In different ways, though with a certain overlapping of community, these two poets are characteristic examples of the defects of the group. One of the two never enjoyed anything but a costly, personal, very limited and fleeting popularity; and, despite (rather than in consequence of) the flouts of certain persons of distinction, despite the additional fact that his principal book has attractions dear to bibliographers and collectors, he has been, until recently, quite forgotten. The other, a man of varied and practical, as well as poetical, genius, immensely popular for not so very short a time, dropped almost wholly out of general knowledge, and, by most of those who have known him at all, has been known either because he made some figure politically, or as the victim of a passing gibe of Dryden and as furnishing Johnson with typical extracts for his important life of Cowley, with its criticism of the metaphysical poets. Benlowes, the elder and by much the longer lived, was born c. 1603, probably at the paternal seat of Brent hall, Essex, which he inherited. He entered St John's college, Cambridge, in 1620, afterwards making the grand tour. At one time of his life, he was a Roman Catholic, but died an English churchman: and it is not certain whether his Romanism was merely an episode or not. So, also, we have only Butler's indirect testimony to the fact of Benlowes having actually served in the civil war: but he was certainly a strong royalist. It is also certain that he lost his fortune, the main cause assigned being overlavishness to friends and flatterers. Latterly, he lived at Oxford and died there (it is said from privation) in 1676. Butler had already selected him as the subject for his character A Small poet, which is full of the bitterest ridicule. Long afterwards, Pope wrote, but did not finally print, in the prologue to his Satires, the couplet

How pleased I see some patron to each scrub
Quarles had his Benlowes, Tibbald has his Bubb,

with the note 'A gentleman of Oxford who patronised all bad poets of that reign.' He left these lines out, but, in the Dunciad (III, 21), he returned to the subject in the line

Benlowes, propitious still to blockheads, bows,

with an enlarged note on Benlowes's own bad poetry which Warburton amplified with ridicule of his titles.

and death dates and the life circumstances of most of the poets mentioned in this paragraph are quite unknown; and even their floruit is usually determined only by the dates of the rare volumes of their work.

Some ten or a dozen different publications are attributed to Benlowes-the use of initials instead of the full name causing doubt-but all of them, except one, are short, most are unimportant and several are in Latin. His title to fame-if any-and the head and front of his offending, lie in a long and singular poem entitled Theophila or Love's Sacrifice, published in 1652 in a folio volume of 268 pages, illustrated rather lavishly, but with such differences in different copies as to make the book something of a bibliographical crux. This, however, matters little to us. The title, to those acquainted with the literature of the time and group, but not with the book itself, might naturally suggest a romance of the kind discussed in the beginning of this chapter. It is, however, nothing of the kind. Theophila is merely a name for the soul and the titles of the several cantos-'Praelibation,' 'Inamoration,' 'Disincantation,' and so on, will at once suggest the vein of theological mysticism which is worked here, though there are large digressions of various kinds, especially in satiric denunciation of fleshly vices. Had there not been a bee in Benlowes's bonnet, the poem might have ranked as a third to those of More and Beaumontnot, perhaps, much more read than it has been, but respected. Unfortunately, that bonnet was a mere hive. In the first place, he selected for his main (not quite his exclusive) medium the exceedingly peculiar stanza of which an example is given below, a triplet of ten, eight and twelve syllables. This combination, which, at the end of others, and so concluding a longer stave, is sometimes successful enough, is, by itself, when constantly repeated, curiously ugly. In the second, the lack of clear arrangement which, as we have seen, is common to almost all the group, becomes more intolerable than ever in a half psychological, half theological disquisition. But his sins become more flagrant still in respect of composition of phrase as distinguished from arrangement of matter; and they rise to their very highest in the selection and construction of phrase itself.

It would sometimes appear as if his sole concern was to be wilfully and preposterously odd. He wishes to denounce drunken

ness:

Cheeks dyed in claret seem o' the quorum

When our nose-carbuncles like link-boys blaze before 'em.

He has a mind to hit at the inconsistency of the extreme reformed sects, so he calls them 'Proteustants.' Butler was particularly wroth with the extraordinary coinage hypocondruncicus. In

a long description of a bedizened courtezan, there occurs this wonderful stanza:

She'd coach affection on her cheek: but why?
Would Cupids horses climb so high

Over her alpine nose t' o'erthrow it in her eye?

In short, there is no extravagance of conceit or word-play at which he blenches.

And yet, Benlowes is not a mere madman or a mere mountebank. He has occasionally, and not very seldom, beautiful poetic phrase; and he manages to suffuse long passages, if not whole cantos, with a glow of devotional atmosphere and imagery which is not very far inferior to Crashaw's. He seems, sometimes, to have a dim and confused notion of the mixture and contrast of passion and humour which makes the triumph of Carlyle and Browning; but he never can bring it off, for want, no doubt, of absolutely transcendent genius, but, still more, for want of moderate and moderating self-criticism. He only partially knows what to attempt; and he does not in the least know what not to attempt.

In many ways (even beyond those already mentioned), John Cleiveland was a striking contrast to Benlowes. Born in 1613 at Loughborough, where his father was a curate, Cleiveland was entered at Christ's college, Cambridge (where Milton was still in residence), in 1627, and became fellow of St John's in 1634. He took a strong line as a royalist, was expelled from his fellowship in 1645, was made judge advocate at Newark in the same year, is said to have been in some danger at the surrender of the place, but passes out of knowledge for nearly ten years till, in 1655, we find him imprisoned as a royalist at Yarmouth. He addressed a dignified petition to Cromwell, who released him; but his health seems to have been broken, and he died in London on 29 April 1658.

Yet, though we have but little detail of his life, he was almost a celebrated person, and quite a celebrated poet. Even Cowley was hardly so popular, and the welter of confusion which besets his bibliography is due mainly to this popularity—the booksellers 'sharking up' every scrap that could with any plausibility, and a great deal that could not with any, be attributed to him. He had published as early as 1640; and, for thirty years after his death his poems continued to be reprinted, till, in 1687, what is sometimes called the most complete edition appeared. Winstanley described him in that year as 'an eminent poet, and the wit of our age.'

Winstanley was no critic and the age was the age of Butler and Dryden; but he is all the more valuable as witness to the opinion of the average man. If confirmation be wanted, it is hardly necessary to go further than the fact that, of the half-score or dozen editions which had appeared in the forty years or so before this date, hardly one failed to be reprinted or revised, and some were reissued many times over.

The work by which this reputation was obtained, even when bolstered out with spurious additions, is not large; the certainly, or probably, genuine part of it does not extend to more than two or three thousand lines. But Cleiveland had a double, in fact a treble, appeal. In the first place, a large proportion of his work was 'straight-from-the-shoulder' political satire, sure to be received rapturously by those who agreed with it, and perforce interesting, though unpleasantly interesting, to its victims. In the second, it was couched in the very extravagance of the metaphysical fashion, yet with an avoidance of the intolerable prolixity and promiscuousness, or the sometimes merely foolish quaintness, of men like Benlowes. In the third (though this is not likely to have been consciously noticed), Cleiveland, evidently, is feeling for new melodies in verse; he is not merely a master of the stopped antithetic couplet, but is one of the earliest writers who shake off the literary timidity of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans as to trisyllabic measures, and boldly attempt anapaestic swing.

To appreciate Cleiveland's political pieces, it must be remembered that, as has been pointed out elsewhere, there was not only a deep though half unconscious thirst for the novel, but, also, a similar nisus towards the newspaper. When, quite early in the conflict, he lampooned the puritan objection to '&c,' in the oath of 1640, and when, shortly afterwards, he poured contempt on Smectymnuus, he was simply a journalist of the acutest type in verse-a poetical leader-writer. These things should be compared with the prose writings, on the other side, of his senior at Christ's. There is nothing to choose in bitterness; Cleiveland has the advantage in point. But the shorter compass and less serious form carry with them a danger which has weighed on all journalism since. The packed allusion, and the rapid searching comment, become almost unintelligible to any but contemporaries. Even Cleiveland's most famous, and, on the whole, most successful, piece, The Rebel Scot, requires more minute acquaintance with detail than can be readily expected or found. The Mixed Assembly, a piece of less than a hundred verses, would scarcely be overcom

mented on the margins of a hundred pages with a verse of text to each. The force and fire are still admirable when realised; but the smoke of the explosion has solidified itself, as it were, and obscures both.

So, again, in non-political pieces, the same accretion of allusive conceit besets the poetry. Men rejoiced, then, frankly and sincerely, in such an image as this, that, when a bee crawls over Fuscara's hand,

He tipples palmistry, and dines

On all her fortune-telling lines.

It can be rejoiced in still, but not by everybody. Yet it should be impossible for anyone with some native alacrity of mind, some literary sympathy and some acquired knowledge, not to derive frequent enjoyment from Cleiveland, even in his altitudes of conceit; and his verse is a real point de repère. In 1643, at latest, we get from him such a couplet as this, which Dryden could hardly have beaten forty years later still:

Such was the painters brief for Venus' face-
Item, an eye from Jane, a lip from Grace.

And, perhaps earlier, certainly not much later, in the semiserious Mark Antony and the avowed burlesque on this his own piece, he attempts, and nearly achieves, anapaestic measure of a kind hardly yet tried. A most imperfect poet he must be called ; a poet of extraordinary gifts he should be allowed to be.

Sufficient stress has been laid cn beauties, throughout this chapter, to make it, though with some general reiteration, fair to draw attention chiefly, in conclusion, to the warning which the whole group more or less, and these last two members of it especially, supply, and which makes the study of it almost indispensable in order to a thorough comprehension of English literature. There are beauties in almost all these writers; charming and poignant beauty in some parts of some of them; and specially characteristic beauty-beauty that you do not find in other periods; nor can it be denied that both their merits and their faults arose from a striving after that daring and headstrong vein which had made the fortune of the great Elizabethans. But there is one power to whom, almost without exception, they neglected to pay attention and she avenges herself with prompt severity. Now this power was criticism.

In some respects, they were very excusable. They could hardly yet know that prose was a far more suitable medium for novel and