n's defiled souls,
For which, as now on fire I am, to work them to their good
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in My blood:'
With these He vanished out of sight, and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas Day."

Something of the glow of this appears elsewhere in the poems, which are,
without exception, religious. They have not a little of the "hectic" tone,
which marks still more strongly the chief English Roman Catholic poet of
the next century, Crashaw; but are never, as Crashaw sometimes is,
hysterical. On the whole, as was remarked in a former chapter, they belong
rather to the pre-Spenserian class in diction and metre, though with
something of the Italian touch. Occasional roughnesses in them may be at
least partly attributed to the evident fact that the author thought of
nothing less than of merely "cultivating the muses." His religious fervour
is of the simplest and most genuine kind, and his poems are a natural and
unforced expression of it.

It is difficult in the brief space which can here be allotted to the
subject to pass in review the throng of miscellaneous poets and poetry
indicated under this group. The reprints of Dr. Grosart and Mr. Arber,
supplemented in a few cases by recourse to the older recoveries of Brydges,
Haslewood, Park, Collier, and others, bring before the student a mass of
brilliant and beautiful matter, often mixed with a good deal of slag and
scoriae, but seldom deficient in the true poetical ore. The mere collections
of madrigals and songs, actually intended for casual performance at a time
when almost every accomplished and well-bred gentleman or lady was expected
to oblige the company, which Mr. Arber's invaluable _English Garner_ and
Mr. Bullen's _Elizabethan Lyrics_ give from the collections edited or
produced by Byrd, Yonge, Campion, Dowland, Morley, Alison, Wilbye, and
others, represent such a body of verse as probably could not be got
together, with the same origin and circumstances, in any quarter-century of
any nation's history since the foundation of the world. In Campion
especially the lyrical quality is extraordinary. He was long almost
inaccessible, but Mr. Bullen's edition of 1889 has made knowledge of him
easy. His birth-year is unknown, but he died in 1620. He was a Cambridge
man, a member of the Inns of Court, and a physician in good practice. He
has left us a masque; four _Books of Airs_ (1601-17?), in which th