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to Fletcher, Milton, Herrick, Wither, and Randolph, yet who of these could have written:

Through the hazels thick espy

The hatching throstle's shining eye?

Such observation was rare among the poets. Though unequal, Marvell is far less so than those typical court poets, Carew, Suckling, and Lovelace. Besides the poems mentioned, his Coronet, in which he approaches Crashaw, Young Love, On Paradise Lost, and the exquisite Where the Remote Bermudas Ride-all are regarded with true affection by lovers of poetry.

As a satirist Marvell is brought into the somewhat shady companionship of John Oldham, a native of Tetbury, and a graduate of Oxford (St. Edmund Hall). Oldham became an usher at Croydon where Rochester and Sedley are said to have visited him, struck perhaps by the regular thwick-thwack of his satirical heroics. He wrote passable imitations of Horace, Juvenal, and Boileau; but his reputation belongs to the episode of the Popish Plot, when his precious couplets against the Jesuits, in describing the sham relics of Rome, are outrageous enough to have been penned by Oates himself. In their uncompromising savagery we recognise a literary progenitor of Charles Churchhill. Pope's opinion is worth hearing on the minor Restoration arts and versifiers: "Oldham is a very indelicate writer: he has strong rage but is too much like Billingsgate. Lord Rochester had much more delicacy and more knowledge of mankind." "Rochester," he added, "is the medium between the rough coarseness of Oldham and the delicate exactness of Lord Dorset. Sedley is a very insipid writer: except in some few of his little love verses." This deprecation of Sedley seems beyond the mark when we consider songs such as "Love still has something of the sea," or the more famous:

Phillis is my only joy,

Faithless as the winds or seas;

Sometimes coming, sometimes coy,
Yet she never fails to please.

But for this we are willing enough to accept Pope's order of merit. It is hard to form a satisfactory estimate of Rochester for the simple reason that many of his cleverest verses are simply unprintable, and this difficulty is complicated by the fact that it is almost impossible to identify Rochester's work, if it may so be described, from that of his collaborators, rivals, or imitators. Born at Ditchley, Rochester graduated M.A. from Wadham when he was thirteen, and set out upon a tour of foreign courts, during which he studied Alcibiades, Boileau, and Cowley as models. At seventeen he appeared at Charles II.'s court a good-looking, slender boy, precociously sprightly and amusing when sober, and extravagantly comical when drunk. His life at the court was a succession of practical jokes, of which the victims varied from the King himself to the harmless city merchant, but Charles could forgive anything rather than spare such an idle rogue from his society. In his last years promiscuous debauchery seems to have given way to habitual intoxication, and Rochester in his penitent state confessed to Burnet that he had been drunk for five years. On his deathbed he ordered his licentious poems to be destroyed, but this naturally was not done, and Rochester is still saddled with many obscenities which he can never have perpetrated. His verses are always described as lewd and profane; but we know of them little more than "Nothing." He died an enfeebled old wreck of thirty-three on July 26, 1680.1

1 There is a good deal of libertine verse, some of it, no doubt, by Rochester, in the collection known as Poems on Affairs of State. See also Bullen's Musa Proterva, Rochester and the Rakes, Rutherford's Singular Life of the Renowned Earl,

Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, was a more amiable rake than Rochester. Walpole confirms Pope's view that he was the finest gentleman at the voluptuous court of Charles II., and that he had as much wit as either the King, Buckingham, or Rochester, without the want of feeling of Charles, the want of principle of the Duke, of the "thoughtlessness" (charming euphemism) of the third. He was undoubtedly a munificent patron to Dryden and Prior, and apart from his gay poems to the royal mistresses, for whom he had a particular tendre, he wrote at least one masterpiece which far surpasses anything of Rochester's, his Song written at Sea in the First Dutch War the Night before the Engagement:

To all you ladies now on land

We men at sea indite:

But first would have you understand
How hard it is to write.

But each one of the eleven stanzas of this sprightly gaiety is a gem. Dorset is also responsible for the happy literary application of the Shakespearean phrase "alacrity in sinking.”. “Gay, vigorous, and airy" Dorset grew fat, and according to Swift dull, when he reached sixty. He died at Bath on January 29, 1706. Sedley and Dorset passed on the tibia to Prior, who were the last to sound it for well-nigh a hundred years.1

Aubrey, Dr. Johnson, and the excellent memoir in the Dictionary of National Biography. A pretty selection of Lyrists of the Restoration has appeared in the Chap-books (ed. Masefield, 1905).

1 Westminster School, under James I. and Charles I., must have been a veritable nest of singing birds, with every variety of note and utterance. In addition to three poets who achieved so much as George Herbert, Herrick, and Cowley, the school was the cradle of two singers of such promise as Cartwright and Randolph, and of a great host of minor versifiers such as

William Strode (1602-1645), author of The Floating Island, and of a pretty kissing song; Henry King (d. 1669), Bishop of Chichester, author of devotional poems not without merit; Jasper Mayne (d. 1672), a priestly playwright of no scruples worth speaking of, and an adept translator of Lucian; Nicholas Hookes (d. 1712), author of Amanda; and several others. William Cartwright, a young person of the humblest origin, passed from Westminster to Christ Church an accepted paragon and particular wit, and his early death, it was said of camp fever, in 1643, was felt as a blow by many, even in that short-lived generation. Among his Poems and Plays collected in 1651 we find nothing save an indifferent play called The Ordinary, nor can we expect his Poemata Græca et Latina to supply the key to this riddle of his fame. Even younger was nipped Thomas Randolph (1605-1635), who went from the school to Trinity, Cambridge. Inspired by a furtive glimpse of Jonson in the Devil Tavern, he drank too greedily, we are told, of the Muses' Spring. So may it be. His plays are in the dust with Davenant's, Nabbes's, and Brome's, but there are some pastoral blossoms among his heroic and other verses, and one phrase, "blithe, buxom, and debonair," which Milton himself condescended to improve.

Charles Cotton (d. 1687), the unsurpassed translator of Montaigne, left a few copies of verse not on any account to be forgotten. Angler ("a dog at a catch "), wit, traveller, and toss-pot, he was a benefactor of poor bards, such as Lovelace, and a bright exemplar of all-around talent. His Poems on Several Occasions (1689) contain Winter (“Hark! Hark! I hear the north wind roar ") and the sunny Retirement. Honest, hearty Mr. Cotton has always been a favourite Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Lamb unite in calling Cotton "a first-rate." Charles Cotton's Voyage to Ireland in Burlesque (1671), which has been claimed as anticipating the Bath Guide of Anstey, owed something, no doubt, to the facetious rhyming Journal (1638) of "Drunken Barnabee" or Richard Brathwait (d. May 4th, 1673, æt., 85), and to the more sprightly humours of Bishop Corbet's Iter Boreale.

CHAPTER VII

FROM THIS WORLD TO THE NEXT: JOHN BUNYAN

"A curious writer is Bunyan. The Pilgrim's Progress is a nursery tale, a blood-curdling allegory, showing the terrible inner mind of one of those fanatics; groans, invasions of the spirit, the belief in damnation, visions of the devil's scruples. Oh! Pray do not turn us into Protestants; let us remain Voltaireans and Spinozists! After the hallucination is calmed down, a sort of rigidity remains, moral spikes with which to wound oneself continually and stab others."-TAINE, Letters. "The whole allegory is a consistent attack on morality and respectability."-SHAW, Man and Superman.

The Pilgrim's Progress and its creator.1

IF Milton represented cultivated Puritanism, the everyday faith of the humble Christian in seventeenth-century England, the class who set out to colonise the backwoods of America is represented by John Bunyan, the most popular religious writer that England has ever produced. The greatness of Milton resides largely in the complexity of his endowment and the scholarly elaboration of his talent; that of Bunyan, on the other hand, depends upon the simplicity of his mind and the devotion of his nature to one

1 The best introduction to The Pilgrim's Progress is supplied by its author's own Grace Abounding. The best Life of Bunyan is that of Dr. John Brown, and the best cheap modern edition that edited by Prof. C. H. Firth (Methuen, 1898). Among famous illustrators are John Martin and Sir John Gilbert. And in recent literature the reader should not fail to notice the appreciation of Bernard Shaw in the Preface to Man and Superman or the respectable solicitor's unbiassed summing-up of Christian's harebrained enterprise in Henry Brocken.

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