LENOX LIBRARY

NEW YORK

CHISWICK PRESS-PRINTED BY WHITTINGHAM AND WILKINS,

TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE.

HIS little pleasure-book of English verse attempts to blend the voices of true poets who lived in the time of Charles I. and the

Commonwealth, into a genuine expression of the manner of their music and the spirit of their time. During the first seven years of the reign of Charles I. all the poets who are here to be heard singing were alive together. In the next year George Herbert passed away; then Randolph; then, in the middle of the reign, Ben Jonson; Carew next; and in its latter years, besides Quarles and Ford, three died in early manhood-Suckling, Cartwright, and Habington. Drummond's death followed close upon the King's; Crashaw lived only into the next year; Lovelace and Cleveland did not survive the Commonwealth; while Milton and Andrew Marvell, Waller, Davenant, Butler, Denham, Cowley, with George Wither, whose age was sixty at the end of the reign of Charles I., lived on into the time of Charles II. The poems are meant to be so arranged, that while they show the love of song for its own sake, and have for a light background the every-day characters of country life and b

town life, mirth of the harvest home, the college, and the tavern, they do, after striking the keynote with a few strongly marked pieces, indicate something of the drift of events to the time of the king's execution, through verse of his friends. The course of song proceeds, after this, to suggest the spirit of the Commonwealth, and when it has reached the immediate sequel of the story, closes with the trustful words of Milton, which our later history has justified. As far as might be, within limits so narrow, I have tried to give coherence to a book of extracts, by basing it on the grand story of our Civil War, and so blending and contrasting the pieces quoted, sometimes rather for expression of character than for inherent merit, that they shall speak the mind of each great party to the struggle as expressed by its own best men, rather than as caricatured by the meaner sort of its opponents.

This being the plan of the book, because Cavalier and Puritan are the only words used generally as short symbols of the two camps in the great political and social battle lying at the heart of it, those words arè placed unwillingly, for want of better, on the title-page. But they have no more specific sense than loose usage has assigned to them, and are taken as the mere x and y of a popular algebra. The true division here intended, and expressed by the chief title of this volume, is between the men who, upon the great questions of principle then in debate, were with the King, and those who were with the Commons. Some minds are so constituted that they combat change, lest they lose what of truth and right the past has won; others seek change wherever they believe that they can take part in the conquests of the future. Minds equal in acuteness are employed continually upon an active test of the

of man.

validity of every questionable plea. Truth only is strong enough to live through this incessant questioning; meanwhile the conflict calls forth all the manliness Here, then, there shall be no gathering of narrow spite from anonymous broadsheets. Where there is bitterness,-and that, too, must be shown,-it is the bitterness which conflict bred in men who earned a right to be remembered among wits and poets of their day. These poets, of all parties, had also a sense of brotherhood in their own craft. Party feeling did not blind Wither or Marvell to the genius of Lovelace. A living poet had the living fellowship of his competitors, a dead poet their praise. The lines of Henry Vaughan to a fellow poet (on p. 93), show what was then, and among men of true genius is now, the temper of the craft. A sense of their old comradeship should quicken the enjoyment of this small gathering of the disembodied wit of men who once were glad to come together in the flesh.

Charles Stuart was twenty-five years old when, on the 27th of March, 1625, he came to the throne of England as King Charles I. Ben Jonson, in that year twice as old as King Charles, then occupied the throne of English poetry. He had of late been writing court masques, but for the last nine years he had not written a play for the public stage. It was six years since, in the course of a visit to Scotland, he had spent part of an April month with William Drummond of Hawthornden. Drummond, a man eleven years his junior, left notes of the conversation of his famous guest, which are not altogether creditable to the note-taker. King Ben's long sickness began with a stroke of palsy in the year of the accession of King Charles. He wrote again for the theatre because he needed bread; wrote the "Staple of

News," and the "New Inn," received ungenerously, though its epilogue said of it," the maker is sick and sad." This caused him to write the indignant verses which, with a few lines in recognition of a gift from Charles, represent in this little book the painful close of an old master's life among the men of the new generation. The true wits of the day paid Ben Jonson utmost honour; none more cordially than the best of the young men who pleased the court of Charles. They were Ben's courtiers too, and lived with the better of their sovereigns in kindly fellowship.

"My son Cartwright writes all like a man," said Jonson. Cartwright was but fourteen years old at the accession of King Charles, and but six-and-twenty when Ben Jonson died. He was one of those who died, as has been said, before the reign was out, when he had scarcely ripened into man's estate. Yet he had indeed written and worked like a man. He earned repute at

Oxford as a scholar with the gift of genius, went into holy orders at the age of twenty-seven, and leapt into fame as "a most florid and seraphical preacher." His loyalty to the king and appetite for work, he is said to have studied sixteen hours a day,—caused him to be made by his University one of the council of war to provide for the king's troops sent to protect the colleges. He was imprisoned when the forces of the Parliament prevailed at Oxford, but released on bail. William Cartwright not only wrote some of the best poems and plays of his time, and preached some of the best sermons, but as reader of metaphysics in his University he earned especial praise. King Charles wore black on the day of his funeral, and fifty wits and poets of the time supplied their tributary verses to the volume, first published in 1651, of "Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with other Poems,