not know what was pointed out by Sir Egerton Brydges that Lovelace, in a song of Orpheus lamenting the death of his wife, wrote:

Oh, could you view the melody

Of every grace,

And music of her face,

You'd drop a tear ; Seeing more harmony In her bright eye

Than now you hear.

His two best-known songs-'To Lucasta' and ''To Althea'-are also by far the best things he did; but even in the first, as Mr Gosse has noted, he uses a figure of Habington's, and in the same words. Habington had in 1634, praising Castara, bestowed his veneration on 'the chaste nunnery of her breasts.'

Song.

Why should you 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.

Have I not loved thee much and long,
A tedious twelve hours' space?
I must all other beauties wrong,
And rob thee of a new embrace,
Could I still dote upon thy face.

Not but all joy in thy brown hair
By others may be found;

But I must search the black and fair,
Like skilful mineralists that sound
For treasure in unploughed-up ground.
Then, if when I have loved my round,
Thou prov'st the pleasant she;
With spoils of meaner beauties crowned,
I laden will return to thee,
Even sated with variety.

The Rose.

Sweet, serene, sky-like flower,
Haste to adorn her bower:
From thy long cloudy bed
Shoot forth thy damask head.

Vermilion ball that's given
From lip to lip in heaven;
Love's couch's coverlid;
Haste, haste to make her bed.

See rosy is her bower,
Her floor is all thy flower;

Her bed a rosy nest,

By a bed of roses prest.

Song.

Amarantha, sweet and fair,

Oh, braid no more that shining hair!

As my curious hand or eye

Hovering round thee let it fly.
Let it fly as unconfined

As its calm ravisher, the wind;

Sir John Denham (1615-69) was born in Dublin, the only son of the Chief-Justice of the King's Bench in Ireland. He was educated in London and at Trinity College, Oxford, where Anthony Wood tells us he was 'a slow dreaming young man, and more addicted to gaming than study'a vice from which his own essay against play did not wean him. In 1634 he married a Gloucestershire heiress with five hundred a year, and went to live with his father at Egham, an estate to which he succeeded four years later. At the outbreak of the great rebellion he was high-sheriff of Surrey, and was made governor of Farnham Castle for the king; on its capture he fell into Waller's hands, and was sent prisoner to London, but soon permitted to retire to Oxford. After Charles I. had been delivered into the hands of the army, his secret correspondence was partly carried on by Denham, who was furnished with nine several ciphers for the purpose. Charles had a respect for literature as well as the arts; and Milton records of him that he made Shakespeare's plays the closet-companion of his solitude. It would appear, however, that he wished to keep poetry apart from State affairs; for he told Denham, on seeing one of his pieces, 'that when men are young, and have little else to do, they may vent the overflowings of their fancy in that way; but when they are thought fit for more serious employments, if they still persisted in that course, it looked as if they minded not the way to any better.'

In 1648 Denham helped to convey the Duke of York to Holland, and thereafter lived some time in that country and in France; in 1650 with Lord Crofts he collected £10,000 for Charles II. from Scots in Poland, and he several times visited England on secret service. The Restoration revived his fallen dignity and fortunes. He was made surveyor-general of works and a Knight of the Bath. He was a better poet than architect, but he had Christopher Wren for his deputy. In 1665 he took for his second wife a young girl, who soon showed such open favour to the Duke of York that the poor poet for a few months went mad. Soon after his recovery Lady Denham died suddenly (6th January 1667)-—of a poisoned cup of chocolate, said scandal. His last years were rendered miserable betwixt poverty and the satires of Butler, Marvell, and others. He was buried near Chaucer in Westminster Abbey.

Cooper's Hill, the poem by which Denham is now best known, was first published in 1642, but did not receive its final form until thirteen years afterwards. It consists of between three and four hundred lines, written in the heroic couplet. Denham's muse was more reflective than descriptive. The descriptions are interspersed with sentimental digressions, suggested by the objects around -the river Thames, a ruined abbey, Windsor Forest, and the field of Runnymede. Dr Johnson gave Denham the praise of being 'the

author of a species of composition that may be denominated local poetry, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection or incidental meditation.' Ben Jonson's fine poem on Penshurst may dispute the palm of originality on this point with Cooper's Hill, but Jonson did not write with so great 'correctness' or such elaborate point as Denham. The versification is smooth and flowing, but Denham had no pretensions to the genius of Cowley, or to the depth and delicacy of feeling possessed by the dramatists or poets of the Elizabethan period. He reasoned fluently in verse, without glaring faults of style, and hence obtained from Johnson approbation far above his deserts. 'That Sir John Denham began a reformation in our verse,' says Southey in his Life of Cowper, 'is one of the most groundless assertions that ever obtained belief in literature. More thought and more skill had been exercised before his time in the construction of English metre than he ever bestowed on the subject, and by men of far greater attainments and far higher powers. To improve, indeed, either upon the versification or the diction of our great writers was impossible; it was impossible to exceed them in the knowledge or in the practice of their art, but it was easy to avoid the more obvious faults of inferior authors and in this way he succeeded, just so far as not to be included in

:

The mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease; nor consigned to oblivion with the "persons of quality" who contributed their vapid effusions to the miscellanies of those days. His proper place is among those of his contemporaries and successors who call themselves wits, and have since been entitled poets by the courtesy of England.' Denham, nevertheless, deserves a place in English literature, though not that high one which used to be assigned to him. The traveller who crosses the Alps or Pyrenees finds pleasure in the contrast afforded by level plains and calm streams; and so Denham's correctness pleases, after the daring imagination and irregular harmony of the greater masters of the lyre who preceded him. In reading him we feel that we have passed into another scene -romance is over, and we must be content with smoothness, regularity, and order.

The Thames-from 'Cooper's Hill.'
My eye, descending from the hill, surveys
Where Thames among the wanton valleys strays;
Thames, the most loved of all the Ocean's sons
By his old sire, to his embraces runs,
Hasting to pay his tribute to the sea,
Like mortal life to meet eternity.

Though with those streams he no resemblance hold,
Whose foam is amber and their gravel gold,
His genuine and less guilty wealth t' explore,
Search not his bottom, but survey his shore,

O'er which he kindly spreads his spacious wing,
And hatches plenty for th' ensuing spring,
Nor then destroys it with too fond a stay,

Like mothers which their infants overlay ;

Nor with a sudden and impetuous wave,

Like profuse kings, resumes the wealth he gave.
No unexpected inundations spoil

The mower's hopes, nor mock the ploughman's toil,
But Godlike his unwearied bounty flows;
First loves to do, then loves the good he does.
Nor are his blessings to his banks confined,
But free and common, as the sea or wind.
When he to boast or to disperse his stores,
Full of the tributes of his grateful shores,
Visits the world, and in his flying towers
Brings home to us, and makes both Indies ours:

SIR JOHN DENHAM. From an Engraving by Legoux after a Picture in the Collection of the Earl of Chesterfield.

Finds wealth where 'tis, bestows it where it wants,
Cities in deserts, woods in cities plants;
So that to us no thing, no place is strange.
While his fair bosom is the world's Exchange.
O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;
Strong without rage; without o'erflowing, full.

But his proud head the airy mountain hides
Among the clouds; his shoulders and his sides
A shady mantle clothes; his curled brows
Frown on the gentle stream, which calmly flows,
While winds and storms his lofty forehead beat,
The common fate of all that's high or great.
Low at his foot a spacious plain is placed,
Between the mountain and the stream embraced,
Which shade and shelter from the hill derives,
While the kind river wealth and beauty gives;
And in the mixture of all these appears
Variety, which all the rest endears.

This scene had some bold Greek or British bard
Beheld of old, what stories had we heard

Of fairies, satyrs, and the nymphs their dames,
Their feasts, their revels, and their amorous flames!
'Tis still the same, although their airy shape
All but a quick poetic sight escape.

The Reformation-Monks and Puritans.
Here should my wonder dwell, and here my praise,
But my fixed thoughts my wandering eye betrays.
Viewing a neighbouring hill, whose top of late
A chapel crowned, till in the common fate
Th' adjoining abbey fell. May no such storm
Fall on our times, where ruin must reform !
Tell me, my Muse, what monstrous dire offence,
What crime could any Christian king incense
To such a rage? Was 't luxury or lust?
Was he so temperate, so chaste, so just?

[more;

Were these their crimes? They were his own much
But wealth is crime enough to him that 's poor,
Who having spent the treasures of his crown,
Condemns their luxury to feed his own.
And yet this act, to varnish o'er the shame
Of sacrilege, must bear devotion's name.
No crime so bold but would be understood
A real or at least a seeming good.
Who fears not to do ill, yet fears the name,
And, free from conscience, is a slave to fame.
Thus he the church at once protects, and spoils :
But princes' swords are sharper than their styles.
And thus to th' ages past he makes amends,
Their charity destroys, their faith defends.
Then did religion in a lazy cell,

In empty, airy contemplation dwell;
And like the block unmoved lay; but ours,
As much too active, like the stork devours.
Is there no temperate region can be known,
Betwixt their frigid and our torrid zone?
Could we not wake from that lethargic dream,
But to be restless in a worse extreme?

And for that lethargy was there no cure,

But to be cast into a calenture?

Can knowledge have no bound, but must advance
So far, to make us wish for ignorance,
And rather in the dark to grope our way,

Than, led by a false guide, to err by day?

Denham had sound and decided views as to the duty of a translator. It is not his business alone,' he says, 'to translate language into language, but poesy into poesy; and poesy is so subtle a spirit, that, in pouring out of one language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the translation, there will remain nothing but a caput mortuum; there being certain graces and happinesses peculiar to every language, which give life and energy to the words.' Hence he says in his poetical address to Sir Richard Fanshawe on his translation of Il Pastor Fido:

That servile path thou nobly dost decline
Of tracing word by word, and line by line.
Those are the laboured births of slavish brains,
Not the effect of poetry, but pains.

Cheap vulgar arts, whose narrowness affords
No flight for thoughts, but poorly sticks at words.

A new and nobler way thou dost pursue,
To make translations and translators too.
They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame,
True to his sense, but truer to his fame.

Denham wrote a tragedy, The Sophy (1642-67), on a plot of Oriental jealousy, treachery, torture, and murder, based, like other plays of the time, on the Travels of Sir Thomas Herbert (see page 601), the sophy being the Shah of Persia. It was extremely popular, and in Ward's opinion deserves to rank as one of the best tragedies of the time. The story is pathetic; as might be expected from Denham, the verse is far above the average of playwrights' rhymes; and there are many pointed and felicitous lines and couplets, as when the envious king asks his counsellor Haly: Have not I performed actions

As great, and with as great a moderation? The courtier and friend replies:

Ay, sir; but that's forgotten :

Actions of the last age are like almanacs of the last year -an experience which we know was nowise exceptional amongst cavaliers in the days of Charles II. Oh! happiness of sweet content

To be at once secure and innocent

is a stock quotation from Denham; so is

Love! in what poison is thy dart
Dipped when it makes a bleeding heart!
None know but they who feel the smart.

In the following bit of Denham's elegy on the death of Cowley, the poet by an odd oversight ignores the fact that Shakespeare was buried on the banks of his native Avon, not in Westminster Abbey, and that both he and Fletcher died long ere time had 'blasted their bays.'

On Mr Abraham Cowley.

Old Chaucer, like the morning-star,
To us discovers day from far.

His light those mists and clouds dissolved
Which our dark nation long involved;
But he descending to the shades,
Darkness again the age invades ;
Next (like Aurora) Spenser rose,
Whose purple blush the day foreshews;
The other three with his own fires
Phoebus, the poet's god, inspires:
By Shakespeare's, Jonson's, Fletcher's lines,
Our stage's lustre Rome's outshines.
These poets near our princes sleep,
And in one grave their mansion keep.
They lived to see so many days,
Till time had blasted all their bays;
But cursed be the fatal hour

That plucked the fairest, sweetest flower
That in the Muses' garden grew,
And amongst withered laurels threw.
Time, which made them their fame outlive,
To Cowley scare did ripeness give.
Old mother-wit and nature gave
Shakespeare and Fletcher all they have:

In Spenser and in Jonson art
Of slower nature got the start;
But both in him so equal are,

None knows which bears the happiest share.
To him no author was unknown,
Yet what he wrote was all his own;
He melted not the ancient gold,
Nor with Ben Jonson did make bold
To plunder all the Roman stores
Of poets and of orators:

Horace his wit and Virgil's state
He did not steal, but emulate;

And when he would like them appear,

Their garb, but not their clothes, did wear:
He not from Rome alone, but Greece,
Like Jason brought the golden fleece;
To him that language-though to none
Of th' others as his own was known.
On a stiff gale, as Flaccus sings,
The Theban swan extends his wings,
When through th' ethereal clouds he flies
To the same pitch our swan doth rise;
Old Pindar's heights by him are reached,
When on that gale his wings are stretched;
His fancy and his judgment such,
Each to th' other seemed too much;
His severe judgment giving law,
His modest fancy kept in awe.

The following song is sung with music to the prince when he is awaiting death, having been poisoned by the minister of his unnaturally jealous (and too late repentant) father:

Song to Morpheus.

Morpheus, the humble god, that dwells
In cottages and smoky cells,

Hates gilded roofs and beds of down;
And, though he fears no prince's frown,
Flies from the circle of a crown.

Come, I say, thou powerful god,
And thy leaden charming rod,
Dipt in the Lethean lake,

O'er his wakeful temples shake,

Lest he should sleep and never wake.

Nature, alas, why art thou so
Obliged to thy greatest foe?
Sleep that is thy best repast,
Yet of death it bears a taste,

And both are the same thing at last.
(From The Sophy, Act v.)

Denham's translation of the Psalms can hardly be pronounced an improvement on earlier renderings. He aims at greater variety of measure, and sometimes employs complicated stanzas. These are the first two verses of his Hundredth Psalm : Ye nations of the earth rejoice When ye to God yourselves present: And make your glad harmonious voice Of his high praise the instrument. He is our God; for man, 'tis sure, Made not himself: we are his sheep; His flock with care he does secure In grandest folds and fields does keep.

Abraham Cowley

was the most popular English poet of his times. Waller stood next in public estimation. Dryden had as yet done nothing to give him a name, and Milton's minor poems had not earned for him a supreme position: the same year that witnessed the death of Cowley ushered the Paradise Lost into the world. Cowley was born in London in 1618, and was the posthumous son of a respectable stationer in Cheapside, who, dying in the August of that year, left £140 each to his six children and to the unborn infant, the poet. His mother had influence enough to procure admission for him as a king's scholar at Westminster; and in

ABRAHAM COWLEY.

From the Portrait by Mrs Mary Beale in the National Portrait Gallery.

1637 he was elected a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, where three years afterwards he obtained a minor fellowship. Cowley 'lisped in numbers.' In 1633, in his fifteenth year, appeared Poetical Blossomes by A. C., with a portrait of the young poet prefixed. In his mother's parlour there used to lie a copy of Spenser's Faerie Queene, which infinitely delighted the susceptible boy and helped to make him a poet. The intensity of his youthful ambition may be seen from the first two lines in his Miscellanies:

What shall I do to be for ever known, And make the age to come my own? Cowley was ejected, as a royalist, from Cambridge, and betook himself to Oxford; thence in 1646 he followed Queen Henrietta Maria to France, where he remained ten years. He was sent on various embassies, and conducted the correspondence in cipher of Charles and his queen— a task that took up all his days and two or

three nights every week. At last the Restoration came, with all its hopes and fears. England looked for happy days and loyalty for its reward, but for many the cup of joy was dashed with disappointment. Cowley expected to be made master of the Savoy, or to receive some other appointment, but his claims were persistently overlooked. In his youth he had written an ode to Brutus, which was remembered to his disadvantage; and a comedy, The Cutter of Coleman Street, which Cowley brought out shortly after the Restoration, and in which the riot and jollity of the cavaliers are painted in strong colours, was misrepresented or misconstrued at court. It is certain that Cowley felt his disappointment keenly, and he resolved to retire into the country. He had only just passed his fortieth year, but the greater part of his time had been spent in incessant labour, amidst dangers and suspense. 'He always professed,' says Dr Sprat, his biographer, 'that he went out of the world as it was man's, into the same world as it was nature's and as it was God's. The whole compass of the creation, and all the wonderful effects of the divine wisdom, were the constant prospect of his senses and his thoughts. And indeed he entered with great advantage on the studies of nature, even as the first great men of antiquity did, who were generally both poets and philosophers.' He thus happily refers to his wish for retirement:

Be prudent, and the shore in prospect keep,
In a weak boat trust not the deep.
Plac'd beneath envy, above envying rise;
Pity great men, great things despise.

The wise example of the heav'nly lark,
Thy fellow-poet, Cowley, mark!
Above the clouds let thy proud musick sound,
Thy humble nest build on the ground.

Cowley obtained, through Lord St Albans and the Duke of Buckingham, the lease of some lands belonging to the queen, worth about £300 per annum-a decent provision for his retirement; and he settled at Chertsey on the Thames. Here, a man of devout beliefs and pure life, he cultivated his garden and his fields, and wrote of solitude and obscurity, of the perils of greatness, and the happiness of liberty. He renewed his acquaintance with the beloved poets of antiquity, whose ease and elegance he sought to rival in praising the charms of a country life; and he composed his fine prose discourses, so full of gentle thoughts and well-digested knowledge, heightened by a delightful bonhomie and communicativeness worthy of Horace or Montaigne. Sprat mentions that Cowley excelled in letterwriting, that he and another friend had a large collection of his letters, but that they had decided that nothing of that kind should be published a regrettable decision. Coleridge protested against the prudery of Sprat 'in refusing