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Ho. Ufinn si Kill Merit MONTREAL. Eeceived -

PARTISAN POETRY

OF

ROUNDHEAD AND CAVALIER.

» • • •

Thesis for the Degree of Master of Arts at McGill University by

JOHN T, MCNEILL. *• X

Oavaliors up I lips fr©& tho cup, Hands fret: tho paster, nor bito tafco, nor aup ! Till ycu*ro !4arohin£ along, fifty. socre strong. Groat hearted sontlODen, singing this sonsi

• • • • » King- Oharloa, and Trhc#ll do hir. right no'/1 ? Kins Char!00, -n-nd tfhofa ripo for fight net ? Give a routso ; horofs in Holl*s dc;:-i.to new, King Charles t

(Robert Browning, "Oavalior Tunes?)

Thoir hoads all stooping low, thoir reinto all in a row, tilt© a whirlwind on tho trees, lifco a dolus* ©n tho djrlcos. Our cuirassiors havo burst on tho ranks of tho Aesurot, And at a shoe*: havo soattorod tho fcrost of his pilros.

• « • * And tho Irings of oarth In foar shall shuddor whon thoy hoar, $hat tho hand of God hath wcught for tho Bousos and tho Word.

C2,B,Eaoaulay» *$ho Battlo of ttasoby.*) ~ 2 ~ Throughout the Elizabethan period, literature was the honoured occupation of the worthiest minds. Scaree any man thought of himself so seriously or of life so holily, as to sniff at the writer*s art. Poetry was felt to be true. Great poets spoke out in the Drama with a frank strength, - mirrored forth human nature with reality and ideality. "Look in thine heart and write", the keynote of those sonnets in which

Sir Philip Sidney gives expression to his ideal passion, might have been Marlowe's motto, or S&akspere1s, or Ben Jonson's.

Despite isolated detractors like Gossen, poetry was never in danger of being discountenanced by the intelligent

Elizabethan ; it could claim the attention of all sane and able men, and the devotion of the highest genius.

It is not too much to say that with the new interest in Theology connected with the Puritan Movement, poetic literature was contemptuously handed over to less serious and masterly minds. If the age of Charles I had geniuses, they were apt to think themselves under obligation to theology first and to literature only afterwards, if at all. The comparatively feeble thought of recognized "wits" like Carew and Suckling, is no true standard by which to guage the height of intellectual attainment or.of imaginative reach in their age.

Truer poets like Sir Thomas Browne penned their inspiration in prose. The work of Milton stands supreme and apart, a ~ 3 ~ magnificent survival of the "spacious times" of Elizabeth. That full treatment of life and richness and exuberance of fancy which are the glory of the Elizabethans^had passed out of poetry, leaving it, as Prof. Dowden says "but the decorative fringe of contemporaneous thought, of which the warp and woof are in serious theological and political writings." The poet, little appreciated by the puritan, was at no pains to laud puritan morals, and frequently made his appeal to an effeminate and depraved moral sense. He failed to see and to treat the whole of life. Thus poetry suffered during the middle half of the

17th. century by the alienation from it of a powerful sect, embracing some of the ablest men.

When Davenant succeeded Ben Jonson as Poet Laureate in 1637, the glory had already departed. Ajschool of Theological

Wit, represented by men like Quarles or Crashaw, had separated itself from the Court School, of which the most conspicuous members were Carew, Suckling and Habington. #Herrick, greater poet than any of these, is as nearly related to one school as to the other. Davenant, Cleveland and Lovelace were to flourish

^^^*m^~mmm*m*^m*mmm~"*~*mm^"^m**^*****^"~*»mrmi»*m i «••!•[*•« # Courthope places Herrick with the Court School. He is of

Ben Jonson's group, but took holy orders. His work combines the polite lyrical with the didactic and speculative types. - 4 «• later as Qayalior Poets. George Wither bad already abandoned tho catholicity of his oarly pastoral work, and announced himoolf the scourge of abuses. She one star cf firzt magnitude in tho firmament -./as scarcely yet discornablo : it was in ifovagbor of tho year conticnod-that t?i3ton, already if* At of both universities, and anther cf *!>'falogro%fIl Ponsoroso* and •Cocms*, composed ll*y«idasl. Donhais had not yot written*Coopers Hill*. Cowley was a rhyming freshman at Cambridge. Joseph ilall, tho satirist, and Phinoao Blotchor the aoralist, -/ore weakly following tho Icmd of Sponsor. John Donne (d.1631) had loft a strong influence in tho direction of obscurity and ingenuity. As theological parties diverged, ardent partisans wrote and published extensively tho apoiogiao of their respective causes. Tho commonest fore of thoso mostly ephemeral productions, boeaitaaftho neat convincing and direct* was tho pamphlet. Xt was tho weapon of tho political controversialist also, when tho civil strife had begun* She T-amp-blot ascended in dignity and inf"uonco. There is a groat advance free tho amorphous and scurrilous pieces of tho Martin Marprolato 3ories (e*X5$0) to tho exhaustive arguments of Bishop Hall against •Smoctymnuus1 (1641)• The panphlotoor ia§ in tho latter case, tho ncuthpiooo of an organised party, and his vcioo is hoard over tho nation. Most of theso - 5 ~ productions were yet, however, quite unliterary, purely and narrowly controversial. It remained for Milton to elevate the pamphlet to literature. The single example of the

"Areopagitica" is sufficient to illustrate this. The author gives to it an imaginative setting and makes of it a finished prose composition in the form of a highly wrought speech before Parliament.

The poetry which forms our material of discussion is in many reppects the verse-parallel of this varied pamphlet literature. For the most part it depended for its primary interest on its nearness to the struggle, rather than upon any artistic excellence. A few great names, - one among the greatest - have contributed to the genre, and their potent genius may touch to life for us the dry bones of events.

Many of the pieces rise out of the commonplace and matter-of- fact to an elevated or passionate strain ; many of them display liveliness of imagination and brilliancy of satirical wit.

Others interest the student of literature mainly for the illustrations they contain of the literary fashions of the time, or the light they shed upon the development of English poetry.

In order to define the subject, it is expedient here to notice certain materials that are to be excluded. There is of course, much lyric and some descriptive verse of the period - 6 - with which we have no direct concern. Nor have we anything to do with the Drama : its treatment at the hands of the puritans, and its attitude towards them in Restoration times, form a different chapter in the literature of the 17th. century.

We have to exclude too not only all purely theological poetry, but a great amount of serious, non-theological work wherein may be traced the influence of puritan and democratic, or of

Royalist and aristocratic ideas and principles, but which aims neither to forward a party cause nor to express party sentiment. There is left for our attention a quantity of verse widely varied in form and value, produced during a period that begins with the open opposition of King and Commons, and ends only after the Restoration;when the voices of the old quarrel were lost in the noise of new political issues. The authors, though they include a number who are members of one or other of the schools just mentioned, were for the most part individualistic in their treatment of party subjects. Poets no longer foregathered for literary converse ; they did not recognize, or fall under the influence of, any great contempor­ ary master. While not strikingly original, their work is individualistic. In view of the nature of the numerous pieces to be dealt with here, the only true division from the standpoint of authorship would be the nossf literary separation of one party from the other; and even this would be illogical m 7 «* fror, tho fafet that scfse wore net fixod in their political allegiances £he division to which-w© are iod icj ono based en tho political or iitfrary relationships of writers, but on the ©ooa m wjiion tno poets sots before #s sorio phafljo or the struggle. the sirs will be not primarily to trace tho events of tho period in versef but rather to illustrate tho expression which pootry gav© to tho wrath and gloom, the loyalty and aspiration, tho irony and tho pathos that wrought in th® hearts of isen in tho throes of that strife. £h# following condensed outline trill servo to indioato the nature and or&or of the treatment. I. pmvmmM fsiiss, HfflUIW •• Apologetic and hortatory pieces* written to vindicate tho attitude of tho writer or to arouso to action. fhis class has a wido rango and includes such lofty exhortation-as Milton*a sonnet to ffairfax, with tho prophooyinga of Wither and tho roistoring lyrics of Alexander Bro&o.

**• jjfljBBR ,M£MQM$h with a rotrospeotivo oloiaont, on tho&os of rojoioing or coning ovor proooding ovents, or criticism of th® tisjost divisible into :

!• PQ.RgflK A3 EP35R. Wl»l«iill»>il«MTWlWiTwilllW g» i«r l.|i M».iWl WiHf III toolsed at fror. the standpoint of jtaediato popularity, probably nb verso of this hortatory class ranks higher than that of Alexander BroDO (1600-1666). Brow interspersed MB •MMIMMMIMI»W«MI*

And lot every varlot undo ua 1 Shall we doubt Of each lout That doth come With a voice like tho noiao of a drum And a aword or a buff-coat to ua ? ~ 9 ~

A year later in "The Royalist" he sings the song of an imprisoned Royalist "a health to our distressed King."

We do not suffer here along,

Tho1 we are beggared, so's the King :

'Tis sin t'have wealth when he has none,

Tush, poverty's a royal thing I

When we are larded well with drink,

Our heads shall turn as round as theirs ;

Our feet shall rise, our bodies sink

Clean down the wind, like caveliers.

There is in this a fine abandon, a release from material surroundings scarcely equalled by Lovelace's philosophical,

# Stone walls do not a prison make Nor iron bars a cage. Loyalty is a spiritual force here ; the King in rags is yet a King ; it is hero worship in its purity,- utilizing a poor enough hero, forsooth, but one imagined and believed to be a hero. There is something admirable too in the comradeship of songs like these,- fine expression of the heart-rallying power of comradeship for defeated men. And Brome's most truly bacchanalian strain is never a mere giddy bibulous

§ in 'To Althea from Prison' ,-<0f also 'The Liberty of the Imprisoned Royalists' ascribed to Roger L*Estrange. My soul is free as ambient air> Altho' my baser parts be mewed. - 28 -

II. POETRY AS PRODUCT, with a retrospectice view.

(a) Panegyrics and lyrics of victory.

It is natural to praise success. When it means the triumph of a cause we have laboured and sacrificed for, we join in the chorus with exultant clamor. Even when it is the victory of those with whom we have no special sympathy, so it be brilliant and spectacular, we do not withhold the meed of praise. Moreover, the good old days when kings and rulers were extravagantly praised in song had scarcely begun to depart in the middle of the 17th. Century, as they have altogether departed since. The poets of the Civil War time did not neglect their function in this respect. With few exceptions, they knew how to praise well, if not always consistently. The electric thrill of Cromwell's victories was caught up and expressed in clear tones, by some who afterwards joined lustily in acclaiming the "much suffering Prince" of the Restoration.

So that, shrewd, independent, egotistical old Wither is almost alonej - as indeed it was his boast to be, - when he welcomes the new monarch in 1660, with no personal flattery, and warns him against those who have poured upon Oliver and his son lyricks,

Heroic poems, odes and panegyricks, of which His Majesty's exploits will thenceforth form the - 29 - subject. (Speculum Speculativum : George Wither 1660.)

No such inconsistency can be charged, however, against the writer of the first poem to be discussed under this head.

What is perhaps the finest effort of ANDREW MARVELL'S

(1620 - 1678) genius was called forth by the fascinating career of Cromwell. It is entitled "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's

Return from Ireland" (1650). This short ode is one of the most perfect imitations of classic poetry in the language.

Aitken in his Introduction to Marvell's poems says the poet is here "like Horace at his best". This is high praise ; but the richness, strength and simplicity of diction, the subdued warmth, and the faultless construction of the piece would do the Roman no discredit. The stanza is of four lines ; two of four, two of three iambic feet. The shortness of the lines renders an effect of deliberate stroke after stroke :

He to the Common's feet presents A Kingdom for his first year's rents. ... What may not others fear If thus he crowns each year ?

But with all this classic dignityand regularity there is no shrinking from a jnin : IIie Pic.t no shelter now can find Within his parti-coloured mind

The poem is elevated out of a narrowly partisan atmosphere - 30 - by a word of generous commendation of the King's heroism in death.

He nothing common did, or mean, Upon that memorable scene, But with his keener eye The axe's edge did try. (We remember, of course, that Marvell was but a recent convert to Cromwellism.)

This *a poem to which one returns. It conveys the satisfying impression of restrained emotion and imagination, of wealth in reserve, for which Marvell is almost unique among panegyrists of the period.

"On the First Anniversary of the Protectorate" (1655) is a more diffuse poem of four hundred lines, containing much to enforce the tenets of Independency. Instrong words, Marvell depicts the Papacy as a hideous monster that, at the pursuit of Cromwell, sinking to her Roman den impure Gnashes her gory teeth ; nor there secure.

Then follows an allusion to the Protector's effort to form a

European Protestant league. In one long simile, the poet compares Cromwell's dismission of the Long Parliament to the wise action of a ship's mate who in a storm, contrary to the wish of the frightened passengers, avoids the shore. In another, the Protector is aptly represented as the angel who troubled the waters that they might heal. The poem is not - 31 -

without considerable merit of expression. The couplet is here

less stiff and formal than in the stilted heroic narrative-poem

"On the Victory Obtained by Blake" (1657). The latter is

rather national than partisan.

EDMUND WALLER (1606-1687) a poet much praised in his day, has left a memorable poem entitled "A Panegyric to my

Lord Protector on the Present Greatness and Joint Interest of

His Highness and this Nation" (1654). Wretched ^timeserver as Waller was, and feeble as his inspiration seems to us in most of his work, he has in this panegyric risen to be manful and whole-hearted. The poem partakes of that smoothness for which

Pope praised the author extravagantly ; yet smoothness is not its chief merit. Therelw as that about the heroic personality of Cromwell which must have been at once the admiration and despair of the weak and fickle; poet. Whatever may be said of

Waller's usual shallowness, this poem is the work of one who has been deeply and soundly impressed with another's greatness.

It derives an advantage from the poet's intimacy with the hero.

Cromwell tolerated him as a kinsman, and they were in the habit of discussing historical subjects together. No doubt these conversations gave genuineness to those parts of the Panegyric ?SeT¥eorir^Ll^ Waller and Denham" 1857. - 32 - in which pride of England parallels the praise of the

Protector.

The piece contains foirty-seven four-line stanzas, each comprising two heroic couplets. The argument may be stated thus : With a somewhat abrupt beginning, we are told of the growth of English power under the Protector, who has subdued the Irish, the Scots and the sea. Stanzas 1-5.

Next England.... the Heaven-appointed peacemaker and guardian of justice in Europe - a world wide sea-power, 6-16. A fine section describes the English race historically. This passes into a fanciful account of Cromwell's victories, 17-21. Then the mildness and toleration of the Protector in peace, are praised ; his private nobleness and self-restraint, 28-35.

Finally, the unending nature of his fame. Like all true heroes, Cromwell has been unappreciated in his own time owing to the envy of lesser men ; but poetry at least will discern and extol his merit. The praise of future poets is figured as a crown of bays and olive, 36-47.

Perhaps the keynote of the poem is best expressed in this stanza :

Heaven (that hath placed this island to give law To balance Europe and her states to awe) In this conjunction doth on Britain smile ; The greatest leader and the greatest isle ! But some of the best stanzas are purely national : - 33 - Things of the noblest kind our own soil breeds, Stout are our men and warlike are our steeds. Rome, though her eagles through the world had flown, Could never make this island all her own. It is not difficult to find weak lines. A 'too frequent use of the definite article, an awkward habit of inverted phrase, for no object but the necessity of maintaining the metre and rhyme, are the prominent faults of expression. There is often, too, a manifest lack of sequence and a vain repetition of ideas. But positive prosiness does not occur, and many lines are truly artistic and striking. e.g.That sun once set, a thousand meaner stars Gave a dim light to violence and wars, lines which convey a worthy description of the state of Rome after the death of Caesar. Or again, of the much-abused

Scot ;

The Caledonians armed with want and cold.

Something more subtle lies in the couplet where Cromwell is compared to Neptune stilling the storm ; one hears softening and dying of sea-gales :

So has your Highness,raised above the rest, Storms of ambition - tossing us - repressed.

In /'his matter-of-fact estimate of Cromwell, Waller bestows just the praise that his modern admirers repeat ; nor does he claim to understand his greater cousin.

Oft have we wondered how you hid in peace A mind proportioned to such thoughts as these. -34-

It is a thoughtful and just estimate with all the little enthusiasm of which the past was capable ; a fair meed of praise for the warrior, statesman and man. Waller has the prudence to make no reference to the Regicide.$ The same prudence did not dictate the use over again of an alliterative phrase with which long before he had closed his "Address to

Chas.I on his Navy". "Such power and so much piety" is only changed to"so much power and piety". Says Dr. Johnson,

"It is not possible to read without some contempt poems by the same author, ascribing the highestdegree of flower and Tjiety to Charles I, then transferring the same power and piety to Oliver Cromwell. Now inviting* Oliver to take the crown and then congratulating Charles II upon his recovered right." Others.of Waller's own day would have applauded this criticism. He was bitterly reproached for the

'Panegyrick' in a short poem by Charles Cotton, a friend of

Brome. Cotton bids Waller "muzzle his muse", calls him a

"vile poet", and his muse an "adulterate hag". "This panegyric" runs the final scornful exclamation, "is thy elegy'.

Waller bestowed a short tribute upon' the dust of Cromwell in

1658. The poem is in comparatively poor heroic couplets, and ?The second stanza, beginning *Let partial spirits^stirrTloud complain" is perhaps to be applied to the Presbyterians. In the poem "On the War with Spain". - 35 - does not merit attention here. It was published* with two poems on the same subject, one by John Dryden (1631-1700) and another by Dr. Thomas Sprat of Oxford.

The "Heroic Stanzas consecrated to the memory of His

Highness Oliver Late Lord Protector of the Commonwealth" forms the first work of any merit from Dryden's pen. The poet seems to have been, at the time, in the employ of Sir Gilbert

Pickering, a Privy Councillor high in the favour of Cromwell, to whom indeed he was related. The young poet was thus given a near view of Cromwell's life, and of its solemn and impressive close.

The poem is in quatrains, the "interwoven stanza of four" used by Davenant in "Gondibert" 1650. John Davies had perfected the form as early as 1599 ig his double elegy

"Nosce Teipsum" (Henry Morley, First Sketch of English

Literature VII,81.) The heroic Stanzas do not form an elegy in any sense of thatjterm. There is nothing either of resignation or lamentation, nothing of the subdued pathos or philosophy of grief that usually marks the elegy. Although

Gray in his Elegy in a Country Churchyard'has remodelled some phrases found in this poem, the spirit of the two pieces is entirely different. Dryden's is all praise. Possibly the ambitious author had in mind the outdoing o f Waller's wPanegyricwwith which his effort has some points of contact. I?n a volume entitled"Three Poems JJijon the Death of his Late Highness Oliver, Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland.". 1659. 11 - 36 -

The first twelve stanzas contain general and them particular remarks on the hero's character. The next five, de

-clare his successes. Three stanzas digress to mention the

"calmer influence" of love, that mingled with avre to make his power complete. Stanzas 21-31 enlarge upon his foreign enterprises, leaving eleven more in which to declare the happy outcome in the peace and prosperity of England. The machinery of a Roman funeral lends a conventional dignity.

The poem is weakened by several commonplace conceits, as in the unpleasing second stanza in which the Protector's apotheosis is thus suggested :

Heaven, what praise we offer to his name Hath rendered more authentic by its choice. Again, in the thirty-fourth, he is depicted as dying because borne down by the weight of his great fame. Some lines bear unmistakable signs of haste and indicate that Dryden's judgment was not matured : e.g. 'But 'tis our duty and our interest too' or, 'When such heroic virtue Heaven sets out,' or, 'His palms, though under weights they did not stand, Still thrive.' - where the lame endings and prosy phrasing are too apparent.

Apart from such defects, however, the poem has distinct merit. The metre is comparatively free and fluid the diction rich and full of energy, in parts of fervour. - 37 - Here are some vigorous verses :

•Fame of the asserted sea, through Europe blown Made France and Spain ambitious of his love.'

•Swift and resistless throught the land he passed.'

•Heaven in his portrait showed a workman's hand.'

Condensed epigrammatic saysngs abound here, as in Dryden's later work, and that of his follower,Pope. These are among the strongest lines :

•For he was great ere fortune made him so.1

'Fortune, the easy mistress of the young, But to her ancient servants coy and hard.' •He fought to end our fighting.'

•When absent, yet we conquered in his might.'

Had Dryden been able to foretell the events of the following year, he would probably have suppressed some of his references to the times. There can be little doubt that he intended his readers to understand a slur at hereditary monarchy when he wrote of the Protector,

•No borrowed bays his temples did adorn.'

And the poet exposed himself to the reproaches of his enemies in after years, by the line which was (not unnaturally) taken to applaud the Regicide,

•He fought to end our fighting and essayed To staunch the blood by breathing of the vein.'

Many who admire Cromwell today will not assent to the belief that his work was not necessarily done, when nature ended it: - 38 -

•Nor died he when his ebbing fame went less But when fresh laurels courted him to live.' The lack of political forsight with which the poet voices, in closing, the complacent assurance of uninterrupted progress under Richard, is not surprising, or in any sense peculiar to Dryden. To the nation as whole as well as to the young student all then looked peaceful and settled. Only a few could have forseen the approaching demolition of all that was external of Cromwelliaaism. We Mly cannot blame Dryden for failing to forsee later events, but he can not be so 4 readily excused for the extravagance of hyperbole in which he indulges to impress the reader with his hero's achievements. The statement, for instance,

At his command we boldly crossed the line, And bravely fought where Southern stars arise, is a careless or wilful fiction employed to heighten the effect. Compared with the 'Panegyric* of Waller, this poem has more energy with more variety of figure and originality of phrasing. While not inferior in respect to form it lacks in some lines the satisfying firmness which

Waller is careful to strive after.

The third poem of this triad is by Thos.Sprat. afterwards Bishop of Rochester, but then, like Dryden who #But'l^delTdistances this for absurd exaggeration in t&e "Threnodia Augustalis" on the Death of Charles II (1686). - 39 - was five years his senior, fresh from the University. Sprat is only incidentally a poet, and his published verse is very meagre. A devoted admirer of Cowley, he imitates here, as best he is able, the style and form of the latter's Pindaric Odes.

If the model was bad, the imitation is immeasurably worse.

The title is "To the Happy Memory of the Lord Protector".

Each of the sixteen stanzas is a paragraph of from twenty to twenty-five lines. There could be nothing more matter of fact than the manner in which Sprat dilates on the virtues of the

Protector.

•That soul, which should so many sceptres sway Learned first to rule in a domestic ** MMHMnM*a^vr--a* =—m ;•» -am- J* *•*_#«».-.=» Grammatical usages are thrust aside to patch up a rhyme, and the silliest of lines are thrown in as filling.

•Thou left1st thy more delightful peace,

... And down they steel and armour took, Wishing that it still hung upon a hook.'

Further illustration would only prove the absurdity of discussing seriously a production so absolutely devoid of merit, so replete with the grossest faults. The praise lavished upon that most mundane individual Richard Cromwell, forms a fitting close to this sorriest of efforts to perpetuate the "happy memory of the Lor

Sprat's only excuse for writing is that the piece iS an exercise in imitation of Cowley. It is hard to conCeive 0f a - 40 ~ professed critic publishing such matter, or of Dr. Johnson's

preserving it.

A new and different hero came in 1660, hailed with

eagerness by all ranks, sung to by representative poets. With

the change of rulers, the song changed, and the singers did not take pains to make any explanation of their motives. As

easily as Waller swung from compliment of Charles I to praise of Cromwell, the chorus of poets now forgot their verses to the austere Protector and hailed the Merry Monarch. They had been impressed with the magnificence of Cromwell's spirit ; but he was dead, and as a political power, his cause with him.

Those of the wits who had their reputation still to make, felt that to refuse to deal in terms of loyalty would be literary suicide. And young men like Dryden must have been carried along in the current, muni IIJUU biun seized with the paroxism of joy that swept over the nation. We must not forget that the Restoration brought to an end at once an era of unwholesome restraint, and an interval of general doubt and foreboding. And of the young king high hopes were entertained. He was welcomed from a career of adversity which it was not unreasonable to suppose had made a sane, strong man of him. Dryden's 'Astrea Redux' (1660) makes much of this. M 41 -

In the expectation of great things from Charles, Dryden was voicing a general hope ; this is not altered by the fact that he sold his appreciation for feold. There need be no attempt here to account for the poet's new front. The apologist of

Dryden might interpret this poem as the obverse of the picture given in the Heroic Stanzas. As in the former poet, there was no committal to disbelief in Monarchy, so here there is the profession of belief in it. But no one who reads both poems carefully can hold them reconcilable. The tone of Astra Redux is almost that of confession of fault. The fault is not personal but is attributed in general to the people of England, for whom the poet writes their repentance of the unnatural treatment their rightful sovereign has so far received. Dryden may not have been quite disinterested ; he was, we know, far too wordly wise to attract suspicion or suffer neglect by silence.

Motives apart, it is clear that the poet interprets :*';t well the reaction from the sever morality of the Commonwealth.

The period whichwas just closed he describes as one in which

Youth that with joys had unacquainted been Envied gray hairs that once good days had seen. By dint of strained comparisons, Dryden makes the most of the

Prince's previous life. Cromwell is called Typhoeus, who has scaled the sky And forced great Jove from his own heaven to fly.

In the exiled Charles, he finds a likeness to David who was ~ 42 ~ banished for the sole crime of being God's anointed. This is the beginning of the elaborate biblical machinery of "Absalom and

Achitophel". With this poem on the Prince's return is closely associated the "Panegyric to his Sacred Majesty on his

Coronation", a piece of slavish flattery. Thes£weak compliment­ ary poems served to give Dryden skill and confidence in the handling of the heroic couplet, which became so powerful in his hands. Waller's "To the King on His Happy Return" is a metrically perfect ode in couplets,- classed as an epistle in his works. It is largely personal to the Prince. Even for one well skilled in compliment, the theme was a difficult one.

There were no brilliant victories, no conspicuous virtues to applaud. He resorts to the veriest froth of hyperbole. Seldom does Waller employ strained metaphors to the extent that they enter here. Charles is besought not too hastily to forgive his subjects the wrong they have done him, lest they be over­ come with excess of joy. The sea trembles to think how she bore up the king's foes. The people, no longer under restraint, break forth like lighted powder in their eagerness to welcome his return.

Yet there is aptness and beauty in some of these figures : ~ 43 - This faulty land Like fainting Ksther does before you stand Watching your sceptre. Great Britain has boon like %lind Polyphono* but, "The giant isle has got her eye again"* And the allttalon in the following is most happy : Budo Indians torturing all their yoyal race Him on tho throne with dear-bought sceptre grace That suffers best. Faith, Law and Piety, long banished, return with tho King* an£ all the blessings of peace abound ; But,above all, tho ©uao-inapirod train Triumph, and raise their drooping heads again. With all the pleasurabl e ease and melody of this, there is a lack of true apirit and emotion which hyperbolic figures cannot impart* %©wovor Waller saight, when twitted by Royalty, put off tho comparison by tho libellous jest that "roots write best of fiction* there can bo no doubt that the"Panegyric to Protector" !*y kord Ka&#*S£ is a bettor poom. Abraham Cowley, who for faithful service to OU rloa 1 and hia Quoon had suffered imprisonment, -resented his tribute to tho new monarch on one of his ao-aallod Pindaric Odea, of tedious length* the piece is a fair example of Corloy's

us* of tho for®. It is alow and irregular in mevomont, and obscure by reason of far-fetched and highly wrought conceits, Cowley cannot auggost, ho must bo prosaically exhaustivo in

small thinga. There is no true proportion, no diatinct m mm. •. m i. • ——in. m mn nm*i*^w»»+mum•v+omitt,*»,,•* wom livor Goldsmith in an essay "On tho Boauttoa of BiolgVlA ootry" rolatos thia incident, 0f Waller and Charles II - 44 - emphasis ; merely a succession of conceits, allusions and statements woven over with confused imagery. The most lucid parts are those in which he scores Oliver Cromwell and his government. Here is a fair illustration :

No frantick Commonwealths or tyrannies No cheats and perjuries and lies No nets of human policies. ... No towns, no fleets by sea, or- troops by land No deeply entrencht islands can withstand, Or any small resistance bring Against the naked truth, and the unarmed King. Again he asks

Where's the Impostor, Cromwell, gone ? Where's now that falling star, his son ? In the last four stanzas, the thought clarifies with the heightened ardor. The riotous joy of the populace indulging in "one wild fit of cheerful follyi'at which no stoic even would frown, is successfully conveyed. The lines on the

Queen Mother (whom Cowley had served personally on the

Continent) are marked with real pathos. General Monk is hailed as a new Zerubbabal, and, with a sprightly play en the word "Long Barliament" and a gibe at the Rump, the ode abruptly ends.

Many inferior poets limp after these leaders in panegyric pieces. Wither's complimentary addresses to the

Lord Protector are but sermons in disguise. Brorae's versified address to General Monk is joyful, but it is not - 45 - poetry. Cleveland's to Prince Rupert is full of tiresome absurdities of hyperbole.

Many ballads were produced in celebration of the return of the Monarchy. Among the most readable of these is

"The Loyall Subject's Joy" by Thomas Robins which must have been a rousing song. A number of others were addressed to

General Monk, who was hailed as the deliverer of the nation.

An interesting acrostic ballad on the name "Georg(e) Monk" occurs among these. It runs through sixteen stanzas, eight repetitions of the name in the initial letters of lines. - 46 - II (b). Elegies anjM^ARents.

If the best panegyric poetry of the period is written in celebration of the deeds of Cromwell, the pathetic and awful figure of fallen majesty in Charles, called forth the most heart-stirring poetry of grief. Besides the tragedy of the King, there is echoed in song the whole story of defeat ; the slow relinquishing of hope, bitter rebellion against fate, violent or philosophical despair in the sequel.

The true Cavalier was not merely saddened by disappointment ; he was seized with horror at the acts of the triumphant

Independents, crowned by what to him was a deed of unparalleled atrocity and anarchy, the shedding of the Sovereign's blood.

There served King Charles I no more loyal spirit than J6HN CLEVELAND (1613 - 1658). He was a sound scholar, a fine orator, and a poet of worth. As a poet his element is satire ; his love poetry is inferior for its absurdly strained conceits. But there is considerable of his work too, that falls in this section of our study. It consists in a number of short poems expressive of heartfelt sorrow, culmin­ ating in a perfect wail of grief at the King's death. The tendency to satire is evident throughout Cleveland's poetry.

His highly fanciful tribute to Prince Rupert, for example, is full of fun at the expense of the Roundheads. In "The King's

Return from Scotland" we are treated to a succession of - 47 - extravagant and meaningless conceits, with some satiric Humour.

But this element is not present in such pieces as that entitled

"The Times", a purely serious subjective poem, a wandering soliloquy with a quiet sadness in it. Gloom had fallen heavily upon the poet when he penned "The General Eclipse", on the absence of the King and Queen. It is only necessary to quote a stanza to note how well it conveys a feeling of aftmost hopeless regret. The addition of a line to the quatrain of oeto-syllabics, adds a certain impressiveness :

Cavelier buds, whom nature teams As a reserve for England's throne ; Spirits whose double edge redemes The last age and adorns your own - What are you now the Prince is gone ? There is fine spontaneity here, and simplicity is preserved in spite of figurative elaboration.

In the "Elegy on Charles I furthered Publicly by His

Subjects" Cleveland uses effectively his usually clumsy matephorical style. While no sorrow would wring such tortured thoughts from a sane man o\ today, yet we cannot but sympathize with the man to whom they were natural channels for the expression of his grief. He looks on the execution of

Charles as a copy of the Crucifixion which buoys up his religious faith but shatters his reason. Two Egyptian plagues at once have fallen upon the land ; it is overflowed by the Red Sea of Murder, and'Vercast with darkness". In - 48 - contrast to these portents is set the sainted spirit of the

King, for whom "death is swallowed up in victory**.

The exalted lines,

And thus his soul, of this her triumph proud, Brofcfe like a flash of lightning through the cloud Of flesh and blood, and from the highest line Of human virtue passed to the divine. convey a lofty conception in condensed and forceful, if somewhat rhetorical and stilted language.

In the "Chronosticon Decollationis Caroli Regis" the poet is more passionate and declamatory. He calls upon all to "view what convulsions shoulder-shake the land", and depicts the Shree Kingdoms in hopeless ruin.

A gem of humorous reverie on the misfortunes of the

Cavaliers, lightens up the gloom. It is entitled "The Poor

Cavalier, in Memory of his Old Suit." The poet traces the history of the state's sufferings, in the vicissitudes of the once scarlet, but now gray and tattered garment.

Thou did* st wear new buttons on thy breast When baffled Waller did retreat from the West. When taken Leicester raised our thoughts and speech Then wert thou reinforced in the breach. But rumours of ill-success wrought rents again. •I could tell Still by new holes how our disasters fell.

This has all the light merriment drawn from sad experience that characterises what is known as vers de societe.

Cleveland never compromised. He remained an - 10 -

rhyme ; it is usually the serious and successful effort of an optimist to wring merriment out of felt misfortune with a view to further effort. The noticeable precision in the use of words in the above song, the unchecked flow of sound and growth of ardour and rousing good cheer, the cumulative effect of the last quatrain, place the lyrical quality of the piece high enough to compare at no great disadvantage with the more popular songs of Burns. It seems unfair that what is universally praised in Burns should not save Brome from absolute neglect ; but the close attachment of the latter's work to half-forgotten historical events, is no doubt a partial excuse for our disregard.

That Brome was fearlessly outspoken is attested by another spirited convivial poem, "The Prisoners : written when O.C. attempted to be King." The author of such lines as these must have risked the pious rage of the now triumphant puritans : As healths are forbidden,

'Will drink them destruction that would destroy drinking.'

Through the uneasy peace that followed, his voice was not silent, and we shall have to return to him in another section of this study. His later work tended to heal old party wounds. When General Monk came to London on his mission of restoration, Brome (whom he publicly recognized) addressed - 11 - to him several poetic tributes full of the hope of unity.

In one song the joyous chorus runs :

We'll eat and we'll drink and we'll dance and we'll sing,

And Roundheads and Caveys no more shall be named ;

•Tis friendship and love that can save us and arm us,

And while we all agree, there is nothing can harm us.

James Graham, Marquis of Montrose (1612-1650), that brilliant soldier, who after signing the Covenant in 1638 and taking the field against Charles, became the king's most unselfish and devoted champion, and was hanged for the royal cause at Edinburgh, left a few fragmentary poems on affairs of state. The ballad attributed to Montrose in which he counsels his love to faithfulness in terms of state-craft, bears also the interpretation that it is a political allegory in which the lover is Charles and the mistress is England. It is marked, in any case, by strong anti-Presbyterian feeling - a genuine abhorrence of synods and committees.

"Be governed by no other sway Than purest Monarchy ; For if confusion have a part Which virtuous souls abhor, I'll call a synod in my heart And never love thee more. " But to force the allegorical interpretation renders almost meaningless such lines as,

I'll make thee glorious by my pen, And famous by my sword, - 12 - where we feel that the poet-soldier is uttering his own gallant boast. The piece is an improved and specialized version of an older ballad.

The Cav&lier cause lost a true poet when

William Cartwright died in 1643. Many of his verses were mutilated or suppressed to save the remnant from puritan censures. His royalist sentiment was strong. Among the selections given in the Johnson Poets is a poem "To the King, on His Majesty's Return from Scotland" full of loyal feeling, but with no evidence of a true appreciation of the seriousness of the situation. It closes by asking Charles to dwell in ft" tT England and show but a beam of his glory "sometimes" to the Scots. It is not in his political verse mainly that

Cartwright has earned the praise which his literary father,

Ben Jonson, bestows upon him, but in the imagination and sense of metre that he displays in his love lyrics.

It is significant of the attitude of the earlier generation of "Court wits" that we find Thomas Carew (1598 -

1638) on the occasion of foreign strife writing complacently to a friend (Townsend) :

Tourneys, masques, theatres better become

Our halcyon days; what tho' the German Queen

Bellow for freedom and revenge, the voice Concerns us not, nor should divert our joys. - 13 -

But the lack of any outspoken word on the situation when

England was seized in the civil struggle, on the part of

ROBERT HERRICK (1591 - 1674), is probably not owing to any such complacent epicureanism. Grosart, in his elaborate

^Memorial-Introduction to Herrick1s works, had been very careful to contradict the error of supposing that the poet was unmoved by the conflict and unconscious of its gravity. The numerous quotations the editor gives, place it beyond doubt that Herrick's lofalty had been outraged by the King's action, and that hew-as in the unhappy position of one whose conscience binds him to a principle in support of which others have done notorious wrong. What wonder then if his own support lacked enthusiasm and vigor I " This exquisite poet was far past middle life when the war began. He had previously devoted his fine fancy and artistic feeling to short flights of verse descriptive of the charms of imaginary mistresses. Later in the "Hesperides" he wrote nature descriptions and theological verses of lasting popularity and undoubted merit. His references to the times are not nearly so infrequent as some critics would lead us to suppose ; but many of them a re obscure and philosophical rather than partisan. Herrick lends himself indeed to the misapprehension that he has no grasp of the

# Alexander B. Grosart, Works of Robert Herrick 1876. Vol.1. - 14 - political movements of his time , and it is ofaly by a thoughtful reading of some suggestive passages that we can escape that view. In this class of partisan poetry may be included such 4k addresses to the King as the one "Upon his coming with his Army into the West", where the poet congratulates Charles upon successes that were but momentary, and that "To the King and

Queen upon their Unhappy Distances",- a rather feeble piece containing, however, a sincere commiseration with Royalty in distress, and holding out hope of a speedy reversal of fortune.

This piece closes unfortunately with the not too self-forgetful afterthought

"These words found true C. M. (i.e. Charles and Maria) remember me '"

Personal loyalty was not wanting in Herrick, but it does not argue much for the depth of his royalist convictions that he should content himself with writing confidently of the temporary successes of the cause, or sympathetically of the discomforts of the King, while the tremendous issues of the Great Rebellion were in the crucible of fate. We shall see that in more serious and personal pieces Herrick is not in close harmony with the Cavalier party. In "The Bad Season Makes the Poet

Sad", he mingles his new pessimism with inane flattery, in f Justification for placing some complimentary verses under~~"~" "POETRY AS POWER" lies in the fact that they contain vindications of the cause and that they would be influential early in the struggle as the pronpuncements of celebrated or representative writers. - 15 - these elegant lines :

Sick is the land to the heart, and doth endure Most dangerous faintings by her desperate cure ; But if that golden Age wo'd come again, And Charles here Rule as he before did Reign ... I should delight to have my Curies halfe-drown*d In Tyrian dewes, and head with roses crown'd. An exquisite pastoral sung to the King, for which Henry Lawes composed the music, gives even sadder expression to Herrick's pessimistic view of the times. Supporting the King's quarrel with superficial compliment, he is at heart unsatisfied with the cause and hopeless of any good to result from it. To the young prince, whose birth he had celebrated in 1630, Herrick looks with some degree of good expectation. But his poem

"To Prince Charles on His Coming to Exeter" (August 1695) lacks directness and meaning.

To realize this fully, we have to depart from these addresses to royalty and select from poems or epigrams of more spontaneous make. Grosart remarks on a number of these.

It was not in harmony with Laud's methods of punishment of the

King's enemies for one to write,

'Tis but a doglike madness in bad lings For to delight in wounds and murderings. .... Kings by killing do increase their foes.

Nor is there flattery or allegiance in this :

So many Kings and Primates too there are Who claim the Fat and Fleshie for their share And leave their subjects but the starved ware. - 16 ~

Herrick had,in fact, the germ of a belief in true democracy : in praising the state of death he claims for it the gift of the equality of all.

Nor need we here to fear the frown Of Court or Crown. Where Fortune bears no sway o'er things, There all are Kings. In short, Herrick is no whole-hearted, unwavering Cavalier.

When Abraham Cowley (1618 - 1686) was ejected from

Cambridge in 1643, and went to Oxford, he had already written considerable/Royalist verse ; and he had received royal notice when Prince Charles visiting Cambridge had listened to his play

"The Guardian". With a scholarly and retiring bent, Cowley combined no little regard for recognition, and while he shrank from, he could not avoid the turmoil of the political arena : he soon appears in the personal service of the Queen in Paris, deciphering her secret correspondence with His Majesty.

Among his Cambridge pieces is one on the"King's

Return from Scotland." The situation is idealized in truly artistic lines :

Others by wajjf their conquests gain ; You like a god your ends obtain ; Who when rude Chaos for his help did call, Spoke but a word and sweetly ordered all ! Again, we can only admire so loyal a man and so confident a prophet as Cowley, when in glowing phrase he pays tribute to - 17 - the King's character and foretells his success :

His valor, wisdom, offspring, speak no less And we, the prophets sons write not by guess. Not by guess, indeed, but by a fond belief, soon to be shattered

(Yet it is easy for us in criticising these poets to be wise after the event ; Cowley in his confidence is not more blind to the situation than the majority in 1641). Another short poem on the same subject is in rather harsh irregular couplets, and loaded with classic allusion.

Meanwhile, the great champion of progress,

JOHN MILTON (1608 - 1664), producing volumes of trenchant controversial prose, gave little attention to verse composition.

What poetry he did produce, however, is tinged with his political feelings. The bitter words of Lycidas (1638) are directed particularly against the clergy, but they are the first breathings of his wrath against the intolerable evils of the time. We need not connect too closely the vivid image of retribution in "that two-handed engine" (line 130) with the execution of Stafford and Of Charles ; suffice it to observe that here, in general terms, the poet foretold the rise of the invincible power of the people against the tyranny of their masters. But he deliberately elected prose as his chief weapon, in asserting the principles of democracy and defending the People of England. He saw probably that no poetic voice - 18 - would be listened to. Poetry is never the most potent means of persuasion to a political creed, all-potent though it may be in persuasion to love of truth and beauty. His opponents used prose, and he must meet them with the same class of weapon, if he would establish his beliefs to the satisfaction of the reader. He might well afford to wait for later generations to give audience to "Paradise Lost" : for the People of England's defence, the need was immediate. * The political sonnets may be roughly placed under the heading ''Poetry as Power* : their aim is mainly hortative.

In these sonnets the tendency is always to appeal to leaders and not to the public directly ; he selects, as it were, a few choice men of influence through whom he can make his inspiration felt. The earliest of those in which reference is made to the struggle need only be mentioned here for the sake of clearness, as it is not in essence a party poem. It is the familiar one addressed to the Royalist commander at Brentford when the advance of his forces upon London was expected. Milton's house in Aldergate Street was peculiarly exposed , not being within the city fortifications. He writes this plea for special regard as a poet, a sacred person, and cites the classic example?of Pindar and Euripides. ("When the Assault was Intended to the City " - 1642.) This fine sonnet is not the less earnest for being half-playful. It cannot have been seriously - 19 - intended as a source of security to the writer; its real import lies in the fact that it rises to a strong assertion of the sacredness of poetry. Two sonnets ensue, "On the Detraction which followed Upon my Writing Certain Treatises", the first of which is a piece of gehuine humour, rare in Milton. The theme is the popular neglect of his pamphlet 'Tetracordon', which he attributes to inability to pronounce the title. A quotation may be permitted :

Cries the stall-reader, "Bless us, what a word on The title-page is this !" and some in file Stand spelling false, while one might walk to Mile- End Green. Why is it harder, sirs, than Gordon, Colkitto or MacDonnel or Galasp ? Those rugged names to our like mouths grow sleek That would have made Quintilian stare and gasp. But the second of these is an apology for the tract itself which has been wrongly received.

I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs. .... ^License they mean when they cry liberty, For who loves that must first be wise and good.

Here we have the very soul of Milton's political morality. You must make people wise and good by education before you dare make them free by legislation.

Almost the soleffixample of political verse of quite popular appeal in Milton, is that "On the New Forcers of

Conscience under the Long Parliament ", 1646. This piece 'f Cf .George Wither, commenting on the VimesT" in 1660™ "~ People sought A liberty whereby without control They might with brutish lusts in pleasure roll. - 20 - (which is a sonnet with some irregular lines added), Masson thinks "although not published till 1673, was in circulation doing service for Independency and liberty of conscience from

1646 onwards." If so, it must have exercised considerable influence among its readers. It combines manly indignation with unanswerable argument : every line is forceful with unsparing accusation. The heart of the argument is that under the system demanded by the Presbyterian party,

Men whose life, learning, pure intent Would have been held in high esteem with Paul, Must now be named and printed heretics. He looks to Parliament, the only hope of Independency, to right the situation.

The tribute "To the Lord General Fairfax" on the capture of Colchester which closed the "Second Civil War"

(1647) is truly Miltonic in sound and effect. The poet remained, indeed, a firm admirer of Fairfax, even after the latter's refusal to be a party to the Regicide. The octave of this sonnet celebrates Fairfax the general : the sextette counsels Fairfax the statesman to undertake the still nobler task of freeing truth from violence. The lines which declare the fame of the Lord General to be world-wide, borne in

#For explanation of the personal references in this poem, see Andrew J. George : Shorter Poems of Milton, 1898. - 21 -

"roumours loud that daunt remotest beings" and the closing sentence,

"In vain doth Valour bleed While Avarice and Rapine share the land," are typical in style of the condensation and force of Paradise

Lost. The latter quotation! sets forth Milton's disbelief in any short-sighted policy of the mere overthrow of a tyrant with no assurance of just and enlightened government.

A parallel sonnet "To the Lord General Cromwell" (1652), contains the oft-qaoted line :

Peace hath her victories, No less renowned than war, and is an earnest warning against both Presbyterianism and

Episcopacy.

Nothing is more evident in Milton's political pieces than the tendency to emphasize the moral and theological, and to minimize the military, and to some degree the legislative, phases of the struggle. He refuses to confine himself to the purely local and temporary. The local and temporary only forms a text by which to enforce the larger aim. It is conscience and charac­ ter that he would elevate ; it is religion and liberty that he would secure. The theological satire of Peter's speech in

Lycidas illustrates the same intense devotion to these ideals. in the supreme passion of holy wrath and sorrow expressed in the sonnet "On the Massacre of the Piedmontese Christians" (1655) - 22 - we have unquestionably some of the best lines Milton ever wrote ; and the underlying note of this prophetic blast is horror of religious tyranny.

If Milton stands for the greatest height and breadth o of Puritanism, GEORGE WITHER (1588 - 1667) no less definitely

% represents its narrowest sentiment and lowest mentality. Wither, by his own confession, was a pampered child and a luxurious youth. He spent two years at Oxford but took no degree. His pastoral poetry, culminating in the "Mistress of Philarete" is still highly praised. His best known early work is a satire in couplets, entitled "Abuse§ Stript and Whipt". "The Scourge" a piece which he appended to "Abuses" was interpreted as antagonistic to the King, and the young poet was rewarded with a term of imprisonment in the Marshalsea. The publication of his original hymns bound with the authorized Psalter, was the cause of a notorious dispute between Wither and interested booksellers, which Ben Jonson used in "Time Vindicated" to vent his just ire against the enterprising and popular young puritan.

In 1625, Wither published the first part of "Britain's

Remembrancer", a poem which illustrates his eccentric habits of mind, and frank didacticism. In 1639 he commanded a company of cavalry against Scotland ; but on the outbreak of the civil war, at the sacrifice of his property, he espoused - 23 - the cause of the Parliament.

During the whole period of the Rebellion he was ceaselessly clamoring in the public ear, in prose and verse that for brazen egotism and wearying dulness would be hard to parallel. The man's manifest moral earnestness won for him a wide circle of uncritical admirers, and the disparagement of literary experts only roused him to new effort in self defence and pious expostulation. Despite his faults, no man was more thoroughly in earnest, or more absolutely free from conscious hypocrisy. It is this, and his sturdy unwavering independence that saves him from contempt. His natural gift of poetry was early dimmed, as he came under the influence of that ultra- puritanism which is fatal to high art. Lacking the self-control of men like Marvell, intent only on persuasion, he pours forth his feeble 'prophecies' and 'raptures', with no artistic restraint, with^fertility of imagination, with no relief from barrenness and monotony. Scaree anyone nowadays would trudge through the desert of such a poem as "Campo-mus^e" (1643).

This is a compilation of some twenty-six hundred lines rhyming alternately, written, as its author admits, in defiance of

"Apollo and the Nine", on the subject of the civil war, from the starting point of the author's own experiences as

Capt.George Wither, serving his "King and Parliament" in previous engagements of the struggle. The point of interest - 24 - is that the poet aims to furnish a basis of reconciliation between King and Parliament. The rhymed argument prefixed to the poem announces as its object to declare

• a voice of peace That she (the muse) hath heard; and there doth cease, Intending as she will proceed, To make some proof how this may speed." But Wither is an out-and-out opponent of systems of hereditary rule.

"Let them who shall hereafter counted be Most honorable persons, never more Be they who show the longest pedigree From Kings and conquerors, as heretofore." He represents the King as misguided, under the influence of emissaries of the Papacy, against which he hurls apocalyptic curses. Though accusative, the piece is not satirical in motive. It is in effect a prosy apology for taking part in the

Rebellion. The author is a democrat, but he does not distinguish between democracy and theocracy. The element of prophecy, so-called, enters largely and the whole reeks with the phraseology of piety. For this (not too pronounced) attitude of reconciliation, Wither was roundly abused by

John Taylor, the Water-Poet (1580-1654) who replied in

"Aqua-Musae", calling our author a "juggling rebell".

Speculum Speculativum (1660) may be classed among

Wither's hortative pieces. It is a preaching address to the new sovereign delivered in oracular tone. No better index to Wither's estimate of his calling could be found than this from the opening lines :

Sir, blest be he that in God's name doth come; In whose name I pronounce you welcome home. Difficult and solemn duties lie before the Prince, and there is a plain-spoken declaration of their nature, for His

Majesty's guidance. The author's own position is one of genuine loyalty, all the more genuine, he argues, for the fact that it is not expressed in terms of flattery. He has stood superior to factions :

•I am of no faction but profess To King and country, in true heartiness Both loyalty and love'. The main argument is the Theocratic principle. God gives to men their governments and may remove them. To the Hebrews he gave the Land of Promise "on conditions". Men failed of those conditions and lost their birthright. The abuse of power or privilege will bring divine retribution. There is a straightforwardness about this that makes the poem readable.

It preserves for us the very' atmosphere of dogmatic puritan thought. But the stupidly prosaic lines, the moral platitudes loosely expressed, that go to compose it, condemn the piece, as poetry, to the very lowest rank. When we are constantly met by such lines as A sickness which is epidemical (In some degree), hath seized upon us all. - 26 - or,

All men of great offences and of many Arw guilty, we know the reason for Pope's epithet - "wretched Wither".

Supposing himself to be "wrestling with God in prayer, for King and people" the narrow old puritan grew more and more egotistical till his mental powers were quite unbalanced and he drifted into imbecility. He set constantly before him the motto which he had expounded in a poem in 1621, "Nee habeo, nee careo, nee euro." It is only to be regretted that so brave a man, and so gifted a writer should have lost that catholicity of taste and interest without which there can be no effective strengfcfe. For sefl-glorification and self-excuse he is a weaker prototype of

Rousseap. His poetry must have had considerable influence with the uncritical public, who always showed willingness to pay for it. But one cannot but wonder whether many may have read

Wither solely for the purpose of having a laugh at his expense.

As might be expected, much of the conflict of opinion found expression in the popular and unsubstantial form of the Ballad. Ballads were as often published anonymously as otherwise, but a number of names are preserved of those who adopted the form for party purposes. Facetious and jovial

Bishop Corbet of Oxford (d.1635) wrote lampoons against the - 27 -

Puritans not far from the ordinary ballad type. The Roxburghe

Collection contains many pieces referring to the strife.

Martin Parker (d.1645) whose name occurs frequently among the writers of these ballads may be mentioned here for his "When the King Enjoys His Own Again" (c.1644). The piece has little 4 wit and probably owed its wide circulation" to the catchy refrain which supplies its title. It is written in answer to some astrological prognostications ; and using the language of

Astrology it reiterates the thought that there will be no relief from gloom till the King's return.

The man in the moon may wear out his shoon, In running after Charles his wain ; But all's to no end, for the times will not mend Till the King enjoys his own again.

# A sequel to this ballad came out after the Restoration. J"*"" See Roxburghe*' 7.f5 680. -fU voZZ* AAJL, S^-u/f*^ftiUo*,**~-^+ k^^^/yp - 49 - irreconcilable Cavalier. His letter to Cromwell from.prison is more of a demand than an entreaty for liberty, and contains no promises. In 1658 our poet heaped new reproaches on the dying

Protector, and celebrated his death with unqualified abuse.

When he chooses to refrain from metaphysical fancies,

Cleveland is a strong writer of good Saxon. But his success lies mainly in his satirical, not in his elegiac work.

Even impulsive and courageous j^ome lost heart in his spirited support of the King's side. In a short poem

"The Riddle", 1644, he laments the wasting struggle and cries out for peace. "A Serious Ballad" 1645, is a plain statement of his position. It reminds us of Wither's Campo-Musae. Brome is a lover of King and Parliament, and can see nothing to be gained by the victory of either.

"I would fight, if my fighting would bring any peace." The only hope of good government lies in the reconciliation of the parties. But he is a thorough conservative. The King's position should be that of absolute command :

•Tis they must advise and 'tis he must command."

For their power from his must spring. Nor shall every 'ignorant fcnave' be allowed to meddle with established religion. The

"Serious Ballad " is as far from meeting the democratic demands, as Campo-Musae is from satisfying the Royalists; It was vain - 50 - to talk of agreement between such a King and an awakened people.

The defeat of these dim hopes was apparent in 1648 when Brome produced "The Lamentation". This is an outburst of sorrow, addressed to the City of London, in four rather formal ten-line stanzas. The poet interprets the success of the Roundheads as the triumph of Evil, prophecies a reign of pride, lust, sloth, and desolation, and calls the citizens to prayer. In his monologue "On the King's Imprisonment" he puts a passionate utterance into the mouth of Charles. Again in his so-called

"Satire on Rebellion", which is really less of a satire than of a lament, he speaks out with no uncertain sound. The theme is that of bitter regret and unqualified denunciation of the victors.

Urge me no more to sing ; I am not able. ... Behold a lawful sovereign to whose mind Dishonesty's a stranger, now confined To the anarchic power of those whose reason Is flat rebellion, and their truth is treason. Two poems on the King's execution reveal Brome's limitations as a serious poet. The passion is lost in philosophical reflection, and there is a great lack of directness and force.

The better of these closes in the language of religious consolation, and with scriptural allusion. "Rest royal Dust !" he exclaims : ... "You did fall Just like our Saviour for the sins of all." and he piously counsels trust in the King of Kings, who has - 51 - permitted the father's downfall but

"Can raise, and will, the son up to the crown."

Brome regained his spirits after this, but he never rises to the lyrical power of his early soldier songs. We shall meet with him again in the field of satire.

ABRAHAM COWLEY tells us in the preface to his mmm^m*mm*mmmmamm&m^»^**. w* *t mr*m**m A volume of 1656 ; " I have cast away all such pieces as I wrote during the late troubles with any relation to the difficulties which caused them." Whatever of political verse he had produced during the period, he sacrificed to his respect for

Cromwellian power. A poem which has been supposed to belong to these rejected pieces same to light in 1679 and has been preserved. The title is "On the Late Civil War". It recalls with regret the incidents that led to the division ; praises

(as Cowley had done) the happy times of James I and Charles I ; trouble lays the blame for the #&£ at the door of the puritan clergy - "Aaron's sons", and recounts with some effort at dramatic description the chief incidents of the war. There is an undercurrent of vindictiveness. The author exults in the slaughter of the Roundheads. He praises the Thames for loyally drowning them at the siege of Brentford. Blank spaces partly conceal the names of Roundhead leaders. It is doubtless

Cromwell who is meant by 'The man who taught confusion's art'. - 52 - The style is unfortunately lifeless ; formal couplets with monotonous regularity of the caesura. It is marked too by many of the extravagances of the metaphysical poets. //Cowley has a habit of scattering verses through his prose essays.

In the Discourse Concerning the Government of Oliver CroBwell

(published 1661, but written as he tells us "in the time of

Richard the Little") he has included a number of short pieces of verse. The longest of these which he calls a "Complaint for England", had for its theme regret for the lost ({) glory of the nation under the Commonwealth. The state is pictured as a ship threatened by ruin, and the poet cries for heaven's mercy for the sake of the royal martyr's intercession. Later in the vision, Cromwell appears as a devil who has wandered from hell, and replies in smooth couplets to the dreamer's eloquent prose arraignment. But the latter interrupts his blasphemies, and is delivered by an angel whose insignia of British crown and bloody cross reveal him as the murdered King. As a wolf whose intended prey is delivered by the shepherd, so does the accursed flee before the heavenly visitor.

Very different from this is Marvell's vievr of the death of the Protector. He gives us in his poem "On the Death of His Late Highness the Lord Protector" (1658), a sympathetic picture of the man Cromwell. Events in the Protector's home life are mentioned with feeling ; particularly the death of his - 53 - daughter, which had cast a gloom over the household a few weeks before his own. There is, too, a fair sample of nature-descript

-ion in the account of the storm that preceded the passing of the hero. But it is when he recalls the toi!3 and victories of the dead that the poet excells. He appreciates the tremendous difficulties of the Protector's task.

What prudence, more than human did he need To keep so dear, so differing ends agreed. Naturally a lover of peace, he had been forced by Heaven to enter the arena of war. There is a sense of tragedy, a rising intensity of awe and pathos in the whole picture. The corpse of the great man is viewed with the grief both of a citizen and of a loyal servant. The exclamatory lines beginning

"0 human glory vain I 0 Death 1 0 wings ! " convey powerfully the distress of the heart brought to realise the transitory nature of the world's best things. In an Horatiafl passage he declares that the name of Cromwell will be a watch­ word to the English soldier in after ages.

As long as rivers to the sea shall run ... Always thy honour, name and fame shall last.

Unfortunate, in the light of after events, is the reference at the close to the "milder beams" of Richard.

Marvell is a poet with a fine sense of expression, but the best, even, of these couplets, lack the condensation - 54 - and force that make the "Horatian Ode" a treasure.

Of ballad, jppetry much of an inferior sort has been preserved dealing with the death, of Charles. The p/ece given by

Percy as written by Charles hi©self, has nothing to prove its royal authorship except the testimony of Bishop Burnet nearly thirty years later. (See "Roxburghe Ballads", Vol.7.p.618 -

"Majesty in Misery".) It is a pious but manly complaint.

Its three line stanzas have no poetic quality beyond that of simplicity and naturalness.

Nature and Law, by Thy Divine Decree (The only root of righteous Loyalty) With this dim diadem invested me. Others on the same subject from a Royalist point of view are

"The Manner of the King's Trial and Death", and versification the King's last speech. - 55

II (c). Satire.

To review exhaustively the surviving partisan verse- satire of the period would form a task°rar greater dimensions than can be undertaken here. We shall gain most in this necessarily brief treatment by confining our effort to a careful examination of a few representative pieces, indicating en passant whatever is most worthy of notice in less important ones.

Never did party causes in England elicit the support of poetry in themes of satire, to the degree in which this occurred in the period under discussion. English poetry from Chaucer to Milton is replete with exposures of political, theological and social abuse. The genial merriment of the

"Canterbury Tales", the bitter arraignment of "Piers Plowman", the frank disgust at court vanities of Spenser's "Colin Clout", the social satire of Shakspere's comic characters, - all spring from general observation untinged by political partiality or prejudice. In the reign of Charles I, it was no longer possible to write satire that was not directed against one or other of the parties that were in process of formation. Satire implies the condemnation of certain usages and principles ; and when parties confront one another at almost every point of belief and practice, the satirist necessarily becomes the ** 56 — assailant of the partisan and of the party.

The satirical phase of the party poetry of the struggle, naturally found emphasis later than the hortatory or the panegyric. The strife, inso far as it was violent was over ; the victory was celebrated in song, before the satirical critic was provided with his materials or found leizure for the use of them. Not that satire was quite neglected throughout the war. In ballad and song, as well as in more elaborate verse-compositions such as Wither's "Scourge" or

"Britain's Remembrancer" we have voluminous satirical poetry bearing on the questions at issue in the struggle and dating from a time long before it began. From that period on, many a rhymer on either side contributed pieces of more or less importance in this field. But it was not until Puritanism as a political force had risen and fallen, that its apologists turned vigorously to attack in satire the vice and folly of the court party. And although anti-puritan satires were being produced, it was not until the whole movement had passed into history, that true genius collected into an immortal work of ridicule the results of a discerning observation of what

Puritanism had revealed of the foibles and insincerities of man.

Brilliant and paralysing as were the victories of the

Roundheads, they could not destroy the spirit of criticism - 57 -

The sword of the Cavalier was broken, but his pen had still to be reckoned with. Met again, and vanquished at every point in prose argumentation by Milton?s pamphlets, he might still resort to the unanswerable argument of derision. And there could be no more tempting field of satire than that offered by the

Parliamentary camp. The appearance of piety is always distrusted^ and the exposure of religious hypocrisy is always popular. The

Glamour of the shallow zealot, the quarrels of diverse and determined sects within the greater party, the wrangling of new- made statesman, called forth the prophets of sarcasm. For a long period Cromwell's party was the party of action, the

Royalists the party of criticism. The adoption by His Highness of some of the very autocratic measures for which that offender,

His Majesty, had been executed, placer! the government in a position for which there was scant logical justification. The whole situation of the triumphant puritans was one that could not fail to attract the shafts of satire in volleys from the hostile camp. And on the other hand, the loose-living Cavaliers weak and ineffective in war, idle and licentious in peace, when they had regained the ascendency, became the objects of derisive comment by those who scorned and disapproved.

Of satirists who were known at the beginning of the century, the foremost are Donne, Lodge and Hall. These three used the ten-syllabled couplet, and were under classic influence. - 58 -

Bishop Hall, for example, is his "Toothless" and "Biting" satires (c.1593), is a conscious imitator of Juvenal. His style, like Donne's, is obscure, and any attempt to play with rhymes is rather clumsy. These satirists lacked the ease of fuller experience. The field of satiric poetry was still occupied by the Drama with its fine character drawing, and by pamphlet literature with its partisan invective. Leaders of the nation were protected by a popular court in Elizabeth's time ; they were placed beyond the satirists' attack. It was in the period of our study that satiric t>oetry came to its own in,. Engl and-, . * . . , A. ^, . ^ Many 01 those who are prominent early mthe period now ceased to write political verse. Milton is not a party satirist in verse. His satirical comment would hardly have been partisan. "Paradise

Lost" conveys, one feels, a veiled disgust of Parliaments, in giving one to the hellish host. Satan has some of the characteristics of Cromwell ; but he is not unsympathetically presented. "S&mpn Agonistes", Milton's most subjective poem, is an outcry,not a satire, against the Court Philistinism.

The blind and afflicted Giant, dissatisfied with Kings and

Protectors, was still able, after 1660, to hearken for higher strains that he felt himself destined to sing. Cowley too sought retirement, and it is only by conjecture that he can be reckoned among satirical poets. Dryden, after his complimentary verse to the King, set to work to make a name for himself in - 59 - the Drama ; his great satirical gifts were to be developed in the political setting of a later time. Many of the earlier

Cavalier poets had died. Sir John Suckling, the hero of a much ridiculed expedition to Scotland, had died in 1642 ;

William Cartwright in 1643; Francis Quarles, who had become a vigorous pamphleteer,in 1644, and gentle Richard Crashaw in

1650. Richard Lovelace, best known by "To Althea from Prison", who was "made Master of Arts for his beauty", after a soldier's career allowed his misfortunes to silence his muse, for ten years, and died in 1658. This w^as also the year of

John Cleveland's death ; Cleveland had already approved himself as a satirist. Robert Herrick, who kept shy of political stirrings, and Henry Vaughan who is unique as a poet of nature and who apologizes in "Ad Posteros" for his aloofness from the civil struggle, both lived on till near the close of the century, but did not cultivate satire. Davenant, who between activities on the royalist side, and imprisonments as punish­ ment for them, did well to write his "Gondibert" (1651), published a "Poem to His Sacred Majesty 1660" and afterwards, turned his attention, like Dryden, to the Drama. Sir John

Denhara, author of a notable dijjigle poem in "Cooper's Hill"

(1642) died in the same year as Davenant, 1668, having written some unimportant satirical Pieces- - 60 - A good deal of anti-Parliamentary satire was published anonymously, and the authorship of some readable pieces is still unsettled. A good example of these floating poems is contained in Cowley's section of the "Johnson Poets" and is entitled the * "Puritan and the Papist". It is a minute comparison, point by point, of Puritan with Papist doctrines.

There is implied condemnation of both, but the satire is unquestionably on the Puritan. A few couplets will serve to illustrate how the poem runs :

"You do hate swearing so that when You've sworn an oath, you break it straight again." "Nay, whether you'd worship saints is not known For you have yet, of your religion, none." "Ye boundless tyrants, how do you outcry Th1Athenians' Thirty, Rome's Decemviry." Ridicule is heaped on the faith of the Puritans who give thanks after a lost battle. There is no shrinking from personalities and the charges made are severe. The metrical weakness of the piece would do no credit to Cowley ; it is in clumsy blank verse. Nor is it saved by a truly penetrating satiric wit, although there is much ingenuity in the

# Grosart in "Chertsey Worthies : Cowley" does not include this, but Moulton ("Library of Literary Criticism") doubtfully attributes it to Cowley. - 61 - comparisons.

"The Character of an Holy Sister", a short character

sketch in verse, which accompanies the above-mentioned poem,

is a savagely sarcastic picture of loathsome female Jiypocrisy.

Cartwright, whose early death in 1643 removed a poet

of some promise, wrote a few playful satirical pieces.

"The Chambermaid's Posset" for example, gives vent to some fun

at the expense of Prynne1s "Histrio-Mastix" and Wither's "Abuses"

and * "Motto".

Of the satires of Alexander Brome, the prevailing mood is that of irony. Most of the pieces are of a low order, and are in the doggerel of the ballad style. The "Saints'

Encouragement" (1643) uses irony in a most matter-of-fact way, leavang nothing to suggestion.

" 'Tis for religion that you fight And for the Kingdom's good, By robbing churches, plundering men And shedding guiltless blood." This was a popular ballad, and is typical of the ballad literature of the time. In "The Independent's Resolve" (1648)

Brome sings ironically the bacchanalian triumph of an

Independent gloating over the prospect of power :

# "Wither's Motto, Nee Habeo. nee Careo, nee Curo" (1621) ~in~ which George Wither asserts his contempt for things mundane. - 62 - "A fig for Divinity, Lectures, and Law '. The Church and the state will turn into liquor,. And spend a whole town in a day. ... We'll keep the demeans And turn Bishops and Deans And over the Presbyter sway." Brome seems groping between a philosophical surrender to circumstances and a passionate revolt against the new powers.

In 1648 he wrote "The Leveller's Rant" and "The Safety" which illustrate this. Another piece ;"The Leveller" cleverly reports the supposed monologues of an extreme radical, who is content at last to submit to the rulers. "The Royalists'

Answer" argues for the recognition of titles and honours : but suggests that they agree to differ silently, to submit to what comes and to drink sack together. Thus the poet decides for himself in favour of an easygoing toleration.

The same spirit marks "The Polititian" (1649) in which he thus states his creed. What is't to us, who's in the ruling power ? While they protect, we're bound to obey But longer, not an hour ! But the quasi-ironical note comes in :

Since all the world is but a stage And every man a player ; They're fools that liv#s or states engage ; Let's act and juggle as others do, Keep what's our own, get others*' too, Play whiffler clown or maior : For he that sticks to what his heart calls just Becomes a sacrifice and prey To the prosperous whirlegig's lust. - 63 -

The ballad beginning "Old England is now a brave Barbary mare",

is of later date. In it Brome humourously depicts the failure of

King Charles I, the "hungry Scot", the Long Parliament, Jack

Presbyter, "Old Noll" and "Dick" to manage the national "mare",

followed by the brilliant success of Charles II.

With this low popular poetry may be grouped a very

witty and lively ballad by James Smith and Sir John Mennis(1639,)

on the subject of Sir John Suckling's Scottish campaign,and

another by Lawrence Price entitled "Win at First, Lose at Last".

SIR JOHN DENHAM, who had written regretfully on the

death of Strafford, now turned a frank and playful humour upon

the Roundheads. His "Humble Petition to the^Five Members"£1641)

urges them in their passion for reform not to remove the poet's

licence to turn falsehood to truth, by themselves usurping that

function.

For lying, that most noble part of a poet, You have it abundantly, and you yourselves know it.

The "Speech against Peace at the Close Committee" dset presents in sprightly lines an ironical summary of a Roundheads reasons

or c ntinuin the War o Were^\ P 2 /

Ml by°citizens| t will not be our least of praise, from arrest ,V Since a new state we could not raise after theirf To have destroyed the old." jart in the i str-/Denham, too, uses the ballad in pieces like "A Western Wonder", - 64 - in which he ridicules the Roundhead victories, and ^"News from

Colchester". I indeed this shamelessly indecent piece, which some have sttributed to ivoland. is from Denham. __ JOHN CLEVELAND turned to account his use of far­ fetched imagery in such early satire as "The Dialogue between

Two Zealots upon the Words Et Cetera in the Oath" where the pious talk of Puritanism parodied. The mixture of sprightliness and obscurity here is suggestive of Browning. A piece on

Smectymnuus (1641 ?) is a set of amusing conjectures on the then unexplained meaning of that name ."The Mixt Assembly", a vigorous poem, is loaded with biblical and literary allusion, and has many personal pointers. "The Hue and Cry after Sir

John Presbyter" opens with a clever picture of a Presbyterian agitator. "The King's Disguise" is a highly wrought example of "Metaphysical"writing in satire. It is addressed to

Charles and reproaches him for his secret entrance of the

Scottish camp and surrender to the Scots at Newark (1646).

Nothing could be more ardent than the poet's zeal against the new democracy expressed in this poem ; and it is mingled with the bitter realization of the King's failure to play a kingly part. Charles had committed high treason against himself, has acted the part of a usurper of his own throne. A number of metaphors are employed to figure forth Charles in his mask. e.g. - 65 -

"A psalm of mercy in a miscreant print."

"The sun wears midnight."

A mediaeval cathedral with its antique shapes is another of these, and the Gospel couched in paral>lves. The King's departure to Scotland is thus bitterly referred to :

But 0, he goes to Gibeon, and renews A league with mouldy bread, and clouted shoes.? Cleveland was more of a Royalist than his sovereign. In a fairly well-known poem, "The Rebell Scot", he shows himself still a true cavalier. The poem is prompted by the surrender of Charles to the Parliamentary forces at Newcastle (1647).

"Come, keen iambics I" he exclaims, seeking language strong enough to voicd the curses he has to utter. They are a nation of beasts who live in the wilderness. Their inveterate wandering is accounted for :

"Had Cain been Scot, God would have changed his doom Not forced him wander, but confined him home."

It is not for the sake of education that they travel ;

"Scots arrant fight, and fight to eat."

The method of dealing with them must no longer be conciliatory, as formerly, "When an act passed to stroke them on the head Call them good subjects, buy them gingerbread." they are only to be tamed by the sword. The prince who would reclaim rebels by yielding is compared to the fool "Who saddled his own back to shame his horse." - 66 - The supporters of "the Cause" who call the Scots the Gospel's

Life-Guard are answered with biting sarcasm "They took Religion for their seamstress and their cook."

The satire is clever and clean-cut, but it is only general and denunciatory ; it lacks the penetration and close observation that characterizes the work of Butler or of Pope. Satire cannot thrive on generalities ; it must come down to minutia.#

"The Scot's Apostacie" (1650) in two parts is in a strain of intense and uncontrollable resentment against those responsible for the surrender of the King to his enemies :

"How my flesh trembles ! 0, you cursed brood Of Cain and Judas, fatted with the blood." Of Innocents !"

They have destroyed not only the person but the office of the king ; and they have done it for gold.

"Could not the sacred name of King restrain Your avarice from such impious gain ? " he asks reproachfully. It is evident enough that Cleveland is too passionately enraged to be able to deride effectively ; he 4 An added*"interest is given to "The Rebell Scot" from the fact that Marvell wrote a reply to it twenty yeqrs later,- "The Loyal Scot". This poem is founded on the incident of the death of Capt. Archibald Douglas, who refused to desert his ship, "The Royal Oak" when it was on fire at Plymouth, and perished in the flames. Marvell brings the ghost of Cleveland (d.1658) to praise this Scotsman, and finally to recant the bitter langaage of hia own poem. (There is no disrespect of Cleveland intended ; rather the implication that if he were alive he would join in the applause of such heroismJ - 67 - must deal in abuse and imprecation.

In atess damnatory style, and far more catchy and effective, is the octosyllabic piece on "The Puritan or The

Town's New Teacher". Thus, through a dozen five-liae stanzas, each with a refrain, runs the pitiless characterization :

With cozening cough and hollow cheeke, To get new gatherings everyweeke, With paltry change of and -aad eke, With some small Hebrew and no Greek, 0 the town, 0 the town's new teacher t The language here is direct and forciful, if not dignified.

The poem is a telling caricature of pietistic, dogmatic,

"inspired", Independent preacher. The congregation meets him at the door with writing tools to make notes of his sermon, and the fantastic discourse lasts two hours.

# "A Lenten Litany" is the same theme to another tune : From a vinegar priest on a crab-tree stock From a foddering prayer four hours by the clock From a holy sister with a pitiful smock, libera nos etc. In " A Zealous Discourse between the Parson and Tabitha" he again employs octosyllabic doggerel. The theme is scandalous to "the new Presbytery", but there is much wit and no obscenity. Cleveland is at his best as a satirist in the use of these lighter metres.

Another piece of sharp ridicule "The Shuttle of an Inspired Weaver" parodies a preacher who closes his - 68 - profession of faith with a request for the "manna" of this

world:

"I profess Zeal and a pye may join both in one mess." "The Schismatick", in irregular short lines is a ridiculous

presentation of puritan doctrines heard at a lecture.

Cleveland's work bears the marks of the impulsive

man of action. But, in much of it he has adopted a sort

of expression that is not suited to his thought. Misled by the

tradition of the school of Donne, he worries with tortured

images ; but he is capable of directness and force, of raciness

and energy. Had he left alone the striving after unnatural

profusion of figurative ideas, and let his well-stocked

vocabulary play, his satirical work would be of a higher order.

Like Wither, he is placed at a disadvantage as a satirist by

the very intensity of his partisanship, which, as we have

seen, is a passion that overrides the restraints of calculating,

penetrating judgment. He is not great enough to be both

satirist and devotee ; he is too much of the devotee to be

a first-rate satirist. He lacks the thorough-going strength of

thought that makes Swift unanswerable, the composure and wisdom

that reinforce the flashing wit of his greater associate and

pupil, Samuel Butler. Yet his work is far from negligible.

He to #Charles Cotton, who was incensed at Waller for the latter*s *2© 67. Panegyric to Cromwell, is the author of another loyal parody on the Litany, closing with : "From his Highness and the Devil (Other examples are common.) 1ibera nos, etc. - 69 -

Written in those days when all was confusion, when judgment was necessarily hasty, when the great poets were almost silenced by the gravity of affairs, it is a creditable performance for one who took his share of soldier's vrork, and died at thirty-five.

What is of most importance to us in Cleveland is what he taught the author of "Hudibras". Their relation is similar to that of Marlowe and Shafcspere. Butler was the elder by a year. The two were associated in a club in

London. And the work of Butler is like the continuation by a man of genius of what his juvenile work had given promise of,"The Town's New Teacher", "The Parson's Discourse with

Tabitha", "The Dialogue between Two Zealots" and the "Rebell

Scot" contain elements of those inimitable characterizations and dialogues that form Butler's material. The metre, too,

Cleveland had used with effect in several pieces. Who shall say what seed-thoughts were sown in Butler"s mind as the two men conversed over cheerful cups, that afterwards flowered in the brilliant rhymes of"Hudibras?"

Satire may be looked uponas thee xpression of dissatisfaction at the short-comings of others. The satirist has his initial standards of morality, of manners, of government - his ideal of the social order, and he resents and - 70 - ridicules the failure of others to measure up to his standards, to catch the vision he has seen. Isaiah with his scathing denunciation of social corruption and commercial injustice, and

Pope with his insinuating ridicule of affectation and folly, are both primarily actuated by an ideal of what ought to obtain in the respective spheres in which they work. Pity it is that the corrector should lose his own inspiration, should despair of what ought to be amid the din of things that are.

Such was the unfortunate case of SAMUEL BUTLER (1612-

1680) the great satirist of Puritanism : his raillery is, as it were, at the price of his soul. Sensitive and independent, solitary in his study and thought ; thrown into a position to observe the public and private life of representative puritans ; antagonized by what he saw in them ; believing that in Reason,

Faith and Virtue lay man's good, yet seeing reason outraged, faith and virtue simulated ; intellectual without a saving imagination ; accepting only the witness of his observation,

Butler arrived at a chronic state of gloom in which he distrusted

&xstxxbK£s£ the valpe of any effort, the reality of any truth.

His admiration for art (for he was early interested in painting and music) he left uncultivated. His respect for man died ; for he saw man in caricature, a hypocritical zealot, a shallow and licentious courtier, or a deluded follower of science. All that was left for him was to use his brilliant wit to express what - 71 - he had seen ; and he set himself about this seriously, with some faith perhaps that he was fulfilling his part in the world as an honest man. Butler does not allow his pessimism to pervade his satire. It is only by inference that we read it between the lines of "Hudibras". Less selfish than Swift, less egotistical than Wither, he neither raves nor whimpers.

He admirably maintains his sanity and his dignity. But as we enjoy the jests of "Hudibras" it must be with the remembrance that the jester once put in verse the direst of laments

"Upon the Weakness and Misery of Man".

While Milton sought relief from his almost equal disappointment, in framing the gorgeous imagery of his great

Epic, - the noblest product of Puritanism - Butler celebrated in derision its shams and vanities. One must know both works to possess an interpretation of the Puritan

Movement. Of course, they defy all comparison ; they are as different as King Arthur and his fool. The lofty seriousness, the reach of thought and imagination, the mastery of stately music that mark the puritan master, area s far beyond the reach of the satirist as are the latter's cleverness and sense of comedy removed from the sphere of the former. Of either it may be said that he is supreme in his kind ; between the kinds, lies the whole scale of poetry.

Courthope is inexact in placing Butler in contrast - 72 - with Cowley for "active partisanship" as opposed to "philosophic quietism". Butler is scarcely as active a partisan as Cowley.

If he lashed one party, it was not that he warmly espoused the other. He was not the man of enthusiasm and conviction that

Cleveland was. Hudibras does not even by implication applaud the courtiers. The searchlight of exposure is thrown severely on them in the "Satire on the Licentious Age of Charles II".

Ths son of a middle class farmer, Butler was perhaps never much of a Royalist. That he selected Puritanism as the object of his most important satire, may have been partly due to the influence of Cleveland, partly to the accident of his being attached to

Sit Samuel Lake, in whose service he found material in' plenty for the note-book which Johnson tells us he kept by him.

To characteri£eF"Hudibras" (1663) as a great partisan satire is indeed to give but a meagre clue to its contents.

True, disgust of the Roundheads is the main motive ; but Butler is an observer of life in general and reveals his hostility to many things connected only remotely with the Roundhead cause.

The mirror is held up to hypocrisy, pretence, untruth of all sorts, Pedantry is jeered at, literary pretension and stupidity are pitilessly buffeted. The persistent mediaeval notions of astrology and magic are laughed out of countenance.

The Law, Medicine, the Clergy, receive their portion, Woman's

Tspenaer (Faerie Queene, Bk.II.C.II.,Stanza 17) makes Sir Huddibras the lover nf T7t^««^ *. ' ur xover of EUssa, who represents austere P "anism. - 73 -

ways are caricatured, and unnatural or feigned love is made ludicrous.

The characters in which these traits of human nature

are bodied forth are a ridiculous, and one may say a

despicable lot, saved from being absolutely revolting only ?it with which their creator details their conduct and aspirations. The story is a succession of mock

heroic incidents strung together without beginning, middle

or end, each leading easily to the next, and each with a new

departure in extravaganza and raillery. As we go on to

survey the poem, let us keep in mind the following condensed

argument :

Part I. Canto I. ; Description of Hudibras and his squire, and the adventure of the Bear and Fiddle, Canto II ; Description of the enemy. Hudibras encounters Talgol. Captures and imprisons the Fiddler. Canto III; On the return of the crowd the Knight is made prisoner and the Fiddler isset free. 7 Part II.Cant* I. ; The widow visits Hudibras*as he is sitting in the stocks. She has him released. Canto II.; A hot dispute between the Knight and his squire. Canto III ;The Knight takes his matrimonial cause to Sidrophel the Conjuror. They quarrel Sidrophel is discomfited. #Part III.Canto I. ; The Knight, having quarrelled with his • m 11 • i, • ..^ - #This section of the poem_was not published till 1678. It is inferior to Parts I hnd II. - 74 - squire is outwitted by the latter, and with the Widow's connivance, carried off by a (supposed) spirit. Part III. Canto II.The Rump Parliament and its squabbles.

Canto III. Hudibras having escaped, seeks legal assistance in his suit to the Widow. Is advised to write her a crafty letter. To which are added :

"An Heroical Epistle of Hudibras to His Lady", and

"The Lady's Answer to the Knight".

Let us here briefly recall the characters of the piece. The opening description of the mock-hero, Sir Hudibras, is a satirical poem in itself, and one of the most successful character-sketches in the language. He is a smatterer in every science, a conventional hero of romance fiction in caricature, thoroughly Quixotic in his vaunted loftiness of motive, and com­ placent superiority to the limitations of human circumstances.

The "mirrour of knighthood", he smacks, too, of the academic cloister. He hurls Greek and Latin at those who know not a word of either. His mastery of logic enables him to prove the most paradoxical as well as the most self-evident statements.

For rhetori c , he could not ope His mouth, but out there flew a trope.

His conversation so abounded in words from foreign languages as to remind the hearer of the tale of Babel.

In making Hudibras a Presbyterian, Butler - 75 - introduces the partisan element, and finds occasion to scourge that body in lines that have never been forgotten :

They prove their doctrine orthodox By Apostolic blows and knocks » . . Compoand for sins they are inclined to By damning those they have no mind to. It is a perfect arraignment of militant and presumptuous hypocrisy.

The person of our Presbyterian Knight is pictured with all the exactness of detail necessary to make him contemptible and ridiculous. His long beard represents a vow against the

Monarchy. We are informed of his corpulence, the fare that produced it, his garb, doublet and breeches, his "puissant sword" (grown rusty), his dagger and pistols,- the whole forming a picture of swaggering impotence. (Some unsavory particulars mar the mirth for us moderns.)

The jaded beast on which he is mounted is pitiably unfit for his heavy burden. As Caesar's war-horse

"would kneel and stoop (Some write) to take his rider up, So Hudibras his ('tis well known) Would often kneel to set him down." The Squire who attends him is, significantly, an Independent.

We learn of Ralph's fantastic genealogy through a long line of cross-legged knights (tailors) from Queen Dido who "gained With subtle shreds a tract of land."

He has in his brain strange places crammed with occult lore. Unlike his matter-of-fact master, he is an apostle of the - 76 - "New Light"

A liberal art that costs no pains.

The rest of the characters are known to us mainly by their several accomplishments, occupations and dispositions.

Sidrophel the sorcerer to whom Hudibras appeals in his difficulty, has in Whackura a zany who aspires

To be an under-conjuror Or journey-man astrologer A few vigorous touches of mock-heroic description introduce to us Magnano the tinker, lover of Trulla, Cerdon the cobbler, armed with his paring-knife, Talgol the butcher, "mortal foe to cows", and Orsin the bear-ward, skilled in medicine, slow of foot and hence

' renowned For stout maintaining of his ground.1

Crowdero the fiddler, flourishing his wooden 1 eg in self- defence when driven to bay by the knight, is a low-comedy creation of the most far-fetched sort. The shrewd Widow with her immense practical joke in the masquerade, and with her views on matrimony is also of a coarse comedy type, like, say, the Nurse in "Romeo".

In the selection and grouping of incidents there is next to no attempt at dramatic order or completeness. The suit of Hudibras to the Widow never really awakens our interest. - 77 m

We do not look beyond the immediate situation as we read of the combats and controversies and madcap escapades of knight and squire in the great cause of Puritanism.

Perhaps the best told of these incidents is the encounter with the Bear and Fiddler, which sets forth the attitude of the puritans towards the practice of bear-baiting

(Part I. Canto II.) The heroic catalogue of the opposing forces is prolonged over several pages, with much circumstance and digression. A stirring piece of declamation on the part of

Hudibras, precedes the attack - a Hannibal's oration in English doggerel, punctuated by rhetorical questions and scraps of

Latin.

Shall we that in the Cov'nant swore, Each man of us, to run before Another still in Reformation, Give dogs and bears a dispensation ? How will dissenting brethern relish it ? What will malignants say ? - videlicet That each man swore to do his best To damn and perjure all the rest I And bid the Devil take the hin'most, etc. Talgol, the butcher, responds with a speech in equally uncompromising terms. These David-and-Goliath preliminaries lead to strife. At the critical moment the knight levels his shot-gun at the head of the enemy. But the fates intervene, through the agency of rust ; the weapon will not discharge.

Throwing it contemptuously from him, Hudibras plies his knightly sword against the butcher's cudgel ; and as in all - 78 - romances of chivalry

Both sides seemed balanced So equal, none knww which was valiant'st. One giant rally of the knight's strength, and the doughty foe just eludes a stroke that had it hit, The upper part of him the blow Had slit, as sure as that below. when something else happens. What happens is that the squire's horse is fomented to create a disturbance, in which the

Knight who has but one stirrup is hurled from his seat and launched upon the back of the bear. But we have to wait for this information while Ralph and Colon, the hostler, engage in deadly combat.

With many a stiff thwack, many a bang Hard crab-tree on old iron rang.

The enraged and terrified bear now tears off his muzzle and breaks away, scattering heddlong both the combatants, and the gloating rabble that had gathered to witness the passage at arms. Crowdero, the fiddler, alone remains to representthe interests of bear-baiting. He advances and proceeds to belabor the prostrate knight, using the only available weapon, his own wooden-leg. This is resented-and resisted by the loyal squire who returning to the ground, overpowers the cripple. Hudibras, awakened from his "swoon", is full of wrath, and it requires two pages of high-flown declamation on - 79 - the part of Ralph, to subdue his master's fierce determination to slay Crowdero on the spot. Finally the command is given

"to bind Crowdero's hands on rump behind And to its former place and use The wooden member to reduce." The Knight rides off the field accompanied by his squire, the fiddle leaning as a trophy against his shoulder, the prisoner hobbling ingloriously behind ; and so makes triumphal entry into the town.

The reductio ad absurdum is ruthless. Not more so is Macaulay's brilliant epigram on the same subject. "The puritans hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators."

The affair with Sidrophel and Whackum if less magnificently, is even more humourously related (Part II, Canto III.). Hudibras in his difficulties is prevailed on to go to the Conjuror for advice. Instead of being quietly satisfied to employ the professor of the black art, the knight engages him in heated disputation, and finally despatches Ralph for

"A constable to seize the wretches."

They are now two to one against our hero, and the conjuror seizes the advantage to attack him with an iron lance. In a trial the offender is disarmed ; Whackum is withheld from escape by flight, and the champion in his triumph mocks his foest with their own terminology - - 80 - "The stars determine You are, my prisoners, base vermin !

But the chief prisoner is crafty. He adopts a Falstaffian policy, and with a stage-speech and groan of agony feigns to die. Shut both his eyes, and stopped his breath And to the life, outKited death. The knight is quite deluded. He decides not to await the issue, but to leave his grim handiwork and desert his squire.

This being resolved, with equal speed And conduct, he approached his steed, And, with activity unwont, Assayed the lofty beast to mount ; Which, once achieved, he spurred his palfrey To get from the enemy and Ralph free. The absurd futility of all the hero's endeavours, the constant occurance of the unexpected, the consistent magnifying of the slightest details, and the broad farcical humour of scene and conduct,- apart from the still more evident wit of expression,- these are the main observations the reader naturally makes on perusal of any of these incidents.

In order to understand "Hudibras" as a work of satire, let us examine more minutely what the author's point of view is, what are the objects of his ridicule, what is his spirit and what is his method.

The puritans are satirized on many other scores than - 81 - as the suppressors of bear-baiting. With unerring and relentles; strokes, Butler lays about him at everything extravagant and absurd connected with Puritanism. It would be foolish to expect to be able to judge Puritanism solely from its manifestations as revealed in Hudibras. A satirist needs no excuse for passing over the admirable qualities of his victims.

His business is to chastise error and folly. Butler may have held unworthy views of good men ; we need not justify his views in order to profit by his book. We do not demand of him a full criticism. We demand of him rather that he should be able to say "Thou aileat here, and here", than that he should draw a faithful and complete picture of all phases of the life he describes. And the glory of "Hudibras" as a satire is that it is unerring, No quality that is admirable, no motive that is worthy, no zeal that is enlightened, is disparaged. It is the pretences of Puritanism rather than its ideals that

Butler seeks to discredit. It is villainy in the garb of holiness, inhumanity pretending to charity, moral cowardice affecting the most scrupulous concern for duty, stupidity masquerading as wit, calculating worldly materialism with an air of fervent gtxptetity spirituality - in a word, every manifestation of that downright hypocrisy which invariably eats its way into the noblest movements as soonas they become successful - this is the basis of his raillery. - 82 -

"Affectation" Fielding contends in his preface to

"Joseph Andrews" "is the only source of the true ridiculous".

Butler before him has seized on this principle, and rendered forever ridiculous the calculating, despicable affectation that was the false side of Puritanism.

Let us illustrate these remarks by a quotation or two :

The hero is seeking excuse for breaking his oath to submit to a whipping. Ralph, called in consultation, easily deduces the pleasant conclusion that

Saint* may claim a dispensation To swear and forswear on occasion from the sophistical syllogism Oaths are but words, and words but wind Too feeble instruments to bind. And besides

If the Devil to serve his turn May tell truth, why the saints should scorn When it serves theirs to swear and lie I think there's little reason why. absolutely conclusive to the willing hearer.

The refinements to which the theme is Carried here, the incisive irony, the smooth use of formal logic and burlesque simile go to make this one of the most telling passages

(Part II. Canto II). Hudibras will debate the question to the bottom; the squire suggests that the whipping be done by proxy, but refuses to act in that capacity ; She dispute grows bitter

?Thes~e words have an echo in Swift's "Tale of .a JEWb" - "Word* *Z are but wind, and therefore learning is but wind. "oros are - 83 -

but ends with due futility in the alarm caused by the din of

an approaching travelling-show.

Again (in Part III Canto I) in the course of a

dialogue between Ralph in disguise and his master who has come,

as a suitor, to the widow's house, occurs a sort of parody

catechism, a true confession of faith extorted from the Knight

by fear, The follovring sample lines will show the trend of the satire.

What's orthodox and true believing Against a conscience ? - A good living. What makes all doctrines plain and clear ? - About two hundred pounds a year, What makes the breaking of all oaths A holy duty ? - Food and clothes. ... What's liberty of conscience I'th' orthodox and genuine sense ? - 'Tis to restox^e with more security Rebellion to its ancient purity. In gart III Canto III there are about a thousand lines devoted to a description of the Rump Parliament and its squabbles.

Names, or pointed allusions to persons,are used freely. The matter of dispute between Presbyterians and Independents is mock­ ingly presented. In this picture of the confusion of counsel

Butler may have had some recollection of a passage in xWither; # Milton, from another standpoint had touched the same theme in "Lycidas" when he scores the hireling clergy. It is also a favourite note in Wither. xIn "An Expofctulatorie Answer to a Derisorie Question Lately made Concerning Peace" fl646), Wither writes : Some With the Parliament partake Some wjtt the King.a party make . . . Some strive for tfus fend some for that (With more of the sor?e)neither know nor care for what. - 84 -

Every individual brother Strove haiv.i to fist against another. Some were for setting up a King And all the rest for no such thing, etc. These chaotic bickerings are of by-gone moment ; but there is salutary criticism here that has its point today as well. He that hath an ear let him hear, among modern councillors, when

Butler speaks of members who are

'tools to intrigue', Who by their precedents of wit Tbut-fast out-loiter and out-sit Can order business underhand. ... Lay public bills aside for private, etc.

We have now noted briefly the nature of those portions of Hudibras which are distinctly inspired by partisan consider­ ations. It must not be forgotten, however, that there are extensive and important sections in which the jest is on those not essentially associated with the Puritan cause. Of the diverse elements which make up these, the literary satire claims at least a brief notice.

There is repeated reference to the extravagances of romance fiction - (the main motive of Butler's model, Don

Quixote.) The confusions and impossibilities in plot, so characteristic of the later romances are thus dealt with :

Some force whole regions in despite 0*Geography, to change their site ; Make former times shake hands with latter. - 85 - The rambling circumlocutions and pedantic nothings that pad these long romances are admirably parodied here and there in the poem.

The balancing of historical evidence in the case of some trifling particulars is conveyed in half-a-dozen stilted lines which show the conflict of manuscript evidence as to whether the mock-warriors advanced at a pace (tollutation) or at a trot

(succussation) JI.II.) Sometimes this elaboration of trifles is scored directly :

And after many circumstances Which vulgar authors in romances Do use to spend their time and wits on To make impertinent description -They got, with muchado, to horse. The extravagant love protestations of the romantic hero are echoed in a mockingly eloquent passage in Part II Canto I.

I'll carve your name on barks of trees With true-love-knots and flourishes.

The poet in some of these couplets closely approaches what might pass for genuine sentiment. In the atmosphere of "Maud" or

"Highland Mary" the logical absurdity of lines like these would not call for remark.

Where'er you tread your foot shall set The primrose and the violet.

But it drops immediately to this sort of thing :

Madam, I do as is my duty Honour the shadow of your shoe-tie.

The age was nbt one of literary criticism, and there is nothing of subtle literary sense expressed in the poem. ~ 86 -

But the castigation ofl dullness is extremely effective. The abuse of rhyiae by some of Butler's contemporaries calls forth tha this oft-quoted jest

They that write in rhyme still make The one verse for the other's sake. Nothing in its kind could be more exquisite than the invocation to the muse of burlesque beginning

Than that with ale or viler liquors „ Did'st inspire Withers, Prynne and Vickars,* How all over-rated dunces must have winced as they recognized themselves scornfully depicted, and their publications jeered at.

The praise0of the author penned B' himself, or wit-insuring friend ; The itch of picture on the front With bays and wicked rhymes upon 't. And Butler has the right to speak. Proud, unpatronized, unrecognized, his very nature would have revolted from such grovelling self-advertisement. It is £ fair enough exposure of literary humbug.

She ways of woman theme of Pope's great mock-heroic tribute.are treated here with all the wit and perception, but not all of that superb delicacy and elegance that are found in the"Rape of the Lock? Butler celebrates the zeal of the sex in the Roundhead caase : They Drew several gifted brethern in And fixed them constant to the party With motivefcn powerful and hearty. . • • What have they done or what left undone That might advance the cause at London? # John Vicars - (1580-1652) -usher at Christ's HosoifclwtPactq pampuleta and .doggerel, poems. _ _ _...* __.._ - 87 -

But he knows woman in another sphere than that of political agitation :

You wound like Parthians while you fly And kill with a retreating eye, Retire the more the more we press, To draw us into ambushes, Reference to female adornment so elaborately treated by Pope is wot wanting here.

So woman to surprise us spread p The borrowed flags, of white and red. Than their old grandmothers the Picts. The Hudibrastic doctrine that marriage should be by seizure. though backed by the classical example and the logical

"because" and "therefore", is answered in unyielding terms in "The Lady's Answer to the Knight," This is something of the spirit of the modern suffragette :

All the privilege you boast Or falsely usurped, or vainly lost Is now our right, etc. The Lady in her "Andwer" spins long, diffuse arguments in the whimsical manner of some of the 17th. Century essayists.

Thus in her defence of the right of the fair "to share vdth art the triumph" of her charms, she enters on a diverting passage in praise of Art as opposed to Nature.

How dull and rugged ere 'tis ground And polished, looks a diamond. ... The whole world without art and dress Would be but one great wilderness.

On the whole thevWidow is a dold, shrewd, selfish worldling. - 88 - She is quite disdainful, too, of her crack-brained suitor ; she twits and tricks him cleverly, and shows no inclination to consider seriously his proposals. ^None receive a more merciless flaying in Hudibras than the legal class, typified by the unscrupulous pettifogger to whom the knight appeals for counsel in his proposed lawsuit against Sidrophel and the Widow ;

An old dull sot who took the clock For many years at Bridewell dock ; and who now

Let out the stocks and whipping-post And cage, to those who gave him most. He cajoles his client into a serene assurance of success, and instructs him in all the means of conducting the prosecution.

Re is to secure witnesses who will "swear to anything you please", and jurymen who will let out their ears to hire, another to engage in correspondence with the widow, filling the unased spaces of her letters with language that would constitute a promise to wed her suitor,

Till with her worldly goods and body, 'Spite of her heart, she has endow'd ye.

Butler is concerned too with the quackeries of astrology and magic. Sidrophel and Whackum make it their profession :

To pump and wheedle,

And men with their own keys unriddle To make them to themselves give answers For which they pay the necromancers.

The magician volubly extols his art, citing numerous historical ~ 89 - cases of its effic s^.cy, and arguing with delightful defiance of reason. These arguments Hudibras characterizes as far from satisfactory T'establish and keep up your factory. The futility of speculation about life in the moon and planets, a form of scientific imagination common in the literature of imaginary voyages, is made the subject of play­ ful satire in the same scene. We have a definite reference to

Bishop Wilkin's "Discovery of a New World in the Moon" written nearly thirty years previously.

Have we not lately in the moon Found a new world to th' old unknown ? And the various and conflicting ideas of the universe held by ancient and modern scholars are humourously detailed.

These examples give some idea of the range of

Butler's satire, andthe effectiveness of his method, His horizon is not that of a mere partisan. He is an observer of humanity, shrewd and alert to detect its shams and vanities.

He is a wise reader, a sensible critic, a student of affairs, one who has all the marks of rationality and mental balance ; yet with a pale cast of pessimism.

"Hudibras" eludes literary criticismT from the fact - 90 ~ that it is virtually unique. There is no other successful work in the language at all closely resembling it. Especially is this true of the poem in regard to its expression.

The metre is a dogg erel form of the octosyllabic rhymed couplet of L»Allegro", Chaucer's "The Book of the

Duchesse" and the 13th. Century romance of "The Owl and the

Nightingale". Cleveland and others had already used the form in doggerel ; Wither frequently employs it in all seriousness of purpose but with absurd effect. In Butler's use of it, there is absolute freedom from concern for strictly poetical expression.

To gain variety an unaccented syllable is very often added :

He was a monster with huge whiskers More formidable than a Switzers. And this 'feminine ending' may be extended to include a second unaccented syllable, e.g. :

T'establish and keep up your factory.

The unit of sense is usually the single couplet, The rhymes are well executed and are on the whole the most pronounced feature of the style. There are ingenius turnings of phrase and the most fantastic reach of sense to secure the needed syllable and amusing departures withal, from exact correspondence in sound.

Thus we have "ancients" rhyming with "man chance", "day" with

"algebra","tall lads" with "ballads", "flambeay" with "damn'd blow", "disparage" with "plum-porridge" and countless like pleasantries. Sometimes these become strained beyond the point - 91 - of being amusing, "Windows" is not even a tolerable approach to "within doors", "shameful" has little sound relation with

"example", "headlong" and "Bedlam", "opera" and"Popery" go badly as rhymes even in doggerel. But these form the exception, not the rule. The amplitude of Butler's vocabulary of rhyme enables him to treat us constantly to a sensation of surprise . *w +mmmmm**m~m**m*»^am*m*mmmmmmt**~*i**imitB*^*~*m^***mm^»*^**'^*'^ This is one of the most notable qualities of the poem.

We cannot guess the ending of the second line from the first.

HadtsiB We read :

Madam, I do as is my duty remembering how many dull poets - and some of the best as well - have regularly rhymed"duty" with "beauty". But it is not in

Butler to be usual. He strikes out in an entirely unexpectable way, and completes the couplet with

Honour the shadow of your shoe-tie.

This sort of thing is one of the chief attractions of true burlesque. It is the very fibre and substance of "Hudibras".

Where else in our literature, unless it be in "Don Juan", do we find anything of this quality ? It is Butler's own. Donne and

Hall tried it, but the result is to lose wit in ingenuity.

The diction of "Hudibras" is plain and vigorous.

There is something of the trenchant keenness of Swift's prose, an analogous frankness and refusal to employ euphuisms. - 92 -

The burlesque form, too, admits of glorious liberties in the use of language. The manner of speech of the hero, for instance, is described in a way that scourges a puritan mannerism, and at the same time conveniently licenses the author to vary his terse Saxon with occasional grandiloquent patches and scraps of school Latin.

When he pleased to showft, his speech With loftiness of sound was rich : A Babylonish dialect Which learned pedants much affect. It was a parti-coloured dress Of patched and pye-balled languages ... It had an odd promiscuous tone, etc. And in the dialogue we find the Knight remarking Twice I In one day veni, vidi, vici. Some of these Latin spots are but ingenious translations of English that would not run into metre :

Have not we enemies plus satis That, cane et anga© pejus, hate us ?

No trickster in language could be more successful in the mingling of English and foreign phrases in metrical composition.

Grammar-book Greek words, are several ti©es thrown together to form a barbarous coinage. - The contest between dog and bear is spoken of as a Cynarctomachy.

The very choice materials of poetry, the imaginative and the figurative, are ingloriously parodied. Take as an example such a deadly fall as : - 93 -

The sun had long since, in the lap Of Thetis, taken out his nap, . And like a lobster boiled the morn From black to red began to turn(!) A little worse than metaphysical poet ever dreamed perhaps ; yet who has not seen amateur verses in print and enjoying a local recognition,in which scarcely less absurd flights are taken in all seriousness ? Such lines condemn by example the use of strained and flat metaphor.

The humour that prevades the whole work is neither the good-natured banter of Addison not the consuming bitterness of Swift. It is rather the wilful sportiveness of one who is toying with an enemy. Severe as the arraignment is, it is delivered with no violence, - rather with that insinuating grace that renders satire effective - (the thing which Cleveland lacked.) There is no loss of temper, no covert pleading for recognition, no whimper of neglect, nothing that detracts from the author's attitude of dignity and superiority. Personalities these are : some of the personal items are stinging enough.*

But they are flung about with apparent unconcern. The absence of any subjective element is, in fact, one of the remarkable characteristics of the poem. Butler was already in 1663 disappointed in his hopes of preferment and unfortunate in his domestic life. But he determines to be entertaining and not rancourous ; we look almost in vain for any element of surliness or discontent. - 94 -

No writer is more inclined to express himself in wise saws. Many of the proverbs contained in "Hudibras" are still well known, and more are worth knowing.

The gray mare's the best better horse, is a commonplace everywhere. Most of us have heard, too, that

When disputes are wearied out •Tis interest still resolves the doubt. and that

Carnal seamen in a storm Turn pious converts and reform, (a libel on the hardened sailor for whom s

There is a subtle turn in this form of a perennial charge against the medical profession : and as the prince Of poets, Homer, said long since A skilful leech is better far Than half an hundred men of war.

In view of these observations on "Hudibras" as a satire and as a poem of wit, we cannot afford to regard the work as one thoughtlessly or superficially wrought. Diverting scenes and welling merriment do not detract from its under­ lying seriousness and wisdom. Almost every page of it has the proofs of profound study and laborious effort. There is depth beneath the spafckle.

It is a common charge against "Hudibras" that it - 95 -

palls on the interest, that it is only readable in short

portions. This is no doubt the experience of most readers,

Pepys could scarcely force himself to peruse it. But it must

be borne in mind that "Hudibras" shares this defect, if defect

it is, with almost every long poem in the language. And the

value of a piece of literature is not surely to be measured by

the number of pages of it we can swallow at a sitting. In fact,

it is often the case that the richer the fare is, the less

largely do we partake. Dr. Johnson's objection to "Hudibras"

that the dialogue is weak and undramatic, is a true criticism.

Conversations are often prolonged unduly, while action waits;

as a narrative poem, it lacks action. But while this is clearly

true, it must also be remembered that suspense of action within

certain limits contributes to the humour of the work. The

constant promise of deeds that never materialize, the futility

of effort, the much ado about nothing, the aimless blustering

and debate, these are a part of the design, a part of the

essential machinery of Butler's ridicule. Burlesque is not the

field for magnificent dramatic action and svreeping movement. Its

humour is partly drawn from the defeat and hindrance of action,

from situations which delay their resolution, and from the nlav of debate in which things trivial are discussed with a mock- seriousness which is a protest against the pedantic and affected in learning, - sparks flying right and left the while at an

N #P^pys« Diary, ov.28.1663 - 96 -

sorts of abuses.

The originality of Butler ends, however, in his use of words and invention of small incidents. The fundamental conception of Knight and Squire engaged in burlesque encounters, comes of course from "Don Quixote". And there are marks in detail as well, of some indebtedness to Cervantes. The fact thit

Don Quixote is a caricature of the romantic hero is reflected in "Hudibras", who, though mainly a militant Presbyterian shares the extravagances of language, the equipment and the escapades of the type. In the largeness of the hero's schemes, the futility of his enterprises, the courting of a defiant woman, and the wheedling and cunning of the Squire there are correspondences. "Rosinante" is a stfced after Hudibras' own heart. And the idea of the whipping of Ralph as a substitute for his master, is directly borrowed - in spite of the fact that no such mode of punishment was employed in England in

Butler's time.

"Hudibras" bears some reaemblance in the range and tone of the satire to the French work in prose and verse entitled "Satyre Menipee" (1594), in which princes, churchmen, lawyers and public characters and institutions in general are ridiculed. And if foreign example was needed for the use of his form, Butler found it in the »Virgne Travestj" (1648) of h&e *toWy»ous work of a group of whom the lead in* « -™I "" Pierre Le.Roy. reading spirit was - 97 - Paul Scarron, a work with which we may suppose he was acquainted. Scarron retells in doggerel the incidents of the

Aeneid with many random references to contemporaneous events.

Of later poets, it would be interesting to know how familiar with this work was the author of "Tarn O'Shanter".

Here the same metre is used, yet the poetry is of a far differ­ ent order. The execution has none of the peculiarities of doggerel. The narrative is carried with a fine dramatic sense that was not within Butler's grasp. The moral is broad and non-partisan in the Scottish poem ; so little emphasised indded that we never think of it till we read it appended at the close. Burns is mainly anxious to tell a good story.

The hero is no impotent victim of grave delusion : he is Burns himself in his wine-inspired imaginings,

O'er all the ills of life victorious.

Yet there are common elements in the mock heroic machinery and the playful magnifying of trifles ; and more important, some probable relation in language.

When chapman billies leave the street And drouthy neebors, neebors meet, sounds like a conscious reversal of the first lines of

"Hudibras".

When civil dudgeon first grew high And men fell out, they knew not why.

But the greatest rival of "Hudibras" as a satirical - 98 - poem is undoubtedly "Don Juan". There are many points of comparison. The plot of each consists of desultory incidents, the adventures of a hero who is used as a medium through which to satirize things deserving. Byron vi#s with Butler in the employment of quips and cranks of diction and phrase, torturing of rhymes, and all the attributes of true doggerel.

Byron*s adoption of a more dignified metre enables him to soar to great heights, from which he "tumbles down" with heartrending effect on some readers. There is nothing of this sort in Butler. In point of view, also, the works are totally different. Byron attacks institutions which Butler would have upheld. Don Juan is largely a subjective creation ; and we have noted the absence of any subjective element in "Hudibras".

Byron's is, nevertheless, a far less real hero, - a flippant clever creature of fortune, thoroughly disillusioned, owning no ideals, equally restless and purposeless. And while the versatility of the earlier poet displays itself in the apt use of quotation and allusion in fields literary and historical, that of Byron is employed in the rapid, dramatic handling of scene and action, and in sympathetic description of nature.

Opinions of "Hudibras" will vary with the point of view of the critic. Prof.Gosse* calls it "a barbarous, and ^Short History of Modern English Literature. - 99 - ribald production", while Dr. Saintsbury# praises its

"acrobatic rhyme". Mrs? Browning thought it antagonistic to poetry. Countless readers have enjoyed its wit and -wisdom, and would declare it well worth writing. No one will class it among great poems. But a mediocre poem may sometimes be a great book ; and such is this one. Sound and useful criticism of things ; learning, observation, wisdom, - these make it such a book as ought not to be forgotten. Scarce any work better gives answer to the essential question : Does the author succeed in doing what he has tried to do ? "Hudibras" is a unique production ; the vrork of one who was, to quote from the

Latin inscription on his grave : scriptorum in suo genere primus et postremus. - 100 - To this immortal satire there was no adequate reply.

Apart from Butler's own fearless lines "On the Licentious Age of Charles II" the anti-Cavalier satire of any merit is confined to the work of Andrew Marvell. Through the influence of

Milton, of whom he was a kindred spirit in politics and theology,

Marvell enjoyed the position of assistant Latin Secretary from

1557 to the Restoration. As early as 1650 he had indulged in a contemptuous satiric poem on the occasion of Thomas May*s death. The latter, on being disappointed in his aspirations of the Laureateship, had turned against the court party and supported the Roundheads. Marvell*s trenchant line,

Most servile wit and mercenary pen, has been recalled by most writers who mention May. But it was in the same year that Marvell celebrated the Protector's return from Ireland. And three years later, a fully persuaded

Roundhead, he satirizes the Dutch friends of Charles II, in

"The Character of Holland". This is a tedious piece, marked by many puns and many commonplace jests on the inhabitants of

Holland and their occupations. He calls them "half" not

"whole-anders" (Hollanders), and identifies the Dutch word

"heeren" (gentlemen) with "herring". The close has a ring of defiance, and a suggestive metaphor at the expense of the exiled

Charles. And while Jove governs in the highest sphere Vainly in hell let Pluto domineer. - 101 - After the Restoration the notorious vices of court life roused in the pure-spirited poet the utmost disgust.

He resorted to plain accusation and strong invective ; as

Mr. A.H.Bullen says in the Chambers Cyclopedia, "he became more scurrilous than a fishwife." To protect himself, he brought out his poems anonymously ; but it was an open secret that he was disaffected. (This fact caused the disallowal on the part of the King;of a tribute to his memory in the form of a tomb-stone which had been offered by the town of Hull.)

The more serious of these satires show the poet calling for higher ideals, a worship of real heroes. In

"Britfcnnia and Raleigh" he brings the Elizabethan adventurer and apostle of freedom to hold dialogue with the nation who declares her woes :

A colony of French possess the court ; ... Such shiny monsters ne'er approached a throne Since Pharaoh's days, nor so defied a crown. Raleigh urges Britannia to make another effort to save the King from his companions, and she asks him to teach the youth of England how arts and arms in thy young days Employed our youth, not taverns, stews and plays. and to give them admiration for the Talbots, Sidneys, Veres

Drake, Cavendish, Blake, who are described as

True sons of glory, pillars of the state. - 102 -

"Nostradmus Prophecy" exemplifies the poet's method of

blunt and outspoken accusation. "Instructions to a Painter

about the Dutch Wars" (1667) is a bald exposure, in crude, near-

indecent imagery, of the court circle, and

With what small arts the public game they play.

In "Royal Resolutions" the King is pictured planning beforehand the actual conditions of his reign :

Then Charles without acre Did swear by his Maker, ... I'll have a religion all of my own Whether Popish or Protestant shall not be known, And if it prove troublesome, I will have none. This, and the ballad on the Lord Mayor's presentation to the

King and Duke of York of the freedom of London, are lightly witty pieces.

Perhaps the most vigorous and effective of these short satires is the one entitled "A Dialogue between Two Horses"

(1674) in which Marvell uses the animal satire type, pfcobably under the influence of his contemporary Lafontaine, whose

"Fables" had been published six years earlier. The two horses are those ofbthe equestrian statues of Charles I and Charles II at Charing Cross and Wool-church respectively. The marble horse at Wool-church and his brazen fellow are provoked to speech by the abuses of the times. They draw a vivid picture of the internal corruption, vice and extravagance of the court where « . None get preferment but who will betray Their country Jo ruin. - 103 - The King has large revenues, but fails to pay his debts. The uselessness of the navy, the foolishness of plenipotentiaries sent abroad, the bribing of Commoners, are exposed in sprightly doggerel. The tone is that of defiance. Charing warns Wool- church to beware of punishment but the reply is

I'll prove etoery tittle of what I have said.

And while the former King had fought desperately, the present one has fallen so low that he 'will not fight unless for his queans.'

Marvell is loyal to Cromwell, and bitter against the

Stuarts.

I freely declare it, I am for Old Noll ; Though his government did a tyrant resemble He made England great, and his enemies tremble. The situation will only be mended When the reign of the line of the Stuarts is ended.

The lilt and flow of the ballad metre here remind the reader of the pastoral dialogue of passages in "The Shpherd's Calender." - 104 - The partisan poetry of Roundhead and Cavalier has now been surveyed. We have read in/it the thoughts and feelings of representative men in one of the most eventful periods of

English history. To the student of history, all literature is worth notice, but such as this is of the utmost importance.

It reveals the very heart of the drama that men were enacting.

To the seeker after literary food there is here at least a wholesome change of diet alike from the unsubstantial love- poetry of the period, and from the heavier theological strain.

The effect of poetry on the issues of a partisan movement is of course not capable of being definitely estimated.

What dashed hopes of the Cavaliers were revived by martial or

Mirthful songs of Brome or Martin Parker, what zeal and resolution were kindled at Wither*s flame or Milton's furnace, no man knoweth. That such effect should be measurable were no surety of the permanent merit of a poem. It is not the chief glory of poetry, in one moment of political upheaval,

To save the Athenian walls (Prom ruin bare.

We feel in the application of poetry to such an end, an unhappy localization and confinement of genius.

This is not to the same extent true of poetry as product of a partisan movement. There is more of the inevitable in it. The poet sings because he has no other vent for his feelings, now that he cannot put them into action for the cause. - 105 -

Hero worship, triumph, sympathy, lamentation, bitterness, contempt, - these he embodies in telling verse.

No one would venture to claim that we find treasures of the highest poetry in the field of our discussion. No one would expect that $f partisan work. There is but little of the material for which we can claim permanent merit. We are justified in making such a claim for all of Milton's contribut­ ions. Aside from the interest that is reflected upon them by

"Paradise Lost" the political sonnets have high intrinsic merit,

Dryden*s"Heroic Stanzas" are mainly of interest n*' literature. for the fact that they form his initial work. Wither, who had an enviable reputation in pastoral, won only condemnation and contempt in political poetry. Cowley's best work is not tinged with politics. Cleveland, not }ret properly edited, has been unwarrantably neglected. But his work is injured by its vehemence ; he is toojblindly ardent a partisan to write a true psalm of strife, Brome, too, resting his reputation solely on pax-ty poems, has won small fame. Marvell, though better knovm, is still little read except by the special student. Butler alone, and in only one vrork, has found readers in every generation since to enjoy his trenchant drollery.

To say that in mast of their political work these men failed to ppoduce anything of broad or permanent interest is not to condemn them as witless rhymers. They contrived to - 106 - wring from events such poetry as the events contained. They gathered about the one chief hero of the Civil War, and, from whatever motive, at least with insight and appreciation, sang his deeds. And they were no less wide awake to the ills and needs of the state than were her professed physicians. Far from being plaster saints themselves, they yet compare favourably for earnestness and moral force, with the rank and file of the men of war and counsel on either side. Their work, indeed, was as useful as statesman's work. Strafford and Falkland, Pym and Cromwell, - what have they wrought into existence more freedom-giving than Milton's sonnets ? What have they chained or shattered more worthy of being thus treated than the sham and cant of which "Hudibras" makes fragments ? - 107 - VVPftKS <>f REFERENCE: ,

Besides editions of poets, the following are the principal works which have been used for reference in this thesis.

THE DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY.

CHAMBERS' CYCLOPEDIA OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.

COURTHOPE : History of English Poetry. Vol.III.

DOWDEN : Puritan and Anglican.

MORLEY : First Sketch of English Literature.

MOULTON : Library of Literary Criticism.

WORKS OF THE ENGLISH POETS FROM CHAUCER TO COWPER (1810) (with Johnson's Lives.)

MASSON : Life of Milton in connexion with the Story of His Time. GREEN : Short History of the English People.

Gardiner \ History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate.