When thirsty grief in wine we steep,

When healths and draughts go free,
Fishes that tipple in the deep,

Know no such liberty.

When, like committed linnets, I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetness, mercy, majesty,
And glories of my King;

When I shall voice aloud, how good
He is, how great should be,
Enlarged winds that curl the flood
Know no such liberty.

Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet takc
That for an hermitage;

If I have freedom in my love,

And in my soul am free,

Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.

George Herbert (1593-1633) was the fourth of the ten children of Richard Herbert of Montgomery Castle, and Magdalen Newport of High Ercall, his wife. The poet, whose elder brother was the philosopher EDWARD, afterwards LORD HERBERT OF CHERBURY (1583-1648), was born in his father's castle, on the 3rd of April 1593The father died in 1597, and the mother removed to Oxford; here George was educated at home until 1605, when he was sent to Westminster School, where he remained for four years. In May 1609 he was admitted a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, took his degree in 1613, became a fellow of his college in 1614, and public orator in 1619. This latter office was then "the finest place in the University, though not the gainfullest"; George Herbert discharged its duties with elegance and a grave gaiety until 1627. He proved a subtle and pleasing courtier, and it was his design to prepare himself for political life, and for the office of a Secretary of State. His mother, however, strongly objected to this, and, supported it would seem by Donne, who was her very dear and tried friend, she urged George Herbert rather in the direction of the Church. His conscience was touched, but he seemed at first to have little or no vocation for a holy life. He resigned his offices at Cambridge, however, and withdrew to "a retreat in Kent, where he lived very privately," endeavouring to make up his mind as to his future business. This mental and moral anxiety, and perhaps also the cessation of social duties, greatly impaired his health, and he was threatened with consumption. He was not yet a priest, but already

Lord Herbert of Cherbury

in 1623 he had accepted the lay rectorship of Whitford, and in 1626 the prebend of Leighton Bromswold. This had been followed in 1627 by the death of his adored and saint-like mother. Still George Herbert hesitated before taking the final step, and exactly when he was ordained is still not known. But in 1628, in order to recover his health, he went to stay with his kinsman, the Earl of Danby, at Dauntsey, in Wilts, and there met a cousin, Jane Danvers, who had "become so much a platonic as to fall in love with Mr. Herbert unseen. This was a fair preparation for a marriage," and after some delay they were united on the 5th of March 1629. By this time George Herbert was certainly in orders, and in April 1630 he was presented to the rectory of Fugglestone - cum Bemerton, which he has made so famous. Here, in the brief remainder of his life, almost all his sacred poems were written. Of his holy behaviour in his parish, "an almost incredible story," Izaak Walton has given a beautiful description. He spent his money on having the church restored, and the adjoining chapel adorned. George

George Herbert

Herbert devoted himself with intense concentration to a zealous interpretation of his clerical duties, and almost his only relaxation was a walk, twice a week, into Salisbury and back. His health steadily declined, and, a few weeks before his death, he gave to a friend who waited upon him a little book of MS. poems, which he desired his visitor to give to Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding, to publish or burn as he saw fit. This was the celebrated Temple. George Herbert "lived like a saint, unspotted of the world, full of alms-deeds, full of humility"; and his death, which took place in his rectory of Bemerton, on the 3rd of March 1633, was a portent of edification. Almost his last action was to call for one of his instruments, for he was a great musician, and to play and sing one of his own poems, "The Sundays of Man's Life." The Temple was published (in the first instance for private circulation) immediately after his death, and his prose Remains in 1652; they were among the most successful productions of the seventeenth century. Izaak Walton in 1670 wrote that more than twenty thousand copies of The Temple had been sold "since the first impression." Herbert destroyed his secular poems in MS. when he adopted the religious life.

A word must be spared for THOMAS RANDOLPH, a "son" of Ben Jonson, whose early death seems to have robbed us of a poet of much solidity and intellectual weight. He came nearer, perhaps, than any other man of his time to the sort of work that the immediate successors of Malherbe were just then doing in France; he may, for purposes of parallelism, be not inaptly styled an English Racan. His verse, stately and hard, full of thought rather than of charm, is closely modelled on the ancients, and inspires respect rather than affection. Randolph is a poet for students, and not for the general reader; but he marks a distinct step in the transition towards classicism.

Thomas Randolph (1605-1635) was born at Newnham-cum-Badby in June 1605. He showed from childhood an invincible determination to be a poet and a scholar; "when other boys (his elders) played with nuts, books were his toys." He was educated at Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he resided from 1624 to 1632. His poverty and the irregularity of his life are said to have shortened his days; he early attracted the admiring attention of Ben Jonson, who "ever after called him Son." Evidences of his attachment to Jonson abound in the poetry of Randolph. His Aristippus was printed in 1630, his play of The Jealous Lovers in 1632; these pieces had been played by students at Cambridge. Randolph was visiting his friend, William Stafford, at his house at Blatherwick, in Northamptonshire, when he died, it is not known of what disease; he was buried on the 17th of March 1635. His best writings, namely his comedy of The Muses' Looking-Glass, his pastoral of Amyntas, and his lyrical poems, were posthumously published in 1638, by his younger brother, Robert. Sir Christopher Hatton caused a bust of white marble, wreathed with laurel, to be raised above Randolph's tomb in the aisle of Blatherwick Church. The few anecdotes preserved about Randolph show him to have been a merry companion, ardent in the pursuit of letters, but without affectation or pedantry.

Prose

About 1640 there was an almost simultaneous revival of interest in Revival of prose throughout the country, and a dozen writers of ability adopted this neglected instrument. It is not easy to describe comprehensively a class of literature which included the suavity of Walton, the rich rhetoric of Browne, the arid intelligence of Hobbes, the roughness of Milton, and the easy gaiety of Howell. But we may feel that the reign of Charles I. lacked a Pascal, as that of Elizabeth would have been greatly the better for a Calvin. What the prose of England under the Commonwealth wanted was clearness, a nervous limpidity; it needed brevity of phrase, simplicity and facility of diction. The very best of our prose-authors of that great and uneasy period were apt, the moment they descended from their rare heights of eloquence, to sink into prolixity and verbiage. In escaping mono

Milton as a

tony, they became capricious; there was an ignorance of law, an insensibility to control. The more serious writers of an earlier period had connived at faults encouraged by the pedantry of James I. This second race, of 1640, were less pedantic, but still languid in invention, too ready to rest upon the ideas of the ancients, and to think all was done when these ideas were re-clothed in brocaded language. But as we descend we find the earnestness and passion of the great struggle for freedom reflected more and more on the prose of the best writers. The divines became something more than preachers; they became Protestant tribunes. The evolution of such events as Clarendon encountered was bound to create a scientific tendency in the writing of history-a tendency diametrically opposed to the "sweet raptures and researching conceits" which Wotton thought praiseworthy in the long-popular Chronicle of Sir Richard Baker. Even style showed a marked tendency towards modern forms. At his best Walton was as light as Addison, Browne as brilliantly modulated as Dr. Johnson, while the rude and naked periods of Hobbes directly prepared our language for the Restoration.

Sir Richard Baker (1568-1645), was a Kentish gentleman who was knighted in 1603, fell into great poverty, and about 1635 took shelter from his debts in the Fleet Prison, where he devoted himself to literature. His famous Chronicle of the Kings of England appeared in folio in 1643; this book enjoyed an unparalleled vogue for half a century and more, "being a common piece of furniture in almost every country squire's hall." It has, however, no historical value, and after the revival of history in the eighteenth century, it fell into absolute obscurity. Baker never escaped from the Fleet Prison, but died there on the 18th of February 1645 at a very great age. His autobiography, which might have proved more interesting than all his other writings, was spitefully destroyed by his son-in-law.

Milton as a prose-writer fills us with astonishment. It is the grossest Prose-Writer exaggeration to declare, with Macaulay, that his prose is "a perfect field of cloth of gold," although it certainly has embroidered passages of great sublimity. But these are rare, and the poet who, in Comus, had known how to obtain effects so pure, so delicate, and so graceful that verse in England has never achieved a more polished amenity, deliberately dropped the lyre for twenty years, and came forward as a persistent prose pamphleteer of so rude and fierce a kind that it requires all our ingenuity to see a relation between what he was in 1635 and was again in 1641. Critics have vied with one another in pretending that they enjoy the invective tracts of Milton; they would persuade us, as parents persuade children to relish their medicine, that the Apology for Smectymnuus is eloquent, and Eikonoklastes humorous. They try to convince us that the passion for liberty, which was Milton's central characteristic, is agreeably expressed in the pamphlets on divorce. But, if we are candid, we must admit that these tracts are detestable, whether for the crabbed sinuosity of their style, their awkward and unseemly heat in controversy, or for their flat negation of all serenity and grace.

If