Chamberlayne's periods, which not infrequently run for thirty lines without a full pause.

Such writing afflicted the delicate taste of Edmund Waller Waller. (1605-1687). Methought,' said he, according to Aubrey, ‘I never saw a good copy of English verses; they want smoothness: then I began to essay. Other men were thinking as he did. Sir John Beaumont in his Lines to his Late Majesty, concerning the True Form of English Poetry, deplored the shapelessness of English verse and demanded a new pattern. Models of correctness were not wanting to Waller. Donne, if his metre had run to looseness in the satires, had in his later Epistles written more strict and formal couplets. Fairfax, whose influence upon himself Waller acknowledges, had, in his translation of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, concluded each of his eight-lined stanzas with a stopped couplet; and George Sandys, while ensuing freedom and variety in his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, had carefully avoided the looseness into which Chamberlayne was to fall. Waller wrote many poems in the couplet the most notable are, perhaps, the long and tantalizing Battle of the Summer Islands; and the Instructions to a Painter, written to commemorate the seafighting of 1665. These and his other poems in the same form have little hold upon the present age, but they gave him a prodigious reputation with his own generation, and with at least two succeeding ones. Dryden declared that the excellence and dignity of rhyme were never fully known till Mr. Waller taught it', and that he first made easy writing a fine art. Pope praised him for his smoothness'. It is perhaps less difficult to understand what the men of the early eighteenth century saw in Waller than to share their enthusiasm for him. They gave him credit for moulding that form of the couplet which became their own standard measure, and for wielding it, in their opinion for the first time, with ease and smoothness. Dismayed by the excesses of the looser form, they welcomed a variety which ensured elegance and order without forfeiting ease, observed the caesura and the normal accentual beat, eschewed weak and loose rhymes, and was far advanced toward the practice, eventually adopted by themselves, of stopping each couplet and confining the sense to its limits. These metrical devices apart, Waller's language is easy, light, and elegant, and was thus highly to the taste of the Augustan Age. A generation which has read Tristram of Lyonesse realizes that the heroic couplet may be freely overrun without becoming loose or weak, and believes, conversely, that the end-stopped form is ill-suited to express the highest flights of passion or imagination.

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Men of all generations can unite in appreciating the beauty of Waller's finest lyrics-' On a Girdle', 'Go, Lovely Rose', or Old Age', with its unforgettable couplet:

The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd,

Lets in new light through chinks that Time has made.

Denham.

Cowley.

Sir John Denham (1615-1669) shared with Waller and Cowley the reputation of having been a 'reformer' of English numbers'. His play, The Sophy (1641) first brought him reputation, though there is little in it to attract the reader of to-day. It was followed in 1642 by Cooper's Hill, his most famous work, which describes the landscape seen from his house at Cooper's Hill, including the distant view of London and the nearer one of Windsor. Many of Denham's descriptions of Nature are interwoven with reflection; yet there is a far cry between him and Cowper or Wordsworth. The poem's finest and most famous passage is that addressed to the Thames, beginning, O could I flow like thee'. Cooper's Hill favours the end-stopped variety of the couplet, though Denham deserts this not infrequently for the overrun form, which he had used in his youthful translation of Virgil's second Aeneid. He has also left a verse paraphrase of Cicero's De Senectute, and poems on Prudence and Justice, together with shorter pieces. He lacks Waller's ease and elegance, and to modern readers his verse possesses little attraction.

The reputation of Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), though it is inferior to his contemporary fame, stands higher to-day than Denham's. His collected works, which he published in 1656, consisted of his youthful lyrics, entitled Miscellanies; a further collection of lyrics, The Mistress; his Pindarique Odes; and his unfinished sacred poem, Davideis. Cowley's lyrics illustrate curiously the spirit of the age; many of them are metaphysical' to a degree, and have Donne's fantastic strangeness without his fire; others, notably his Anacreontics, are as classically smooth as anything of Jonson's. Cowley tells us in the Miscellanies that he considered bombast to be a crying sin o' the English muse'; yet he could never persuade himself to forgo it. But if innumerable examples of it might be cited from his poems, he could on occasion use 'conceits' after happier fashion, as in the concluding stanza of Friendship in Absence:

And when no art affords me help or ease,
I seek with verse my griefs t' appease,
Just as a bird that flies about

And beats itself against the cage,

Finding at last no passage out

It sits and sings, and so o'ercomes its rage.

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Cowley's elegiac verses on William Harvey and on Crashaw are
affecting and sincere, though the latter poem contains one of
his most extreme and infelicitous conceits'. At other times,
as in the admirably playful Chronicle, and in Inconstancy, he
flaunts the fashionable cynicism of the time, and proclaims
The world's a scene of changes, and to be
Constant, in Nature were inconstancy.

The pleasant personal note which is so frequent in Cowley's
prose appears in such a stanza as this, from The Wish:

Ah yet, e'er I descend to the grave,
May I a small House and large Garden have,
And a few friends and many Books, both true,
Both wise, and both delightful too!

Cowley's Odes were written in professed imitation of Pindar's, though, as was subsequently shown by Congreve, they ignored the fundamental laws of his prosody. Among the more successful is that To Mr. Hobbes'-the great Columbus of the Golden Lands of New Philosophies The Odes are little, perhaps too little, read nowadays; though conceited' to a degree, they contain fine things, and are interesting historically, owing to their curious effect on the subsequent development of the English Ode. Davideis, as its sub-title indicates, was A Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David. Written in the couplet, it is marred by incorrigible' conceits and constant digressions. Much of the Second Book is simply a chronicle of the kings of Israel and Judah; but the First Book contains a fine description of Hell, home of ' tyrannous and unquestioned night', and the Fourth Book is memorable for David's glowing description of Jonathan. In Davideis and elsewhere Cowley played his part in the evolution of the couplet, to which he strove to impart fullness and force rather than the easy smoothness of Waller. His prose is discussed elsewhere. His early comedy, The Guardian, was revised after the Restoration, and acted under the title Cutter of Coleman Street.

The work of Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) falls into two Marvell. classes the first of these includes his early poetry in praise of love and nature, and his non-satirical patriotic poetry; the second comprises the fierce and outspoken satire which, after the Restoration, he directed at the abuses of his beloved country. Marvell had, perhaps, as keen an eye for Nature and as passionate a delight in her as any English poet before Cowper, or even Wordsworth. While tutor to Lord Fairfax's daughter at Nun Appleton in Yorkshire, he had drunk his fill of natural beauty, and much of this had passed into his song. There did he

through the hazels thick espy

The hatching throstle's shining eye,1

and note the 'sapphire-winged mist' of the kingfisher skimming the streams, or lose himself in the beauty of the garden, Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade.2

Some of his poems—for instance, Eyes and Tears-are as 'conceited' as anything of Donne's; but the conceits are given the happiest turn in the famous To His Coy Mistress, which contains the great couplet,

Lesser

Poets.

Marvell's most great and stately poem is his Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, with its splendid stanzas describing the last hours of Charles. His poems show a considerable emotional range: some of them-as The Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda-are light and joyous; others— as A Dialogue between the Soul and Body-are lit with moral and religious fervour. The most notable of his satires is the Last Instructions to a Painter, which owes its title to one of Waller's best-known poems.

The age was remarkable for a number of small poets, many of whom left long poems. The dramatist Shakerley Marmion is represented by Cupid and Psyche (1637), John Chalkhill by Thealma and Clearchus (1683), Sir Francis Kynaston by Leoline and Sydanis (1642), and the amazingly extravagant Edward Benlowes by Theophila, or Love's Sacrifice. These poems, though metrically and otherwise they have a certain bearing on the evolution of literature, are hardly literature themselves. Two writers, however, stand somewhat ahead of the rest: the first is William Chamberlayne, whose Pharonnida (1659), already mentioned for its metre, is a lengthy and disjointed poetical romance containing passages of genuine beauty; and Sir William Davenant (1606-1668), whose Gondibert is an unfinished heroic poem possessing a determined moral purpose and written in rhyming quatrains. Davenant is far from being a great poet. Among writers of shorter poems may be mentioned Thomas Stanley, Henry King, and John Hall, each of whom has left some fine lyrics. The greatest poet of the age will be discussed in a separate chapter.

CHAPTER XVI

JOHN MILTON

THE spirit of John Milton's life (1608-1674) is perhaps best expressed in his second sonnet,1 and in the words of his letter to his friend Diodati: You make many inquiries as to what I am about. What am I thinking of? Why, with God's help, of immortality! Forgive the word, I only whisper it in your ear! Yes, I am pluming my wings for a flight.' From his early youth onwards, Milton's was a dedicated life. He had achieved erudition and scholarship during his seven years at Cambridge, where learning had been broadened and humanized by the Renaissance, and Calvinistic theology and Aristotelian logic had alike become leavened with Platonism. Here Milton, in spite of certain troubles by the way, 'performed the collegiate and academical exercises to the admiration of all'. Here he 1 Beginning:

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year.

learnt to write Latin prose freely and correctly, and Latin verse not merely correctly, but in such a way as to liberate inspiration. His university studies were those of his time, and he studied hard; his habit of life was pure, and for this, and perhaps also because of his beauty and natural refinement, his fellows styled him 'the lady of Christ's'.

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Even as an undergraduate he had written great poetry in Early the English tongue. To this period belong his exquisite lines Poetry. On the Death of a Fair Infant, and his stately Ode on the Nativity, which to all who knew must have proclaimed the appearance of a new force in poetry. He left Cambridge at the age of twenty-three, and, like Wordsworth, eschewed the occupation of money-getting. Through his father's understanding kindness he was enabled to live for the next seven years in delightful rustic retirement at the village of Horton in Buckinghamshire. These years, he tells us, were studious and contemplative'; they were altogether spent in the search of religious and civil knowledge'. The quiet beauty of his surroundings passed into his soul and his song: clear reminiscences of it are to be found in the perfect flower-pieces which recur throughout his poems. The earliest fruits of this sojourn were his two great essays in the pastoral ode, L'Allegro L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. Both of these are constructed on the same model, and both are written in the eight-syllabled rhyming couplet, which Milton handles with admirable ease and variety. L'Allegro begins with an invocation to Mirth, and traces a day of the poet's life spent in her company from the dawn, vocal with the lark's song, on through the various scenes and music of the day, till the quiet evening, given to the reading of old romance and of light drama, and to musing on

Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.

At the close are heard

soft Lydian airs

Married to immortal verse,

Such as the meeting soul may pierce
In notes with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out.

In Il Penseroso there is similar progress, this time beneath the
guidance of Melancholy, that

pensive Nun, devout and pure,

Sober, steadfast, and demure.

The music is the song of Philomel, the study tragedy, and the poem closes on the solemn note of the organ.

and Il

Penseroso.

In 1634 Milton was asked by his friend, the composer Henry Comus. Lawes, to write the words for a musical entertainment to be given at Ludlow Castle before the Earl of Bridgewater, President of Wales and the Marches. The result was Čomus, a masque in form, yet greater than any masque hitherto written. Its theme of innocence triumphant over an enchanter's