Gay, frolic verse for idle hours, Light as the foam whence Venus sprang; Strains heard of old in courtly bowers, When Nelly danced and Durfey sang. NOTE.-Seven Hundred and Eighty Copies printed for England and America, each num bered as issued, and type distributed. No. 759 TH belonged, with few exceptions, to the first half of the seventeenth century. In the present volume I have attempted to deal with the lovepoetry of the Restoration and Revolution. Manners were loose in the days of "old Rowley," and poets too frequently indulged in ribaldry.1 No sensible reader will tolerate the foul and tedious grossness of the abandoned Rochester; and the obscenities of Restoration Drolleries have no place in honest literature. Who would care to watch a crew of goldfinders dancing round the shrine of Venus Cloacina? By all means let us shun such unedifying spectacles; but we need not wrap a thick cloak of prudishness about us and put on 1 Professor Alexandre Beljame, in the early chapters of his learned and valuable work Le Public et les Hommes de Lettres en Angleterre au Dix-huitième Siècle, discusses this subject very fully. a vinegar aspect. I like to see the Muse in good humour. Prior's lightest verses do not offend me, and I am enlivened by Sedley's gaiety. A few of the poems here collected may occasionally pass the bounds of strict decorum; but it will be found that these delinquencies (never of a violent character) are atoned by some happy jerk of fancy or playful sally of wit. The Restoration was not one of the great ages of English poetry. Even in the poorest of Elizabethan dramatists and lyrists we find flashes of Shakespearean imagination, stray breaths of divine harmony, touches of romantic tenderness. But one may read Shadwell's plays (and they are well worth reading) from end to end without once catching a note of higher poetry. Shadwell is thoroughly representative of his age; he was the Ben Jonson of the Restoration,-Jonson stripped of his graces. Of the noble dramatists-" the giant race before the flood"-Shirley alone survived. Oldys tells how "young persons of parts" used to resort to Chapman in his declining days "as a poetical chronicle"; but no such homage was paid to Shirley by the wits of the Restoration. The author of The Lady of Pleasure and The |