ears before the Restoration, a needy though not
an exiled cavalier, in London purlieus. Both have written songs of quite
marvellous and unparalleled exquisiteness, and both have left doggerel
which would disgrace a schoolboy. Both, it may be suspected, held the
doctrine which Suckling openly champions, that a gentleman should not take
too much trouble about his verses. The result, however, was in Lovelace's
case more disastrous than in Suckling's. It is not quite true that Lovelace
left nothing worth reading but the two immortal songs, "To Lucasta on going
to the Wars" and "To Althea from Prison;" and it is only fair to say that
the corrupt condition of his text is evidently due, at least in part, to
incompetent printing and the absence of revision. "The Grasshopper" is
almost worthy of the two better-known pieces, and there are others not far
below it. But on the whole any one who knows those two (and who does not?)
may neglect Lovelace with safety. Suckling, even putting his dramatic work
aside, is not to be thus treated. True, he is often careless in the bad
sense as well as in the good, though the doggerel of the "Sessions" and
some other pieces is probably intentional. But in his own vein, that of
coxcombry that is not quite cynical, and is quite intelligent, he is
marvellously happy. The famous song in _Aglaura_, the Allegro to Lovelace's
Penseroso, "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" is scarcely better than "'Tis
now since I sat down before That foolish fort a heart," or "Out upon it! I
have loved Three whole days together." Nor in more serious veins is the
author to be slighted, as in "The Dance;" while as for the "Ballad on a
Wedding," the best parts of this are by common consent incomparable. Side
by side by these are to be found, as in Lovelace, pieces that will not even
scan, and, as _not_ in Lovelace (who is not seldom loose but never nasty),
pieces of a dull and disgusting obscenity. But we do not go to Suckling for
these; we go to him for his easy grace, his agreeable impudence, his
scandalous mock-disloyalty (for it is only mock-disloyalty after all) to
the "Lord of Terrible Aspect," whom all his elder contemporaries worshipped
so piously. Suckling's inconstancy and Lovelace's constancy may or may not
be equally poetical,--there is some reason for thinking that the lover of
Althea was actually driven to something like despair by the loss of his
mistress. But that matters to us very little. The songs remain, a