Robert Herrick.

III

ciated save in select extracts? Beautiful as his devout earnestness is, and poetical and striking as are many of his thoughts, his quaint conceits prove an insuperable stumbling-block to many. "Neither their intrinsic excellence," says Mr. Ruskin, "nor the authority of those who can judge of it, will ever make the poems of George Herbert popular in the sense in which Scott and Byron are popular, because it is to the vulgar a labour instead of a pleasure to read them; and there are parts in them which to such judges cannot but be vapid and ridiculous." If Mr. Ruskin had said that parts of them are vapid and ridiculous, he would, we think, have approached nearer the truth; though to not a few whose opinion is worthy of all respect it will appear something little short of profanity to say so. The แ "Hesperides" of Robert Herrick, which was published in 1648, has supplied many choice flowers to our poetical anthologies. In a similar way the works of Wither, of Carew, and others have been laid under contribution. To all these Campbell's criticism on Herrick may, with the requisite modifications, be applied: "Herrick, if we were to fix our eyes on a small portion of his works, might be pronounced a writer of delightful anacreontic spirit. He has passages where the thoughts seem to dance into numbers from his very heart, and where he frolics like a being made up of melody and pleasure, as when he sings

'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that blooms to-day,

To-morrow will be dying.'

In the same spirit are his verses to Anthea, concluding

'Thou art my life, my love, my heart,

The very eyes of me;

And hast command of every part,

To live and die for thee.'

But his beauties are so deeply involved in surrounding coarseness and extravagance, as to constitute not a tenth part of his

poetry; or rather, it may be safely affirmed that of 1400 pages of verse which he has left, not a hundred are worth reading." Herrick, Lovelace, and their fellow-lyrists belonged to the Cavalier party, but Puritanism, which produced the greatest statesmen and soldiers of the age, produced its two greatest imaginative writers, Milton and Bunyan; a rather curious fact when we remember that the Royalists prided themselves on having a monopoly of the arts, which the austere Puritans were apt to regard with ill-judging contempt. John Milton, England's greatest epic poet, in comparison to whose organ tones the voices of his contemporary singers seem as penny-whistles, was born on December 9, 1608, at a house in Bread Street, Cheapside. His father, a cultivated man, of puritanical tendencies, but fond of music and the arts, was a well-to-do scrivener, a calling uniting part of the work now done by attorneys and law-stationers. Milton's early education was sedulously attended to: he was, to use his own words, “exercised to the tongues and some sciences as my age would suffer, by sundry masters and teachers both at home and the schools." Very early he applied himself to study with that intense eagerness which he retained through life; from the twelfth year of his life, he tells us, he very rarely went to bed without studying to midnight, thus, as he believed, laying the seeds of that weakness in his eyes which developed into blindness. To the period. of Milton's school-days belong the first poems of his which have been preserved, Paraphrases of the cxiv. and cxxxvi. Psalms, verses well described by Johnson: "They raise no great expectations; they would in any numerous school have obtained praise but not excited wonder."

From St. Paul's School, where he had been for some years, Milton, early in 1625, went to Cambridge, where he was enrolled as a lesser pensioner of Christ's College. Rooms there, venerable from their association with his name, are still pointed out to visitors. After his enrolment he returned to London, where he remained till his matriculation in April of the same year. For seven years, barring vacations, visits to his parents, &c., Milton remained at Cambridge, not leaving it till he took his

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M.A. degree in 1632, having previously graduated B. A. in 1629. By the undergraduates he was nicknamed "The Lady," on account of his "fair complexion, feminine and graceful appearance, and a certain haughty delicacy in his tastes and morals." At first he was not popular among his associates; nor is there any reason to wonder that he was not so. It is easy to imagine with what scorn the youthful poet, self-restrained, self-conscious, haughty, and of purity approaching to asceticism, must have regarded the rough fun, the practical jokes, the noisy gatherings, the jovial conversation which are the delight of undergraduates possessed of high animal spirits. A want of humour, with its usual concomitant, a want of power to do justice to men of different type from himself, was Milton's great defect through life. As time wore on, however, he seems to have made himself more agreeable to his associates; and he certainly was distinguished for his learning and accomplishments. ""Twas," says Anthony Wood, speaking of Milton's Cambridge life, "usual with him to sit up till midnight at his book, which was the first thing that brought his eyes into the danger of blindness. By his indefatigable study he profited exceedingly -performed the academical exercises to the satisfaction of all, and was esteemed a virtuous and sober person, yet not to be ignorant of his own parts." At the outset of his university career, in 1626, he had a quarrel with his tutor, which led to his temporary rustication: he is even said on this occasion to have suffered the indignity of corporal punishment. However this may be, Milton certainly looked back to his university life with no great liking or respect for his Alma Mater.

The following is a list, with dates, of the English poems composed by Milton during his Cambridge life. We omit the Latin ones, as not properly coming within the scope of a book on English literature:-"On the Death of a Fair Infant" (1626); "At a Vacation Exercise in the College" (1628); "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" (1629); "Upon the Circumcision;""The Passion;" "" On Time ;" ""At a Solemn Music;" Song on May Morning ;"" On Shakespeare” (1630);

"On the University Carrier;"" Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester;" "Sonnet to the Nightingale ;"" Sonnet on Arriving at the Age of Twenty-three" (1631). Of these, the most interesting, for different reasons, are the "Ode on the Nativity," which, despite some fantastic conceits which Milton's maturer judgment would have rejected, is an excellent specimen of a class of poetry of which very few excellent specimens exist; the lines on Shakespeare, prefixed, along with other verses, to the second folio edition, published in 1632, and thus the first printed of Milton's English poems, which show that Milton had not yet become fully imbued with the spirit of Puritanism, and could look on all forms of art with a more catholic spirit than he afterwards showed; and the epitaph on Hobson, the University carrier, which proves how totally destitute Milton was of humour. His witticisms, as has been more than once remarked, resemble the gambollings of his own "unwieldy elephant," who,

"To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed
His lithe proboscis."

Lastly, the “ Sonnet on Arriving at the Age of Twenty-three " is of deep personal interest. It was accompanied by a letter to an unknown friend, explaining why Milton declined to enter the Church, the profession for which he had been destined by his friends, and which he himself had at one time intended to pursue.

On leaving the University, Milton went to reside at Horton, a small village in Buckinghamshire, where his father, having retired from business, had taken a country-house. There he remained for five years, "wholly intent," he writes, "through a period of absolute leisure, on a steady perusal of the Greek and Latin writers, but still so that I occasionally exchanged the country for the city, either for the purpose of buying books, or for that of learning anything new in mathematics or in music, in which I then took delight." During his seclusion in this pretty pastoral spot, surrounded by woods, orchards, cornfields, streams, and all country sights and sounds, Milton

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Allegro" and
The dates of

wrote the finest of his smaller poems-the "Penseroso," the "Arcades" and "Comus." the three former poems are not quite certain; "Comus" was represented in 1634. The "Allegro," beginning with morn and ending with night, represents things as they appear to a man of cheerful mood; the "Penseroso," beginning with night and ending with morn, represents things as they appear to a man of melancholy mood. Both poems are triumphs of versification; rarely or never was sense better linked to sound than in some of their lines. The "Arcades," part of a masque presented before the Countess-Dowager of Derby at Hanfield, does not call for special notice. Much more remarkable is "Comus," both for its intrinsic merits, and as throwing light on Milton's tone of thought. The dignity of its blank verse, weighted with deep thought, the beauty of the lyrics interspersed, the almost passionate praise of purity, the scorn manifested for those who indulge in sensual delights, sufficed to prove that a new poet, unique alike in his imaginative and in his moral power, had arisen in England. It was published anonymously by Milton's friend Lawes, the musical composer, in 1637. Sir Henry Wotton's opinion of it was doubtless that of most cultivated men into whose hands it came: "A dainty piece of entertainment, wherein I should much commend the tragical part, if the lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Doric delicacy in your songs and odes, whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our language."

"Lycidas," the last poem of Milton's Horton period, was written in 1637. It commemorates the death of a college companion of his, Edward King, who met his death by shipwreck while crossing the Irish Sea, and was published in 1638 in a volume of memorial verses by various writers, designed to commemorate the sad event. In form it is a pastoral; first there is an introduction, then the monody of the shepherd lamenting his lost friend, then an epilogue. There are no traces in the poem of such deep emotion as we find in "In Memoriam ;" the careful artist is more visible in it than the