In Spenser and in Jonson art None knows which bears the happiest share; Yet what he wrote was all his own. He melted not the ancient gold, Nor, with Ben Jonson, did make bold Horace's wit and Virgil's state He did not steal, but emulate, And when he would like them appear, Their garb, but not their clothes, did wear; Each to the other seemed too much, His severe judgment, giving law, His modest fancy, kept in awe, As rigid husbands jealous are When they believe their wives too fair. THOMAS STANLEY. [THOMAS STANLEY was born at Cumberlow, in Hertfordshire, in 1625, and died in Suffolk Street, London, on the 12th of April, 1678. His translations appeared in 1649 and his original poems in 1651.] Eminent among the scholars of the Restoration as the historian of Philosophy and the expounder of Aeschylus, Stanley had dedicated his youth to studies less severe, and is now principally remembered as the last of the old school of lyrists. Born into a younger generation than that of Waller and Denham, he really belongs, as a poet, to the age before them, and in him the series of writers called 'Metaphysical' closes. Stanley is without the faults or the merits of his predecessors. His conceits are never violent or crude, though often insipid: but he has no flashes of music or sudden inspired felicities. He is a tamer and duller Herrick, resembling that writer in his versification, and following him at a distance in temperament and tone. Stanley was a very delicate and poetical translator; and he had the originality to select the authors from whom he translated according to his own native bias. He delighted in Moschus and Ausonius among the ancients, and in Joannes Secundus and Ronsard among the moderns; the world in which his fancy loved to wander was one of refined Arcadian beauty, rather chilly and autumnal, but inhabited by groups of nymphs and shepherds, who hung garlands of flowers on votive urns, or took hands in stately pensive dances. In no poet of the century is the negative quality of shrinking from ugliness and coarseness so defined as in Stanley. He constantly sacrifices strength to it, not as Habington sometimes did, from instinctive reticence and modesty of fancy, but from sheer over-refinement. Stanley makes a strange figure among the rough prosaic writers of the Restoration, and no poems of his have been preserved, except those of his youth. He probably ceased to write, and gave his intellect to less shifting studies, when he found the whole temper of the nation obstinately set against his inclination. He died in middle life, just when Lee and Otway were at the height of their vogue, and a few weeks before another great tradition in English poetry ceased at the death of Marvell. EDMUND W. GOSSE. CELIA SINGING. Roses in breathing forth their scent, The winged chariot of the light, Or the slow silent wheels of night, The shade which from the swifter sun Or souls that their eternal rest do keep, But if the Angel, which inspires Should mould this breath to words, and those The music of this heavenly sphere And into plants and stones infuse A life that Cherubim would choose, And with new powers invert the laws of fate, THE TOMB. When, cruel fair one, I am slain And, as a trophy of thy scorn, To some old tomb am borne, Nor can thy flame immortal burn, Thus freed from thy proud empire, I shall prove There is more liberty in Death than Love. And when forsaken lovers come To see my tomb, Take heed thou mix not with the crowd And, as a victor, proud To view the spoils thy beauty made Lest thy too cruel breath or name But if cold earth or marble must Whilst hid in some dark ruins, I The pride of all thy victory Will sleep with me; And they who should attest thy glory, Will, or forget, or not believe this story. Then to increase thy triumph, let me rest, Since by thine eye slain, buried in thy breast. SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. [SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT was born at Oxford, in February 1605, and died in Lincoln's Inn Fields, April 17, 1668. His epic poem of Gondibert was printed in 1651.] There is not a more hopelessly faded laurel on the slopes of the English Parnassus than that which once flourished so bravely around the grotesque head of Davenant. The enormous folio edition of his works, brought out in 1673 in direct emulation of Ben Jonson, is probably the most deplorable collection of verses anywhere to be found, dead and dusty beyond the wont of forgotten classics. The critic is inclined to say that everything is spurious about Davenant, from the legend that connects his blood with Shakespeare's to the dramatic genius that his latest contemporaries praised so highly. He is not merely a ponderous, he is a nonsensical writer, and having begun life by writing meaningless romantic plays in imitation of Massinger, and insipid masques in the school of Ben Jonson, he closed his long and busy career by parodying the style of Dryden. But he really deserves to be classed with none of these authors, but with Sir William Killigrew and Sir Robert Stapleton, the dullest crew of pedants and poetasters which our literature has seen. From this wide condemnation of the writings of Davenant, his romantic epic of Gondibert must be excepted. It is a poem of chivalry, the scene of which is laid in Lombardy, but' which the author grew tired of before it had occurred to him to construct a plot. It is, accordingly, nothing but an incoherent, rambling fragment, through which the reader toils, as if through a quicksand, dragging his steps along, and rewarded every now and then by a firmer passage containing some propriety of thought or a beautiful single line. The form of Gondibert is borrowed from the Nosce Teipsum of Sir John Davies, and was soon afterwards employed again by Dryden for his Annus Mirabilis. EDMUND W. GOSSE VOL. IL U |