nd remain
yet unsurpassed, as the most perfect celebrations, in one case of
chivalrous devotion, in the other of the coxcomb side of gallantry, that
literature contains or is likely ever to contain. The songwriting faculty
of the English, which had broken out some half century before, and had
produced so many masterpieces, was near its death, or at least near the
trance from which Burns and Blake revived it more than a century later,
which even Dryden's superhuman faculty of verse could only galvanise. But
at the last it threw off by the mouths of men, who otherwise seem to have
had very ordinary poetical powers, this little group of triumphs in song,
to which have to be added the raptures--equally strange and sweet, equally
unmatched of their kind, but nobler and more masculine--of the "Great
Marquis," the few and wonderful lines of Montrose. To quote "My dear and
only love, I pray," or "Great, good, and just, could I but rate," would be
almost as much an insult to the reader as to quote the above-mentioned
little masterpieces of the two less heroic English cavaliers.

Quarles, More, and Joseph Beaumont form, as it were, a kind of appendix to
the poetry of Herbert and Vaughan--an appendix very much less distinguished
by poetical power, but very interesting as displaying the character of the
time and the fashion (strange enough to us moderns) in which almost every
interest of that time found its natural way into verse. The enormous
popularity of Francis Quarles's _Emblems_ and _Enchiridion_ accounts to
some extent for the very unjust ridicule which has been lavished on him by
men of letters of his own and later times. But the silly antithesis of
Pope, a writer who, great as he was, was almost as ignorant of literary
history as his model, Boileau, ought to prejudice no one, and it is
strictly true that Quarles's enormous volume hides, to some extent, his
merits. Born in 1592 at Romford, of a gentle though not very distinguished
family, which enters into that curious literary genealogy of Swift, Dryden,
and Herrick, he was educated at Cambridge, became cup-bearer to the
ill-fated and romantically renowned "Goody Palsgrave," held the post which
Middleton and Jonson had held, of chronologer to the city of London,
followed the King to Oxford to his loss, having previously had losses in
Ireland, and died early in 1644, leaving his memory to be defended in a
rather affecting document by his widow, Ursula. Quarles was a kind of