he most marked way. Herrick,
despite his sometimes rather obtrusive learning, is emphatically the
natural man. He does not show much sign of the influence of good society,
his merits as well as his faults have a singular unpersonal and, if I may
so say, _terraefilian_ connotation. Carew is a gentleman before all; but a
rather profane gentleman. Crashaw is religious everywhere. Again, Herrick
and Carew, despite their strong savour of the fashion of the time, are
eminently critics as well as poets. Carew has not let one piece critically
unworthy of him pass his censorship: Herrick (if we exclude the filthy and
foolish epigrams into which he was led by corrupt following of Ben) has
been equally careful. These two bards may have trouble with the _censor
morum_,--the _censor literarum_ they can brave with perfect confidence. It
is otherwise with Crashaw. That he never, as far as can be seen, edited the
bulk of his work for press at all matters little or nothing. But there is
not in his work the slightest sign of the exercise of any critical faculty
before, during, or after production. His masterpiece, one of the most
astonishing things in English or any other literature, comes without
warning at the end of _The Flaming Heart_. For page after page the poet has
been poorly playing on some trifling conceits suggested by the picture of
Saint Theresa and a seraph. First he thinks the painter ought to have
changed the attributes; then he doubts whether a lesser change will not do;
and always he treats his subject in a vein of grovelling and grotesque
conceit which the boy Dryden in the stage of his elegy on Lord Hastings
would have disdained. And then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,
without warning of any sort, the metre changes, the poet's inspiration
catches fire, and there rushes up into the heaven of poetry this marvellous
rocket of song:--

"Live in these conquering leaves: live all the same;
And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame;
Live here, great heart; and love, and die, and kill;
And bleed, and wound, and yield, and conquer still.
Let this immortal life where'er it comes
Walk in a crowd of loves and martyrdoms.
Let mystic deaths wait on't; and wise souls be
The love-slain witnesses of this life of thee.
O sweet incendiary! show here thy art,
Upon this carcase of a hard cold heart;
Let all thy scatter'd shafts of light, that play
Among the leaves of thy