TO A.D. 1625]

GEORGE WITHER

531

Beware; that were a sauciness indeed ;
But if the great ones to offend be bold,
I see no reason but they should be told."

Wither was bold in condemnation as others in offence. While he continued the attack upon self-seeking of the higher clergy, he maintained the office of the bishop, and gave high praise to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London. The Satires, although sharp, were generous; their style was diffuse, but simple, earnest, often vigorous, for Wither had the true mind of a poet. He would tell what he knew,

"And then if any frown (as sure they dare not)

So I speak truth, let them frown still, I care not."

The great ones did frown, and Wither was locked up in the Marshalsea. But he was not to be silenced. He sang on in his cage, and sang plain English, contemning the pedantry of fashion. Wither translated in his prison a Greek poem on "The Nature of Man," besides writing the most manly pastorals produced in James's reign, The Shepheards Hunting : being certain Eclogues written during the time of the Author's Imprisonment in the Marshalsey, and a Satire to the King, in justification of his former Satires. In the "Shepheard's Hunting," we learn how Wither, as Philarete (lover of Virtue), had hunted with ten couple of dogs (the satires in " Abuses Stript and Whipt ") those foxes, wolves, and beasts of prey that spoil our folds and bear our lambs away. But wounded wolves and foxes put on sheep's clothing, complained of the shepherd's hunting, and caused his imprisonment. In his prison, Philarete talked with his friends, kept up his spirit, and was comforted by song. Wither's Motto, Nec habeo, nec careo, nec curo (“I have not, want not, care not")-a line in it says, " He that supplies my want hath took my care" was published in 1618. In 1622 Wither's poems were collected as Juvenilia; and in the same year he published Faire-Virtue, the Mistresse of Philarete, written by Him-selfe. Virtue is here described as a perfect woman, mistress of Philarete (lover of Virtue). This long poem, in seven-syllabled verse, is musical with interspersed songs, including the famous"Shall I, wasting in despair,

Die because a woman's fair !"

and delicately playful with the purest sense of grace and beauty. George Wither takes his own way still, saying:

"Pedants shall not tie my strains

To our antique poets' veins,
As if we in latter days

Knew to love, but not to praise.
Being born as free as these,

I will sing as I shall please,
Who as well new paths may run
As the best before have done."

Wither remained an active writer in the reign of Charles I.; and Francis Quarles, who was four years younger than Wither, produced his best work after the death of James I. Quarles was born in 1592, at Romford, in Essex, educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, and at Lincoln's Inn. He was cupbearer to James's daughter, the Queen of Bohemia, and afterwards served in Ireland as secretary to Archbishop Usher (§ 17). His first publication was in 1620, A Feast for Wormes in a Poem on the History of Jonah, with Pentalogia; or, the Quintessence of Meditation. In 1621 followed Hadassa; or, the History of Queen Esther, these histories being in ten-syllabled couplets, and, in the same measure, Argalus and Parthenia, a poem in three books, founded on a part of Sidney's “Arcadia" (ch. vii. § 44). Then came in 1624, Job Militant, with Meditations Divine and Moral; also Sion's Elegies, wept by Jeremie the Prophet; and, in 1625, Sion's Sonnets, sung by Solomon the King, and periphrased. The writing of Quarles in the reign of James I. consisted, then, of Argalus and Parthenia, and those pieces which were collected into one volume, in 1630, as Quarles's Divine Poems.

29. William Drummond, M.A. of Edinburgh, after four years in France, inherited, in 1610, at the age of twenty-five, his paternal estate of Hawthornden, gave up the study of law, took his ease, and wrote poetry. He joined in the lament for the death of Henry, Prince of Wales; published at Edinburgh, in 1616, Poems: Amorous, Funerall, Divine, Pastorall, in Sonnets, Songs, Sextains, Madrigals, by W. D., the Author of the Teares on the Death of Meliades, (Meliades was the anagram made for himself by the prince from "Miles a Deo "); and in 1617, upon James's visit to Scotland, published Forth Feasting: a Panegyric to the King's Most Excellent Majestie. During the greater part of April, 1619, Drummond had Ben Jonson for a guest, and took ungenial notes of his conversation. In 1623 he published Flovvres of Sion, to which is adjoyned his Cypresse Grove. His sonnets were true to the old form of that

TO A.D. 1625] QUARLES.

DRUMMOND.

OVERBURY

533

kind of poem, and they were not all of earthly love and beauty, for sonnets in the spirit of Spenser's Hymns of Heavenly Love and Beauty (ch. vii. § 77) are among the spiritual poems in Drummond of Hawthornden's "Flowers of Sion."

Sir Thomas Overbury was murdered in 1613, when but thirty-two years old. As a follower of the king's favourite, Carr, he opposed his marriage with the Countess of Essex. The king, wishing to send Overbury out of the way, offered him an embassy to Russia. He refused it, and was committed to the Tower for contempt of the king's commands. There, by the connivance of Lady Essex, Overbury died of poison ten days before the judgment of divorce; and this was followed, as the year closed, by the creation of Carr as Earl of Somerset, and his marriage to the Countess in the Chapel Royal. Bacon devised a masque at Gray's Inn in honour of the marriage. He also took part, in May, 1616, in the trial of the earl and countess for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. The victim of this crime was in repute among the writers of his day for a poem on the choice of a wife, called A Wife now a Widowe, published the year after his murder, in 1614, and reprinted in the same year with the addition of twenty-one characters. To write compact and witty characters of men and women was a fancy of the time, derived in the first instance from Theophrastus, and associated with the quick growth of the drama. Such pithy character writing had been prefixed formally as "The Character of the Persons" to Ben Jonson's "Every Man Out of his Humour;" and the dialogue of the second act of his "Cynthia's Revels," produced in 1600, is chiefly made up of such character writing as that in which Sir Thomas Overbury showed his skill in 1614, and John Earle showed his in 1628. It was the manner of this character writing that suggested to young Milton his lines on the death of Hobson, the University carrier.

30. John Milton was seventeen years old at the end of James's reign, and we may now pass with him into the reign of Charles I. He was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, on the 9th of December, 1608. His father, also a John Milton, was son to a Catholic, of Oxfordshire, perhaps a husbandman, perhaps an under-ranger of Shotover Forest, who had cast him off for changing his religion. Thus the poet's father had settled in London as a scrivener, and prospered. He had a taste for music. In 1601 he had been one of twenty-two musicians who

published twenty-five madrigals, as The Triumphs of Oriana. In 1614, when the poet son was about six years old, the musician father was joined with others in providing music to the Tears and Lamentations of a Sorrowful Soul. Seven years later, as contributor to a book of Psalms, he harmonised the tunes still popular as "Norwich" and "York." Of the tenor part of York tune, it has been said that at one time "half the nurses in England were used to sing it by way of lullaby." Thus the poet's father had musicians among his friends, as well as men like himself earnest in religious feeling. One of these, Thomas Young, of Loncarty, in Perthshire, afterwards a minister in Suffolk, and a man of note among the Puritans, was the boy's first teacher. In 1622, Young, aged thirty-five, went to be pastor of the congregation of English merchants at Hamburg; his pupil had then been for a couple of years at St. Paul's School (ch. vi. § 10). where Mr. Gill was head master, and his son, Alexander Gill, taught under him. Milton was a schoolboy at St. Paul's from 1620 until a few months before the close of the reign of James I. His father too readily encouraged the boy's eagerness for study; he had teaching at home as well as at school, suffered headaches, and laid the foundation of weak sight by sitting up till midnight at his lessons.

At St. Paul's School Milton found a bosom friend in Charles Diodati. The friendship outlasted their boyhood, only death interrupted it. Charles was the son of Theodore Diodati, a physician in good practice in London, who had been born in Geneva, the son of Italian Protestants. His younger brother, Giovanni, uncle of Milton's friend, was still at Geneva, professor there of theology, and had published translations of the Bible into Italian and French. Of such a household came the friend to whom young Milton spoke his inmost thoughts. Charles Diodati left school more than two years before Milton, and went to Trinity College, Oxford, where, in November, 1623, he joined in writing Latin obituary verse upon the death of William Camden. But John Milton and Charles Diodati had their homes in the same town, and their friendship was easily maintained by visits and correspondence. There is a Greek letter written in London from Diodati to Milton, hoping for fine weather and cheerfulness in a holiday the two friends meant to have next day together on the Thames. The surviving children in Milton's home were Anne, the eldest; John; and Christopher, seven years younger than John.' Towards the close of 1624

JOHN MILTON.

BEN JONSON

535

TO A.D. 1625]
Milton's sister, Anne, married Mr. Edward Phillips, of the Crown
Office in Chancery.

In February, 1625, John Milton was admitted at Christ's College, Cambridge, aged two months over sixteen; but he had returned to London before the end of the term, and was there on the 26th of March, writing to his old tutor, Thomas Young, an affectionate letter: "I call God to witness how much as a father I regard you, with what singular devotion I have always followed you in thought." The next day, March 27, 1625, was the day of the death of James I.

B.-REIGN OF CHARLES I.

31. Charles I. came to the throne at the age of twenty-five. Ben Jonson was then fifty years old, Milton not seventeen, and Bacon sixty-four, with but another year to live. John Fletcher (§ 6) died five months after the accession of Charles I.

At the accession of Charles I., Dr. Donne (§ 26) was fifty-two years old, and he lived until 1631; George Chapman (ch. vii. § 98, ch. viii. § 10) was sixty-eight years old, and lived till 1634. John Marston (ch. vii. § 99, 100) died about the same time as Chapman. Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood (ch. vii. § 99), who continued to write plays, lived on till about 1641. Heywood had "an entire hand or a main finger" in 220 plays. John Webster (§ 9) lived throughout the reign of Charles I., and died under the Commonwealth, about 1654.

32. Ben Jonson (ch. vii. § 100, ch. viii. § 5), after the death of James I., was driven to the stage again by poverty. The town did not receive his play, The Staple of News, produced in 1625, with much favour, and at the close of that year the poet had a stroke of palsy. He had bad health during the rest of his life. His play of The New Inn, acted in January, 1630, was driven from the stage; and it was then that Jonson turned upon the playhouse audiences with an indignant ode. At the end of 1631 a quarrel with our first great architect of the Renaissance, Inigo Jones, who invented the machinery for the court masques, deprived Jonson of all court patronage, and in 1632 and 1633 he was compelled to write feebly for the public stage his last plays, The Magnetic Lady and The Tale of a Tub. But after this, court favour and city favour, which also had been withdrawn, were regained for him. He had a pension from court of £100 and The favour of all the good poets of the

a tierce of canary.