ever, other English Dukes, see “Bridgewater," and the list of the Sheriffs of London.

LOVELACE'S POEMS.

AMONG the first objects of Sutton's bounty-certainly among its first fruits-stands the name of RICHARD LOVELACE. Believing that some interest would naturally attach in the minds of his fellow-Carthusians to the earliest, if not the best, among the poets whom their common mother has sent forth; and further, urged by the extreme scarcity of his works, I have been induced to lay before them some extracts from his writings, accompanied by a few passing remarks on their nature and style.

But the man and the poet are so intimately connected, that we should be able to understand little of his writings without we knew something of his life.

He was born in 1618, the eldest son of Sir William Lovelace, of Woolwich; and inherited a family estate at Bethesden near Canterbury. His birth, fortune, and above all his disposition, inclined him to take an active part in the civil struggles of the day, and he attached himself with unfailing zeal to the fortunes of the ill-fated Charles. He was indeed in mind, manners, and writings, not less than in name, the very type of the Cavalier.

The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword, were his, and are all equally apparent in his productions. Not a page of his writings, nor an incident in his life, but marks the spirit of the times and party to which

he belonged. Attached to the forms of his religion, even to bigotry, yet utterly devoid of its moral influences, beautiful in person beyond the common limit of masculine form, elegant in his scholarship, and scholarlike in his poetry, a courtier in manners and dress, but wholly free from selfishness in his chivalrous attachment to the person of his King, equally undaunted in battle and in prison, Richard Lovelace presents the very exemplar of the English gentleman of the reign of Charles I.

Whether we view him as the Gentleman-commoner of Gloucester Hall, at the early age of sixteen; where "he was accounted the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld, of innate modesty, virtuous, and a courtly deportment:"—the young M.A., to which dignity, on occasion of a Royal visit, he was raised by the complaisant authorities (it must be feared at the risk or loss of some of the modesty and virtue recorded above) while but of two years' standing, " at the request of a great lady belonging to the Queen :"-the gay courtier inditing sonnets "to Elinda's glove:”—the gallant ensign under the profligate Goring:-the loyal knight of the shire presenting the Kentish petition to the sourvisaged Parliament for the restoration of the King:the Gatehouse prisoner, bailed upon £40,000, and, what he valued higher, his parole:-the soldier of fortune, a voluntary, not a mercenary, in the French service, covered with glory and wounds at Dunkirk :-losing his affianced bride, who believed him dead :—again a prisoner:-and released at last ruined in health, in fortune, and in cause, to drag out an end more miserable than his master's; his life extended enough by the ill-spared pittances of his former friends to outlive the murder of one King, and yet not sufficiently prolonged to view the Restoration of another:-in each, and all the phases of

this varied existence, we trace, together with the history of Richard Lovelace, the fortunes of hundreds of the same party, who, had they served their God with half the zeal with which they served their King, might not have been left in their age naked and destitute to their enemies.

The following short extract from Aubrey tells an eloquent tale of his desolate end:-" Richard Lovelace, Esq. obiit in a cellar in Long Acre, a little before the Restoration of his Matie. Mr. Edm. Wyld, &c. had made collections for him, and given him money. He was an extraordinary handsome man, but prowd."

Born in the same year as Cowley, he was content, like his brother loyalist and poet, to adopt in his writings the prevalent fashion of the period, rather than to attempt to launch into a new and more natural style of his own. This was indeed essentially the age of Conceits. That very word, which then simply signified thought, derived its new meaning from that æra, and thenceforth came to be synonymous with everything that is absurd and outré and tricksy in composition. In the same way the word "wit," which up to the time of the First James had the broad and full meaning of ingenium or talent, when all ingeny was restricted by that monarch and his coterie to "a combination of dissimilar images, a discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike," became contracted in its signification, and being more and more applied to that particular species, has finally been appropriated to it alone.

It was the age of vertu in poetry; images were sought for from every distant, and barbarous, and hitherto unrifled region; and so that a thought was strange, and far-fetched, and quaint, it mattered not how monstrous,

or out of place, or unbecoming it might be. Dr. Johnson has described this school of poetry, in which Donne was the earliest adept, as the Metaphysical school. The propriety of the term may, however, be questioned. Difficult as Metaphysics may be to define, it would be still more difficult to bring the wit of this class of writers under any conceivable definition of that very indefinite subject; but as the Doctor had no very great love or knowledge of that department of philosophy, it is probable that he only meant to designate by the term metaphysical, the general obscurity and extravagance of this very extensive class. They might much more fairly be described as the Metaphoric or Hyperbolic school, in distinction to the Allegoric one of Spenser and Drayton. Let us take an example of the different genius of the two. Drayton crowned the absurdity of his (the Allegoric) system by assuming for his arms, "Pegasus rampant in a field azure, guttée d'eau from Helicon," and for his crest, "A cap of Mercury amid sunbeams proper." Lovelace will supply us with an instance of the Hyperbole of his college.

LUCASTA WEEPING.

Lucasta wept, and still the bright
Enamour'd God of day,

With his soft handkerchief of light,
Kiss'd the wet pearls away.

But when her tears his heat o'ercame,
In clouds he quench'd his beams,
And griev'd, wept out his eye of flame,
So drowned her sad streams.

At this she smil'd, when straight the sun
Clear'd, with her kind desires;

And by her eyes' reflection,

Kindled again his fires.

This is serious, and most excellently good. The sun to stanch Lucasta's tears takes out his white pockethandkerchief, but the stream being too much for the great monophthalmist to dry, he succeeds by drowning it, and is about to walk away in grief, like Polyphemus -with his eye out,-when Lucasta-and no wondersmiles, whereupon the sun catches the reflexion, clears up, and shines brightly,—and no doubt the birds sang, and the bells began merrily ringing.

This style, though it flourished in full glory under Charles the First, undoubtedly arose from the tone which the court of James gave to the literature of the day. Everything was then to be achieved by Learning, and poor poetry was doomed, in spite of the "Nascitur, non fit," to the same process; thus it came to be manufactured out of a mixture of polemical divinity, abstruse technicalities, and scholastic pedantry. Theology betook itself to rhyme, and Poetry was overlaid with learning. Hence Brooke philosophized, and Davies preached, in metre. Hence Donne, who was essentially a poet, became a divine; and Nahum Tate, who might have abided by his divinity, was accounted a poet.

But the excess of illustration from every possible quarter, and of the most heterogeneous kind, was the peculiar characteristic of the school. Nothing was so mean that it might not lend an image to the sublimest subject, and nothing so lofty that might not be applied to one the most ordinary. The consequence was an entire overthrow of everything like propriety of expression. The sublime was brought down without being made more intelligible, and the low was exalted without any gain to its dignity: where all is on a level, it must necessarily be flat and tedious.