nceits."

What Carew really is, and what he may be peremptorily declared to be in
opposition even to such a critic as Hazlitt, is something quite different.
He is one of the most perfect masters of lyrical form in English poetry. He
possesses a command of the overlapped heroic couplet, which for sweep and
rush of rhythm cannot be surpassed anywhere. He has, perhaps in a greater
degree than any poet of that time of conceits, the knack of modulating the
extravagances of fancy by the control of reason, so that he never falls
into the unbelievableness of Donne, or Crashaw, or Cleveland. He had a
delicacy, when he chose to be delicate, which is quintessential, and a
vigour which is thoroughly manly. Best of all, perhaps, he had the
intelligence and the self-restraint to make all his poems wholes, and not
mere congeries of verses. There is always, both in the scheme of his
meaning and the scheme of his metre, a definite plan of rise and fall, a
concerted effect. That these great merits were accompanied by not
inconsiderable defects is true. Carew lacks the dewy freshness, the
unstudied grace of Herrick. He is even more frankly and uncontrolledly
sensual, and has paid the usual and inevitable penalty that his best poem,
_The Rapture_, is, for the most part, unquotable, while another, if he
carried out its principles in this present year of grace, would run him the
risk of imprisonment with hard labour. His largest attempt--the masque
called _Coelum Britannicum_--is heavy. His smaller poems, beautiful as they
are, suffer somewhat from want of variety of subject. There is just so much
truth in Suckling's impertinence that the reader of Carew sometimes catches
himself repeating the lines of Carew's master, "Still to be neat, still to
be drest," not indeed in full agreement with them, but not in exact
disagreement. One misses the "wild civility" of Herrick. This
acknowledgment, I trust, will save me from any charge of overvaluing Carew.

A man might, however, be easily tempted to overvalue him, who observes his
beauties, and who sees how, preserving the force, the poetic spell, of the
time, he was yet able, without in the least descending to the correctness
of Waller and his followers, to introduce into his work something also
preserving it from the weaknesses and inequalities which deface that of
almost all his contemporaries, and which, as we shall see, make much of the
dramatic and poetical work of 1630-1660 a chaos of slipshod