prosaic (which is the danger of the style and, in this use, of the metre), presents an early, a fairly original and a very interesting, anticipation of 'Whistlecraft' and Don Juan. The Latin Troilus, though, of course, only a tour de force, is a remarkable counterpart, in its straightforward utilisation of a classical language for modern metre, of earlier and later experiments in classical metre with modern language. And, though the statement may seem rash, it suggests that the rarer and less popular experiment has in it less inherent elements of failure. Something more will be said later of Kynaston's lyrics. But they certainly illustrate that remarkable diffusion of the lyrical spirit which is one of the notes of the age; and, as certainly, they are not the less interesting from being found in company with a long poem of considerable individuality and no small merit, and with a curious experiment of the kind just described-the whole due, not to a professional man of letters or a mere recluse student, but to a person of fortune, of position in politics as well as in academic business and of evidently active tendencies. Their author is not the best poet of this chapter, but he is one of its most notable and typical figures.

The remaining heroic romances of this period are inferior to the four just described in poetical merit; but there are several of them, they are mostly very rare in original editions and they contribute to the importance and interest of the class in the history, both of English poetry and of the English novel. The oldest, the Sheretine and Mariana of Patrick Hannay, is not strictly Caroline, as it was published a year or two before Charles came to the throne; but it is essentially of the group. This poem, a tragic legend of love and inconstancy, is based on, or connected with, Hungarian history after the battle of Mohacz (1526), and is recounted by the heroine's ghost in two books and more than two hundred six-lined stanzas of decasyllables. Hannay (of whom next to nothing is known, but who was certainly of the Galloway Hannays, and may, later, have been a master of chancery in Ireland) also wrote a long version of the story of Philomela, in curious lyrical form, which he seems to have thought might be sung throughout (he gives the tune), though it extends to nearly 1700 lines; a poem called The Happy Husband (1619); elegies on Anne of Denmark; and some smaller pieces. He is no great poet, but has minor historical interests of varied kinds, including that of writing in literary English strongly tinged with Scoticisms.

The Chaste and Lost Lovers or Arcadius and Sepha of William Bosworth or Boxworth is a couplet poem in less than 3000 lines

varied by some other metres, much less enjambed than others of the period in form, and decidedly less 'metaphysical' in diction; but having a double portion of intricacy and unintelligibility of story. It was published, with some minor poems, a year after its author's death, in 1651; but he seems to have written it considerably earlier—in fact, when he was not twenty, in the first or second year of Charles. As might be expected, these poems lack precision no less than compression, and they are rather promise than performance; but their promise is considerable and the circumstances of their production noteworthy. Bosworth, of whom, again, next to nothing is known, but who, apparently, was a country gentleman in Cambridgeshire, is, perhaps, best seen in his shorter piece Hinc Lachrimae or To Aurora, which is not so much a single poem as a sequence of dixains; but there are many good things in Arcadius and Sepha itself.

Besides these, we have further, of the same kind, the Albino and Bellama (1637) of Nathaniel Whiting, a poem of more than four thousand lines in sixains, with strong inclination to the heroicomic, and with something of the greater clearness of tale-telling which the comic element often brings with it, but with a more vulgar tone than Kynaston's; the Arnalte and Lucenda (1639) of Leonard Lawrence, a piece of little merit, and one or two others not worth mentioning. The last-named poem (which is worth mentioning if only for this reason) pretends to be adapted 'from the Greek of an unknown author,' and this is an indirect testimony, much stronger than the direct assertion, to the influence of the late Greek romances on the whole class.

As will have been seen, they even follow, with the single exception of Pharonnida, the double title, by hero's and heroine's name, which is usual in those romances; and they follow them, less superficially, in the predominance of love-interest as a central motive, and in the working out of the story by an endless series of mostly episodic adventures. This may appropriately bring us round to some consideration of the general character of the class itself. That character may be put afresh as showing vividly the persistence of the appetite for poetry, the disposition to couch fiction in verse and the decay of concentrated poetical power in the average writer, despite a strange general diffusion of some share of it; with, on the other side, the strong, blind groping after fiction itself. All these writers want to tell a story; but, for the most part, they do not in the very least know how to do it. Even if they were not perpetually neglecting their main business in

order to scatter poetical flowers, which (except in the case of Chamberlayne conspicuously and of others more or less) they, again, do not know how to produce of the true colour and sweetness, their mere notion of novel arrangement is (except, perhaps, with Kynaston) hopelessly inadequate. Their confusion in this way infects, and, in its turn, is aggravated by, the disorder of their grammar, their style and their versification. It is true that, in almost all of them-as, for instance, in such an utterly forgotten person as Bosworth-there is a something, a suggestion, a reminiscence, of a kind of poetry not to be met again for a hundred and fifty years. But it rarely comes-save in Chamberlayne-to much more than a suggestion of poetry; and, everywhere, there is much more than a suggestion of the imperative necessity of an interval of 'prose and sense.'

Some, however, of these poets also devoted themselves, and a larger number of others devoted themselves more or less, to kinds of poetry which, though certainly not less exacting in respect of purely poetical characteristics, are much less so in respect of the characteristics which poetry shares with prose. In the first chapter of this volume, something has been said concerning the differences derived from, or first exemplified by, Jonson and Donne, of later, as compared with earlier, lyric. But these differences, though exhibited on a larger scale, in greater variety and with more sustained perfection, by Herrick, Carew and others already mentioned, are nowhere more characteristically shown than by some of the lesser people who provide the subject of this chapter. Chalkhill's verse, in this kind-more generally known than anything else here owing to its inclusion by Walton in The Compleat Angler-is good; but by far the best lyrist of the poets already mentioned is Kynaston, whose Cynthiades or Amorous Sonnets (1642) long ago furnished anthologists of taste with one or two specimens, and might have been much more largely drawn upon. The pieces which begin 'Look not upon me with those lovely eyes'; 'Do not conceal those radiant eyes'; 'When I behold the heaven of thy face'; 'Dear Cynthia, though thou bear'st the name' and 'April is past: then do not shed' display, in all but the highest degree, though with some inequality, the impassioned quaintness of thought and expression, with the mellifluous variety of accompanying sound, which form the combined charm of this department of verse.

Of lyrists proper, the one writer of whose work at least one piece is almost universally known, is Henry King, bishop of

E. L. VII. CH. IV.

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Chichester. King—who was a Westminster boy and Christ Church man, and who successively held all the lesser dignities of the Anglican church as prebendary of St Paul's, archdeacon of Colchester, canon of Christ Church and dean of Rochester, before his elevation to the bench-was a friend of Donne, Jonson and Walton, and was acquainted with many other men of letters. But his own literary fortunes have been rather unlucky. For, when, nearly seventy years ago, Hannah undertook the republication of King's Poems (1657 and later), he at first limited his design to religious pieces, then intended to do the whole, but, finding his biographical and bibliographical material too great for that whole in one volume, promised a second, which he never found time to publish. It therefore happens, by a most singular chance, that the only poem by King which everyone knows will be looked for in vain in the only extant edition, properly so called, of his works. This piece, 'Tell me no more how fair she is,' cannot, indeed, claim to be of the most absolutely exquisite among the many exquisite lyrics of this period. But there are few pieces which unite a sufficient dose of this peculiar exquisiteness with so complete an absence of all the faultier characteristics-obscurity, preciousness, conceit, excessive sensuousness, 'metaphysical' diction, metrical inequality; and, consequently, there is hardly one which can be more fitly put before the average reader as a sample of the style. His other pieces are inferior relatively, but do not deserve the positive sense which is sometimes given to the word. His elegies are sometimes fine; and The Legacy, The Exequy, Silence, The Dirge, have caught almost more of the quieter spirit and manner of Donne than has the work of any other poet, though they have not Donne's intensity, or his magic.

There is, however, yet another piece attributed to King which has considerable interest both in itself and as illustrating a peculiarity of the time. There was still, on the one hand, a certain shyness in regard to the formal publication of poetry, and, on the other, the inveterate habit of handing about MS copies of verses, with the result that ill-informed persons entered them in their albums, and piratical, or, at least, enterprising, publishers issued them in collections, under different names. The instance at present referred to is the curious batch of similes for the shortness and instability of life sometimes entitled Sic Vita and, in its best form, beginning

Like to the falling of a star.

They are, in the same form, attributed, also, to Francis Beaumont;

and they either served as models to, or were continued by, some half-score similar pieces-some of them attributed to well-known persons like Browne and Quarles, some anonymous or belonging to a schoolmaster named Simon Wastell. There can be no doubt that King was quite equal to composing the best of them; but his authorship is a question of less interest than the way in which the circumstances illustrate the manners and tastes of the time.

Much more various and extensive, and of more diffused excellence, though no one piece of it may be so generally known as 'Tell me no more,' is the work of Thomas Stanley, who, again, is a typical figure of the time. His great grandfather was a natural son of the third earl of Derby; but his descendants had maintained position and wealth. Stanley's father was a knight, and his mother Mary was one of the Kentish Hammonds whom we shall meet again in this chapter, and who were to be of continued literary distinction. The poet first had, as private tutor, a son of Fairfax, translator of Tasso, and then went to Pembroke college, Cambridge, which he left for the grand tour. Coming home just at the beginning of the civil war, he did not take any active part in politics or fighting, but settled himself in the Temple, married soon, used his not inconsiderable wealth for the benefit of numerous literary friends and died in 1678. He holds no small place in English literary history on more grounds than one, as editor of Aeschylus, as author of the first serious English History of Philosophy, which was long a standard, and (our present concern) as a poet both original and in translation as well as a copious translator in prose. His original poetical work is mainly comprised in two volumes, issued, respectively, in 1647 and 1651; but, five years later than the last date, he allowed a musician, John Gamble, to 'set' a large number of his poems and gave him some not yet printed. The two volumes also contain numerous translations from poets ancient and modern, while Stanley also Englished the whole or part of prose and poetical work by Theocritus, Ausonius, the pseudo-Anacreon, Bion, Moschus, Johannes Secundus, Preti, Marino, Boscan, Gongora, Montalvan and others.

The mere list of Stanley's works may suggest an industrious pedant, curiously combined with a butterfly poet. But his work actually possesses very considerable charm. It is possible to lay too much stress on his selection of classical poets for translation, as indicating a decadent character; but, undoubtedly, 'the favour and the prettiness' of such things as Cupido Cruci Affixus, and Basia, the rather uncanny grace of Pervigilium, were much akin