when I was forced to entertain such as came to visit me, I tired them with more grave instructions than their mothers, and plucked all their babies [dolls] to pieces, Lady Fanshawe and kept the children in such awe that they were glad when I entertained myself with elder company, to whom I was very acceptable; and, living in the house with many persons that had a great deal of wit, and very profitable serious discourses being frequent at my father's table and in my mother's drawing-room, I was very attentive to all, and gathered up things that I would utter again to great admiration of many, that took my memory and imitation for wit." Much of the verse of the transitional period took ugly and eccentric forms, and is worthy of notice now solely on account of its curiosity. The most impracticable ideas clothed in the most extravagant language, render the philosophical verse of the late Commonwealth perfectly unread able. In HENRY MORE, however, we have some survival of the sinuous sweetness of Spenser; in STANLEY the colours which had flushed so freshly and rosily in the Elizabethan lyrists finally faded away. What was lacking to all these latest verse-writers of the Renaissance was not so much talent or skill, as taste. They had no dignity of fancy, no propriety or harmony of style. And their errors simply made inevitable the change in the whole texture and character of English prose which was, even as they wrote, beginning to be manifested. In the group of so-called English Platonists, the leader and the most gifted with Lucy Hutchinson shire in October 1614, and was the child of Calvinist parents. He proceeded to While yet the world is in her vernal pride; Of precious spicery wafted with soft wind, Their parts, each fair, in fit proportion all John Cleveland (1613-1658), who can hardly be called a poet, was a Cambridge royalist who published The Character of a London Diurnal in 1647, and collected his Poems in 1651. These productions, mainly satirical, were exactly to the taste of the age, and were incessantly reprinted for fifty years. Cleveland's best couplet occurs in a rough attack on the Scotch : John Cleveland "Had Cain been Scot, God would have chang'd his doom, 1 The title of this work is rarely given correctly. The whole "Platonical Song" is entitled Psychodia Platonica, but is made up of "four several poems" or cantos, respectively named Psychozoia, Psychathanasia, Antipsychopannuchia and Antimonopsychia. A strong propensity to literature was discovered in that fantastic couple, William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle (1592-1676) and his Duchess, Margaret Lucas (1624?-1674). The Duke wrote romantic comedies in verse, in which Shirley is believed to have helped him; and he is better remembered by his stately treatise on horsemanship (1667), a very handsome illustrated edition of which had appeared in French, at Antwerp, ten years earlier. The Duke, whom Clarendon describes as "a very fine gentleman," was "neat in shape and exactly proportioned, his stature of a middle size, and his complexion sanguine. The Duchess, who was his second wife, and married him when he was Marquis, William Cavendish, Earl (afterwards Duke) of Newcastle From an Engraving by Holl, after the Picture by Vandyck in 1645, was one of the most eccentric persons of her time; her great delight was in attiring herself in strange and costly garments, the fashion of which she had invented herself. Her most pleasing quality was her frank, absorbed idolatry of her elderly husband, whose Life she wrote during his lifetime (1667). She was the author of no fewer than twenty-six plays, which she published in two folio volumes in 1662 and 1668. Her modesty excused her. In a general prologue she said : "But, noble readers, do not think my plays Are such as have been writ in former days, As Jonson, Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher writ; The Latin phrases I could never tell, But Jonson could, which made him write so well. Greek, Latin poets I could never read, Thomas Stanley (1625-1678), in whom the poetry of artifice and fancy expired, was born at Cum- A specimen of Stanley's rich meandering versification may be given from Cupid "A hundred more, who their old love's review 1 7 |