It is difficult, or even impossible, to mark out the Caroline from the Jacobean poets, who, again, overlap with the Elizabethan poets. The chief schools of the Caroline poets were (1) the writers occupied mainly with holy things, such as Crashaw, Herbert, and Vaughan. Next (2) come the crowd of "gentlemen who wrote with ease," now and then triumphantly well, but often loosely and carelessly, such are Lovelace, Carew, Suckling, and minor names. Herrick stands by himself as a consummate lyrist, but his mood is often, though he was a parish priest, that of the gay cavalier. Marvell had many facets, and Milton, of course, is apart, a world of poetry in himself.

Crashaw.

Richard Crashaw, the son of a controversial Protestant preacher, was born in London, early in the second ten years of the seventeenth century. He went to the Charterhouse School and to Peterhouse in Cambridge, where he took his Master\'s degree in 1638. His earlier verses were Latin exercises. He was expelled from his Fellowship at Cambridge because he would, not take the Solemn League and Covenant, in 1644: that odd document was forced on men under "the new liberty". He had written a hymn to St. Theresa while still a Protestant; when he retired to France he became a Catholic. In 1646 the poet Cowley, his friend, found him in great poverty, and induced the almost equally poor exiled Queen of England to use her influence in his favour. He obtained a canonry at Loretto, where he died in 1649. His poems, sacred and secular, "Steps to the Temple," were published in 1646;[Pg 329] another edition, with an interesting preface concerning his saintly life at Cambridge, is of 1648-1649.

Pope, at the age of 22, criticized Crashaw with much superiority; "he writ like a gentleman" (that is, like an amateur), not "to establish a reputation". What Pope did in his anxiety to establish a reputation was not done "like a gentleman". "Nothing regular or just can be expected from him," "no man can be a poet who writes for diversion only". Crashaw\'s pious outpourings were scarcely "writ for diversion," but things "just and regular" are not his chief care. A fiery vehemence, an overloaded ornament are his quality and his defect. For example in "The Weeper" (St. Mary Magdalen) he writes:—

Not in the Evening\'s eyes
When they red with weeping are
For the Sun that dies,
Sits Sorrow with a face so fair,
Nowhere but here did ever meet
Sweetness so sad, sadness so sweet.

Here he has his style in hand. But when he calls the Magdalen\'s tears

Ye simpering sons of those fair eyes

he has certainly found the most inappropriate epithet.

Many of his sacred poems are a kind of brief religious epigrams in four lines. His "Hymn of the Nativity" is a "fade" thing, compared with Milton\'s. In longer poems he uses rhymed decasyllabic couplets with some skill: "On a Prayer Book Sent to Mrs. M." is a good ode in the irregular verse and conceited manner of the time, but to speak of what Carew does speak of as Mrs. M.\'s "heavenly armful" is to remind us of a letter of Robert Burns on a purely secular subject. Save for the Hymn to St. Theresa, with "That not Impossible She," "The Flaming Heart," and some pretty translations, Crashaw, like all the Cavalier poets except Carew, is usually on a low poetic level. But in the pieces mentioned, and above all towards the close of "The Flaming Heart,"

Singing still he soars and soaring ever singeth.

[Pg 330]

Herbert.

George Herbert, author of "The Temple," was born on 13 April, 1593; was of noble descent, and a younger brother of Lord Herbert of Cherbury. From his fifth to his twelfth year George probably lived at Oxford with his mother. He then went to Westminster School; thence to Trinity College, Cambridge (1609), where he obtained a Fellowship (1616) and early in 1619 was chosen Public Orator. In this capacity he wrote the letters of the University to kings, princes, and the great in general who visited it. He became a friend of Bacon and of Bishop Andrewes, Ludovick, Duke of Lennox, and James, Marquis of Hamilton. As a schoolboy he had written Latin epigrams against the Hildebrand of Scottish Presbyterianism, the learned and truculent Andrew Melville, for whose tyranny in Scotland James VI and I took an unconstitutional revenge when safe on the throne of England. In a war of Latin verse Andrew was very capable of holding his own.

Herbert, while at Cambridge, was a somewhat assiduous courtier of "gentle King Jamie," though we do not know that he gratified the monarch by adopting the Scottish and continental pronunciation of Latin and Greek. The death of James probably disappointed any hopes he may have had of State employment.

In 1627 he resigned his oratorship, and according to Izaak Walton retired to a country place in Kent where he meditated on the choice of a secular or saintly life. He preferred the saintly, took holy orders, lost his beloved mother in 1627, married Jane Danvers in 1629, and was presented to the living of Bemerton, between Wilton and Salisbury, in the next year. He died in 1633, and Walton must be consulted for "an almost incredible story of the great sanctity of the short remainder of his holy life". On the Sunday before his death he rose, took a musical instrument, and "sang to it such hymns as the angels and he and Mr. Ferrar" (of Little Gidding) "now sing in heaven".

His poems, "The Temple," were published in 1633, and their great popularity is a proof that piety had not wholly deserted the Anglican Church for the Sects. "The Temple" opens with "The Porch," a series of moral and religious counsels, in verses[Pg 331] of six stanzas. The poem "Affliction" is autobiographical: at first, in his career, "There was no month but May". Then came maladies and the deaths of friends

Whereas my birth and spirit rather took
The way that takes the Town,
Thou didst betray me to a lingering book
And wrap me in a gown...
Ah, my dear God, though I am quite forgot,
Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.

Sacred poetry is of all kinds the most difficult. Herbert\'s is full of conceits, though he has not the extravagances that mar the work of Donne and Crashaw. Verses in the shape of altars and of wings are examples of extreme decadence, but these are rare. Herbert\'s simplest poem is his best, the famous

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night,
For thou must die.

"The Pearl" is also of great beauty and autobiographic interest. He knows the ways of Learning, Honour, and Pleasure, and he has chosen the better way. The British Church is commended as the Midway between "Her on the hills" (the Seven Hills) and Her that

in the valley is so shy
Of dressing, that her hair doth lie
About her ears;
While she avoids her neighbour\'s pride,
She wholly goes on th\' other side,
And nothing wears;

better than wearing "rags of Aaron\'s old wardrobe" said Milton. "The Quip" hath a certain holy gaiety, as of a ballad. Herbert was not a great poet, he never storms the cloudcapt towers, and "flaming walls of the world," like Crashaw. But he has been dear to many holy and humble men of heart.

Vaughan.

Henry Vaughan and his twin brother Thomas were born in 1622, at Newton St. Bridget, on the Usk, in South Wales, hence[Pg 332] he chose to style himself "Silurist" from the name of the ancient tribe of that region. There is some confusion between him and his brother Thomas, who certainly went (1638) to Jesus College, Oxford, while Henry\'s name is not on the books. Henry is said to have studied law in London. In the Civil War he may have taken up arms, at least he saw, if he did not fight in the battle of Rowton Heath (24 Sept., 1645) and he commemorates in a poem the courage of a friend, Mr. R. W., who fell on the Cavalier side. In some humorous verses about a huge cloak borrowed from another friend he speaks of wearing it during the Royalist retreat from the Dee, and about the Puritan soldiery that seized him. In a Latin poem, "Ad Posteros," he says that he merely lamented the war; in any case he won no laurels and probably shed no blood. "The Bard does not fight," says a Gaelic proverb. He studied medicine, and lived retired at Brecknock. His first verses (1641) congratulate Charles I on his return from Scotland. In 1646 appeared his "Poems," including a rather tame translation of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal on "The Vanity of Human Wishes," with some pretty love lyrics to Amoret. Unlike Suckling and Carew, these volatile hearts,

I not for an hour did love,
Or for a day desire,
But with my soul had from above
This endless holy fire.

He "courted the mind," not the body.

His volume, "Olor Iscanus" (the swan of Usk) appeared in 1651, opening with a eulogy of his beautiful native river, in smooth rhymed octosyllabic verse, mixed with decasyllabic couplets. There are also epistles to friends, one deplores the antiquated dullness of Brecknock, another celebrates the matchless Orinda, Mrs. Phillips, and there are translations from Latin verse.

Vaughan lives, not by these poems, nor by "Thalia Rediviva," but by his "Silex Scintillans," the sparkling flint, sacred poems of 1650-1655. He professedly follows George Herbert, being "the least of his many pious converts". Direct imitations of[Pg 333] Herbert are not infrequent in these hymns, which, like Herbert, sigh for the far-away days when angels sat at Abraham\'s board,

O, how familiar then was heaven!

There is a party who prefer Herbert to Vaughan, another that prefer Vaughan to Herbert. The Silurist perhaps strikes the higher and the deeper note, when he does strike it, for all the Cavalier poets, sacred or secular, blossomed but rarely into perfect and memorable song: they would excel in an opening verse, in a phrase, but their full inspiration was occasional. A line like the second in "Vanity of Spirit" is rare:—

Quite spent with thoughts, I left my cell and lay
Where a shrill spring tuned to the early day.

"The Retreat":—

Happy those early days, when I
Shone in my angel infancy

is perfect, and has a forenote of Wordsworth\'s "Intimations of Immortality".

Like Wordsworth, Vaughan finds the divine near him everywhere:—

There\'s not a wind can stir,
Or beam pass by,
But straight I think, though far
Thy hand is nigh.

"Silence and Stealth of Days" is excellent, but never quite recaptures the charm of the opening phrase. "The Burial of an Infant" has the purity of a snowdrop: and "They are all gone into the World of Light" haunts the memory; while "The Timber" is a set of variants on a brief melancholy note of Homer. There are lovely lines, not unlike Herrick\'s, on "St. Mary Magdalen," and her locks,

Which with skill\'d negligence are shed
About thy curious, wild, young head.

Vaughan lived to see another Revolution, and died in 1695.

[Pg 334]

Herrick.

Robert Herrick, son of a prosperous goldsmith of a Leicestershire family, was born in London, in 1591, and for twelve years was an "Elizabethan," though his poems are "Caroline". In 1607 Herrick was apprenticed to his uncle; in 1613 entered as a Fellow Commoner at St. John\'s, Cambridge, he migrated to Trinity Hall, and took his Master\'s degree in 1620. He had friends and patrons at Court, was one of the sons of Ben Jonson, and lived on his wits and on his patrons, in a poetical, musical, pleasant idleness. He took holy orders, not in the spirit of George Herbert, and in 1629 received the living of Dean Prior, in Devonshire. He did not desert, and probably did not neglect, his parish, from which he was thrust by the Puritans in 1647; in the next year his "Noble Numbers," and "Hesperides" was printed in "a rich disorder"—the lines are on various levels in this most desirable volume. The frontispiece shows a fleshly, muscular rather Roman-looking poet to whose lips the bees bring honey. At the Restoration, Herrick was restored to Dean Prior, where he died in October, 1674.

"Dull Devonshire" he calls the county, in his verses; he did not live long to resent its rural torpor. His delightful poems are all full of the country life, they smell April and May. His book is like a large laughing meadow in early June, all diapered with flowers, and sweet with the songs of birds, some a mere note or two of merry music, some as prolonged and varied, though never so passionate, as the complaint of the nightingale.

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers,
Of April, May, of June and July flowers;
I sing of Maypoles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes.

Everything is sweet, spontaneous, glad and musical. Some pieces are far from straitlaced of course, but, even setting these apart, "The Hesperides" hold the greatest and richest bouquet of English songs. Favourites are "Delight in Disorder," "Gather Ye Rose buds while Ye May," "Corinna\'s Going a Maying,"

[Pg 335]

To Anthea (Bid me to live and I will live
Thy Protestant to be.)

To Meadows (Ye have been fresh and green,
Ye have been filled with flowers.)

To Daffodils (Fair daffodils, we weep to see.)

To Blossoms (Fair pledges of a fruitful tree,
Why do ye fall so fast?)

and so on; every reader culls and chooses for himself, and cannot go wrong. Herrick speaks in his "Noble Numbers" of

my unbaptized rhymes
Writ in my wild unhallowed times,

but his "Noble Numbers," or poems on sacred themes, show an almost unregenerate happiness.

The Child of his "Ode on the Birth of our Saviour" is, first of all, a human child to Herrick, and he was in love with children as with roses. His "Litany to the Holy Spirit" is extremely human in its foresight of death,

When the artless doctor sees
No one hope but of his fees.

His "Grace for a Child" is a miniature of the pathos of a child\'s devotion.

Of Herrick\'s epigrams, as of Ben Jonson\'s, there is no good to be said: we can only marvel how the poets stooped to imitate the worst faults of Martial, their Latin model.

Carew.

Thomas Carew was one of the famous Carews or Careys of the West: his family was settled in Gloucestershire. He was probably born about 1598: Clarendon says that he died about the age of 50; and his death was in 1638 or 1639. His life "was spent with less severity or exactness than it ought to have been," but he made a good end. He seems to have been at Corpus, Oxford, where he took no degree; he was Sewer (a Court office of value), to Charles I, and was among those of "the tribe of Ben Jonson". His poems were published (1640-1642) after his decease.

[Pg 336]

Suckling, in his Sessions of the Poets declares that Carew\'s poems, were "seldom brought forth but with trouble and pain," in fact he did take trouble, and it is a pity that most of his contemporaries took none. His "Persuasions to Love" is a most musical version of that old lesson of the brief-lived rose which is taught by the Greek lyrists of the Anthology and by Ronsard and Herrick so sweetly, and so often. "Give me more love or more disdain," "When thou, poor excommunicate," "He that loves a rosy cheek," the poems "In Absence," "Mark how the bashful morn in vain," the "Elegy on Maria Wentworth," "Ask me no more where Jove bestows," and many other pieces by the lover of Celia, are admirable in versification, and in their own philosophy, which is not remarkable for "severity and exactness". Carew never approaches the elevation of Lovelace at his best, but he perhaps never falls to the pitch of Lovelace when uninspired. There are graceful turns and songs in his Masque "Coelum Britannicum" (1634). Carew\'s verse is a moment in the development from careless speed towards the less varied and more "correct" style that passed from Waller to Dry den and onwards.

Lovelace.

Richard Lovelace is when at his best the greatest of the Cavalier poets, and is personally one of the most sympathetic of men. The eldest son of Sir William Lovelace of "Woolidge" (Woolwich), he was born in 1618, educated at Charterhouse School, and at Gloucester Hall, in Oxford. He is styled "Adonis" in some pleasant verses by a friend, and, like that more glorious cavalier, Wogan, as described by Clarendon, was "accounted the most amiable and beautiful person that eye ever beheld," according to the Oxford antiquary, Wood. Under Goring, to whom he wrote a ringing song of camp revelry, he served in the inglorious expedition of Charles I to Scotland, in 1639; and wrote a lost play, "The Soldier". For presenting a Royalist petition from the county of Kent to Parliament (April, 1642) he was imprisoned for some weeks, and then let out on bail of ￡40,000 (?) not to leave the Parliamentary lines.

He and his brothers were devoted to each other, as appears[Pg 337] from poems which passed between them. He provided Francis and William, slain at Carmarthen, with money and men for the Royal service, and Dudley with the expenses of a military education. In 1646 he raised a regiment for the French service, was wounded at Dunkirk, and was reported dead. His Lucasta, Lucy Sacheverell, then married another man, and, in 1648, Richard returned to England, and, with Dudley, was taken and imprisoned.

In 1649 be published his "Lucasta," with engravings after Lely (who signs himself "P. Lilly"), it is a strangely ill-printed little volume. After the death of Charles I, Lovelace was reduced to great poverty, and died "in Gunpowder Alley, near Shoe Lane," in 1658. His friend, Charles Cotton, the pupil and friend of Walton, is said to have helped to support him. A second part of "Lucasta," containing little of merit, was published by Dudley Lovelace in 1659.

Like so many of the poets of his day, Lovelace was inspired but seldom, and, when uninspired fell into sterile conceits and below mediocrity. His unrivalled poems of true love, "To Lucasta, Going beyond Seas," "To Alth?a, from Prison," "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars" (strangely attributed by Scott to Montrose), are beyond praise or rivalry. "Honour is my Life," wrote Montrose in his Bible; love and honour inspire Lovelace with faultless and immortal verse. "To Amarantha, that she would dishevel her hair,"

But shake your head and scatter day,

is also a charming song; and Suckling could not exceed the cheerful impudence of

Why shouldst thou swear I am forsworn,
Since thine I vowed to be,
Lady, it is already Morn,
And \'twas last night I swore to thee
That fond impossibility.

We can but wish for Lovelace that he had ridden with Wogan from Dover to the North, and died with the last of the loyal on the hills.

[Pg 338]

Suckling.

Sir John Suckling, the son of a wealthy man, who held various offices at Court, was born at Whitton in 1609 (?). Not much is known of his education, but in town he was one of the tribe of Ben Jonson, wits and courtiers, such as Davenant, Carew, and Endymion Porter. His "Session of the Poets" is inelegant banter of his friends. His plays "Aglaura," "The Goblins," "Brennoralt," are very decadent in style, and a man must have a strong passion for the drama who can read them "for human pleasure".

In Charles\'s expedition against the Scottish Covenanters, in 1639, each army occupied itself in observation, Charles at Berwick, Leslie at Duns Law. The commanders on both sides were dispirited, and if a troop of horse, equipped by Suckling at great expense, ran away, it was probably from Kelso, where a small Royalist command was driven in. We know nothing with certainty, but derisive ballads were made against the poet\'s courage, though there never was a braver man than Colonel Gardiner, whose dragoons on every occasion used their spurs, in 1745. Suckling died in Paris in 1642; various tales are told of the cause of his decease.

Suckling is the typical jolly, audacious, amorous, now constant, now amusingly volatile Cavalier poet. His verses are well made but seldom so well as Carew\'s; and though he is not always on pleasure bent he never approaches the heights of Lovelace. The first edition of his poems, "Fragmenta Aurea," is of 1646, and the frontispiece exactly meets our natural theory of Suckling\'s personal aspect. He looks very pleasant in his armour. Among his successes in verse are

\'Tis now since I sate down before
That foolish fort, a heart

and "A Ballad of a Wedding" (the most charming thing of its
kind in English poetry):

Out upon it, I have loved
Three whole days together,
When, dearest, I but think of thee,

and

Why so pale and wan, fond lover?

[Pg 339]

It was with very slight trouble that the gay Suckling stormed the gates of poetic immortality.

Habington.

William Habington (1605-1654) was of a Catholic family; his father (of Hindlip in Worcestershire), had suffered on the occasions of Babington\'s and of the Gunpowder plots. The poet was educated abroad (St. Omer\'s and Paris). He married Lucy, daughter of Lord Powys; his Muse was the domestic, and he ceaselessly celebrated his wife under the name of "Castara". His play, "The Queen of Arragon," had some success. Many of the lyrics to Castara are quite pretty, whether they be prenuptial or written in wedlock, whether Castara is "sick," or "in a trance," or beginning to recover, or weeping, or setting forth on a journey. In lines to the celebrated first and only Marquess of Argyll, Habington applauds those feats of military daring which History does not recognize in the vanquished of Inverlochy and Kilsyth. A Catholic who thought the cause of the Covenant "just," must have had a very open mind. Wood says, in fact, that Habington "did run with the times, and was not unknown to Oliver Cromwell". Habington\'s relations with Argyll are rather puzzling. In addition to his many poems on his wife, Habington composed eight elegies on the death of George Talbot, Esquire.

Cartwright.

William Cartwright (1611-1643) must have been a most amiable man, agreeable University wit, and "florid and seraphical preacher". He passed much of his life at Oxford, being a student of Christ Church; he was an active military organizer when King Charles and the Court were at Oxford, he was Junior Proctor, lectured on the Metaphysics, was lamented by the King and University on his death, and was admired in his life by Dr. Fell.

His poems are mainly birthday odes, and complimentary addresses to ladies. In the person of Lady Carlisle he celebrated,

Masses of ivory blushing here and there,

[Pg 340]

and he wrote disdainfully of what is called "Platonic" Love. He also wrote a song called "The Ordinary".

Davenant.

Sir William Davenant (1606-1668) was more interesting as a man, and in his relations with greater men of letters, than as a poet. His vast "epic" "Gondibert," concerned with the heroic age of Lombardy, and written in quatrains of alternately rhyming decasyllabic lines, is a monument of misplaced ambition. Davenant\'s father was landlord of the Crown Inn, at Oxford, and Davenant did not discourage the legend that Shakespeare was his mother\'s admirer. At a very early age, Davenant wrote the briefest of elegiac odes on Shakespeare\'s death. His best lyric is

The lark now leaves his watery nest,
And climbing, shakes his dewy wings,
He takes this window for the east,
And to implore your light, he sings:
"Awake, awake, the Morn will never rise
Till she can dress her beauty at your eyes".

Davenant was of Lincoln College, Oxford; was one of the London wits, and is bantered by Suckling in "The Session of the Poets" for a sad misfortune. To Lombardy, Davenant turned, in 1629, for the topic of his tragedy of Albovine, a theme with which poets have rarely been successful. In 1638 Davenant was made Poet Laureate; he managed a theatre; in 1641 was accused of being engaged in a Cavalier enterprise, escaped to France, returned, was knighted (1643) for his services at the siege of Gloucester; failed, in 1646, to make Charles accept the terms of the Covenanters, and, after various loyal adventures, was placed in the Tower (1650). Milton is said to have pleaded for him, and he, later, for Milton. On the Restoration he was rewarded by the patent of a theatre, where he produced plays by no means Shakespearean.

He forms a link between the Shakespeare of his childish years, Milton, and the young Dryden. Waller and Cowley wrote the only recommendatory verses for his "Gondibert," which is dedicated, with Davenant\'s ideas on the Art of Poetry, to Thomas[Pg 341] Hobbes. Davenant modestly compared himself to Homer. He trusts that his verses in "Gondibert" will be "sung at village feasts," "like the works of Homer ere they were joined together and made a volume by the Athenian king". A stranger combination of vanity with erroneous pedantry has seldom been printed.

Cowley.

The name of Abraham Cowley is likely to live as long as histories of English literature are written, and yet some students who are not passionately fond of Lydgate would much liefer read Lydgate than Cowley. To Charles Lamb, on the other hand, Cowley\'s was "one of the sweetest names, which carry a perfume in the mention". He was born in London in 1618, and Dr. Johnson suspected that his father was not only a Puritan but a grocer.

A copy of "The Faery Queen" which lay on the window-seat of his mother\'s chamber is said to have wakened Cowley\'s ambition. He "lisped in numbers," and published his verses at Westminster School, whence he went on to Cambridge. There he is said to have written much of his Biblical epic, the "Davideis". The poem is in the heroic couplet, thus

Rais\'d with the news he from high heaven receives,
Straight to his diligent God just thanks he gives
To divine Nob directs he then his flight,
A small town, great in fame, by Levi\'s right.

The poem breaks off at the passage where Jonathan, after fighting all day, tastes some honey of the wild bees.

To compare with Milton\'s Satan the Satan of Cowley,

Thrice did he knock his iron teeth, thrice howl
And into frowns his wrathful forehead roll

is to perceive that the Cavalier was no match for the Puritan poet in sacred epic.

Cowley had done much secretary\'s work for Charles I during the war, he was employed by the Queen in Paris, and returned in 1656 to England, where he was arrested, but presently released. He returned to France just as the star of Molière was rising, came[Pg 342] home at the Restoration, was dissatisfied with such reward as his loyalty obtained, and left town for a very pleasant house at Chertsey, where he died in 1667. His set of amatory verses, "The Mistress," holds a high place in collections. He revelled in what Dr. Johnson called "metaphysical" conceits. Odes he wrote in great numbers, in imitation of Pindar; one of them is addressed to the Royal Society and hails the new birth of divine Science.

Pindaric Odes became a fashion that lasted long, and, in its day, produced little of merit till Dryden came. Not much of Cowley in verse is now read for pleasure except the lively and graceful "Chronicle" of the names of his mistresses. If we could suppose that without Cowley the great Odes in the language would not have been written, Cowley might be regarded as an important influence. But when we turn to his "Praise of Pindar,"

Pindar is imitable by none;
The Ph?nix Pindar is a vast species alone,

Cowley does not seem very inspiring! But Dr. Johnson held that Cowley "was the first who imparted to English numbers the enthusiasm of the greater ode, and the gaiety of the less," while "he left such specimens of excellence" in versification "as enabled succeeding poets to improve it".

Denham.

The poems of Sir John Denham (1615-1669) might, had they perished, have been reckoned in "the veniable part of things lost". He was of the Royalist party, and his occasional political rhymes are humourless libels. In 1642 he published "The Sophy," and surprised the wits, for he had been best known as a dicer and gambler. In 1642 his "Cooper\'s Hill," an early example of local poetry, appeared, and in this was little of what Dr. Johnson called "the old manner of continuing the sense ungracefully from verse to verse," which disfigured his translation of the Second Book of the "?neid". For restricting the sense to the couplet, Denham was reckoned with Waller among the reformers of English poetry.

Four lines of "Cooper\'s Hill," admired by Dryden, are all that men remember; he wrote not ungracefully on Cowley, and he[Pg 343] succeeded in getting ￡10,000 for the Royal cause from the Scottish traders in Poland. He is no longer, as by Dr. Johnson, deservedly considered as one of the fathers of our English poetry, "who improved our taste and advanced our language".

Sherburne, Stanley, Browne, Cotton.