Of all we have named hitherto among the Elizabethan poets, the only ones who would be likely to appear there in Charles I.’s time would be George Chapman, of the Homer translation; staid and very old now, with snowy hair; and Dekker—what time he was out of prison for debt; possibly, too, John Marston. Poor Ben Jonson wrote about this time his last play, which did not take either with courtiers or the public; whereupon the old grumbler was more rough than ever, and died a few years thereafter, wretchedly poor, and was put into the ground—upright, tradition says, as into a well—in Westminster Abbey. There one may walk over his name and his crown; and this is the last we shall see of him, whose swagger has belonged to three reigns.

Among other writers known to these times and who went somewhiles to these suppers at the Apollo was James Howell,[34] notable because he wrote so much; and I specially name him because he was the earliest and best type of what we should call a hack-writer; ready for anything; a shrewd salesman, too, of all he did write; travelling largely—having modern instincts, I think; making small capital—whether of learning or money—reach enormously. He was immensely popular, too, in his day; a Welshman by birth, and never wrote at all till past forty; but afterward he kept at it with a terrible pertinacity. He gives quaint advice about foreign travel, with some shrewdness cropping out in it. Thus of languages he says:

Then he says, for improvement, it is well to have the acquaintance of some ancient nun, with whom one may talk through the grated windows—for they have all the news, and “they will entertain discourse till one be weary, if one bestow on them now and then some small bagatells—as English Gloves, or Knives, or Ribands—and before hee go over, hee must furnish himself with such small curiosities.”

The expenses of travel in that day on the Continent, he says, for a young fellow who has his “Riding and Dancing and Fencing, and Racket, and Coach-hire, with apparel and other casual charges will be about £300 per annum”—which sum (allowing for differences in moneyed values) may have been a matter of $6,000. He says with great aptness, too, that the traveller must not neglect letter-writing, which

Wotton and Walton.

Another great traveller of these times—but one whose dignities would, I suspect have kept him away from the Devil Tavern—was Sir Henry Wotton.[35] He was a man who had supplemented his university training by long residence abroad; who had been of service to King James (before the King had yet left Scotland) by divulging to him and defeating some purposed scheme of poisoning. Wotton was, later, English ambassador at the brilliant court of Venice, whence he wrote to the King many suggestions respecting the improvement of his garden, detailing Italian methods, and forwarding grafts and rare seedlings; he was familiar with most European courts—hobnobbed with Doges and with Kings, was a scholar of elegant and various accomplishments, and the reputed maker of that old and well-worn witticism about ambassadors—that “they were honest men, sent to lie abroad for the good of their country.” He was, furthermore, himself boastful of the authorship of this prickly saying, “The itch of disputation is the scab of the church.”[36] There is also a charming little poem of his—which gets place in the anthologies—addressed to that Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, whom we encountered as a bride at the Castle of Heidelberg, and who became the mother of the accomplished and daring Prince Rupert. Such a man as Wotton, full of anecdote, bristling with wit, familiar with courts, and one who could match phrases with James, or Charles, or Buckingham, in Latin, or French, or Italian, must have been a god-send for a dinner-party at Theobalds, or at Whitehall. To crown his graces, Walton[37] tells us that he was an excellent fisherman.

And this mention of the quiet Angler tempts me to enroll him here, a little before his time; yet he was well past thirty when James died, and must have been busy in the ordering of his draper’s shop in Fleet Street when Charles I. came to power. He was of Staffordshire birth, and no millinery of the city could have driven out of his mind the pretty ruralities of his Staffordshire home, and the lovely far-off views of the Welsh hills. His first wife was grandniece of Bishop Cranmer; he was himself friend of Dr. Donne, to whom he listened from Sunday to Sunday; a second wife was sister of that Thomas Ken who came to be Bishop of Bath and Wells; so he was hemmed in by ecclesiasticisms, and loved them as he loved trout. He was warm Royalist always, and lived by old traditions in Church and State—not easily overset by Reformers. No fine floral triumphs of any new gardeners, however accredited, could blind him to the old glories of the eglantine or of a damask rose. A good and quiet friend, a placid book, a walk under trees, made sufficient regalement for him. These, with a fishing bout (by way of exceptional entertainment), and a Sunday in a village church, with the Litany well intoned, were all in all to him. His book holds spicy place among ranks of books, as lavender keeps fresh odor among stores of linen. It is worth any man’s dalliance with the fishing-craft to make him receptive to the simplicities and limpidities of Walton’s Angler. I am tempted to say of him again, what I have said of him before in other connection:—very few fine writers of our time could make a better book on such a subject to-day, with all the added information and all the practice of the newspaper columns. What Walton wants to say, he says. You can make no mistake about his meaning; all is as lucid as the water of a spring. He does not play upon your wonderment with tropes. There is no chicane of the pen; he has some pleasant matters to tell of, and he tells of them—straight.

Another great charm about Walton is his childlike truthfulness. I think he is almost the only earnest trout-fisher (unless Sir Humphry Davy be excepted) whose report could be relied upon for the weight of a trout. I have many excellent friends—capital fishermen—whose word is good upon most concerns of life, but in this one thing they cannot be religiously confided in. I excuse it; I take off twenty per cent. from their estimates without either hesitation, anger, or reluctance.

I must not omit to mention his charming biographic sketches (rather than “lives”) of Hooker, of Wotton, of Herbert, of Donne—the letterpress of all these flowing easily and limpidly as the brooks he loved to picture. He puts in very much pretty embroidery too, for which tradition or street gossip supplied him with his needs, in figure and in color; this is not always of best authenticity, it is true;[38] but who wishes to question when it is the simple-souled and always honest Walton who is talking? And as for his great pastoral of The Complete Angler—to read it, in whatever season, is like plunging into country air, and sauntering through lovely country solitudes.

I name Sir Thomas Overbury[39]—who was the first, I think, to make that often-repeated joke respecting people who boasted of their ancestry, saying “they were like potatoes, with the best part below ground”—because he belonged to this period, and was a man of elegant culture and literary promise. He was poisoned in the Tower at the instance of some great people about the court of James, who feared damaging testimony of his upon a trial that was just then to come off; and this trial and poisoning business, in which (Carr) Somerset and Lady Essex were deeply concerned, made one of the greatest scandals of the scandalous court of King James. Overbury’s Characters are the best known of his writings, but they are slight; quaint metaphors and tricksy English are in them, with a good many tiresome affectations of speech. What he said of the Dairymaid is best of all.

George Herbert.

This is a name which will be more familiar to the reader, and if he has never encountered the little olive-green, gilt-edged budget of Herbert’s[40] poems, he can hardly have failed to have met, on some page of the anthologies, such excerpt as this about Virtue:

And now, that I have quoted this, I wish that I had quoted another; and so it would be, I suppose, were I to go through the little book. One cannot go amiss of lines that will show his tenderness, his strong religious feeling, his gloomy coloring, his quaint conceits—with not overmuch rhythmic grace, but a certain spiritual unction that commends him to hosts of devout-minded people everywhere. Yet I cannot help thinking that he would have been lost sight of earlier in the swarm of seventeenth-century poets, had it not been for a certain romantic glow attaching to his short life. And first, he was a scion from the old Pembroke stock, born in a great castle on the Welsh borders, and bred in luxury. He went to Cambridge for study at a time when he may have encountered there the grim boy-student, Oliver Cromwell, or possibly that other fair-faced Cambridge student, John Milton, who was upon the rolls eight years later. He was a young fellow of rare scholarship, winning many honors; was tall, spare, with an eagle eye; and so he wins upon old James I., when he comes down on a visit to the University (the Mother Herbert managing to have the King see his best points, even to his silken doublets and his jewelled buckles, of which the lad was fond). And he is taken into favor, bandies compliments with the monarch, goes again and again to London and to court; sees Chancellor Bacon familiarly—corrects proofs for him—and has hopes of high preferment. But his chief patron dies; the King dies; and that bubble of royal inflation is at an end.

It was after long mental struggle, it would seem, that George Herbert, whom we know as the saintly poet, let the hopes of court consequence die out of his heart. But once wedded to the Church his religious activities and sanctities knew no hesitations. His marriage even was an incident that had no worldly or amorous delays. A Mr. Danvers, kinsman of Herbert’s step-father, thought all the world of the poet, and declared his utter willingness that Herbert “should marry any one of his nine daughters [for he had so many], but rather Jane, because Jane was his beloved daughter.” And to such good effect did the father talk to Jane, that she, as old Walton significantly tells us, was in love with the poet before yet she had seen him. Only four days after their first meeting these twain were married; nor did this sudden union bring such disastrous result as so swift an engineering of similar contracts is apt to show.

At Bemerton vicarage, almost under the shadow of Salisbury cathedral, he began, shortly thereafter, that saintly and poetic life which his verse illustrates and which every memory of him ennobles. His charities were beautiful and constant; his love of the flesh, his early “choler,” and all courtly leanings crucified. Even the peasants thereabout stayed the plough and listened reverently (another Angelus!) when the sounds of his “Praise-bells” broke upon the air. It is a delightful picture the old Angler biographer gives of him there in his quiet vicarage of Bemerton, or footing it away over Salisbury Plain, to lift up his orison in symphony with the organ notes that pealed from underneath the arches of Salisbury’s wondrous cathedral.

Yet over all the music and the poems of this Church poet, and over his life, a tender gloom lay constantly; the grave and death were always in his eye—always in his best verses. And after some half-dozen years of poetic battling with the great problems of life and of death, and a further battling with the chills and fogs of Wiltshire, that smote him sorely, he died.

He was buried at Bemerton, where a new church has been built in his honor. It may be found on the high-road leading west from Salisbury, and only a mile and a half away; and at Wilton—the carpet town—which is only a fifteen minutes’ walk beyond, may be found that gorgeous church, built not long ago by another son of the Pembroke stock (the late Lord Herbert of Lea), who perhaps may have had in mind the churchly honors due to his poetic kinsman; and yet all the marbles which are lavished upon this Wilton shrine are poorer, and will sooner fade than the mosaic of verse builded into The Temple of George Herbert.

Robert Herrick.

I deal with a clergyman again; but there are clergymen—and clergymen.

Robert Herrick[41] was the son of a London goldsmith, born on Cheapside, not far away from that Mermaid Tavern of which mention has been made; and it is very likely that the young Robert, as a boy, may have stood before the Tavern windows on tiptoe, listening to the drinking songs that came pealing forth when Ben Jonson and the rest were in their first lusty manhood. He studied at Cambridge, receiving, may be, some scant help from his rich uncle, Sir William Herrick, who had won his title by giving good jewel bargains to King James. He would seem to have made a long stay in Cambridge; and only in 1620, when our Pilgrims were beating toward Plymouth shores, do we hear of him domiciled in London—learning the town, favored by Ben Jonson and his fellows, perhaps apprenticed to the goldsmith craft, certainly putting jewels into fine settings of verse even then; some of them with coarse flaws in them, but full of a glitter and sparkle that have not left them yet. Nine years later, after such town experiences as we cannot trace, he gets, somehow, appointment to a church living down in Devonshire at Dean Prior. His parish was on the southeastern edge of that great heathery stretch of wilderness called Dartmoor Forest: out of this, and from under cool shadows of the Tors, ran brooks which in the cleared valleys were caught by rude weirs and shot out in irrigating skeins of water upon the grassland. Yet it was far away from any echo of the Mermaid; old traditions were cherished there; old ways were reckoned good ways; and the ploughs of that region are still the clumsiest to be found in England. There Robert Herrick lived, preaching and writing poems, through those eighteen troublous years which went before the execution of Charles I. What the goldsmith-vicar’s sermons were we can only conjecture: what the poems were he writ, we can easily guess from the flowers that enjewel them, or the rarer “noble numbers” which take hold on religious sanctities. This preacher-poet twists the lilies and roses into bright little garlands, that blush and droop in his pretty couplets, as they did in the vicar’s garden of Devon. The daffodils and the violets give out their odors to him, if he only writes their names.

Hear what he says to Phyllis, and how the numbers flow:

Then again, see how in his soberer and meditative moods, he can turn the rich and resonant Litany of the Anglican Church into measures of sweet sound:

Now, in reading these two poems of such opposite tone, and yet of agreeing verbal harmonies, one would say—here is a singer, serene, devout, of delicate mould, loving all beautiful things in heaven and on earth. One would look for a man saintly of aspect, deep-eyed, tranquil, too ethereal for earth.

Well, I must tell the truth in these talks, so far as I can find it, no matter what cherished images may break down. This Robert Herrick was a ponderous, earthy-looking man, with huge double chin, drooping cheeks, a great Roman nose, prominent glassy eyes, that showed around them the red lines begotten of strong potions of Canary, and the whole set upon a massive neck which might have been that of Heliogabalus.[42] It was such a figure as the artists would make typical of a man who loves the grossest pleasures.

The poet kept a pet goose at the vicarage, and also a pet pig, which he taught to drink beer out of his own tankard; and an old parishioner, for whose story Anthony à Wood is sponsor, tells us that on one occasion when his little Devon congregation would not listen to him as he thought they ought to listen, he dashed his sermon on the floor, and marched with tremendous stride out of church—home to fondle his pet pig.

When Charles I. came to grief, and when the Puritans began to sift the churches, this Royalist poet proved a clinker that was caught in the meshes and thrown aside. This is not surprising. It was after his enforced return to London, and in the year 1648 (one year before Charles’ execution at Whitehall), that the first authoritative publication was made of the Hesperides, or Works, both Humane and Divine, of Robert Herrick, Esq.—his clerical title dropped.

There were those critics and admirers who saw in Herrick an allegiance to the methods of Catullus; others who smacked in his epigrams the verbal felicities of Martial; but surely there is no need, in that fresh spontaneity of the Devon poet, to hunt for classic parallels; nature made him one of her own singers, and by instincts born with him he fashioned words and fancies into jewelled shapes. The “more’s the pity” for those gross indelicacies which smirch so many pages; things unreadable; things which should have been unthinkable and unwritable by a clergyman of the Church of England. To what period of his life belonged his looser verses it is hard to say; perhaps to those early days when, fresh from Cambridge, Ben Jonson patted him on the shoulder approvingly; perhaps to those later years when, soured by his ejection from the Church, he dropped his Reverend, and may have capped verses with such as Davenant or Lovelace, and others, whose antagonism of Puritanism provoked wantonness of speech.

At the restoration of Charles II., Herrick was reinstated in his old parish in Devonshire, and died there, among the meadows and the daffodils, at the ripe age of eighty-four. And as we part with this charming singer, we cannot forbear giving place to this bit of his penitential verse:

Revolutionary Times.

I have given the reader a great many names to remember to-day; they are many, because we have found no engrossing one whose life and genius have held us to a long story. But we should never enjoy the great memories except they were set in the foil of lesser ones, to emphasize their glories.

The writers of this particular period—some of whom I have named—fairly typify and illustrate the drift of letters away from the outspoken ardors and full-toned high exuberance of Elizabethan days, to something more coy, more schooled, more reticent, more measured, more tame.[43] The cunning of word arrangement comes into the place of spontaneous, maybe vulgar wit; humor is saddled with school-craftiness; melodious echoes take the place of fresh bursts of sound. Poetry, that gurgled out by its own wilful laws of progression, now runs more in channels that old laws have marked. Words and language that had been used to tell straightforwardly stories of love and passion and suffering are now put to uses of pomp and decoration.

Moreover, in Elizabethan times, when a great monarch and great ministers held the reins of power undisturbed and with a knightly hand, minstrelsy, wherever it might lift its voice, had the backing and the fostering support of great tranquillity and great national pride. In the days when the Armada was crushed, when British ships and British navigators brought every year tales of gold, tales of marvellous new shores, when princes of the proudest courts came flocking to pay suit to England’s great Virgin Queen, what poet should not sing at his loudest and his bravest? But in the times into which we have now drifted, there is no tranquillity; the fever of Puritans against Anglicans, of Independents against Monarchy Men, is raging through all the land; pride in the kingship of such as James I. had broken down; pride in the kingship of the decorous Charles I. has broken down again. All intellectual ardors run into the channels of the new strifes. Only through little rifts in the stormy sky do the sunny gleams of poesy break in.

There are colonies, too, planted over seas, and growing apace in these days, whither the eyes and thoughts of many of the bravest and clearest thinkers are turning. Even George Herbert, warmest of Anglicans, and of the noble house of Pembroke, was used to say, “Religion[44] is going over seas.” They were earnest, hard workers, to be sure, who went—keen-thoughted—far-seeing—most diligent—not up to poems indeed, save some little occasional burst of melodious thanksgiving. But they carried memories of the best and of the strongest that belonged to the intellectual life of England. The ponderous periods of Richard Hooker, and the harshly worded wise things of John Selden,[45] found lodgement in souls that were battling with the snows and pine-woods where Andover and Salem and Newburyport were being planted. And over there, maybe, first of all, would hope kindle and faith brighten at sound of that fair young Puritan poet, who has just now, in Cambridge, sung his “Hymn of the Nativity.”[46]

But the storm and the wreck were coming. There were forewarnings of it in the air; forewarnings of it in the court and in Parliament; forewarnings of it in every household. City was to be pitted against city; brother against brother; and in that “sea of trouble,” down went the King and the leaders of old, and up rose the Commonwealth and the leaders of the new faith.

In our next talk we shall find all England rocking on that red wave of war. You would think poets should be silent, and the eloquent dumb; but we shall hear, lifting above the uproar, the golden language of Jeremy Taylor—the measured cadences of Waller—the mellifluous jingle of Suckling and of his Royalist brothers, and drowning all these with its grand sweep of sound, the majestic organ-music of Milton.

CHAPTER IV.

I did not hold the reader’s attention long to the nightmare tragedies of Webster and Ford, though they show shining passages of amazing dramatic power. Marston was touched upon, and that satiric vein of his, better known perhaps than his more ambitious work. We spoke of Massinger, whose money-monster, Giles Overreach, makes one think of the railway wreckers of our time; then came the gracious and popular Beaumont and Fletcher, twins in work and in friendship; the former dying in the same year with Shakespeare, and Fletcher dying the same year with King James (1625). I spoke of that Prince Harry who promised well, but died young, and of Charles, whose sad story will come to ampler mention in our present talk. We made record of the death of Ben Jonson—of the hack-writing service of James Howell—of the dilettante qualities of Sir Henry Wotton, and of the ever-delightful work and enduring fame of the old angler, Izaak Walton. And last we closed our talk with sketches of two poets: the one, George Herbert, to whom his priestly work and his saintly verse were “all in all;” and the other, Robert Herrick, born to a goldsmith’s craft, but making verses that glittered more than all the jewels of Cheapside.

King Charles and his Friends.

We open this morning upon times when New-England towns were being planted among the pine-woods, and the decorous, courtly, unfortunate Charles I. had newly come to the throne. Had the King been only plain Charles Stuart, he would doubtless have gone through life with the reputation of an amiable, courteous gentleman, not over-sturdy in his friendships[47]—a fond father and good husband, with a pretty taste in art and in books, but strongly marked with some obstinacies about the ways of wearing his rapier, or of tying his cravat, or of overdrawing his bank account.

In the station that really fell to him those obstinacies took hold upon matters which brought him to grief. The man who stood next to Charles, and who virtually governed him, was that George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who by his fine doublets, fine dancing, and fine presence, had very early commended himself to the old King James, and now lorded it with the son. He was that Steenie who in Scott’s Fortunes of Nigel plays the braggadocio of the court: he had attended Prince Charles upon that Quixotic errand of his, incognito, across Europe, to play the wooer at the feet of the Infanta of Spain; and when nothing came of all that show of gallantry and the lavishment of jewels upon the dusky heiress of Castile, the same Buckingham had negotiated the marriage with the French princess, Henrietta. He was a brazen courtier, a shrewd man of the world; full of all accomplishments; full of all profligacy. He made and unmade bishops and judges, and bolstered the King in that antagonism to the Commons of England which was rousing the dangerous indignation of such men as Eliot and Hampden and Pym. Private assassination, however, took him off before the coming of the great day of wrath. You must not confound this Duke of Buckingham with another George Villiers, also Duke of Buckingham, who was his son, and who figured largely in the days of Charles II.—being even more witty, and more graceful, and more profligate—if possible—than his father; a literary man withal, and the author of a play[48] which had great vogue.

Another striking figure about the court of Charles was a small, red-faced man, keen-eyed, sanctimonious, who had risen from the humble ranks (his father having been a clothier in a small town of Berkshire) to the position of Archbishop of Canterbury. So starched was he in his High-Church views that the Pope had offered him the hat of a cardinal. He made the times hard for Non-conformists; your ancestors and mine, if they emigrated in those days, may very likely have been pushed over seas by the edicts of Archbishop Laud. His monstrous intolerance was provoking, and intensifying that agitation in the religious world of England which Buckingham had already provoked in the political world; and the days of wrath were coming.

This Archbishop Laud is not only keen-sighted but he is bountiful and helpful within the lines of his own policy. He endowed Oxford with great, fine buildings. Some friend has told him that a young preacher of wonderful attractions has made his appearance at St. Paul’s—down on a visit from Cambridge—a young fellow, wonderfully handsome, with curling locks and great eyes full of expression, and a marvellous gift of language; and the Archbishop takes occasion to see him or hear him; and finding that beneath such exterior there is real vigor and learning, he makes place for him as Fellow at Oxford; appoints him presently his own chaplain, and gives him a living down in Rutland.

Jeremy Taylor.

This priest, of such eloquence and beauty, was Jeremy Taylor,[49] who was the son of a barber at Cambridge, was entered at Caius College as sizar, or charity scholar, just one year after Milton was entered at Christ College, and from the door of his father’s shop may have looked admiringly many a time upon the

which belonged even then to the young Puritan poet. But Jeremy Taylor was not a Puritan; never came to know Milton personally. One became the great advocate and the purest illustration of the tenets of Episcopacy in England; and the other—eventually—their most effective and weighty opponent. In 1640, only one year after Jeremy Taylor was established in his pleasant Rutland rectory, Archbishop Laud went to the Tower, not to come forth till he should go to the scaffold; and in the Civil War, breaking out presently, Jeremy Taylor joined the Royalists, was made chaplain to the King, saw battle and siege and wounds; but in the top of the strife he is known by his silvery voice and his exuberant piety, and by the rare eloquence which colors prayer and sermon with the bloody tinge of war and the pure light of heaven. He is wounded (as I said), he is imprisoned, and finally, by the chances of battle, he is stranded in a small country town near to Caermarthen, in South Wales.

The little boat he speaks of was the obscure mountain home where he taught school, and where he received, some time, visits from the famous John Evelyn,[50] who wrote charming books in these days about woods and gardens, and who befriended the poor stranded chaplain. Here, too, he wrote that monument of toleration, The Liberty of Prophesying, a work which would be counted broad in its teachings even now, and which alienated a great many of his more starched fellows in the Church. A little fragment from the closing pages of this book will show at once his method of illustration and his extreme liberality:

Jeremy Taylor did not learn this teaching from Archbishop Laud, but from the droiture of his own conscience, and the kindness of his own heart. He wrote much other and most delectable matter in his years of Welsh retirement, when a royal chaplain was a bugbear in England. He lost sons, too—who had gone to the bad under the influences of that young Duke of Buckingham I mentioned; but at last, when the restoration of Charles II. came, he was given a bishopric in the wilds of Ireland, in a sour, gloomy country, with sour and gloomy looks all around him, which together, broke him down at the age of fifty-five. I have spoken thus much of him, because he is a man to be remembered as the most eloquent, and the most kindly, and the most tolerant of all the Church of England people in that day; and because his treatises on Holy Living and Holy Dying will doubtless give consolation to thousands of desponding souls, in the years to come, as they have in the years that are past. He was saturated through and through with learning and with piety; and they gurgled from him together in a great tide of mellifluous language. The ardors and fervors of Elizabethan days seem to have lapped over upon him in that welter of the Commonwealth wars. He has been called the Shakespeare of the pulpit; I should rather say the Spenser—there is such unchecked, and uncheckable, affluence of language and illustration; thought and speech struggling together for precedence, and stretching on and on, in ever so sweet and harmonious jangle of silvery sounds.

A Royalist and a Puritan.

Another Royalist of these times, of a different temper, was Sir John Suckling:[52] a poet too, very rich, bred in luxury, a man of the world, who had seen every court in Europe worth seeing, who dashed off songlets and ballads between dinners and orgies; which songlets often hobbled on their feet by reason of those multiplied days of high living; but yet they had prettinesses in them which have kept them steadily alive all down to these prosaic times. I give a sample from his “Ballad upon a Wedding,” though it may be over-well known:

He was a frequenter of a tavern which stood at the Southwark end of London Bridge. Aubrey says he was one of the best bowlers of his time. He played at cards, too, rarely well, and “did use to practise by himself abed.” He was rich; he was liberal; he was accomplished—almost an “Admirable Crichton.” His first military service was in support of Gustavus Adolphus, in Germany. At the time of trouble with the Scots (1639) he raised a troop for the King’s service that bristled with gilded spurs and trappings; but he never did much serious fighting on British soil; and in 1641—owing to what was counted treasonable action in behalf of Strafford, he was compelled to leave England.

He crossed over to the Continent, wandered into Spain, and somehow became (as a current tradition reported) a victim of the Inquisition there, and was put to cruel torture; a strange subject surely to be put to the torture—in this life. He was said to be broken by this experience, and strayed away, after his escape from those priest-fangs, to Paris, where, not yet thirty-five, and with such promise in him of better things, he came to his death in some mysterious way: some said by a knife-blade which a renegade servant had fastened in his boot; but most probably by suicide. There is, however, great obscurity in regard to his life abroad.

He wrote some plays, which had more notice than they should have had; possibly owing to a revival of dramatic interests very strangely brought about in Charles I.’s time—a revival which was due to the over-eagerness and exaggeration of attacks made upon it by the Puritans: noticeable among these was that of William Prynne[53]—“utter barrister” of Lincoln’s Inn. “Utter barrister” does not mean æsthetic barrister, but one not yet come to full range of privilege.

This Prynne was a man of dreadful insistence and severities; he would have made a terrific schoolmaster. He was the author, in the course of his life, of no less than one hundred and eighty distinct works; many of them, it is true, were pamphlets, but others terribly bulky—an inextinguishable man; that onslaught on the drama and dramatic people, and play-goers, including people of the Court, called Histriomastix, was a foul-mouthed, close-printed, big quarto of a thousand pages. One would think such a book could do little harm; but he was tried for it, was heavily fined, and sentenced to stand in the pillory and lose his ears. He pleaded strongly against the sentence, and for its remission upon “divers passages [as he says in his petition] fallen inconsiderately from my pen in a book called Histriomastix.”

But he pleaded in vain; there was no sympathy for him. Ought there to be for a man who writes a book of a thousand quarto pages—on any subject? The violence of this diatribe made a reaction in favor of the theatre; his fellow-barristers of Lincoln’s Inn hustled him out of their companionship, and got up straightway a gay masque to demonstrate their scorn of his reproof.

They say he bore his punishment sturdily, though the fumes of his book, which was burned just below his nose, came near to suffocate him. Later still, he underwent another sentence for offences growing out of his unrelenting and imperious Puritanism—this time in company with one Burton (not Robert Burton,[54] of the Anatomy of Melancholy), who was a favorite with the people and had flowers strown before him as he walked to the pillory. But Prynne had no flowers, and his ears having been once cropt, the hangman had a rough time (a very rough time for Prynne) in getting at his task. Thereafter he was sent to prison in the isle of Jersey; but he kept writing, ears or no ears, and we may hear his strident voice again—hear it in Parliament, too.

Cowley and Waller.

Two other poets of these times I name, because of the great reputation they once had; a reputation far greater than they maintain now. These are Abraham Cowley and Edmund Waller.[55] The former of these (Cowley) was the son of a London grocer, whose shop was not far from the home of Izaak Walton; he was taught at Westminster School, and at Cambridge, and blazed up precociously at the age of fifteen in shining verses.[56] Indeed his aptitude, his ingenuities, his scholarship, kept him in the first rank of men of letters all through his day, and gave him burial between Spenser and Chaucer in Westminster Abbey. He would take a humbler place if he were disentombed now; yet, in Cromwell’s time, or in that of Charles II., the average reading man knew Cowley better than he knew Milton, and admired him more. I give you a fragment of what is counted his best; it is from his “Hymn to Light:”