ociety, such as Lovelace and Suckling, whose class
degenerated into a class of boon companion song-writers, such as Alexander
Brome, and, at the extremity of our present period, Charles Cotton, in
whose verse (as for the matter of that in the famous muses of Lovelace and
Suckling themselves) the rapidly degenerating prosody of the time is
sometimes painfully evident. This is also apparent (though it is
compensated by much exquisite poetry, and on the strictly lyric side rarely
offends) in the work of Randolph, Corbet, Cartwright, Chamberlayne of the
_Pharonnida_, Sidney Godolphin, Shakerley Marmion, Cleveland, Benlowes,
Kynaston, John Hall, the enigmatic Chalkhill, Patrick Carey, Bishop King.
These about exhaust the list of poets who must be characterised here,
though it could be extended. Cowley, Marvell, and Waller fall outside our
limits.

George Herbert, the one popular name, if we except Lovelace and Suckling,
of the last paragraph, was born at Montgomery Castle in 1593, of the great
house now represented in the English peerage by the holders of the titles
of Pembroke, Carnarvon, and Powis. George was the younger brother of the
equally well-known Lord Herbert of Cherbury; and after being for some years
public orator at Cambridge, turned, it is said, on some despite or
disappointment, from secular to sacred business, accepted the living of
Bemerton, and, after holding it for a short time, died in 1633. Walton's
_Life_ was hardly needed to fix Herbert in the popular mind, for his famous
volume of sacred poems, _The Temple_, would have done so, and has done so
far more firmly. It was not his only book by any means; he had displayed
much wit as quite a boy in counter-lampooning Andrew Melville's ponderous
and impudent _Anti-Tami-Cami-Categoria_, an attack on the English
universities; and afterwards he wrote freely in Greek, Latin, and English,
both in prose and verse. Nothing, however, but _The Temple_ has held
popular estimation, and that has held it firmly, being as much helped by
the Tractarian as by the Romantic movement. It may be confessed without
shame and without innuendo that Herbert has been on the whole a greater
favourite with readers than with critics, and the reason is obvious. He is
not prodigal of the finest strokes of poetry. To take only his own
contemporaries, and undoubtedly pupils, his gentle moralising and devotion
are tame and cold beside the burning glow of Crashaw, commonplace and
popular beside