allusion is to a tradition of the Turks to the effect that, when

any one is born into the world, a certain quantity of meat and drink is apportioned to him for consumption during his mortal existence, and that when it is consumed he dies; the moral being that a man who desires to live long must be thrifty in his meat and drink.

XCI

From Hesperides.

XCII

Katherine Fowler, born in 1631, married about 1647 James Philips of Cardigan, died 22nd June 1664, in the thirty-third year of herage. "The matchless Orinda" is the author of many poems of a grave and serious cast, which by no means discredit the eulogies of Cowley and Dryden. Her poems were published in quarto in 1664, under the title of "Poems, by the incomparable Mrs. K." There were many subsequent editions. I give the text, not as it appears in the quarto, but as it appears in the Poems, by Eminent Ladies, for that is the best text.

XCIII

From Epigrams of All Sorts, 1670. This is not the only really beautiful poem written by Flecknoe. See note on cix.

XCIV

Burd, maiden. This pathetic poem is from Herd's Collection. It is printed in Chambers's Scottish Songs, and in Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy, and from thence has often been transcribed. The date and authorship are alike unknown. The story on which it was founded is briefly this. Helen Irving, the daughter of the Laird of Kirconnel in Dumfriesshire, had two suitors, Adam Fleming of Kirkpatrick and the Laird of Blacket House. Fleming was the favourite, and one afternoon, when the lovers were together, the Laird, mad with jealousy, levelled his cross-bow at his successful rival, and Helen, perceiving him doing so, threw herself before her lover to shield him from the arrow, and received it in her breast, dying instantly.

From The Broken Heart.

XCV

XCVI

From Clarastella, 1650. Nothing is certainly known about Heath, but he is a very accomplished poet, who deserves to be rescued from the oblivion into which he has fallen.

XCVII

Henry King (1591-1669) was a student of Christ Church in 1608 and afterwards Chaplain to Charles I. and Dean of Rochester. He died, Bishop of Chichester, in 1669. He versified the Psalms, and published in 1657 a small volume of "Poems, Elegies, Paradoxes, and Sonnets." Terse and serious reflection, clothed in fluent and often graceful verse, is the predominating characteristic of his poetry.

XCVIII

From the Emblems, Book ii. Epig. xv.

XCIX

From the Emblems, Book ii. Embl. v.

CI

In the original this Hymn comprises twenty-six stanzas. As the choice lay between omission and curtailment, I have adopted the latter, and not I think to the detriment of the poem, for many of the excised stanzas are flat and harsh and much below the level of what is best in it; and what is best is truly noble. The only tolerable poem of Yalden—his Hymn to Darkness-is a parody of this.

CII

From the poem entitled Reason in the Miscellanies. Never perhaps has the distinction between Reason and Faith

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