verse, and no anthology can be considered complete without two or three of them. They include: "Go, thou gentle whispering wind"; "Ask me no more"; "In Celia's face a question did arise, Which were more beautiful, her lips or eyes"; "Give me more love or more disdain "; “Kiss, lovely, Celia, and be kind"; "You that will a wonder know"; and "He that loves a rosy cheek, or a coral lip admires." His epitaph on Donne has the fine couplet:

Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit,
The universal monarchy of wit.

To the same college of wits as Carew, with the same conventions, the same ideals, and the same standards, belonged the Cavalier poet, Richard Lovelace. Grandson of one of Queen Elizabeth's knights and son of one of James's, Sir William Lovelace, who was killed in 1628, after brave service under Sir Horace Vere in the Low Countries, the poet Richard Lovelace was born at Woolwich in 1618. He was taught at the Charterhouse, and began writing poetry while he was at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, during 1635-6. He wrote a comedy, The Scholar, and a tragedy called The Soldier. He was one of the bold squires of Kent who, in April, 1642, at Maidstone Assizes, resolved to petition the House of Commons praying that the King might be restored to his rights. For his temerity in delivering this petition he was, on April 30, committed to the Gate House at Westminster. There, during a seven weeks' imprisonment, he wrote that celebrated song called "Stone walls do not a prison make." While in London Lovelace consorted with the chief musicians, poets, and painters of the day. He was well known to Lely, the Cottons, and Andrew Marvell, and he may have been the addressee of Suckling's famous "I tell thee, Dick, where I have been." During 1646-8 he was once more in the King's service, and he ran through his money in attempts to serve his

sovereign. Returning to England in 1648, and once more imprisoned, he beguiled his confinement by framing for the press his Lucasta, Epodes, Odes, Sonnets, Songs. Lovelace was released from prison by warrant in December, 1649, but he was a ruined man. Alms were conveyed to him from Charles Cotton and others, but he sank and died in 1658 in a mean lodging in Gunpowder Alley, between Shoe Lane and Fetter Lane, close to the spot where, a little more than a hundred years later, Chatterton was given a pauper's funeral. He was buried at the west end of St. Bride's, one of the churches burned in the fire of 1666.

Lovelace's connection with St. Bride's suggested to Rich'ardson the name of the hero of Clarissa, and thus, by an ironical destiny, "Lovelace" passed through the agency of Clarissa into common use in the eighteenth century as a synonym for a libertine. Though supplanted in England by the older Lothario from Rowe's Fair Penitent, it still survives in France. Lovelace's immortality rests upon two short lyrics in Lucasta, "Tell me not (sweet) I am unkind," and To Althea from Prison, containing the famous couplet, "Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage." In the whole garden of Caroline lyric poetry these are perhaps (if we except a blossom or two of Wither's, such as "Shall I, wasting in despair?") the most perfect flowers. It cannot be denied that Lovelace is both imitative and unequal; his thought is tortuous and his expression often careless. There is a spirit of nobleness in his best verses, as charming to every reader as the gallantry and heroism of his life; but he is at other times, especially in the Posthume Poems (1659), frigid, conceited, and not a little obscure. His popularity is shown in the numberless imitations; and, yet, where else among contemporary lyrists shall we attain to the happy valiancy of that noble couplet:

I could not love thee, dear, so much
Lov'd I not honour more?

Robert, son of Nicholas Herrick,1 a goldsmith, of Wood Street, Cheapside, was born in London, and baptised at St. Vedast's, Foster Lane, on August 24th, 1591. In the following year Herrick's father committed suicide by the novel method of jumping out of an upper window, leaving a good estate in trust for his children. At sixteen Robert (after Westminster) was apprenticed to his uncle and guardian, Sir William Herrick, a favourite goldsmith and banker of James I. But in 1614 he abandoned the business, and entered St. John's College, Cambridge. After taking his bachelor's degree in 1617, he settled in London, cultivated the society of wits and courtiers, took the time of day from Ben Jonson, passed round in manuscript the lightest of light lyrics, and was welcome wherever songs and glees were held in honour. He may have had a small post in the chapel at Whitehall: at any rate he took orders, wrote a Farewell to Sack, and in September, 1629, was presented to the vicarage of Dean Prior, near Totnes, in Devonshire.

Some of the bantlings of his wit first saw the light in a miscellany of 1640, called Wit's Recreations. A volume of religious rhymes containing one or two gems, such as his thanksgiving to God for his house, and much more doggerel, appeared in 1647 under the title of Noble Numbers; or, Pious Pieces. A corrective to this was found, and Herrick's true talent revealed in his Hesperides, or works both 1 Variously spelt, as Allingham's allusion hints:

"Hayrick some do spell thy name,

And thy verse approves the same;
For 'tis like fresh-scented hay

With country lasses in't at play."

Herrick is excluded from Southey's Select Works of the British Poets from Chaucer to Jonson (1831), which contains the best poems of Greville, Davies, Daniel, Donne, Carew, the Fletchers, Habington, Wither, Browne, Davenant, Lovelace, and the whole of Drayton's Polyolbion.

humane and divine, of 1648. Before this appeared Herrick had been tumbled out of his sequestered parish by the storms of the civil war, and had returned gaily to London, where he seems to have dropped his clerical style and habit, called himself Robert Herrick, Esquire, and renewed the acquaintance of the tempestuous petticoats of his youth. To this period may possibly be referred his Welcome to Sack. In the Caroline College of Wit-Crackers Herrick stands alone, in so much as he rhymed not as an elegant accomplishment, but by vocation. He versified as instinctively as Wordsworth. The joy of life was strong within him, and found expression in a continual stream of fleurettes, posies, and mottoes. Now and again he soars for a more sustained flight with an exquisite lyrical movement. But it is always essentially a butterfly flight. The poise and colour and sunshine of it are perfect; but of the music which comes from the emotion felt, or mystery shadowed, there is practically none. Herrick speaks of himself as singing of "brooks and blossoms, birds and bowers," of April, May, of June and July flowers:

I sing of may-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes.

It is true he does rhyme on these subjects, and on many others besides under earth and heaven; but he is really poetical on the smallest possible number of themes, and those the common property of all tuners of the elegant lyre. Let us drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die. Love's a stuff will not endure. Where are the snows of yester year? Herrick can touch all these subjects with enchanting delicacy and with some tenderness. He imitates freely from Horace, Catullus, Martial, Marot, Ronsard, Du Bellay, Marlowe, Ben Jonson. He anticipates Prior, Praed, Moore, and Fitzgerald. He is, perhaps, essentially a writer of vers de société before his time. Before, that is to say, either the

material or the instrument was quite ripe for such treatment. He is pagan, malicious, scholarly, Anacreontic, and, above all, frivolous, as every accomplished occasional writer should be, but he is also inveterately quaint. His poems are as nice as kisses-kisses that are never more than playful. The proportion of Herrick's verses that is of really high quality is extremely small, but a few of his songs have come to be almost everywhere known. These indispensable little poems combine an amatory playfulness and quaintness with a lyrical daintiness and melody so enchanting as fully to justify the resuscitation of Herrick by the nineteenth century as a poet ranking with Wither, Crashaw, Collins, and Hood; but not to justify the excessive laudation of Herrick as second, third, or even first of English lyrists, into which some enthusiasts have been betrayed.1

After fourteen more years of London life the versatile Herrick once more resumed a surplice. Having witnessed the festivities of the joyous Restoration, a favouring gale wafted him back to his old moorings at Dean Prior in August, 1662, and there he was buried on October 15, 1674.

Sir John Suckling was born at his father's house in the parish of Twickenham in January, 1609. His grandfather

1 There is a perfect rage to-day for reprinting, and we suppose re-purchasing (more problematically for re-perusing) the poets of the seventeenth century. Among the ranks of the reprinted Herrick is easily first favourite. Witness recent editions in the Golden Treasury Series (F. T. Palgrave), Aldine and Canterbury Poets, Muses' and Red Letter Libraries, Century, World, and Temple Classics, Caxton and Newnes Reprints, and many others. His monument at Dean Prior went up in 1857. See Edinburgh Review, January, 1904. He is represented by seven pieces in The Golden Treasury, and no less than twenty in the Lyra Elegantiarum. Lovelace still awaits an edition by Mr. Thorn Drury. For his life see Dict. Nat. Biog.