*

nonsense.* He probably found that his vein, which never flowed very freely, had run dry. It gushed again before he died, as we shall see. His best poem written during the Exile is one "Against Love," which is inspired by a sort of spirited cynicism, very paradoxical and fantastic, but rather refreshing after the interminable love-languishings and melting sonnets to my lady's eyebrow which had constituted the main part of lyrical literature in the preceding generation. I will close the present chapter by printing a few of these stanzas, the versification of which appears to me to be particularly forcible and graceful :

"AGAINST LOVE.

Love making all things else his foes,
Like a fierce torrent overflows
Whatever doth his course oppose.

This was the cause the poets sung,
Thy Mother from the sea was sprung,
But they were mad to make thee young.

Her father, not her son, art thou;

From our desires our actions grow,

And from the cause the effect must flow.

Love is as old as place or time;
'Twas he the fatal tree did climb,

Grandsire of Father Adam's crime.

*He had forgotten that in the very next year, 1648, he had published a paraphrase of Cato Major on Old Age. Was it modesty at the Royal reprimand, or a desire to seem consistent, which made him omit this poem in 1667?

Love drowsy days and stormy nights

Makes, and breaks friendship, whose delights
Feed, but not glut our appetites.

How happy he, that loves not, lives!
Him neither hope nor fear deceives
To Fortune who no hostage gives.

How unconcerned in things to come!
If here he frets, he finds at Rome,
At Paris, or Madrid his home.

Secure from low and private ends,
His life, his zeal, his wealth attends
His prince, his country and his friends."

DAVENANT AND COWLEY.

DAVENANT AND COWLEY.

It is very important that we should appreciate the temper of mind in which it is desirable to approach literature as distinguished from the history of literature, and still more poetry as distinguished from the history of poetry. Literature, in the exact sense in which I use the word here, is a somewhat rare product. It is the quintessence of good writing, in all ages, in all languages, and no single nation within one single century can be presumed to have supplied very much of it. For instance, this very seventeenth century which we are considering produced of the highest poetic literature, of the literature which is of universal importance, just the writings of Shakespeare and Milton, with some sparse pages from Ben Jonson and Dryden. We look a little closer, with eyes a little less critical, and we see a great deal more than this which is sound poetic literature; we begin to perceive Webster and Herrick, Fletcher and Marvell, Browne and Otway, with a score of lyrists, a score of playwrights, to whom the praise of genuine literary execution, in isolated bursts and fragments, must not be denied. But if we are set upon the discovery of literature alone, and not on the observation of literary history, we must go no further.