The pliant water, moved with anything

Let fall into it, puts her motion out
In perfect circles, that move round about
The gentle fountain, one another raising;
So Truth and Poesy work; so Poesy, blazing
All subjects fall'n in her exhaustless fount,
Works most exactly, makes a true account
Of all things to her high discharges given,
Till all be circular and round as heaven.

And lastly, great Prince, mark and pardon me:

As in a flourishing and ripe fruit-tree,
Nature hath made the bark to save the bole,
The bole the sap, the sap to deck the whole

With leaves and branches, they to bear and shield
The useful fruit, the fruit itself to yield
Guard to the kernel, and for that all those,
Since out of that again the whole tree grows;
So in our tree of man, whose nervy root
Springs in his top, from thence even to his foot
There runs a mutual aid through all his parts,
All join'd in one to serve his Queen of Arts,
In which doth Poesy like the kernel lie

Obscured, though her Promethean faculty

Can create man, and make even death to live,

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For which she should live honour'd. Kings should give
Comfort and help to her that she might still
Hold up their spirits in virtue, make the will
That governs in them to the power conform'd,
The power to justice; that the scandals, storm'd
Against the poor dame, clear'd by your fair
Your grace may shine the clearer. Her low place,
Not showing her, the highest leaves obscure.
Who raise her raise themselves; and he sits sure
Whom her wing'd hand advanceth, since on it
Eternity doth, crowning virtue, sit.

grace,

The prince full of high promise to whom this dedication was addressed died in the following year, in November, 1611, and was lamented in verse by many of the poets.

We have lyric verse also from a pair of dramatists who worked together, and whose plays, like those of Cyril Tourneur, belong entirely to the reign of James I., while most of their fellow-playwrights either began under Elizabeth, or ended under Charles I., or, like Ben Jonson, wrote in all three reigns. There was ten years' difference of age between them: John Fletcher, the elder, born in 1576, survived his friend nine years, continued to write, and died at the end of James's reign in 1625, aged forty-nine. Francis Beaumont died at the age of thirty, in 1616, the same year as Shakespeare. Their first printed verses were in praise of Ben Jonson, prefixed in 1607 to the first edition of his "Volpone," and for the remaining nine years of Beaumont's life, from twentyone to thirty, they wrote plays together. Beaumont's poetical taste, it was said, controlled, in their joint work, Fletcher's luxuriance of wit and fancy.

He is ever good, and must

Thus be honoured.

Daffodillies,

Roses, pinks, and lovéd lilies, Let us fling,

Whilst we sing,

Ever holy,

Ever holy,

Ever honoured, ever young!

Thus great Pan is ever sung.

The next is a song from "The Mad Lover:"

THE BATTLE OF PELUSIUM.

Arm, arm, arm, arm! the scouts are all come in;
Keep your ranks close, and now your honours win.
Behold from yonder hill the foe appears;

Bows, bills, glaves, arrows, shields, and spears!
Like a dark wood he comes, or tempest pouring:
Oh, view the wings of horse the meadows scouring.
The vanguard marches bravely. Hark, the drums!

From the usurer to his sons, there a current swiftly runs; From the sons to queans in chief, from the gallant to the thief;

From the thief unto his host; from the host to husbandmen; From the country to the court; and so it comes to us again. How round the world goes, and every thing that's in it! The tides of gold and silver ebb and flow in a minute.

John Webster, who lived on into the time of the Commonwealth, wrote two of his finest plays in the reign of James I. From one of them, "The White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona," we take a dirge, of which Charles Lamb said that he knew nothing like it, except the ditty that reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father in "The Tempest." "As that is of the water, watery; so this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intenseness of feeling which seems to resolve itself into the elements which it contemplates."

A DIRGE.

Call for the robin-redbreast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.

Call unto his funeral dole

The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole,

To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm,
And (when gay tombs are robbed) sustain no harm;
But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.

Thomas Heywood, who also began to write in Elizabeth's reign, said that he had a hand in two hundred and twenty plays; but only twenty-three have reached us. From his "Fair Maid of the Exchange" let us take

A MESSAGE TO PHILLIS.

Ye little birds that sit and sing
Amidst the shady valleys,

And see how Phillis sweetly walks,
Within her garden-alleys;

Go, pretty birds, about her bower;
Sing, pretty birds, she may not lower.
Ah, me! methinks I see her frown!
Ye pretty wantons, warble.

Go, tell her, through your chirping bills,

FRANCIS BACON.

From the Portrait prefixed to his Posthumous Works (1657).

LIFE.

The world's a bubble, and the life of man

Less than a span;

In his conception wretched, from the womb

So to the tomb;

Curst from his cradle, and brought up to years With cares and fears:

The light and graceful Euphuism which in Elizabeth's reign filled our poetry with dainty conceit that disarmed criticism by its lively turns of wit and fancy, hardened under James I., in many writers, into a pedantic strain to be ingenious. If the king's clumsy trifling was according to his nature, it was also according to his time. Italian influence upon the outward forms of literature was not yet superseded, but was in decay; and the characters of that Later Euphuism which gave rise among the poets to what Dr. Johnson, not knowing what it was or what to call it, styled, for inscrutable reasons, "metaphysical poetry," were manifest at the same time in the literatures of Italy herself, of Spain, and of France. In Italy Marino, in Spain Gongora, had about the same time like characters in literary history to those which distinguished in this country Dr. John Donne as a type of the later euphuistic style. In Spain those whom we called in England Euphuists were called Conceptistas, and our Later Euphuists (miscalled "metaphysical" poets) corresponded to those men of their own day who live in the history of Spanish literature as the "Cultos." In France such writers were known as the Pleiades, and in Italy, after Marino, whose style was not cause but consequence of the surrounding changeand who was a better poet than Donne-they were called Marinisti. Here is Donne writing upon a primrose :

Live, Primrose, then, and thrive
With thy true number five;

And women, whom this flower doth represent,
With this mysterious number be content;
Ten is the farthest number, if half ten
Belongs unto each woman, then
Each woman may take half us men,
Or if this will not serve their turn, since all
Numbers are odd or even, since they fall
First into five, women may take us all.

We seem to have left Marlowe very far behind when we find Donne echoing his music in this fashion:

THE BAIT.

Come live with me, and be my love, And we will some new pleasures prove Of golden sands and crystal brooks, With silken lines and silver hooks.

There will the river whisp'ring run Warm'd by thy eyes more than the sun, And there th' enamoured fish will stay, Begging themselves they may betray.

When thou wilt swim in that live bath,
Each fish, which every channel hath,
Will amorously to thee swim,
Gladder to catch thee than thou him.

If thou to be so seen beest loath,
By sun or moon, thou dark'nest both;
And if myself have leave to see,
I need not their light, having thee.

Let others freeze with angling reeds,
And cut their legs with shells and weeds,
Or treacherously poor fish beset
With strangling snare or windowy net:

Let coarse bold hands from slimy nest The bedded fish in banks out-wrest, Or curious traitors, sleavesilk flies, Bewitch poor fishes' wand'ring eyes.

For thee, thou need'st no such deceit, For thou thyself art thine own bait. That fish, that is not catch'd thereby, Alas, is wiser far than I.

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John Donne, born in 1572, son of a London merchant, was trained at both Oxford and Cambridge, travelled on the Continent, and then became secretary to Chancellor Ellesmere. But he offended Lady Ellesmere by marrying her niece, and suffered many troubles while a sickly family increased about him. For some years Sir Francis Woolley, of Pirford in Surrey, befriended him, and afterwards Sir Robert Drury. His long and careful study of the points in controversy between the English Reformed Church and the Church of Rome, and his loyal views upon

the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, brought him King James's favour. After a conscientious delay of three years that reflects honour upon him, Donne

JOHN DONNE.

From the Portrait prefixed to his Poems (1669).

yielded to the king's suggestion that he should enter the Church. By the king's command, Cambridge gave the degree of Doctor of Divinity, and in a few years James had conferred on Donne the Deanery of St. Paul's in a fashion that, no doubt, seemed witty and pleasant to them both. The king invited Donne to dinner, sat down himself, and said, "Dr. Donne, I have invited you to dinner; and though you sit not down with me, I will carve you of a dish I know you love well; for, knowing you love London, I do therefore make you Dean of St. Paul's. when I have dined, then take your beloved dish home to your study, say grace there to yourself, and much good may it do you."

And

Another illustrator of the decay of Euphuism was Joshua Sylvester. He expected to be remembered by remote posterity as translator of the works of a now neglected French Protestant poet, Guillaume Saluste du Bartas, whose chief work, "La Sepmaine," was a religious poem in highest repute from the close of Queen Elizabeth's reign until the time of Charles I. Prefixed to his translation were "shaped verses," arranged as columns, altars, pyramids, for which the fashion was extending in the reign of James. Ben Jonson, Samuel Daniel, Joseph Hall, and other good writers, highly praised Joshua Sylvester's version of Du Bartas. This is its praise as sounded by John Davies, of Hereford :

IN PRAISE OF THE TRANSLATOR.

If divine Bartas (from whose blessed braines
Such works of grace or gracefull workes did stream)
Were so admir'd for wit's celestiall strains

As made their vertues seat the high'st extream;

Then, Josuah, the sun of thy bright praise

Shall fixéd stand in Art's fair firmament Till dissolution date Time's nights and dayes, Sith right thy lines are made to Bartas bent, Whose compass circumscribes (in spacious words) The Universall in particulars;

And thine the same, in other tearms, affords : So, both your tearms agree in friendly wars: If thine be only his, and his be thine, They are (like God) eternall, sith divine.

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Here are some of Joshua Sylvester's secular ingenuities:

AN ACROSTIC SONNET ON HIS OWN NAME. Jn paine 'tis paine past pleasures to record; O how it grieves in grief to think of gladnesse, S mart after smiles ingenders treble sadnesse : Use of delight makes dolour more abhorr'd. A h, what availes mee (then) thy wonted favour? High hopes dejected double in despaire,

So ev'ry smile-beame of thy sun-shine faire, Y f now thou frowne, makes ev'ry torment graver: Love, think not, then, ah think not it sufficeth V nto thy merit, that thou didst affect mee; E ven that remembrance, if you now neglect mee, ST ings more than all-else sorrow that ariseth. E asie's his pain, who never pleasure proved, Rougher, disdaine, to him that hath beene loved.

ACROSTITELIOSTICHON.

R are type of gentrie, and true Vertues star R
O ne entire payment of the zeale wee 0

Breake still the best threades of our busie we B
E vill the Muses with griev'd mindes agre E
Ruth, more than youth, and rather crie than quave R
T is said of some things, that the last is bes T
No praise, but pardon to our new-found strai N
I will enforce my leaden thoughts to AI
Cloude-high, to grave it, in a diamond ro C
O n every thing, forbeares the Muses th O
Lost with their lives, their lives memorial L
Sweet learning, yet, keeps fresh their famous storie S
O ur
verse, your vertues shall eternize to O
Nothing a whit more cleare than radiant su N

But this sonnet is daintier :

THE BROKEN CHARM. Thrice toss these oaken ashes in the air,

And thrice three times tie-up this true love-knot;
Thrice sit thee down in this enchanted chair,
And murmur soft, She will, or she will not.

Go burn these poisoned weeds in that blue fire,
This cypress gathered at a dead man's grave;
These screech-owl's feathers, and this pricking briar,
That all thy thorny cares an end may have.
Then come you fairies dance with me a round:
Dance in this circle, let my love be centre;
Melodiously breathe out a charming sound:
Melt her hard heart, that some remorse may enter.

In vain are all the charms I can devise!
She hath an art to break them with her eyes.

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