is a real instance of what some foreign critics very unjustly
charge on English literature as a whole--a foolish and almost canting
prudery. The poet dins the chastity of his mistress into his readers' heads
until the readers in self-defence are driven to say, "Sir, did any one
doubt it?" He protests the freedom of his own passion from any admixture of
fleshly influence, till half a suspicion of hypocrisy and more than half a
feeling of contempt force themselves on the hearer. A relentless critic
might connect these unpleasant features with the uncharitable and more than
orthodox bigotry of his religious poems. Yet Habington, besides
contributing much agreeable verse to the literature of the period, is
invaluable as showing the counterside to Milton, the Catholic Puritanism
which is no doubt inherent in the English nature, and which, had it not
been for the Reformation, would probably have transformed Catholicism in a
very strange fashion.

There is no Puritanism of any kind in a group--it would hardly be fair to
call them a school--of "Heroic" poets to whom very little attention has
been paid in histories of literature hitherto, but who lead up not merely
to Davenant's _Gondibert_ and Cowley's _Davideis_, but to _Paradise Lost_
itself. The "Heroic" poem was a kind generated partly by the precepts of
the Italian criticism, including Tasso, partly by the practice of Tasso
himself, and endeavouring to combine something of the unity of Epic with
something and more of the variety of Romance. It may be represented here by
the work of Chalkhill, Chamberlayne, Marmion, and Kynaston. John Chalkhill,
the author of _Thealma and Clearchus_, was, with his work, introduced to
the public in 1683 by Izaak Walton, who styles him "an acquaintant and
friend of Edmund Spenser." If so, he must have been one of the first of
English poets to adopt the very loose enjambed decasyllabic couplet in
which his work, like that of Marmion and still more Chamberlayne, is
written. His poem is unfinished, and the construction and working-up of the
story are looser even than the metre; but it contains a great deal of
charming description and some very poetical phrase.

Much the same may be said of the _Cupid and Psyche_ (1637) of the dramatist
Shakerley Marmion (_v. inf._), which follows the original of Apuleius with
alternate closeness and liberty, but is always best when it is most
original. The _Leoline and Sydanis_ (1642) of Sir Francis Kynaston is