and with the accent shifting from place to place in successive lines. If we had space for such comparisons, it would not be uninteresting to place side by side an exercise of Lord Falkland's and one of Sidney Godolphin's, each in heroic couplet, by way of emphasizing the distinction between the two styles; but we may remark, in passing, that the men who showed the truest aptitude for the new manner of writing appeared scarcely to have learnt, but to be born into it. Meanwhile Falkland was not the only poet who did not bear his life away from the battle fields of the Civil War. Peter Hausted, a Cambridge clergyman, who wrote one remarkable play, The Rival Friends, was shot on the ramparts of Banbury, while the Roundheads were vigorously besieging it in 1645, and he lies buried in Banbury Church. Fanshawe had been made tutor to the Prince of Wales, and fled with him from Exeter to Scilly, thence to Jersey, and placed him at last, in 1646, in the hands of his mother in Paris, after infinite toil and alarm by land and sea. Cleveland, the forerunner of Hudibras, had, perhaps, the hardest fate of all, for, although he was by no means a fanatical supporter of the King's extreme views, he left Cambridge for Oxford to wait upon Charles, helped to defend Newark through the assault and siege of that town, and avoided no hardship of the war, until at last he was taken prisoner and thrown into jail at Yarmouth, where he languished for years, until Oliver Cromwell released him in consideration of his literary gifts and his political helplessness. Most of the leading men of letters, however, and in particular those in whom we now take an interest, escaped to France. All the English exiles were well received, for the sake of Henrietta Maria, who was a very great favourite, even with the common people. We may read in the Mémoires of Madame de Motteville how inconsolable, how like a draggled and bespattered bird of gorgeous plumage, the Queen of England seemed at first, and how, slowly, as one of her children after another was restored to her, she preened her feathers, and regained something of her sanguine composure. We read of the fêtes at Fontainebleau in the summer of 1646, and again in 1647; of the urbane affability of Anne of Austria and of the good manners of little Louis XIV., of the "balls, comedies and promenades" with which the English exiles were regaled, and in the reading of all this we must interpolate for our present entertainment that among those exiles were some of the brightest Englishmen then living-probably Waller and Hobbes, certainly Cowley, Fanshawe, Shirley, and Davenant. What, then, were the influences which were exercised on these men's minds by their exchange of London and Oxford for Paris and Fontainebleau ? On some of them we may safely say, There was none at all. Sir Richard Fanshawe, for instance, a learned and industrious poet of the third order, was about thirty-eight years of age when he conducted the future Charles II. to France. On him France had no effect whatever. His famous translation of the Pastor Fido, published in 1647, his little epic of Dido and Æneas in the Spenserian stanza, his odes and sonnets, his epistles and addresses, are all of them in the fullblown Marinist manner of the preceding generation. Here is an example of a pretty stanza in praise of peace :— "Plant trees you may, and see them shoot And learn to use their several gums; 'Tis innocence in the sweet blood Of cherries, apricots, and plums To be imbrued." Not a line of this but Waller or Denham would have rejected. It was precisely these dislocated constructions, these languid broken rhythms, these harsh clusters of consonants that it was their function to rebel against. And yet, for a Marinist stanza of the school of 1630, it is distinctly pretty. To men like Shirley and Fanshawe, then, France had no lesson; but what did it say to the reformers, to the men whose ears were open? The posthumous poems of Malherbe, could they be without interest to Waller? Is it credible that the relation of Chapelain's odes and St Amant's anacreontics to the anacreontics and odes of Cowley is purely accidental? I think not. The condition of French literature was precisely that which was likely to discourage the romantic and Spanish tendencies in our poets, and to encourage the feeling for classical precision. Some wit said that French poetry in the age of Anne of Austria was a young lady, no longer quite young, who had missed two or three advantageous marriages, and who, in order not to die a maid, accepted the hand of M. de Malherbe, an elderly gentleman. We might, perhaps, say that English poetry was a widow, who had married Shakespeare for love, and now consented to marry Waller for a position. The state of things was so exactly analogous that the lady from the north could learn much by the experience of her slightly older sister. But, to descend from this too oriental region of simile, the parallelism between the history of French and English poetry of precision is in one particular so exact that I wonder that it has not been, as I believe it has not, already observed. The sweet and monotonous versification of Malherbe was first of all emulated by his pupil Maynard, whose slightly provincial vein of reflection was expressed with a more rugged vigour than Malherbe had displayed. Exactly the same language might be used to describe the relation of Waller to Denham, and the latter, with his slight touch of provinciality, from which the former is free, and with his force of versification, would be singularly like Maynard, even if it were not the case that the principal poems of them both-the Cooper's Hill and the Alcippe-are occupied by precisely the same order of reflections, and might each, in parts, be a paraphrase of the other. It would be exceedingly rash to take for granted that Maynard ever heard of Denham, or vice versâ; such a supposition, indeed, is extremely improbable; but the same ideas were common to both, and it seems to me beyond a doubt that by transplanting English poetry into French air |