The largest mind, and which did most extend To live; what path to follow; what decline; Not more a pattern in her life than death, There is perhaps a touch of the old-fashioned method of versification in the final couplet. The remainder is sustained at a far more even height of eloquence, and in neater couplets than Denham could at that time pretend to have reached, and it is probable that if Godolphin had lived, his executive skill in verse would have hastened the coming of the Augustan era. The date, 1643, then, is a very important one in our whole inquiry. It has hitherto been rashly presumed that it was the Exile, which by bringing the poets to Paris, and placing them in contact with the French masters of literature, brought about the Classical reaction. But if I have been able to prove anything it is this, that the Exile had not taken place, that not a single Royalist writer had come under the French influence, when that reaction had already begun, and had even advanced to a certain point of development. The year 1643 gives us the opportunity of exactly gauging what had been done; it is the date of Waller's flight, of Sidney Godolphin's death, of Denham's publication of his Cooper's Hill revised; and we see that before the Exile began each of these important writers had finished the most characteristic part of his works, that part which the critics of the coming age were principally to point to as his respective contribution to the change. Two of them were to write much more, and Denham, at least, was to write with considerably more of the Gallic grace, but no one who reads their early pieces can doubt the direction their talent was spontaneously taking. The Revolution swept them over to France, and there there was much for them to learn; but the great point upon which I desire to insist is that before they started they knew as clearly as possible what it was they wished for. French taste and practice merely provided them with a primrose path up the prim and dusty Helicon which they had long determined to climb. It is extremely difficult to follow the fortunes of literature through the vicissitudes of the Civil War. In order to do so with some measure of success we must fix our attention on the move ments of Queen Henrietta Maria. Several of the most important men of letters were entirely devoted to her service. We shall see, later on, what part she gave to Davenant in her first visit to France. When she fled from Exeter with the newborn Princess of Wales in July, 1644, Cowley was with her, and for the next twelve years was constantly attached to her person. Another interesting figure in letters took part in that doleful flight, namely, Margaret Lucas, the girl who was to become the most eccentric of all poetasters, the erudite and fantastic Duchess of Newcastle. The Queen settled for three months at the baths of Bourbon, whither, to soothe her misery, as Madame de Motteville tells us, Anne of Austria sent her sympathetic messages, and a nurse, and 20,000 pistoles. She passed on for the winter to Paris, and hither the young Duke of Newcastle, flying from defeat at Marston Moor, joined her, swiftly to be smitten by the lettered charms of Margaret Lucas. There was presently a colony of English people in Paris. Hobbes, the philosopher and critic, Leviathan himself, was already there, and the last of the great Jacobean dramatists, James Shirley, who had left a starving wife and children behind him, was in attendance upon the Royal Mistress who had been his consistent patron. Well might Cowley speak with bitterness of "us, the poets militant below." As he walked in the streets of Paris, he met his old friend Crashaw starving, and had but just enough patronage left to find him a place in the household of a Roman cardinal, where he might eat a piece of bread. Killigrew, wearily wasting the vigour of his youth in secret missions to all the courts of Europe, came back each time more wretched, with a dismaller tale to tell. Yet, at worst, the poets in exile, with all their poverty and discomfort, fared better than the poets at home'. The first great loss which letters and statecraft suffered was when Lord Falkland fell, on the 20th of September, 1643, at the Battle of Newbury. He called for a clean shirt. before he went into battle, for, said he, "They shall not find my dead body in foul linen." And as his friends begged him, a civilian, not to rush into a needless danger, he bid them know that he was weary of the times, and believed he should be out of it all ere night. He was; and with him 1 Denham says of Killigrew, William Murray and himself :— "Mirth makes us not mad, Nor sobriety sad, But of that we are seldom in danger; At Paris, at Rome, At the Hague, we're at home, The Good Fellow is nowhere a stranger." fell the greatest ornament of the Royalist party, the man from whom more might have been expected than from any other soldier or civilian in all the King's party, that almost fabulous Cary, Viscount Falkland, of whom Clarendon, as the mouthpiece of the times, says, that he "was a person of such prodigious parts of learning and knowledge, of that inimitable sweetness and delight in conversation, and so flowing and obliging a humanity and goodness to mankind, and of that primitive simplicity and integrity of life, that if there were no other brand upon this odious and accursed civil war, than that single loss, it must be most infamous and execrable to all posterity." The body in which so much wit, virtue, and energy resided was small and feeble; those who knew him noted the brightness of his black eyes; Mr Matthew Arnold, in a most striking essay, has drawn attention recently to his intellectual character. Lord Falkland was the centre of the group of wits to which Waller, Morley, and Godolphin belonged, and we should expect him, with his liberal and sympathetic character, to be with them. in their literary revolution. But, on the contrary, the existing poems of Lord Falkland belong entirely to the old school, with frequent use of overflow, |