While composing his dramas he lived in Oldstreet, St. Luke's, which was at that time thought retirement from London; but at times he frequented the city, and had the honour of ranking Shakspeare and Selden among his friends. In his old age he turned husbandman, and closed his days at a farm in Somersetshire.

RICHARD THE SECOND, THE MORNING BEFORE HIS MURDER IN POMFRET CASTLE.

DANIEL'S CIVIL WARS, ST. 62, 69.

WHETHER the soul receives intelligence,
By her near genius, of the body's end,
And so imparts a sadness to the sense,
Foregoing ruin, whereto it doth tend;
Or whether nature else hath conference
With profound sleep, and so doth warning send,
By prophetizing dreams, what hurt is near,
And gives the heavy careful heart to fear :-

However, so it is, the now sad king,
Toss'd here and there his quiet to confound,
Feels a strange weight of sorrows gathering
Upon his trembling heart, and sees no ground;

derision of Daniel's verses, which is pointed out by the editor himself, in Cynthia's Revels. This was unworthy of Jonson, as the verses of Daniel at which he sneers are not contemptible, and as Daniel was confessedly an amiable man, who died " beloved, honoured, and lamented."-E.

Feels sudden terror bring cold shivering;
Lists not to eat, still muses, sleeps unsound;
His senses droop, his steady eyes unquick,
And much he ails, and yet he is not sick.

The morning of that day which was his last,
After a weary rest, rising to pain,

Out at a little grate his eyes he cast

Upon those bordering hills and open plain,
Where other's liberty makes him complain
The more his own, and grieves his soul the more,
Conferring captive crowns with freedom poor.

O happy man, saith he, that lo I see,
Grazing his cattle in those pleasant fields,
If he but knew his good. How blessed he
That feels not what affliction greatness yields!
Other than what he is he would not be,

Nor change his state with him that sceptre wields.
Thine, thine is that true life: that is to live,
To rest secure, and not rise up to grieve.

Thou sitt'st at home safe by thy quiet fire,
And hear'st of other's harms, but fearest none :
And there thou tell'st of kings, and who aspire,
Who fall, who rise, who triumph, who do moan.
Perhaps thou talk'st of me, and dost enquire
Of my restraint, why here I live alone,
And pitiest this my miserable fall;
For pity must have part-envy not all.

Thrice happy you that look as from the shore,
And have no venture in the wreck you see;
No interest, no occasion to deplore

Other men's travels, while yourselves sit free:
How much doth your sweet rest make us the more

To see our misery and what we be:

Whose blinded greatness, ever in turmoil,

Still seeking happy life, makes life a toil.

GILES AND PHINEAS
FLETCHER.

THE affinity and genius of these two poets naturally associate their names. They were the cousins of Fletcher the dramatist, and the sons of a Dr. Giles Fletcher, who, among several important missions in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, negotiated a commercial treaty with Russia greatly to the advantage of England, in spite of many obstacles that were presented by a capricious czar and a barbarous court. His remarks on Russia were suppressed on their first appearance, but were afterwards republished in 1643, and incorporated with Hakluyt's Voyages.

Mr. A. Chalmers, in his British Poets, mentions Giles as the elder son of this Dr. Fletcher, evidently by mistake, as Giles, in his poetry, speaks of his own "green muse hiding her younger head," with refer

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X

ence to his senior brother. Giles was bred at Cambridge, and died at his living of Alderston, in Suffolk, in 1623. Phineas was educated at the same university, and wrote an account of its founders and learned men. He was also a clergyman, and held the living of Hilgay, in Norfolk, for twenty-nine years. They were both the disciples of Spenser, and, with his diction gently modernized, retained much of his melody and luxuriant expression. Giles, inferior as he is to Spenser and Milton, might be figured, in his happiest moments, as a link of connexion in our poetry between those congenial spirits, for he reminds us of both, and evidently gave hints to the latter in a poem on the same subject with Paradise Regained.

Giles's "Temptation and Victory of Christ" has a tone of enthusiasm peculiarly solemn. Phineas, with a livelier fancy, had a worse taste. He lavished on a bad subject the graces and ingenuity that would have made a fine poem on a good design. Through five cantos of his "Purple Island," he tries to sweeten the language of anatomy by the flowers of poetry, and to support the wings of allegory by bodily instead of spiritual phenomena. Unfortunately in the remaining cantos he only quits the dissecting table to launch into the subtlety of the schools, and describes Intellect, the Prince of the Isle of Man, with his eight counsellors, Fancy, Memory, the Common Sense, and the five external Senses, as holding out in the Human Fortress against the Evil Powers that besiege it. Here he strongly resembles the old Scottish

poet Gavin Douglas, in his poem of King Heart. But he outstrips all allegorists in conceit, when he exhibits Voletta, or the Will, the wife of Intellect, propt in her fainting fits by Repentance, who administers restorative waters to the Queen, made with lip's confession and with "pickled sighs," stilled in the alembic of a broken spirit. At the approach of the combat between the good and evil powers, the interest of the narration is somewhat quickened, and the parting of the sovereign and the queen, with their champions, is not unfeelingly pourtrayed.

Long at the gate the thoughtful Intellect
Staid with his fearful queen and daughter fair;
And when the knights were past their dim aspect,
They follow'd them with vows and many a prayer;
At last they climb up to the castle's height,
From which the deeds of every knight,

And mark'd the doubtful end of this intestine fight.

As when a youth, bound for the Belgic war,
Takes leave of friends upon the Kentish shore,
Now are they parted; and he sail'd so far,
They see not now, and now are seen no more;
Yet, far off, viewing the white trembling sails,
The tender mother soon plucks off her vails,
And, shaking them aloft, unto her son she hails.

But the conclusion of the Purple Island sinks into such absurdity and adulation, that we could gladly