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answer: "Poets succeed better with fiction than in truth, your Majesty." Waller's mother was a sister of John Hampden, and his sympathies would naturally have been given to the popular side; but although he espoused this cause at first, he was constant to none, and changed his allegiance as often as suited his convenience. He lived to be eighty-two years old, and shortly before his death wrote the poem in which these fine lines occur:

Clouds of affection from our younger eyes
Conceal that emptiness which age descries:
The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,

Lets in new light through chinks which time has made.

Stronger by weakness, wiser men become,

As they draw near to their eternal home;

Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view,
That stand upon the threshold of the new.

Of Waller's excellence as a critic, we may form some idea by his remarks about Milton. He says: "The blind old poet hath published a tedious poem on the fall of man. If its length be not considered as a merit, it hath no other."

Sir John Denham (1615-68), the good-natured poet whose joke saved the life of his political opponent, Wither, wrote a long descriptive poem about "Cooper's Hill" (a beautiful place near Windsor), which received high praise from Dryden. Posterity, however, has not borne out this good opinion, finding the verses cold and formal. One quatrain certainly deserves to be remembered. It occurs in an address to the river Thames:

Oh, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream

My great example, as it is my theme!

Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull;
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing, full.

Denham wrote a poor tragedy called "The Sophy," founded on a Turkish story.

Henry Vaughan (1621-95), a Welshman and one of the minor poets, wrote many devotional poems, collected under the title "Silex Scintillans," some of which are equal to Herbert's in purity of feeling and beauty of imagery. Here is a beautiful stanza on the departed:

He that hath found some fledged bird's nest, may know

At first sight, if the bird be flown;

But what fair dell or grove he sings in now,

That is to him unknown.

Abraham Cowley (1618-67), a precocious boy who published a volume of poems at the age of thirteen, was thought by many persons of his own day a better poet than Milton. Time has reversed this judgment, though Cowley's poems still read well in comparison with those of most of his contemporaries. He has no delicate little gems such as we find in the verses of Herrick, Waller or Lovelace; but his pieces have a sustained quality, and some of them are very pleasing. He is a votary of the "metaphysical" school which Donne made fashionable, and even his lovepoems show no depth of feeling. His most ambitious work is the "Davideis," an unfinished poem intended for an epic on the life of David, king of Israel. It is written in heroic verse (ten-syllabled iambic metre), and shows a correct ear, but the execution is dreary and the treatment uninteresting. His fame as a poet must rest on his shorter pieces.

It is as an essayist, however, that Cowley takes his stand among the best writers of his day. Without the terseness of Bacon, and on the other hand without the prolixity and affectation of Browne, he gives us a foretaste of the grace and versatility of Addison. The essays are still interesting, and show the author to have been a man of learning, refined tastes and good sense.

Cowley was, like most of the poets of his day, a staunch royalist, and proved the sincerity of his attachment to

the cause by accompanying the royal family into exile in France. Upon the Restoration, he naturally expected some recompense for all this labor; but Charles II. preferred to spend his money on new favorites rather than to reward old services, and Cowley was suffered to end his life in poverty. When he died, the king paid him the compliment of saying that he had not left behind him a better man in England, and the poet was honored with a tomb and monument in Westminster Abbey, where he lies buried near Chaucer and Spenser. "He asked for bread and they gave him a stone."

Andrew Marvell (1620-78), at one time assistant-secretary to Milton while the latter was employed by Cromwell's government, was one of the few poets on the Puritan side. He is most famous as a satirist, not sparing, in his keen ridicule, either the king or the royal party, generally. If Charles II. had not been good-natured as well as profligate he would not have endured couplets like these:

Ah Tudor! Ah Tudor! of Stuarts enough;

None ever reigned like old Bess in the ruff.

But canst thou devise when things will be mended?

When the reign of the line of the Stuarts is ended.

The court-party would gladly have secured for their own side one who wielded so sharp a pen, and Lord Danby, the Lord Treasurer, was sent by the king with offers of money and position if Marvell would come over to his side. It was all useless; the old Puritan stood firm, and continued to satirize the government, in prose and verse, to the day of his death.

Marvell closes the short list of Puritan poets. Although his name and that of Wither pale beside the mighty one of Milton, all three did good service to their cause.

The most celebrated satirist on the royalist side, in fact, almost the only one, was Samuel Butler (1612–80), author of "Hudibras." He was the son of a farmer, and picked

up a good education without going through a college course, though he studied for a short time at Cambridge. While still young he entered the service of Sir Samuel Luke, a Puritan justice-of-the-peace, whom he is supposed to ridicule in his verses. After the Restoration, Butler gave vent to his long suppressed feelings in the famous satire, which instantly became popular though it brought him no money. Charles II. carried about a copy of it in his pocket and often quoted from it, but he did nothing for the author, who died in poverty and obscurity a year or two after the publication of the last part of his poem.

"Hudibras" (which the writer rhymes with ass, thus settling the pronunciation of the name) is a pompous Presbyterian knight who starts out with his squire, Ralpho, to seek adventures and put down cavaliers. The idea is evidently suggested by the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. They have many encounters with the Cavalier party, generally coming out worst; and the overflowing wit and bubbling humor prevented the nine cantos from becoming wearisome to the earliest readers. It is impossible to give an idea of the fun which appealed to the readers of that time; but a few couplets will show the keen wit of the author:

What makes all doctrines plain and clear?

About two hundred pounds a year.

And that which was proved true before
Prove false again? Two hundred more.

Ah me! what perils do environ
The man who meddles with cold iron!

I am not now in fortune's power;

He that is down can fall no lower.

To swallow gudgeons ere they're catched,
And count their chickens ere they're hatched.

For those that fly may fight again,

Which he can never do that's slain.

He that complies against his will

Is of his own opinion still.

CHAPTER XX.

JOHN MILTON.

Na strictly chronological arrangement, the name of John Milton (1608-74) would have taken its place before several of the poets already mentioned; but Milton stands so emphatically alone in his generation, belonging to no group and to be compared with no other poet, that it has seemed best to consider him separately. Although not an aged man when he died, his life falls naturally into three parts, each marked by literary achievements which of themselves would have been enough to fill the record of an ordinary man and win for him enviable renown.

Milton is classed by all critics in all lands as one of the world's great poets. Macaulay ranked his and Bunyan's as the only two creative minds of the eighteenth century; and most authorities would consider this coupling of the names together as a greater compliment to the latter than the former, great as was the "inspired tinker." Both were "Non-comformists"; that is, in a certain sense Puritans; but Milton was so much a lover of liberty that he disclaimed absolute subjection even to Cromwell's government; as witness his refusal to apply for a license to publish his pamphlet on divorce, or his "Areopagitica" or plea for entire freedom of the press, which was, in fact an attack upon the Puritan parliament itself. He was an Independent to the uttermost.

It is one of the curious anomalies of the time that Milton's grandfather was a rigid Roman Catholic, and disinherited John, the Puritan poet's father, because he became an Episcopalian. The latter took up the business of scrivener, or writer of law-papers; but he must have had peculiar

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