set of meditative or religious poems, in which he describes the feelings of a good man in matters higher than the matrimonial. "Catholic faith," he says, "is the foundation on which he erects religion, knowing it a ruinous madness to build in the air of a private spirit or on the sands of any new schism. His impiety is not so bold to bring Divinity down to the mistake of Reason, or to deny those mysteries his apprehension reacheth not. His obedience moves still by the direction of the magistrate; and, should conscience inform him that the demand is unjust, he judgeth it nevertheless high treason by rebellion to make good his tenets." From these sentences it will be seen that Habington, in this particular portion of his poems, takes a place among the religious poets of the time, beside Donne and Herbert, with about as much difference as might be supposed to arise from the mode of thought of a loyal English Catholic, as compared with that of two Anglican churchmen. In these poems he rises above his pedantry and frigidity, and even seems to leave poor Castara behind, as though still perfect enough in her way, only an impediment in the higher ecstasies of his private contemplations. Thus in his poem Cogitabo pro peccato meo, after passing in review all the stages of his past life, his love and his literature included, as but time trifled away, he concludes: 'But now, my soul, prepare To ponder what and where we are: How a shrill trumpet shall Us to the bar as traitors call. Then shall we see too late that pridę Hath hope with flattery belied; And that the mighty in command Pale cowards there must stand. In Habington's poetry, more easily than in any other poetry of the period of the same virtuous aim and tendency, there may be detected (and perhaps his Jesuit training had something to do with it) a characteristic which nevertheless exists in almost all the poets with whom we have associated him. It may be described as consisting in an inordinately particular recognition of the fact of sex. These words are used to distinguish between what they are here meant to signify and that apparently identical but really different perception which pervades the poetry of all ages, and without which history would be full of fallacy, and philosophy itself imperfect the perception of love as an influence in all human affairs, of the perpetual working at all points of human society of Aphrodite's white hand. Quite different was the mental habit of which we speak. It was rather a fascination of the mind round the radical fact of sex, a limitation of the mental activity within the range of the immediate suggestions of that fact, a diffusion of it, and of deductions from it, through all kinds of considerations. There may be noted, for example, in most of the writers under view, a strained attention to the fact, as if all morality depended on continual reference to it; a vigilance of it as of the only tree of the knowledge of good and evil within the whole circle of the garden wherein men now walk. The word sin, in their language, almost invariably means but one class of those actions which are included in a larger and manlier definition. Hence, in some of them, a view of human duty negative and special rather than positive or broad. Even the saintly Herbert is not free from this narrowness, and Ferrar's very notion of the best means towards a blessed life may be referred to some such cause. But it is worse when, as is the case with some of them, they will not, with all their alarm respecting the fact, take the obvious precaution of getting out of its vicinity. With some of them it is as if, in walking round and round this one charmed tree, and avoiding every other part of the garden in their anxiety to mark it well, they divided their business between warnings not to eat of the fruit and praises of its deliciousness when licit. But this is not all. The same fact by which, in its primary aspect, some were alternately repelled and attracted, was transformed and allegorized and sublimated in the minds of others, till it passed into a permanent mode of their thought, and affected all their rhetoric. In Donne, indeed, whose grasp of the fact was bold even to audacity, and in whose earlier poems there is an absolute contempt of all distinction between licit and illicit (which contempt he scarcely loses even when he writes conjugally), it is as a text susceptible of endless metaphysical interpretations, in addition to the literal one, that the fact continually figures. In others, however, the fact, in proportion as it is shunned by the hard intellect, seems to take out its influence in a certain enervation and languor of sentiment, and, above all, in a kind of introversion of the sensual into the spiritual. In some of the devotional poets under notice, it is as if that one allegory of Scripture, which is set forth at large in Solomon's Song, and also offered by St. Paul as full of spiritual significance, had taken exclusive possession of their imagination, and had there melted and melted till all their language was tinged by its deliquescence. Let one example suffice. In a devotional poem, written in a prayer-book sent by the poet to a lady, feminine piety is thus described: This is not from Donne or Herbert, or any other of the poets that have been mentioned, but from another poet usually included in the same group — Richard Crashaw. In 1632, Crashaw, the son of an eminent London preacher, was but a young scholar, newly admitted at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and known there only as the author of some pieces of verse on general topics, in virtue of which he might have been ranked rather among the young Spenserians than among the religious poets. Had Milton, before leaving Christ's College, become acquainted with the younger versifier of Pembroke, and read his "Music's Duel," his "Elegies on the Death of Mr. Herrys," and such other pieces of verse, original or translated, as he then had to show, he would have found in them a sensuous beauty of style and sweetness of rhythm quite to his taste. It was only in the course of the next ten years or so that Crashaw, still residing at Cambridge (latterly as fellow of Peterhouse), was to leave lighter Spenserian themes for the “Scriptures, divine graces, martyrs, and angels," which are the topics of the greater part of his remaining poems. It was then also that he exhibited that tendency to a mystical or seraphic piety which led him at last to forsake the Church of England for the communion of Rome. Herbert's "Temple" became the model of his religious poetry; and it is from his collection of pieces named "Steps to the Temple," written at Cambridge as a kind of sequel to Herbert's poems, though not published till 1646, that the foregoing extract is taken. On the whole, there was a richer vein of poetical genius in Crashaw than in Herbert; but the spiritualized voluptuousness which appears in the above extract, and which characterizes many of Crashaw's religious poems, is foreign to the clear Anglican muse of Herbert, and is chargeable rather to Crashaw's idiosyncrasy as affected by contemplations in a particular order of doctrines, to which the Roman Catholic Church has always attributed a peculiar religious efficacy-the doctrines of celibacy, of the immaculate conception of the Virgin, and the like. And yet in Crashaw's poetry, in this respect, we see but the undisguised excess of a mode of thought perceptible not only among the poets with whom he is usually associated, but also among the religious prose-writers most closely connected with them. Apart from the modified intellectual assent expressly accorded by Donne, by Ferrar, and by others, to some of the Catholic doctrines which Crashaw seems to have made his spiritual diet, we trace a more occult effect of the same influence in a rhetorical peculiarity common to many of the writers of this theological school. We cannot define the peculiarity better than by saying that it consists in a certain flowing effeminacy of expression, a certain languid sensualism of fancy, or, to be still more particular, an almost cloying use of the words, “sweet,” “dear,” and their cognates, in reference to all kinds of objects. In Izaak Walton's prose, and in much of the richest English prose of the seventeenth century, this peculiarity is discernible. There is an Oriental fragrance in the air, an odor as of concealed apples, in which one exists and breathes with one's eyes half shut. IV. There remain to be yet named a few poetic wits and humorists, who, though all known as skirmishers in the literary field prior to 1632, had not, up to that time, taken a definite rank among their contemporaries by regular publication. Among these (without referring to Herbert, Crashaw, and others already named, who were still in this predicament) there were some of the cleverest men of the day, and one or two whom we name now as eminent English poets. The list, to be complete, would have to include some scores of courtiers, lawyers, clergymen, etc.; but only the more important can be glanced at. We may head the list with a bishop-the jolly Bishop Corbet, of Norwich, just removed to that see from Oxford. He was now fifty years of age, of a sufficiently grave and episcopal aspect, and of Laudian or Arminian principles, but with a reputation like that of Friar Tuck in the old ballads, or of Chaucer's monk in the Canterbury Pilgrimage. His reputation for facetiousness and good fellowship had begun while he was yet a student of Christ Church, Oxford, and had accompanied him through his clerical career. It was said that, after he was Doctor of Divinity, he had, in a freak, put on a ballad-singer's jacket, and sold off his stock of ballads for him at the market-cross of Abingdon. Riding once in a coach, in a very dirty lane, in wet weather, with a Dr. Stubbins, who was "one of his cronies, and a jolly fat doctor," he had a break-down, the results of which he described by saying that, on recovering his senses, he found Stubbins up to the elbows in mud, and himself up to the elbows in Stubbins. "One time, as he was confirming, the country people pressing in to see the ceremony, said he, 'Bear off there, or I'll confirm ye with my staff.' Another time, being to lay his hand on the head of a man very bald, he turns to his chaplain and said, 'Some dust, Lushington,' i. e. to keep his hand from slipping. This chaplain, Dr. Lushington, was a very learned, ingenious man, and they loved one another. The bishop would sometimes take the key of the wine-cellar, and he and his chaplain would go and lock themselves in, and be merry; then first he lays down his hood, 'There lies the doctor;' then he puts off his gown, 'There lies the bishop:' then 't was, 'Here's to thee, Corbet;' 'Here's to thee, Lushington.'" These stories, whether true of the 1 Aubrey's Lives. |