William Cartwright (1611-1643), a young Oxford don, who died at the early age of thirty-two, was highly esteemed among his contemporaries as a poet and man of learning. Dr. Fell, Bishop of Oxford, said of him, 'Cartwright is the utmost man can come to.' Nothing in the writings that he has left justify the warm admiration that his personality seems to have evoked. He is a facile verse writer, especially of panegyric addresses, and a few of his shorter poems are pleasant enough of their kind-academic exercises in amorous verse such as the minor poets of the age were accustomed to produce. Sir Edward Sherburne, whose literary work began during the Civil war, and lasted till nearly the end Translators. of the reign of Charles II., is chiefly known. as a translator of Seneca, Manilius, and other Latin and Greek authors. His original verse is not of any special note. Another translator of repute was George Sandys, son of the Archbishop of York, who beguiled the closing years of a life spent chiefly in travel by making a metrical translation of the Psalms in smooth, clear, and vigorous verse. The volume was published in 1636; and Sandys then set to work on a translation of the Æneid, ▷ which was left uncompleted at the time of his death. Thomas May, dramatist and historian, published in 1627 a translation of Lucan's Pharsalia, and three years later a Continuation in seven books, carrying on the poem to the death of Cæsar. This Continuation he afterwards translated into Latin verse, which was thought to be not inferior, in the purity of the Latin, and the harmony of the verses, to the verses of Lucan himself,' and won for its author a high reputation as a poet and scholar. CHAPTER VI. TRANSITIONAL POETS. During the MOST of the poets mentioned in the last chapter had completed their work by the death of the king. Commonwealth a new group of verse-writers came into prominence, forming a connecting link between the age of Herrick and Crashaw, and that of Dryden and Butler. The chief characteristics of this new school are wholly different from those of the writers of the Caroline period. Exuberance and extravagance of poetic fancy gave place to an even-paced and conventional style of verse, pruned and trimmed into the octosyllabic couplet that now became the one recognized metrical form. Poetry, which in the earlier period had been chiefly passionate and emotional, now became descriptive and didactic, and thus while enlarging the sphere of its activity narrowed the scope of its genius. Let Waller's verses to Sacharissa be compared with Herrick's to Julia, and the change will become apparent. The tangled and straggling beauty of a Devonshire thicket has become the well-clipt neatness of a suburban hedgerow. But though much was lost in the change, something was gained; the extravagant conceits and overstrained metaphors of the metaphysical' school disappeared from the poetry of the Restoration to be replaced by the massive solidity and regulated ornateness of the classical style. Waller, Denham and Davenant are the ป chief poets of the new school during the Commonwealth, while in Cowley and the satirist Cleveland we may trace X the new influence gradually becoming predominant over the old. In matter, rather than in style, Joseph Beaumont, Henry More and Chamberlayne belong to the same group. Edmund Waller (1605-1687). L The inscription on Waller's tomb, describing him as inter poetas sui temporis facile princeps, represents the deliberate verdict of the age of the Restoration on his work. Born in a position of affluence, the only son of one of the richest squires of Buckinghamshire, and connected, through his mother, with Hampden and Cromwell, Edmund Waller knew in early life nothing of that adversity which is traditionally associated with the service of the Muses. He was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, when scarcely seventeen was returned for Amersham as member of the third parliament of James I., and continued ▸ to sit during the first three parliaments of Charles I. In 1627 he caused some scandal in London society by carrying' off an heiress of great beauty, whose hand the Court had designed to confer on a rival suitor. Left a widower a year later, he now paid his addresses, in a series of pretty but singularly unemotional love poems, to Lady Dorothy Sidney, whom he styles Sacharissa; her marriage, some years later, to Lord Spenser, does not seem to have caused her admirer any very poignant grief. The Battle of the Summer Islands, a narrative poem in three cantos describing a fight between the islanders of Bermuda and two whales that were stranded in the bay, was written about this time, and shows clearly the new developement of the heroic couplet, with which Waller was to be specially associated. Another poem of about the same date, Upon his Majesty's Repairing of Paul's, has a special interest owing to Denham's reference to it in Cooper's Hill: 'Secure while thee the best of poets sings, Preserved from ruin by the best of Kings.' As the clouds of political conflict darkened, Waller's close connection with the Court and with the parliamentary leaders led him into an equivocal position, and in 1642 he ✓ became involved in a plot which nearly cost him his life. Saved from death by abject and discreditable self-abasement, Waller took refuge in France till 1654, when Cromwell allowed him to return-a favour which the poet repaid with a fulsome though perhaps not wholly insincere panegyric. After the Restoration, Waller's reputation as a wit and poet grew rapidly, culminating at the time of his death in 1687. The more temperate praises of Dryden, Addison, and Pope, served to retain for him a high place among English poets during the eighteenth century, since which time he has shared in the general neglect into which the minor classical' poets have fallen. Considering that Waller's earliest verses were written in 1621, and his latest on his death-bed in 1687, the total amount of his verse is surprisingly small. Most of his poems are occasional, and many of them trivial in their immediate subject, but they are polished with the utmost care and good taste. His panegyrics and complimentary verses are graceful and often dignified. While the heroic couplet was, from the very beginning of his poetical career, his favourite metre, he was almost the last of the poets of the time who could write songs worthy to rank with the masterpieces of the Elizabethan age. XGo, Lovely Rose! is too familiar to need quotation, but the lines On a Girdle are less known— 'That which her slender waist confin'd, No monarch but would give his crown 'A narrow compass, and yet there As an illustration of Waller's use of the couplet, here are the closing lines of his poem on Divine Love, dictated, according to tradition, on his death-bed: 'The seas are quiet, when the winds give o'er ! As they draw near to their eternal home; 1 Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view However Waller may have lived, few poets have taken leave of life in lines of more dignified composure. The anonymous writer of the preface to a volume of Waller's Posthumous Poems, published in 1690, sums up the contemporary verdict on the poet. Our language owes more to him than the French does to Cardinal Richelieu and the whole Academy. The tongue came into his hands like a rough diamond; he polished it first, and to that degree that all artists since him have admired the 1 I.e., prejudice. |