We were venturing upon almost sacred ground when—in our last chapter—we had somewhat to say of the so-called King James’ Bible; of how it came to bear that name; of those men who were concerned in its translation, and of certain literary qualities belonging to it, which—however excellent other and possible future Bibles may be—will be pretty sure to keep it alive for a very long time to come. Next, I spoke of that king of the dramatists who was born at Stratford. We followed him up to London; tracked him awhile there; talked of a few familiar aspects of his life and character; spared you the recital of a world of things—conjectural or eulogistic—which might be said of him; and finally saw him go back to his old home upon the Avon, to play the retired gentleman—last of all his plays—and to die.

This made a great coupling of topics for one chapter—Shakespeare and the English Bible! No two titles in our whole range of talks can or should so interest those who are alive to the felicities of English forms of speech, and who are eager to compass and enjoy its largest and keenest and simplest forces of phrase. No other vocabulary of words, and no other exemplar of the aptitudes of language, than can be found in Shakespeare and in the English Bible are needed by those who would equip their English speech for its widest reach, and with its subtlest or sharpest powers. Out of those twin treasuries the student may dredge all the words he wants, and all the turns of expression that will be helpful, in the writing of a two-page letter or in the unfolding of an epic. Other books may make needful reservoir of facts, or record of theories, or of literary experimentation; but these twain furnish sufficient lingual armament for all new conquests in letters.

We find ourselves to-day amid a great hurly-burly of dramatists, poets, prose-writers, among whom we have to pick our way—making a descriptive dash at some few of them—seeing the old pedant of a king growing more slipshod and more shaky, till at last he yields the throne to that unfortunate son of his, Charles I., in whose time we shall find some new singing-birds in the fields of British poesy, and birds of a different strain.

Webster, Ford, and Others.

All those lesser dramatists going immediately before Shakespeare, and coming immediately after or with him, may be counted in literary significance only as the trail to that grander figure which swung so high in the Elizabethan heavens; many a one among the lesser men has written something which has the true poetic ring in it, and is to be treasured; but ring however loudly it may, and however musically it may, it will very likely have a larger and richer echo somewhere in Shakespeare.

Among the names of those contemporaries whose names are sure of long survival may be mentioned John Webster; a Londoner in all probability; working at plays early in the seventeenth century; his name appearing on various title-pages up to 1624 certainly—one time as “merchant tailor;” and there are other intimations that he may have held some church “clerkship;” but we know positively very little of him. Throughout the eighteenth century his name and fame[23] had slipped away from people’s knowledge; somewhere about the year 1800 Charles Lamb gave forth his mellow piping of the dramatist’s deservings; a quarter of a century later Mr. Dyce[24] wrote and published what was virtually a resurrection work for Webster; and in our time the swift-spoken Swinburne transcends all the old conventionalities of encyclopÆdic writing in declaring this dramatist to be “hardly excelled for unflagging energy of impression and of pathos in all the poetic literature of the world.”

Webster was not a jocund man; he seems to have taken life in a hard way; he swears at fate. Humane and pathetic touches there may be in his plays; but he has a dolorous way of putting all the humanities to simmer in a great broth of crime. At least this may not be unfairly said of his chiefest works, and those by which he is best known—the “Vittoria Corombona” and the “Duchess of Malfi.” There are blood-curdling scenes in them through which one is led by a guidance that is as strenuous as it is fascinating. The drapery is in awful keeping with the trend of the story; the easy murders hardly appal one, and the breezes that fan the air seem to come from the flutter of bat-like, leaden wings, hiding the blue. There are, indeed, wondrous flashes of dramatic power; by whiles, too, there are refreshing openings-out to the light or sinlessness of common day—a lifting of thought and consciousness up from the great welter of crime and crime’s entanglements; but there is little brightness, sparse sunshine, rare panoply of green or blooming things; even the flowers are put to sad offices, and

When a man’s flower culture gets reduced to such narrow margin as this it does not carry exhilarating odors with it.

John Ford[25] was another name much coupled in those and succeeding days with that of Webster; he was indeed associated with him in some of his work, as also with Dekker. He was a man of Devonshire birth, of good family;—a little over-boastful of being above any “want for money;” showing traces, indeed, of coarse arrogance, and swaying dramatically into coarse brutalities. He, too, was borne down by enslavement to the red splendors of crime; his very titles carry such foretaste of foulness we do not name them. There are bloody horrors and moral ones. Few read him for love. Murder makes room for incest, and incest sharpens knives for murder. Animal passions run riot; the riot is often splendid, but never—to my mind—making head in such grand dramatic utterance as crowns the gory numbers of Webster. There are strong passages, indeed, gleaming out of the red riotings like blades of steel; now and then some fine touch of pathos—of quiet contemplative brooding—lying amid the fiery wrack, like a violet on banks drenched with turbid floods; but they are rare, and do not compensate—at least do not compensate me—for the wadings through bloody, foul quagmires to reach them.

Marston—another John[26]—if not up to the tragic level of the two last named, had various talent; wrote satires, parodies; his Image of Pygmalion had the honor of being publicly burned; he wrought with Jonson on Eastward Hoe! won the piping praises of Charles Lamb in our century, also of Hazlitt, and the eulogies of later and lesser critics. But he is coarse, unequal, little read now. I steal a piquant bit of his satire on metaphysic study from What you Will; it reminds of the frolic moods of Browning:

Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher.

Some dozen or more existing plays are attributed to Philip Massinger,[27] and he was doubtless the author of many others now unknown save by name. Of Wiltshire birth, his father had been dependant, or protÉgÉ of the Pembroke family, and the Christian name of Philip very likely kept alive the paternal reverence for the great Philip Sidney. Though Massinger was an industrious writer, and was well accredited in his time, it is certain that he had many hard struggles, and passed through many a pinching day; and at the last it would appear that he found burial, only as an outsider and stranger, in that old church of St. Saviours, near to London Bridge, where we found John Gower laid to rest with his books for pillow. If Massinger did not lift his lines into such gleams of tragic intensity as we spoke of in Webster and in Ford, he gave good, workman-like finish to his dramas; and for bloody apparelling of his plots, I think there are murderous zealots, in his Sforza[28] story at least, who could fairly have clashed swords with the assassins of “Vittoria Corombona.” It is a large honor to Massinger that of all the dramas I have named—outside some few of Shakespeare’s—no one is so well known to modern play-goers as the “New Way to Pay Old Debts.” The character of Sir Giles Overreach does not lose its terrible significance. In our times, as in the old times,

When Massinger died tradition says that he was thrust into the same grave which had been opened shortly before for John Fletcher; if not joined there, these two had certainly been fellows in literary work; and there are those who think that the name of Massinger should have recognition in that great dramatic copartnery under style of Beaumont and Fletcher.[29] Certain it is that other writers had share in the work; among them—in at least one instance (that of “Two Noble Kinsmen”)—the fine hand of Shakespeare.

But whatever helping touches or of outside journey-work may have been contributed to that mass of plays which bears name of Beaumont and Fletcher, it is certain that they hold of right that brilliant reputation for deft and lively and winning dramatic work which put their popularity before Jonson’s, if not before Shakespeare’s. The coupling together of this pair of authors at their work has the air of romance; both were well born; Fletcher, son of a bishop; Beaumont, son of Sir Francis Beaumont, of Grace-Dieu (not far away from Ashby-de-la-Zouch); both were university men, and though differing in age by eight or nine years, yet coming—very likely through the good offices of Ben Jonson—to that sharing of home and work and wardrobe which the old gossip Aubrey[30] has delighted in picturing. They wrought charmingly together, and with such a nice welding of jointures, that literary craftsmen, of whatever astuteness, are puzzled to say where the joinings lie. In agreement, however, with opinions of best critics, it may be said that Beaumont (the younger, who died nine years before his mate) was possessed of the deeper poetic fervors, while Fletcher was wider in fertilities and larger in affluence of diction.

The dramatic horrors of Ford and Webster are softened in the lines of these later playwrights. These are debonair; they are lively; they are jocund; they tell stories that have a beginning and an end; they pique attention; there are delicacies, too, and—it must be said—a good many indelicacies; there are light-virtued women, and marital infelicities get an easy ripening toward the over-ripeness and rottenness that is to come in Restoration times. These twain were handsome fellows, by Aubrey’s and all other accounts; Beaumont most noticeably so; and Fletcher—brightly swarthy, red-haired, full-blooded—dying a bachelor and of the plague, down in the time of Charles I., and thrust hastily into the grave at St. Saviours, where Massinger presently followed him.

I must give at least one taste of the dramatic manner for which both of these men were sponsors. It is from the well-known play of “Philaster” that I quote, where Euphrasia tells of the tender discovery of what stirred her heart:—

Nothing better in its way can be found in all their plays. One mentioning word, however, should be given to those delightful lyrical aptitudes, by virtue of which the blithe and easy metric felicities of Elizabethan days were overlaid in tendrils of song upon the Carolan times. I wish, too, that I had space for excerpts from that jolly pastoral of The Faithful Shepherdess—bewildering in its easy gaieties, and its cumulated classicisms—and which lends somewhat of its deft caroling, and of its arch conceits to the later music of Milton’s “Comus.” Another foretaste of Milton comes to us in these words of Fletcher:—

King James and Family.

Meanwhile, how are London and England getting on with their ram-shackle dotard of a King? Not well; not proudly. Englishmen were not as boastful of being Englishmen as in the days when the virgin Elizabeth queened it, and shattered the Spanish Armada, and made her will and England’s power respected everywhere. James, indeed, had a son, Prince Henry, who promised far better things for England, and for the Stuart name, than his pedant of a father.

This son was a friend of Raleigh’s (would, maybe, have saved that great man from the scaffold, if he had lived), a friend, too, of all the high-minded, far-seeing ones who best represented Elizabethan enterprise; but he died, poor fellow, at nineteen, leaving the heirship to that Charles I. whose dismal history you know. James had also a daughter—Elizabeth—a high-spirited maiden, who, amid brilliant fÊtes made in her honor, married that Frederic, Elector Palatine, who received his bride in the magnificent old castle, you will remember at Heidelberg. There they show still the great gateway of the Princess Elizabeth, clad in ivy, and the Elizabeth gardens. ’Twas said that her ambition and high spirit pushed the poor Elector into political complications that ruined him, and that made the once owner of that princely chÂteau an outcast, and almost a beggar. The King, too, by his vanities, his indifference, and cowardice, helped largely the discomfiture of this branch of his family, as he did by his wretched bringing up of Charles pave the way for that monarch’s march into the gulf of ruin.

In foreign politics this weak king coquetted in a childish way—sometimes with the Catholic powers; sometimes with the Protestant powers of Middle Europe; and at home, with a ridiculous sense of his own importance, he angered the Presbyterians of Scotland and the Puritans of England by his perpetual interferences. He provoked the emigration that was planting, year by year, a New England west of the Atlantic; he harried the House of Commons into an antagonism which, by its growth and earnestness was, by and by, to upset his throne and family together. His power was the power of a blister that keeps irritating—and not like Elizabeth’s—the power of a bludgeon that thwacks and makes an end.

And in losing respect this King gained no love. Courtiers could depend on his promises as little as kingdoms. He chose his favorites for a fine coat, or a fine face, and thereafter, from sheer indolence yielded to them in everything. In personal habits, too, he grew more and more unbearable; his doublets were all dirtier; his wigs shabbier; his coarse jokes coarser; his tipsiness frequenter. A foulness grew up in the court which tempted such men as Fletcher and Massinger to fouler ways of speech, and which lured such creatures as Lady Essex to ruin. A pretty sort of King was this to preach against tobacco!

James had given up poetry-writing, in which he occasionally indulged before coming to England; yet he had poetical tastes; he enjoyed greatly many of Shakespeare’s plays; Ben Jonson, too, was a pet of his, and had easy access to royalty, certainly until his quarrel with the great court architect, Inigo Jones. But, as in all else, the King’s taste in poetry grew coarser as he grew older, and he showed a great liking for a certain John Taylor,[32] called “the Water-Poet,” a rough, coarse creature, who sculled boats across the Thames for hire; who made a foot-trip into Scotland in rivalry of Ben Jonson, and who wrote a Very merry wherry Voyage from London to York, and a Kecksy-Winsey, or a Lerry-cum-twang, which you will not find in your treasures of literature, but which the leering King loved to laugh over in his cups. Taylor afterward was keeper of a rollicking, Royalist tavern in Oxford, and of another in London, where he died at the age of seventy-four.

Tobacco, first introduced in Raleigh’s early voyaging times, came to have a little fund of literature crystallizing about it—what with histories of its introduction and properties, and onslaughts upon it. Bobadil, the braggart, in “Every Man in his Humor,” says: “I have been in the Indies (where this herbe growes), where neither myself nor a dozen gentlemen more (of my knowledge) have received the taste of any other nutriment, in the world, for the space of one and twenty weeks, but Tobacco only. Therefore it cannot be, but ’tis most Divine.”

There were many curious stories afloat too—taking different shapes—of the great apprehension ignorant ones felt on seeing people walking about, as first happened in these times, with smoke pouring from their mouths and noses. In an old book called The English Hue and Crie (printed about 1610), it takes something like this form:

King James’ Counterblaste to the Use of Tobacco, had about the same efficacy with the Welshman’s beer-pot. But to show the King’s method of arguing, I give one little whiff of it. Tobacco-lovers of that day alleged that it cleared the head and body of ugly rheums and distillations;

Is it any wonder people kept on smoking? He reasoned in much the same way about church matters; is it any wonder the Scotch would not have Anglicanism thrust upon them?

The King died at last (1625), aged fifty-nine, at his palace of Theobalds, a little out of London, and very famous, as I have said, for its fine gardens; and these gardens this prematurely old and shattered man did greatly love; loved perhaps more than his children. I do not think Charles mourned for him very grievously; but, of a surety there was no warrant for the half-hinted allegation of Milton’s (at a later day) that the royal son was concerned in some parricidal scheme. There was, however, nowhere great mourning for James.

A New King and some Literary Survivors.

The new King, his son, was a well-built young fellow of twenty-five, of fine appearance, well taught, and just on the eve of his marriage to Henrietta of France. He had a better taste than his father, and lived a more orderly life; indeed, he was every way decorous save in an obstinate temper and in absurd notions about his kingly prerogative. He loved play-going and he loved poetry, though not so accessible as his father had been to the buffoonery of the water-poet Taylor, or the tipsy obeisance of old Ben Jonson. For Ben Jonson was still living, not yet much over fifty, though with his great bulk and reeling gait seeming nearer seventy; now, too, since Shakespeare is gone, easily at the head of all the literary workers in London; indeed, in some sense always at the head by reason of his dogged self-insistence and his braggadocio. All the street world[33] knows him, as he swaggers along the Strand to his new jolly rendezvous at the Devil Tavern, near St. Dunstan’s, in Fleet Street—not far off from the Temple Church—where he and his fellows meet in the Apollo Chamber, over whose door Ben has written:

Of all we have named hitherto among the Elizabethan poets, the only ones who would be likely to appear there in Charles I.’s time would be George Chapman, of the Homer translation; staid and very old now, with snowy hair; and Dekker—what time he was out of prison for debt; possibly, too, John Marston. Poor Ben Jonson wrote about this time his last play, which did not take either with courtiers or the public; whereupon the old grumbler was more rough than ever, and died a few years thereafter, wretchedly poor, and was put into the ground—upright, tradition says, as into a well—in Westminster Abbey. There one may walk over his name and his crown; and this is the last we shall see of him, whose swagger has belonged to three reigns.

Among other writers known to these times and who went somewhiles to these suppers at the Apollo was James Howell,[34] notable because he wrote so much; and I specially name him because he was the earliest and best type of what we should call a hack-writer; ready for anything; a shrewd salesman, too, of all he did write; travelling largely—having modern instincts, I think; making small capital—whether of learning or money—reach enormously. He was immensely popular, too, in his day; a Welshman by birth, and never wrote at all till past forty; but afterward he kept at it with a terrible pertinacity. He gives quaint advice about foreign travel, with some shrewdness cropping out in it. Thus of languages he says:

Then he says, for improvement, it is well to have the acquaintance of some ancient nun, with whom one may talk through the grated windows—for they have all the news, and “they will entertain discourse till one be weary, if one bestow on them now and then some small bagatells—as English Gloves, or Knives, or Ribands—and before hee go over, hee must furnish himself with such small curiosities.”

The expenses of travel in that day on the Continent, he says, for a young fellow who has his “Riding and Dancing and Fencing, and Racket, and Coach-hire, with apparel and other casual charges will be about £300 per annum”—which sum (allowing for differences in moneyed values) may have been a matter of $6,000. He says with great aptness, too, that the traveller must not neglect letter-writing, which

Wotton and Walton.

Another great traveller of these times—but one whose dignities would, I suspect have kept him away from the Devil Tavern—was Sir Henry Wotton.[35] He was a man who had supplemented his university training by long residence abroad; who had been of service to King James (before the King had yet left Scotland) by divulging to him and defeating some purposed scheme of poisoning. Wotton was, later, English ambassador at the brilliant court of Venice, whence he wrote to the King many suggestions respecting the improvement of his garden, detailing Italian methods, and forwarding grafts and rare seedlings; he was familiar with most European courts—hobnobbed with Doges and with Kings, was a scholar of elegant and various accomplishments, and the reputed maker of that old and well-worn witticism about ambassadors—that “they were honest men, sent to lie abroad for the good of their country.” He was, furthermore, himself boastful of the authorship of this prickly saying, “The itch of disputation is the scab of the church.”[36] There is also a charming little poem of his—which gets place in the anthologies—addressed to that Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, whom we encountered as a bride at the Castle of Heidelberg, and who became the mother of the accomplished and daring Prince Rupert. Such a man as Wotton, full of anecdote, bristling with wit, familiar with courts, and one who could match phrases with James, or Charles, or Buckingham, in Latin, or French, or Italian, must have been a god-send for a dinner-party at Theobalds, or at Whitehall. To crown his graces, Walton[37] tells us that he was an excellent fisherman.

And this mention of the quiet Angler tempts me to enroll him here, a little before his time; yet he was well past thirty when James died, and must have been busy in the ordering of his draper’s shop in Fleet Street when Charles I. came to power. He was of Staffordshire birth, and no millinery of the city could have driven out of his mind the pretty ruralities of his Staffordshire home, and the lovely far-off views of the Welsh hills. His first wife was grandniece of Bishop Cranmer; he was himself friend of Dr. Donne, to whom he listened from Sunday to Sunday; a second wife was sister of that Thomas Ken who came to be Bishop of Bath and Wells; so he was hemmed in by ecclesiasticisms, and loved them as he loved trout. He was warm Royalist always, and lived by old traditions in Church and State—not easily overset by Reformers. No fine floral triumphs of any new gardeners, however accredited, could blind him to the old glories of the eglantine or of a damask rose. A good and quiet friend, a placid book, a walk under trees, made sufficient regalement for him. These, with a fishing bout (by way of exceptional entertainment), and a Sunday in a village church, with the Litany well intoned, were all in all to him. His book holds spicy place among ranks of books, as lavender keeps fresh odor among stores of linen. It is worth any man’s dalliance with the fishing-craft to make him receptive to the simplicities and limpidities of Walton’s Angler. I am tempted to say of him again, what I have said of him before in other connection:—very few fine writers of our time could make a better book on such a subject to-day, with all the added information and all the practice of the newspaper columns. What Walton wants to say, he says. You can make no mistake about his meaning; all is as lucid as the water of a spring. He does not play upon your wonderment with tropes. There is no chicane of the pen; he has some pleasant matters to tell of, and he tells of them—straight.

Another great charm about Walton is his childlike truthfulness. I think he is almost the only earnest trout-fisher (unless Sir Humphry Davy be excepted) whose report could be relied upon for the weight of a trout. I have many excellent friends—capital fishermen—whose word is good upon most concerns of life, but in this one thing they cannot be religiously confided in. I excuse it; I take off twenty per cent. from their estimates without either hesitation, anger, or reluctance.

I must not omit to mention his charming biographic sketches (rather than “lives”) of Hooker, of Wotton, of Herbert, of Donne—the letterpress of all these flowing easily and limpidly as the brooks he loved to picture. He puts in very much pretty embroidery too, for which tradition or street gossip supplied him with his needs, in figure and in color; this is not always of best authenticity, it is true;[38] but who wishes to question when it is the simple-souled and always honest Walton who is talking? And as for his great pastoral of The Complete Angler—to read it, in whatever season, is like plunging into country air, and sauntering through lovely country solitudes.

I name Sir Thomas Overbury[39]—who was the first, I think, to make that often-repeated joke respecting people who boasted of their ancestry, saying “they were like potatoes, with the best part below ground”—because he belonged to this period, and was a man of elegant culture and literary promise. He was poisoned in the Tower at the instance of some great people about the court of James, who feared damaging testimony of his upon a trial that was just then to come off; and this trial and poisoning business, in which (Carr) Somerset and Lady Essex were deeply concerned, made one of the greatest scandals of the scandalous court of King James. Overbury’s Characters are the best known of his writings, but they are slight; quaint metaphors and tricksy English are in them, with a good many tiresome affectations of speech. What he said of the Dairymaid is best of all.

George Herbert.

This is a name which will be more familiar to the reader, and if he has never encountered the little olive-green, gilt-edged budget of Herbert’s[40] poems, he can hardly have failed to have met, on some page of the anthologies, such excerpt as this about Virtue:

And now, that I have quoted this, I wish that I had quoted another; and so it would be, I suppose, were I to go through the little book. One cannot go amiss of lines that will show his tenderness, his strong religious feeling, his gloomy coloring, his quaint conceits—with not overmuch rhythmic grace, but a certain spiritual unction that commends him to hosts of devout-minded people everywhere. Yet I cannot help thinking that he would have been lost sight of earlier in the swarm of seventeenth-century poets, had it not been for a certain romantic glow attaching to his short life. And first, he was a scion from the old Pembroke stock, born in a great castle on the Welsh borders, and bred in luxury. He went to Cambridge for study at a time when he may have encountered there the grim boy-student, Oliver Cromwell, or possibly that other fair-faced Cambridge student, John Milton, who was upon the rolls eight years later. He was a young fellow of rare scholarship, winning many honors; was tall, spare, with an eagle eye; and so he wins upon old James I., when he comes down on a visit to the University (the Mother Herbert managing to have the King see his best points, even to his silken doublets and his jewelled buckles, of which the lad was fond). And he is taken into favor, bandies compliments with the monarch, goes again and again to London and to court; sees Chancellor Bacon familiarly—corrects proofs for him—and has hopes of high preferment. But his chief patron dies; the King dies; and that bubble of royal inflation is at an end.

It was after long mental struggle, it would seem, that George Herbert, whom we know as the saintly poet, let the hopes of court consequence die out of his heart. But once wedded to the Church his religious activities and sanctities knew no hesitations. His marriage even was an incident that had no worldly or amorous delays. A Mr. Danvers, kinsman of Herbert’s step-father, thought all the world of the poet, and declared his utter willingness that Herbert “should marry any one of his nine daughters [for he had so many], but rather Jane, because Jane was his beloved daughter.” And to such good effect did the father talk to Jane, that she, as old Walton significantly tells us, was in love with the poet before yet she had seen him. Only four days after their first meeting these twain were married; nor did this sudden union bring such disastrous result as so swift an engineering of similar contracts is apt to show.

At Bemerton vicarage, almost under the shadow of Salisbury cathedral, he began, shortly thereafter, that saintly and poetic life which his verse illustrates and which every memory of him ennobles. His charities were beautiful and constant; his love of the flesh, his early “choler,” and all courtly leanings crucified. Even the peasants thereabout stayed the plough and listened reverently (another Angelus!) when the sounds of his “Praise-bells” broke upon the air. It is a delightful picture the old Angler biographer gives of him there in his quiet vicarage of Bemerton, or footing it away over Salisbury Plain, to lift up his orison in symphony with the organ notes that pealed from underneath the arches of Salisbury’s wondrous cathedral.

Yet over all the music and the poems of this Church poet, and over his life, a tender gloom lay constantly; the grave and death were always in his eye—always in his best verses. And after some half-dozen years of poetic battling with the great problems of life and of death, and a further battling with the chills and fogs of Wiltshire, that smote him sorely, he died.

He was buried at Bemerton, where a new church has been built in his honor. It may be found on the high-road leading west from Salisbury, and only a mile and a half away; and at Wilton—the carpet town—which is only a fifteen minutes’ walk beyond, may be found that gorgeous church, built not long ago by another son of the Pembroke stock (the late Lord Herbert of Lea), who perhaps may have had in mind the churchly honors due to his poetic kinsman; and yet all the marbles which are lavished upon this Wilton shrine are poorer, and will sooner fade than the mosaic of verse builded into The Temple of George Herbert.

Robert Herrick.

I deal with a clergyman again; but there are clergymen—and clergymen.

Robert Herrick[41] was the son of a London goldsmith, born on Cheapside, not far away from that Mermaid Tavern of which mention has been made; and it is very likely that the young Robert, as a boy, may have stood before the Tavern windows on tiptoe, listening to the drinking songs that came pealing forth when Ben Jonson and the rest were in their first lusty manhood. He studied at Cambridge, receiving, may be, some scant help from his rich uncle, Sir William Herrick, who had won his title by giving good jewel bargains to King James. He would seem to have made a long stay in Cambridge; and only in 1620, when our Pilgrims were beating toward Plymouth shores, do we hear of him domiciled in London—learning the town, favored by Ben Jonson and his fellows, perhaps apprenticed to the goldsmith craft, certainly putting jewels into fine settings of verse even then; some of them with coarse flaws in them, but full of a glitter and sparkle that have not left them yet. Nine years later, after such town experiences as we cannot trace, he gets, somehow, appointment to a church living down in Devonshire at Dean Prior. His parish was on the southeastern edge of that great heathery stretch of wilderness called Dartmoor Forest: out of this, and from under cool shadows of the Tors, ran brooks which in the cleared valleys were caught by rude weirs and shot out in irrigating skeins of water upon the grassland. Yet it was far away from any echo of the Mermaid; old traditions were cherished there; old ways were reckoned good ways; and the ploughs of that region are still the clumsiest to be found in England. There Robert Herrick lived, preaching and writing poems, through those eighteen troublous years which went before the execution of Charles I. What the goldsmith-vicar’s sermons were we can only conjecture: what the poems were he writ, we can easily guess from the flowers that enjewel them, or the rarer “noble numbers” which take hold on religious sanctities. This preacher-poet twists the lilies and roses into bright little garlands, that blush and droop in his pretty couplets, as they did in the vicar’s garden of Devon. The daffodils and the violets give out their odors to him, if he only writes their names.

Hear what he says to Phyllis, and how the numbers flow:

Then again, see how in his soberer and meditative moods, he can turn the rich and resonant Litany of the Anglican Church into measures of sweet sound:

Now, in reading these two poems of such opposite tone, and yet of agreeing verbal harmonies, one would say—here is a singer, serene, devout, of delicate mould, loving all beautiful things in heaven and on earth. One would look for a man saintly of aspect, deep-eyed, tranquil, too ethereal for earth.

Well, I must tell the truth in these talks, so far as I can find it, no matter what cherished images may break down. This Robert Herrick was a ponderous, earthy-looking man, with huge double chin, drooping cheeks, a great Roman nose, prominent glassy eyes, that showed around them the red lines begotten of strong potions of Canary, and the whole set upon a massive neck which might have been that of Heliogabalus.[42] It was such a figure as the artists would make typical of a man who loves the grossest pleasures.

The poet kept a pet goose at the vicarage, and also a pet pig, which he taught to drink beer out of his own tankard; and an old parishioner, for whose story Anthony À Wood is sponsor, tells us that on one occasion when his little Devon congregation would not listen to him as he thought they ought to listen, he dashed his sermon on the floor, and marched with tremendous stride out of church—home to fondle his pet pig.

When Charles I. came to grief, and when the Puritans began to sift the churches, this Royalist poet proved a clinker that was caught in the meshes and thrown aside. This is not surprising. It was after his enforced return to London, and in the year 1648 (one year before Charles’ execution at Whitehall), that the first authoritative publication was made of the Hesperides, or Works, both Humane and Divine, of Robert Herrick, Esq.—his clerical title dropped.

There were those critics and admirers who saw in Herrick an allegiance to the methods of Catullus; others who smacked in his epigrams the verbal felicities of Martial; but surely there is no need, in that fresh spontaneity of the Devon poet, to hunt for classic parallels; nature made him one of her own singers, and by instincts born with him he fashioned words and fancies into jewelled shapes. The “more’s the pity” for those gross indelicacies which smirch so many pages; things unreadable; things which should have been unthinkable and unwritable by a clergyman of the Church of England. To what period of his life belonged his looser verses it is hard to say; perhaps to those early days when, fresh from Cambridge, Ben Jonson patted him on the shoulder approvingly; perhaps to those later years when, soured by his ejection from the Church, he dropped his Reverend, and may have capped verses with such as Davenant or Lovelace, and others, whose antagonism of Puritanism provoked wantonness of speech.

At the restoration of Charles II., Herrick was reinstated in his old parish in Devonshire, and died there, among the meadows and the daffodils, at the ripe age of eighty-four. And as we part with this charming singer, we cannot forbear giving place to this bit of his penitential verse:

Revolutionary Times.

I have given the reader a great many names to remember to-day; they are many, because we have found no engrossing one whose life and genius have held us to a long story. But we should never enjoy the great memories except they were set in the foil of lesser ones, to emphasize their glories.

The writers of this particular period—some of whom I have named—fairly typify and illustrate the drift of letters away from the outspoken ardors and full-toned high exuberance of Elizabethan days, to something more coy, more schooled, more reticent, more measured, more tame.[43] The cunning of word arrangement comes into the place of spontaneous, maybe vulgar wit; humor is saddled with school-craftiness; melodious echoes take the place of fresh bursts of sound. Poetry, that gurgled out by its own wilful laws of progression, now runs more in channels that old laws have marked. Words and language that had been used to tell straightforwardly stories of love and passion and suffering are now put to uses of pomp and decoration.

Moreover, in Elizabethan times, when a great monarch and great ministers held the reins of power undisturbed and with a knightly hand, minstrelsy, wherever it might lift its voice, had the backing and the fostering support of great tranquillity and great national pride. In the days when the Armada was crushed, when British ships and British navigators brought every year tales of gold, tales of marvellous new shores, when princes of the proudest courts came flocking to pay suit to England’s great Virgin Queen, what poet should not sing at his loudest and his bravest? But in the times into which we have now drifted, there is no tranquillity; the fever of Puritans against Anglicans, of Independents against Monarchy Men, is raging through all the land; pride in the kingship of such as James I. had broken down; pride in the kingship of the decorous Charles I. has broken down again. All intellectual ardors run into the channels of the new strifes. Only through little rifts in the stormy sky do the sunny gleams of poesy break in.

There are colonies, too, planted over seas, and growing apace in these days, whither the eyes and thoughts of many of the bravest and clearest thinkers are turning. Even George Herbert, warmest of Anglicans, and of the noble house of Pembroke, was used to say, “Religion[44] is going over seas.” They were earnest, hard workers, to be sure, who went—keen-thoughted—far-seeing—most diligent—not up to poems indeed, save some little occasional burst of melodious thanksgiving. But they carried memories of the best and of the strongest that belonged to the intellectual life of England. The ponderous periods of Richard Hooker, and the harshly worded wise things of John Selden,[45] found lodgement in souls that were battling with the snows and pine-woods where Andover and Salem and Newburyport were being planted. And over there, maybe, first of all, would hope kindle and faith brighten at sound of that fair young Puritan poet, who has just now, in Cambridge, sung his “Hymn of the Nativity.”[46]

But the storm and the wreck were coming. There were forewarnings of it in the air; forewarnings of it in the court and in Parliament; forewarnings of it in every household. City was to be pitted against city; brother against brother; and in that “sea of trouble,” down went the King and the leaders of old, and up rose the Commonwealth and the leaders of the new faith.

In our next talk we shall find all England rocking on that red wave of war. You would think poets should be silent, and the eloquent dumb; but we shall hear, lifting above the uproar, the golden language of Jeremy Taylor—the measured cadences of Waller—the mellifluous jingle of Suckling and of his Royalist brothers, and drowning all these with its grand sweep of sound, the majestic organ-music of Milton.