were similar to those on manners. Some thing more light, unaffected, and alluring was still wanting; in everything but sincerity of intention it (Poetry) was deficient. . . . Carew and Waller jointly began to remedy these defects. In them Gallantry, for the first time was accompanied by the Graces.-HEADLEY, HENRY, 1787, Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry, vol. I. The want of boldness and expansion in Carew's thoughts and subjects, excludes him from rivalship with great poetical names; nor is it difficult, even within the narrow pale of his works, to discover some faults of affectation, and of still more objectionable indelicacy. But among the poets who have walked in the same limited path, he is pre-eminently beautiful, and deservedly ranks among the earliest of those who gave a cultivated grace to our lyrical strains. His slowness in composition was evidently that sort of care in the poet, which saves trouble to his reader. His poems have touches of elegance and refinement, which their trifling subjects could not have yielded without a delicate and deliberate exercise of the fancy; and he unites the point and polish of later times with many of the genial and warm tints of the elder muse. Like Waller, he is by no means free from conceit; and one regrets to find him addressing the surgeon bleeding Celia, in order to tell him that the blood which he draws proceeds not from the fair one's arm, but from the lover's heart. But of such frigid thoughts he is more sparing than Waller; and his conceptions, compared to that poet's, are like fruits of a richer flavour, that have been cultured with the same assiduity.-CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1819, Specimens of the British Poets. Carew was an elegant court trifler.HAZLITT, WILLIAM, 1820, Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, p. 192. More of a poet than Corbet, and accounted the prince of the amorous versifiers of his day, was Thomas Carew. . . There is a light French spirit in his love poems, a grace and even a tenderness of sentiment, and a lucid softness of style, that make them peculiarly pleasing, and that, even when he becomes licentious, help to save him. . . . Spenser and Shakspeare seem to have been his favorites for private reading, and he seems to have formed his style partly from them and partly from the light artificial French poets with whom he had become acquainted in his travels.-MASSON, DAVID, 1858, The Life of John Milton, vol. 1, ch. vi. No one touches dangerous themes with so light and glove-guarded a hand.-GILFILLAN, GEORGE, 1860, Specimens of the Less-Known British Poets, vol. 1, p. 270. In polish and evenness of movement, combined with a diction elevated indeed in its tone, as it must needs be by the very necessities of verse, above that of mere good conversation, but yet in ease, lucidity, and directness rivalling the language of ordinary life, Carew's poetry is not inferior to Waller's; and, while his expression is as correct and natural, and his numbers as harmonious, the music of his verse is richer, and his imagination is warmer and more florid. But the texture of his composition is in general extremely slight, the substance of most of his pieces consisting merely of the elaboration of some single idea; and, if he has more tenderness than Waller, he is far from having so much dignity, variety, or power of sustained effort.-CRAIK, GEORGE L., 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature and of The English Language, vol. II, p. 25. Among the Royalist lyrists of the seventeenth century Carew takes a foremost place. In genius he is surpassed by Herrick only, and in age he is the first of that gallant band of cavalier song-writers of whom Rochester is the last. Born in the flush of the Elizabethan summer, when the whole garden of English poetry was ablaze with blossom, he lived to hand down to his followers a tradition of perfume and dainty form, that vivified the autumn of the century with a little Martin's summer of his own. . . . Carew was far too indolent to trouble himself with the rhetoric of the schools or to speculate upon the conduct of the mind. He loved wine, and roses, and fair florid women, to whom he could indite joyous or pensive poems about their beauty, adoring it while it lasted, regretting it when it faded. ... The claim of Carew to a place among the artificers of our language must not be overlooked. In his hands English verse took a smooth and flexible character that had neither the splendours nor the discords of the great Elizabethan school, but formed an admirable medium for gentle thought and florid reverie. The praise that Voltaire gave to Waller might be transferred to Carew if it were not that to give such praise to any one writer is uncritical. But Waller might never have written, and the development of English verse would be still unbroken, whereas Carew is a necessary link between the Elizabethans and Prior. He represents the main stream of one of the great rivers of poetic influence proceeding from Ben Jonson, and he contrived to do so much because he remained so close to that master and yet in his particular vein excelled him.-GOSSE, EDMUND, 1880, English Poets, ed. Ward, vol. II, pp. 111, 112, 113. He He is one of the most perfect masters of lyrical form in English poetry. He possesses a command of the overlapped heroic couplet, which for sweep and rush of rhythm cannot be surpassed anywhere. He has, perhaps in a greater degree than any poet of that time of conceits, the knack of modulating the extravagances of fancy by the control of reason, so that he never falls into the unbelieveableness of Donne, or Crashaw, or Cleveland. had a delicacy, when he chose to be delicate, which is quintessential, and a vigour which is thoroughly manly. Best of all, perhaps, he had the intelligence and the self-restraint to make all his poems wholes, and not mere congeries of verses. There is always, both in the scheme of his meaning and the scheme of his metre, a definite plan of rise and fall, a concerted effect. That these great merits were accompanied by not inconsiderable defects is true. Carew lacks the dewy freshness, the unstudied grace of Herrick. even more frankly and uncontrolledly sensual, and has paid the usual and inevitable penalty that his best poem, "The Rapture," " is, for the most part, unquotable, while another, if he carried out its principles in this present year of grace, would run him the risk of imprisonment with hard labour. His largest attempt the masque called "Coelum Britannicum"-is heavy. His smaller poems, beautiful as they are, suffer somewhat from want of variety of subject. There is just so much truth in Suckling's impertinence that the reader of Carew sometimes catches himself repeating the lines of Carew's master, He is "Still to be neat, still to be drest," not indeed in full agreement with them, but not in exact disagreement. One misses the "wild civility" of Herrick. This acknowledgment, I trust, will save me from any charge of overvaluing Carew.SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1887, History of Elizabethan Literature, p. 360. It was Carew, indeed, who first sounded these "courtly amorous strains" throughout the English land; who first taught his fellow-poets that to sing of love was not the occasional pastime, but the serious occupation of their lives. Yet what an easy, indolent suitor he is! What lazy raptures over Celia's eyes and lips! What finely poised compliments, delicate as leaves, and well fitted for the inconstant beauty who listened, with faint blushes. and transient interest, to the song!-REPPLIER, AGNES, 1891, English Love-Songs, Points of View, p. 36. rose Instead of Carew's poetry being characteristically euphuistic, licentious, trivial, and sporadic, the exact opposite is the truth. It is true that he has his concetti, like the other poets of his day, but they are relatively to the whole of his verse but a small proportion. . With a very slight deduction, his volume is good throughout. There are few pages on which one is not struck by something fine. Carew was an artist as well as a poet. If he in some slight degree misses the gay, artless charm of Suckling, he has a more serious attractiveness. There is a richness and dignity, likewise an intellectual force, in his verse which lifts him to the rank of a serious poet, and makes one regret that, with such natural gifts and artistic acquirements, he did not devote himself to poetry more continuously and of set purpose. For, to a considerable degree, he shared with Waller the gift of the stately line, and his verse has that body and glamour in which for the most. part Waller's is deficient. There was indeed a drop of the ruddy Elizabethan blood in Carew.-LE GALLIENNE, RICHARD, 1894 95, Retrospective Reviews, vol. II, pp. 77, 79. Carew has been unjustly condemned by Hazlitt as "an elegant Court trifler" in poetry. But it must be granted that he was a master of lyrical form, and that he had a rare sense of delicacy, which he combined too seldom with a manly glow and vigor of passion. He just misses being the equal of Herrick.-ROBERTSON, J. LOGIE, 1894, A History of English Literature, p. 106. Carew's largest work was the masque, "Coelum Britannicum," with the production of which the court had tried, in 1634, to outrival the magnificance of the performance of Shirley's "Triumph of Peace" at the Inns of Court. It is of but slight literary interest, the words being subordinated to elaborate scenic effects. But Carew also wrote a small number of poems, almost all short, in the style of amorous addresses then coming into vogue; and it is on these that his claim is true that in Carew's verses there is lit- John Spotiswood 1565-1639 John Spotswood (Spotiswood), Scotch prelate; born at Mid-Calder, near Edinburgh, 1565; died in London, Dec. 26, 1639. He was educated at Glasgow University, and succeeded his father as Parson at Calder, in 1583, when only eighteen. In 1601 he accompanied the Duke of Lennox as chaplain in his embassy to France, and in 1603 James VI. to England. In 1603 he was made Archbishop of Glasgow, and privycouncillor for Scotland. In 1615 he was transferred to St. Andrews, so that he became primate and metropolitan. On June 18, 1633, he crowned Charles I. at Holyrood. In 1635 he was made chancellor of Scotland. He was the leader in the movement to introduce the Liturgy into the church of Scotland, which occasioned the rebellion (1637). When the Covenant was signed (1638), he retired in disappointment to London. He wrote "The History of the Church and State of Scotland” (203-1625), London, 1655; best ed., Edinburgh, 1847-51, 3 vols., with life of the Author.SCHAFF-HERZOG, 1883, Encyclopædia of Religious Knowledge, vol. III, p. 2232. PERSONAL In prosperity his behaviour was without moderation, in adversity without dignity; but the character of a leading, aspiring prelate has either been unduly extolled, or unjustly degraded. As a scholar and an historian he excelled his contemporaries; and it was his peculiar felicity, that his erudition was neither infected with the pedantry, nor confined to the polemical disputes, of the age. His abilities recommended him first to preferment; but his ambitious views were chiefly promoted by the supple, insinuating habits of craft and intrigue. His revenge was formidable to the nobility and officers of state, oppressive to the clergy, and, joined with an inordinate ambition, ultimately ruinous to his own order. At an happier period, when no temptation was presented to his inordinate ambition, the same talents might have rendered him a distinguished ornament to that church, which his disregard of the gloomy decorum exacted by fanatics, was supposed to disgrace.- HISTORY OF SCOTLAND Archbishop Spotiswoode was author of the "History of Scotland," a work compiled from scanty materials, but with great impartiality. There is throughout. the whole an air of probity and candour, which was the peculiar character of the writer. This history was undertaken by the command of James I. who had a high opinion of the author's abilities. Upon expressing a diffidence to James about that part of it which relates to his mother, and which had been the stumbling-block of former historians, he replied, "Speak the truth, man, and spare not.". GRANGER, JAMES, 1769-1824, Biographical History of England, vol. 11, p. 342. Archbishop Spotswood's "Church History" was penned at the special command of K. James the Sixth; who, being told that some passages in it might possibly bear too hard upon the memory of his Majesty's mother, bid him "write the truth and spare not:" and yet he ventured not so far with a commission as Buchanan did without one.-NICOLSON, WILLIAM, 1696-1714, Scottish Historical Library. Is considered to be, on the whole, a faithful and impartial narrative of the events of which it treats.-MILLS, ABRAHAM, 1851, Literature and Literary Men of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 1, p. 467. It is an honest book, written by a strong upholder of Episcopacy.—MORLEY, HENRY, 1873, A First Sketch of English Literature, p. 566. If he was a courtier, he had all the graces, and far more than the virtues, of the Court. It is natural to compare his work with that of Knox. Readers will declare for or against the sentiments of either according to their prepossessions. In energy, in narrative power, and in the general impression of genius produced, the earlier writer must be pronounced by far the superior. Spottiswoode's merits. are of a different order. His style is smooth, but seldom strikes any high note. There is no display of enthusiasm; the reader is rarely warmed into strong approval or censure; the tone is that of gentlemanly compromise or bland remonstrance. The really notable point about the book is the breadth of its charity. In this Christian virtue it must be acknowledged that the earlier Scottish Reformers were sadly deficient. Knox was most intolerant of opposition. Spottiswoode, in the whole of his "History," has not a bitter word for foe or friend, unless it be one about Andrew Melville, who had indeed been a sore thorn in His Grace's flesh.-DODDS, JAMES MILLER, 1893, English Prose, ed. Craik, vol. II, p. 68. John Ford Born at Ilsington, Devonshire, England, 1586 (baptized April 17): died after 1639. An English dramatist. Little is known of his life except that he was a member of the Middle Temple and not dependent on his pen for his living, and that he was popular with playgoers. He apparently retired to Ilsington to end his days. His principal plays are "The Lover's Melancholy" (printed 1629), "Tis Pity She's a Whore" (1633), "The Broken Heart" (1633), "Love's Sacrifice" (1633), "The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck" (1634), "The Fancies Chaste and Noble" (1638), "The Lady's Trial" (1639), "The Sun's Darling" (with Dekker, 1656), "The Witch of Edmonton" (with Dekker, Rowley, etc., 1658). His works were collected by Weber in 1811, by Gifford in 1827, and by Dyce (Gifford) in 1869.—SMITH, BENJAMIN E., ed., 1894-97, The Century Cyclopedia of Names, p. 400. PERSONAL A Gentleman of the Middle-Temple, who liv'd in the Reign of King Charles the First: Who was a Well-wisher to the Muses, and a Friend and Acquaintance of most of the Poets of his Time.-LANGBAINE, GERARD, 1691, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets, p. 219. Of his social habits there little can be told with certainty. There is sufficient, however, to show that he lived, if not familiarly, yet friendlily, with the dramatic writers of his day, and neither provoked nor felt personal enmities. He speaks, indeed, of opposition; but this is merely the language of the stage; opposition is experienced by every dramatic writer worth criticism, and has nothing in common with ordinary hostility. In truth, with the exception of an allusion to the "voluminous" and He seems to have been a proud, reserved, austere kind of man, of few and warm attachments, with but slender gifts in the way of ebullient spirits or social flow. He was a barrister, with a respectable ancestry to look back to; and though he wrote several plays, and did not disdain to work in conjunction with such a professional playwright as Dekker, he was nervously anxious lest it should be. supposed that he made his living by playwriting. In his first Prologue he spoke contemptuously of such as made poetry a trade, and he took more than one opportunity of protesting that his plays were the fruits of leisure, the issue of less serious hours. Some of his plays he dedicated to noblemen, but he was careful to assure them that it was not his habit to court greatness, and that his dedication. was a simple offering of respect without mercenary motive.-MINTO, WILLIAM, 1874-85, Characteristics of English Poets, p. 360. Ford drops from sight after the publication of the "Ladies Trial" in 1639; but in Gifford's time "faint traditions in the neighbourhood of his birth-place" led to the supposition that, having obtained a competency from his professional practice, he retired to Devonshire to end his days. In the "Time-Poets" ("Choice Drollery," 1656) occurs the couplet Deep in a dump John Forde was alone got, be despicable; but it contains some choice poetry, notably the description (after Strada) of the contention between the nightingale and the musician.-BULLEN, A. H., 1889, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XIX, p. 420. 'TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE 1633 Thence to Salisbury Court play house, where was acted the first time "Tis Pity She's a Whore," a simple play and ill acted, only it was my fortune to sit by a most pretty and most ingenious lady which pleased me much.--PEPYS, SAMUEL, 1661, Diary, Sept. 9. All we can say in favour of Ford is, to wish he had employed his beautiful writing to a more laudable purpose.-DIBDIN, CHARLES, 1795, A Complete History of the Stage, vol. III, p. 280. Ford was of the first order of poets. He sought for sublimity, not by parcels, in metaphors or visible images, but directly where she has her full residence in the heart of man; in the actions and sufferings of the greatest minds. There is a grandeur of the soul above mountains, seas, and the elements. Even in the poor perverted reason of Giovanni and Annabella, in the play which stands at the head of the modern collection of the works of -BULLEN, A. H., 1889, Dictionary of this author, we discern traces of that THE LOVER'S MELANCHOLY 1628-29 "The Lover's Melancholy; Contention of a Bird and a Musician."-This Story, which is originally to be met with in Strada's Prolusions, has been paraphrased in rhyme by Crashaw, Ambrose Philips, and others: but none of those versions can at all compare for harmony and grace. with this blank verse of Ford's. It is as fine as anything in Beaumont and Fletcher; and almost equals the strife which it celebrates.-LAMB, CHARLES, 1808, Specimens of Dramatic Poets. "The Lover's Melancholy" has been to almost all its critics a kind of lute-case for the very pretty version of Strada's fancy about the nightingale, which Crashaw did better; otherwise it is naught. -SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1887, History of Elizabethan Literature, p. 403. Gifford rightly pronounces the comic. portions of "The Lovers Melancholy" to fiery particle, which, in the irregular starting from out the road of beaten action, discovers something of a right line. even in obliquity, and shows hints of an improvable greatness in the lowest descents and degradations of our nature. -LAMB, CHARLES, 1808, Specimens of Dramatic Poets. It has been lamented that the play of his which has been most admired (" "Tis Pity She's a Whore") had not a less exceptionable subject. I do not know, but I suspect that the exceptionableness of the subject is that which constitutes the chief merit of the play. The repulsiveness of the story is what gives it its critical interest; for it is a studiously prosaic statement of facts, and naked declaration of passions. It was not the least of Shakspeare's praise, that he never tampered with unfair subjects. His genius was above it; his taste kept aloof from it. I do not deny the power of simple painting and polished style in this tragedy in 1 |