Being in want of employment, he applied to Thomas Murray, tutor of Charles, Prince of Wales, sending to the former a copy of his Latin poem Locusta, together with some verses addressed to the Prince himself. His epistle to Murray must have been written later than 1614, the year in which Prince Henry died, but Locusta-which may have been accompanied by The Apollyonists, its English equivalent-was, by the poet's own avowal, the work of an earlier period, having been no doubt conceived while the Gunpowder Plot was still fresh in men's memory.1 We may assume that Murray listened to his appeal, and that, through his influence, Fletcher wasabout the year 1616-appointed domestic chaplain to Sir Henry Willoughby.2 From his new patron he obtained, in 1621, the living of Hilgay in Norfolk, of which parish he certainly remained Rector till 1648. As there is no record of his burial in the place, and as another person was admitted "Minister" there in 1650 by a Parliamentary Committee, it is a not unreasonable inference that Fletcher was among the clergy ejected from their livings under the Long Parliament. He died not later than 1650, in which year his will was proved. No considerable poem written by Phineas Fletcher is known to have been published before 1627, in which year appeared Locusta and The Apollyonists. These were His stubborn hands my net have broken quite, My fish, the guerdon of my toil and pain, Second Piscatory Eclogue. "The verses," he tells Murray, "are indeed ill-turned, nor have they been returned to the anvil, and they were composed among distractions of business unfavourable to the Muses." The concluding address to Charles I. in The Apollyonists must of course have been written to fit the circumstances of the year when the poem was published. " In dedicating his Way of Blessedness (1621) to Sir H. Willoughby, Fletcher says: "Most worthy Patron, I have been bold to entitle you and your worthy Lady to this labour, not only in remembrance of your much love and my long courteous entertainment in your house (such as I never saw any gentleman give unto their Minister) or that first I initiated my weak ministry in your family and hamlet: but especially because I acknowledge myself and whatsoever is mine yours in the Lord Jesus Christ." The interval between his leaving Cambridge and his appointment to Hilgay would thus seem to be accounted for. : followed, in 1631, by a piscatory comedy which had been acted many years before in the University of Cambridge; last of all came, in 1633, what appears to have been the earliest of his compositions, The Purple Island. No better reason for this tardiness of publication is assigned than the severity of the poet's own judgment on his youthful work.1 If Fletcher was sincere in his reluctance to give the world a moral poem like The Purple Island, this would be a strong argument against his being the author of the amorous Britain's Ida-published anonymously in 1628-which has, however, been assigned to him on what is certainly strong internal evidence, and which (if his) must have been the work of his young days at Cambridge.2 Giles Fletcher, Phineas's younger brother, was not restrained by any scruples of false modesty in making an early appearance as an author. The date of his birth indeed cannot be exactly ascertained, though the place of it is known to have been London. He was admitted as a scholar in Trinity College, Cambridge, from Westminster School, in 1605, and, as he is not likely to have been more than 18 at that time, he can hardly have been born before 1587. While still at school he had given proof of his poetical powers in some verses written to commemorate the death of Elizabeth, which were published in 1603, with others composed by his brother Phineas, in a volume entitled 1 In his dedication of The Purple Island to Edward Benlowes, Fletcher speaks of "these raw essays of my very unripe years and almost childhood." "How unseasonable," he continues, "are blossoms in autumn (unless perhaps in this age when there are more flowers than fruit): I am entering upon my winter, and yet these blooms of my first spring must now show themselves to our ripe wits, which certainly will give them no other entertainment but derision." And W. Benlowes, in his praise of the poem, says : How many barren wits would gladly own, How few o' the pregnantest own such another? Thou father art, yet blushest to be known, And though 't may call the best of Muses mother, 2 For the evidence as to the authorship of Britain's Ida, see Grosart's edition of Phineas Fletcher's Works (Letter to Sir J. D. Coleridge). Sorrow's Joy. As the production of a boy of 16 or 17, this "memorial canto" was remarkable, and it perhaps brought the poet to the notice of Dr. Nevile, Dean of Canterbury and Master of Trinity, to whom, in his dedication of Christ's Death and Victory, Giles acknowledges that he owes his scholarship. The latter poem was published in 1610, and is Giles's only monument in verse. In 1612 he edited the remains of Nathaniel Pownall-probably his cousin-a young Oxford scholar, who then enjoyed a considerable reputation both as a divine and a linguist. Giles was afterwards appointed, perhaps on the recommendation of Bacon, to the living of Alderton in Suffolk, which remote parish, if Fuller is to be believed, showed little appreciation of the genius of its learned Rector, and where his life was shortened by his uncongenial surroundings.1 He died in 1623. The two Fletchers were evidently united by a strong fraternal affection, which reveals itself, not only in their mutual allusions to each other's work, but also in their common poetical aim. Both educated in the same university, they were equally inspired by the Cambridge genius. Their poetical object was to embody the spirit of Calvinistic theology in the allegorical forms of the Middle Ages, combined with the framework and diction of Latin epic or bucolic verse. Their artistic merits have been very variously judged. Campbell and other critics, following the eighteenth-century canon of taste, have disparaged them as second-rate copyists of Spenser. In our own day they have been exalted, by a natural reaction, but with a tendency to exaggeration, as the forerunners and masters of Milton.3 The true proportion of their genius and their place in our literature may be more justly determined, if we regard them as forming the middle and connecting stage in the progress of English poetry from one of these great writers to the other. 1 Fuller, Worthies (1811), vol. ii. p. 82. 2 Lives of the Poets (1848), p. 178. 3 See Grosart's edition of P. Fletcher's Works, vol. i. pp. clxi-ccclxiii. Spenser's genius is inspired almost exclusively by the Middle Ages. The chivalrous matter of his poems is mediæval: so is his allegorical spirit: so is his quasiarchaic diction. Enthusiastic admirer of the classics as he is, all that he really draws from them is a frequent allusion to the tales of Greek mythology, and a certain concinnity in the metrical combination of words and phrases, which he imitates from the style of the Latin poets. The structure of his composition is in every sense of the word "romantic." The Fletchers are almost as mediæval in spirit as Spenser. Like him they make their starting-point in the scholastic and allegorical interpretation of Nature: their theological matter, for all its Calvinistic dress, is essentially the same as had been taught in the schools of Christian divinity since the time of Augustine. But in the form of their poetry they show themselves far more open than their master to the influence of the classical Renaissance. While Spenser founds himself primarily on the example of Ariosto, I doubt if an allusion to the Orlando Furioso occurs in the works of either Fletcher. Giles, as we have seen, looks, for the models and precedents of his epic style, to the Christian successors of Virgil: he copies Prudentius and Sedulius, and announces, like any Latin epic poet, the subject of his song. Phineas, while expressing his love and admiration for Spenser, goes back for his pastoral and epic forms to Virgil. He says of his style : Two shepherds most I love with just adoring, That Mantuan swain, who changed his slender reed And next our home-bred Colin's sweetest firing; But though they thus deliberately employed a pastoral-epic form, the real poetical motive of the Fletchers was didactic, descriptive, epigrammatic, rather than narrative. True children of their age, they were alive to all the influences expressed in the word "wit," and they perceived that the dogmas of theology offered to the imagination a wide field for the development of the poetical resources of Christian paradox. Giles in particular turned his attention in this direction: Phineas worked rather in the philosophical vein opened by Sir John Davies in Nosce Teipsum: in both of their epics the theological or scientific motive modifies the structure of the action, and determines the character of the diction. Christ's Death and Victory is professedly an epic narrative of the supernatural events on which is founded the Christian philosophy of human nature. The poet sets forth his subject in the classical epic style as follows: The birth of Him that no beginning knew, By growing less, and how the rising Morn That shot from Heaven, did back to Heaven return; The obsequies of Him that could not die ; And death of life; and of eternity; How worthily He died that died unworthily; How God and Man did both embrace each other; Met in one Person Heaven and Earth did kiss ; And how a Virgin did become a Mother, And bore that Son who the world's Father is To clothe Himself in naked misery, Sailing at length to Heaven and Earth triumphantly; Is the first flame wherewith my whiter Muse It is to be observed that Giles Fletcher does not deal with all the subjects he here enumerates. His poem is divided into four parts: the action of the first, Christ's Victory in Heaven, begins towards the close of Christ's actual life on earth, so that all the facts mentioned in the second of the above stanzas are presupposed; Christ's Victory on Earth is a fanciful version of the incidents of the Temptation; Christ's Triumph over Death relates (as |