cealed in his beloved obscurity," he tried to farm his own land; he seems to have been unlucky in the enterprise. One summer evening in 1667, he stayed out in his fields, superintending his haymakers, too late, and became soaked with the dew. He caught a severe cold, of

which he died on the 28th of July. Charles II., in tardy recognition, exclaimed, "Mr. Cowley has not left behind him a better man in England!" He was buried by the side of Chaucer and Spenser in Westminster Abbey. Cowley was a very honest man, beloved by his friends, faultless in his public and private conduct; he was consumed, as few men have been, by the burning ambition for a sound literary reputation. If his life had not been broken into and ravaged by political events which destroyed all his leisure through the best years of his youth, Cowley would probably have made very substantial contributions to literature. His

Essays (published in 1668) proved his rare command of simple prose.

Dedicatory Verses to Cowley's Poetical Blossoms

But the root of the matter was not quite in him, and it is doubtful

whether we have lost much by the enforced disturbance of his plans.

FROM "ON THE DEATH OF MR. CRASHAW."

Pardon, my mother church, if I consent

That angels led him when from thee he went,

For even in error sure no danger is,

When join'd with so much piety as his.

Ah, mighty God, with shame I speak't and grief,
Ah, that our greatest faults were in belief!
And our weak reason were even weaker yet,
Rather than thus our wills too strong for it.
His faith perhaps in some nice tenets might
Be wrong; his life, I'm sure, was in the right;
And I myself a Catholic will be,

So far at least, great saint, to pray to thee!

Hail, bard triumphant! and some care bestow

On us, the poets militant below!

Opposed by our old enemy, adverse chance,
Attacked by envy, and by ignorance,

Enchain'd by beauty, tortured by desires,

Expos'd by tyrant-love to savage beasts and fires.
Thou from low earth in nobler flames didst rise,
And like Elijah, mount alive the skies.
Elisha-like (but with a wish much less,
More fit thy greatness, and my littleness)

Lo, here I beg (I whom thou once didst prove

So humble to esteem, so good to love)

Not that thy spirit might on me doubled be,

I ask but half thy mighty spirit for me;

And when my muse soars with so strong a wing,

'Twill learn of things divine, and first of thee to sing.

He

Sir John Denham (1615-1669), son of a knight of the same name, of Little Horsely, in Essex, was born in 1615, in Dublin, while his father was Chief Baron of the Exchequer in Ireland. The Denhams came over to England in 1617, the father receiving a high judicial appointment, and the future poet was put to a London grammar school. In 1631 he entered Trinity College, Oxford, as a gentlemancommoner; he was now "a slow, dreaming young man, more addicted to gaming than study." Denham entered at Lincoln's Inn, married in 1634, and was called to the Bar in 1638; in which year his father died, and left him a fortune, a great part of which he dissipated in gambling. was high sheriff of Surrey and governor of Farnham Castle when the Civil War broke out, and he took the Royalist side. Having given no evidence of a turn for poetry, he "broke out like the Irish Rebellion, three score thousand strong, when nobody was aware or in the least suspected it," as Waller said, by publishing in 1642 his tragedy of The Sophy and his famous topographical poem Cooper's Hill, both anonymous. It was on these works, and on these alone, that his great reputation was so long sustained. Denham retired to Oxford to the king, and he was engaged in personal attendance on various members of the royal family until 1652. In 1650 he took the perilous journey to Poland, and brought back £10,000 for Charles II. from his Scotch subjects there. Early in 1652 Denham came back to London, but, his estates having been confiscated, he was glad to accept the hospitality of the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton, and lived very quietly until the Restoration. When the king came back, Denham was made surveyor-general of His Majesty's Buildings, and was knighted at the Coronation. He appears to have become for a while insane, after a second marriage. Lady Denham died in January 1667, and her husband recovered his mental health, but not

his spirits, and died in his office at Whitehall in March 1669. He was buried, close to
Chaucer, Spenser, and Cowley, in Poets' Corner. No other publication of Denham's
needs be mentioned here; he lives, if he lives at all, in The Sophy and in Cooper's
Hill. It is in the latter that the
famous lines occur which have so often
and so effectively been quoted and
parodied :-

"O could I flow like thee, and make thy

stream

My great example, as it is my theme! Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;

Strong, without rage; without o'er-
flowing, full."

These justly celebrated lines cannot,
however, have aided in the original
popularity of the poem, since they are
not found in the early editions of it;
it is believed that they occur for the
first time in the sixth impression
(1655) of Cooper's Hill.
Sir John
Denham collected his poems just be-
fore his death, in 1668.

It is in verse that we can study, far more easily than in prose, the crisis in English literature which we have now reached. That there is a distinction between the manner of Wilkins and of Tillotson, for instance, Title-page of Sir John Denham's "Cooper's Hill," First Edition, 1642 can be maintained and proved, yet to insist upon it might easily lead to exaggeration. But no one with an ear or an eye can fail to perceive the difference between Herrick and Denham; it cannot be too strongly affirmed; it is external as well as intrinsic, it is a distinction of form as well as essence. Denham, to put it otherwise, does not very essentially differ as a versifier from such a poet as Falconer, who lived one hundred and twenty years later. But between him and his exact contemporary Crashaw a great gulf is fixed; they stand on opposite platforms of form, of sentiment, of aim. In the years immediately preceding the Commonwealth, literature fell very low in England. But we must not forget that it was a composite age, an age of variegated experiments and highly coloured attempts. One of these deserves a certain prominence, more for what it led to than what it was.

So long as the drama reigned among us, prose fiction was not likely to Novels flourish, for the novel is a play, with all the scenery and the scene-shifting added, written for people who do not go to the theatre. But Sidney's example was still occasionally followed, and in the middle of the seventeenth

Milton

century the huge romances of the French began to be imported into England and imitated. The size of the originals may be gathered when it is said that one of the most popular, the Cléopâtre of Calprenède, is in twenty-three tomes, each containing as much as a volume of a Mudie novel. The English translations began to be very numerous after 1650, a version of the Grand Cyrus, in nearly 7000 pages, enjoying an immense success in 1653. It is difficult to speak of these pompous, chivalric romances without ridiculing them. A sketch of the plot of one reads like a burlesque. The original works of the English imitators of these colossal novels are of inferior merit to the original products of the Rambouillet school; the unfinished Parthenissa, composed in "handsome language" by Lord Orrery in 1654, is the best known of the former. The great vogue of these romances of chivalry was from 1650 to 1670, after which they were more or less merged in the "heroic" plays in rhymed verse which Dryden made popular. Their principal addition to literature was an attempt to analyse and reproduce the rapid emotional changes in the temperament of men and women, thus vaguely and blindly preparing the way for the modern realistic novel of psychology, and, more directly, for the works of Richardson. They formed the main secular reading of English women during the final decade preceding the Restoration, and in their lumbering diffuseness and slackness they exemplify, to an almost distressing degree, the main errors into which, notwithstanding the genius of one or two individuals, and the high ambition of many others, English literature had sunken.

Between 1645 and 1660 the practice of literature laboured under extraordinary disabilities. First among these was the concentration of public interest on political and religious questions; secondly, there was the suspicion and enmity fostered between men, who would otherwise have been confrères, by these difficulties in religion and politics; thirdly, there was the languor consequent on the too prolonged cultivation of one field with the same methods. It seems paradoxical to say of an age that produced the early verse of Milton and the prose of Browne and Jeremy Taylor, that it was far gone in decadence; but these splendid and illuminating exceptions do not prevent the statement from being a correct one. England needed, not a few beacons over a waste of the waters of ineptitude, but a firm basis of dry land on which to build a practicable style for daily service; and to get this the waters had to be drained away, and the beautiful beacons extinguished, by the cataclysm of the Restoration.

Before we consider, however, whither that revolution was to whirl the literature of this country, we must deal again with a stationary figure which belonged neither to the bankrupt past nor to the flushed and animated future. During twenty years Milton, but for an occasional sonnet, had said. farewell to poetry. Not that the power had left him, not that the desire and intention of excelling in verse had passed away, but because other aspects of life interested him more, and because the exact form his great song should ultimately take had not impressed itself upon him. Milton permitted youth

of the King's Army Northward