"Though God be our true glass through which we see
All, since the being of all things is he,

Yet are the trunks, which do to us derive

Things in proportion fit, by perspective

Deeds of good men; for by their living here,
Virtues, indeed remote, seem to be near."

and asks, "Who but Donne would have thought that a good man is a telescope?" Yet naturally, in writing the life of Cowley, he had most to say about the form which the fault took in that writer. Now, to understand Donne's position, it is essential to remember that the poetry of the time of Elizabeth was of two kinds, that of the stage and that of the court. That of the stage was the expression of the national feeling; that of the court was the expression of but a small number of cultivated people familiar with Spanish and Italian literatures, who were already affected by the euphuism which Lyly's "Euphues" (1580) introduced into England by those foreign sources. An example of it may be found in Shakspere's "Love's Labour's Lost," where are these lines (I. i. 163):

"Our court, you know, is haunted

With a refined traveller of Spain:

A man in all the world's new fashion planted,
That hath a mint of phrases in his brain;
One whom the music of his own vain tongue

Doth ravish like enchanting harmony;"

and later in the play the King of Navarre and his lords for

swear

"Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,

Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical;"

and determine to woo henceforth

"In russet yeas and honest kersey noes."

Sidney's "Sonnets" (1591) show the same tendency to

making a display of wit, and Donne carries the tendency very far. The affectations that marked the metaphysical school then were not mere inventions of a later time; they were not a reaction against the vigor of the playwriters they were rather one of the forms in which the renewed intellectual excitement of the Renaissance found expression. The fantastic poetry was coincident in time with the glory of the English stage, and some of the poets, who when they wrote for the court racked heaven and earth for all sorts of conceits, wrote plays which are models of dignity and vigor: Beaumont is an instance. In fact, it is impossible to overlook a certain resemblance between the literary school of the court at the time of Elizabeth and the neo-romantic æstheticism of the present day. The language and emotions of Bunthorne, for instance, may represent for us something which will enable us to understand how euphuism and its results struck our

ancestors.

When the stage was in its prime, the metaphysical school was less prominent: the poems were read, but they do not to our mind stand as representatives of that period. Yet their influence remained; and when the stage lost its glory, and the popular impulse that inspired it took the form of Puritanic zeal, the literature of the court remained true to its old principles of literary affectation, and Cowley (1618-1667) preserved very closely the traditions of the school of Donne. It is easy to turn Cowley into ridicule. Dr. Johnson, as I have said, collected a number of ludicrous bits from his poems. For example:

and this:

"All armed in brass, the richest dress of war

(A dismal glorious sight!), he shone afar.
The sun himself started with sudden fright,
To see his beams return so dismal bright;"

"His bloody eyes he hurls round, his sharp paws
Tear up the ground; then runs he wild about,
Lashing his angry tail and roaring out.

Beasts creep into their dens, and tremble there;
Trees, though no wind is stirring, shake with fear;
Silence and horror fill the place around;

Echo itself dares scarce repeat the sound;"

or this ode to the Muse:

"Go, the rich chariot instantly prepare;
The queen, my muse, will take the air:
Unruly Fancy with strong Judgment trace;
Put in nimble-footed Wit,

Smooth-paced Eloquence join with it;

Sound Memory with young Invention place;
Harness all the winged race:

Let the postilion Nature mount, and let

The coachman Art be set;

And let the airy footmen, running all beside,

Make a long row of goodly pride,

Figures, Conceits, Raptures, and Sentences,

In a well-worded dress;

And innocent Loves, and pleasant Truths, and rueful Lies,

In all their gaudy liveries.

Mount, glorious queen! thy travelling throne,

And bid it to put on," etc.

It is not hard to imagine the emotions with which Dr. Johnson must have read these lines. Yet Cowley was better than his faults. His poem on the death of Hervey contains some fine passages :

"Say, for you saw us, ye immortal lights,

How oft unwearied have we spent the nights,
Till the Ledæan stars, so fam'd for love,

Wonder'd at us from above!

We spent them not in toys, in lusts, or wine;

But search of deep philosophy,

Wit, eloquence, and poetry,

Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine."

While Cowley, after all, did service to the mechanism of literature by his ingenuity, even if, as Dryden said, "he could never forgive any conceit which came in his way, but swept, like a drag-net, great and small," it was Waller who more especially struck out the path which was to be followed for about two hundred years; and to do that is what falls to the lot of but few writers. That Waller should have been the man to do it, is a thought that may arouse the hopes of the most diffident. To us he is simply the author of "Go, Lovely Rose," and the lines “On a Girdle;" his other poems rest untouched on the shelf. Dryden said of him: "The excellence and dignity of rhyme were never fully known till Mr. Waller taught it; he first made writing easily an art, first showed us to conclude the sense, most commonly, in distichs, which in the verse of those before him runs on for so many lines together that the reader is out of breath to overtake it." That is to say, Waller was the first English poet to use the couplet. He began with it in a poem written about 1623 (he was born in 1605, and died in 1687) in a poem, "Of the Danger his Majesty [being Prince] Escaped in the Road at St. Andero ".

"These mighty peers placed in the gilded barge,

Proud with the burden of so brave a charge,

With painted oars the youths began to sweep

Neptune's smooth face, and cleave the yielding deep;
Which soon becomes the seat of sudden war
Between the wind and tide that fiercely jar.
As when a sort of lusty shepherds try
Their force at football, care of victory
Makes them salute so rudely breast to breast,
That their encounter seems too rough for jest;
They ply their feet, and still the restless ball,
Tossed to and fro is urged by them all.

So fares the doubtful barge 'twixt tide and winds
And like effect of their contention finds."

The sea gets rougher, however,

"And now no hope of grace

Among them shines, save in the Prince's face;

The gentle vessel (wont with state and pride

On the smooth back of silver Thames to ride)—"

It will be noticed that boats sail on the "smooth face" of Neptune and on the "smooth back" of rivers

"Wanders astonished on the angry main.

The pale Iberians had expired with fear,
But that their wonder did divert their care,
To see the Prince with danger moved no more
Than with the pleasures of their court before;
Godlike his courage seemed, whom nor delight
Could soften, nor the face of death affright.
Next to the power of making tempests cease,
Was in that storm to have so calm a peace."

Certainly the outlook was bad for poetry when lines such as these should set a fashion. They were the model which all the writers who hoped for success were gradually obliged to follow. I could find passages in Waller's heroic measure less grotesque than this one, of which the sole merit, it seems to me, is technical correctness; and as a favorable specimen I would mention his panegyric on Cromwell. Yet the lines just read have been admired in their day, and may, without extreme unfairness, show what it was that gave him for a time the name of the greatest English poet. In his straining for classical illustrations we see very much the same quality that is to be noticed in Cowley. Waller, in order to convince us that a storm was really severe, tells us, "Great Maro could no greater tempest feign;" and Cowley says that his heart was an Etna, which enclosed Cupid's forge instead of Vulcan's shop. Allusions to the classics were for a long time