This delectable versifier was born in 1589, in Gloucestershire, from an old family in which he sprung. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, but neither matriculated nor took a degree. After finishing his travels, he returned to England, and became soon highly distinguished, in the Court of Charles I., for his manners, accomplishments, and wit. He was appointed Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and Sewer in Ordinary to the King. He spent the rest of his life as a gay and gallant courtier; and in the intervals of pleasure produced some light but exquisite poetry. He is said, ere his death, which took place in 1639, to have become very devout, and bitterly to have deplored the licentiousness of some of his verses.

Indelicate choice of subject is often, in Carew, combined with great delicacy of execution. No one touches dangerous themes with so light and glove-guarded a hand. His pieces are all fugitive, but they suggest great possibilities, which his mode of life and his premature removal did not permit to be realised. Had he, at an earlier period, renounced, like George Herbert, 'the painted pleasures of a court,' and, like Prospero, dedicated himself to 'closeness,' with his marvellous facility of verse, his laboured levity of style, and his nice exuberance of fancy, he might have produced some work of Horatian merit and classic permanence.