recognised as the inspiring source of Eve's amorous address to Adam in Paradise Lost:-1

The sun is fair when he with crimson crown
And flaming rubies leaves his eastern bed;
Fair is Thaumantias in her crystal gown,

When clouds engemmed hang azure, green, and red;
To western worlds when wearied day goes down,
And from Heaven's windows each star shows her head,
Earth's silent daughter, Night, is fair, though brown ;
Fair is the moon, though in love's livery clad :

The spring is fair when it doth paint Aprile,

Fair are the meads, the woods, the floods are fair;

Fair looketh Ceres with her yellow hair,

And Apples' Queen when rose-cheeked she doth smile.
That heaven, and earth, and seas are fair is true,

Yet true that all not please so much as you.

And, in another vein, this sonnet (written after the death
of his mistress) is equally deserving of praise :—
What hapless hap had I for to be born

In these unhappy times and dying days
Of this now doting world, when good decays,
Love's quite extinct and virtue held in scorn!
When such are only prized by wretched ways
Who with a golden fleece them can adorn!
When avarice and lust are counted praise,
And bravest minds live orphan-like forlorn!
Why was not I born in the golden age,

When gold yet was not known? and those black arts
By which base worldlings vilely play their parts,
With horrid acts staining earth's stately stage?

To have been then, O heaven, had been my bliss:
But bless me now, and take me soon from this!

If there was unreality of sentiment in the classical conceits with which Drummond lamented the death of Prince Henry, no such approach to the balanced melodies of Latin pastoral poetry had yet been made as is manifest in the following lines from the Tears on the Death of Maliades:

Eye-pleasing meads, whose painted plain forth brings
White, golden, azure, flowers, which once were kings,
To mourning black their shining colours dye,
Bow down their heads while sighing zephyrs fly.

1 Paradise Lost, iv. 641-656.

Queen of the fields, whose blush makes blush the morn,
Sweet rose, a prince's death in purple mourn ;

O hyacinths! for aye your AI keep still,

Nay with more marks of woe your leaves now fill:
And you, O flower! of Helen's tears that's born,
Into those liquid pearls again you turn :

Your green locks, forests, cut; to weeping myrrhs,

To deadly cypress and ink-dropping firs,

Your palms and myrtles change: from shadows dark
Winged syrens wail; and you, sad echoes, mark
The lamentable accents of their moan,

And 'plain that brave Moliades is gone.

Stay, sky, thy turning course, and now become

A stately arch unto the earth, his tomb;
And over it still, wat'ry Iris, keep,
And sad Electra's sisters who still weep
Mæliades sweet courtly nymphs, deplore
From Thule to Hydaspes' pearly shore !

When it is remembered that these verses were written nearly one hundred years before Pope's Windsor Forest, the genius of Drummond, as an inventor of harmony in English verse, stands out in strong relief. Even more remarkable, in its anticipation of the great master of the English heroic couplet, is the classical turn of the compliment to James I. in Forth Feasting:

To virgins flowers, to sun-burnt earth the rain,
To mariners fair winds amidst the main,
Cool shades to pilgrims which hot glances burn,
Are not so pleasing as thy blest return.1
That day, dear prince, which robb'd us of thy sight,
(Day? no, but darkness and a dusky night)
Did fill our breasts with sighs, our eyes with tears,
Turn minutes to sad months, sad months to years;
Trees left to flourish, meadows to bear flowers,
Brooks hid their heads within their sedgy bowers;
Fair Ceres cursed our trees with barren frost,

As if again she had her daughter lost :

The Muses left our groves, and for sweet songs

Sat sadly silent, or did weep their wrongs.

You know it, meads; you murmuring woods it know,

1 Compare Pope's pastoral, Autumn (43-46), where the above passage is imitated:

Not bubbling fountains to the thirsty swain,
Not balmy sweets to lab'rers faint with pain,
Not showers to larks, not sunshine to the bee,

Are half so charming as thy sight to me.

Hills, dales, and caves, co-partners of their woe :
And you it know, my streams, which from their eyne
Oft on your glass received their pearly brine;

66

"O Naiads dear," said they, "Napæas fair!

O Nymphs of trees! Nymphs which on hills repair!
Gone are those maiden glories, gone that state,
Which made all eyes admire our bliss of late."
As looks the heaven when never star appears,
But slow and weary shroud them in their spheres,
While Tithon's wife embosomed by him lies,
And world doth languish in a mournful guise;
As looks a garden of its beauty spoil'd,
As woods in winter by rough Boreas foil'd,
As portraits rased of colours used to be:

So look'd these abject bounds deprived of thee.

While Drummond was elaborating his metrical experiments north of the Tweed, Sir John Beaumont was developing the same poetical ideal in the Court of St. James. In many respects the latter, in genius, rank, and character, closely resembled the Scottish poet. Like him he was a landed proprietor; like him he preferred a life of studious retirement to the life of courts; yet, still like him, much of his art was devoted to the manufacture of courtly compliment. He was the second son of Francis Beaumont, one of the Justices of the Common Pleas, by his wife, Anne Pierrepoint, being therefore elder brother to Francis Beaumont, the dramatist. Born in 1582 or 1583, he was educated at Broadgates Hall (now Pembroke College), Oxford, where he was entered as a gentleman commoner in February 1596-97, but left the university without taking a degree. In November 1600 he was admitted to the Inner Temple, and five years afterwards, through the death of his eldest brother, Henry, succeeded to the possession of the estate of Grace Dieu in Leicestershire, which, being originally a priory, had been conveyed to his grandfather, John Beaumont, in 1539. His earliest poem, The Metamorphosis of Tobacco, was published in 1602, and must therefore have been written while he was in residence at the Inner Temple. It shows evident signs of the influence of Drayton, with whom we know that the

VOL. III

To the same influence

author was on terms of intimacy. may be not unreasonably ascribed the conception of Beaumont's narrative poem, Bosworth Field; but as this was not published till after his death, there is no evidence as to the date of its composition. He must have married early, for his eldest son, Sir John Beaumont-killed at the siege of Gloucester in 1644—who collected and published his father's works in 1629, writes as if he were then himself in an established position at Court. His second son, Francis, who became a Jesuit, offered a poetical tribute to his genius among the commendatory verses prefixed to the volume, which contained the following beautiful and pathetic elegy written by Sir John himself on his third son, Gervase, who died in childhood:

Can I, who have for others oft compiled

The songs of death, forget my sweetest child,
Which, like a flow'r crusht with a blast, is dead,
And ere full time hangs down his smiling head,
Expecting with clear hope to live anew
Among the angels, fed with heavenly dew?
We have this sign of joy that many days,
While on the earth his struggling spirit stays,
The name of Jesus in his mouth contains
His only food, his sleep, his ease from pains.
O may that sound be rooted in my mind,
Of which in him such strong effect I find!
Dear Lord, receive my son, whose winning love
To me was like a friendship, far above
The course of Nature or his tender age,
Whose looks could all my bitter grief assuage:
Let his pure soul, ordained seven years to be

In that frail body which was part of me,

Remain my pledge in heaven, as meant to show
How to this port at every step I go.

From a retirement which, it may readily be inferred from the above lines, was suited to his temperament, Beaumont was drawn by the persuasion of his relative, the rising favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. His Royal and Courtly Poems open with an epigram on the twentieth anniversary of James's reign, and contain several eulogistic addresses to the Duke (or, as he then was, the Marquess), in one of which he says:--

Sir, you are truly great, and every eye
Not dim with envy, joys to see you high;
But chiefly mine, which, buried in the night,
Are by your beams raised and restored to light.
You, only you, have power to make me dwell
In sight of men, drawn from my silent cell.

And again :

My Muse, which took from you her life and light,
Sat like a weary wretch, whom sudden night
Had overspread; your absence casting down
The flowers and sirens' feathers from her crown :
Your favour first th' anointed head inclines
To hear my rural songs, and read my lines;
Your voice my reed with lofty music rears,
To offer trembling songs to princely ears.

Through Buckingham's influence, and his own poetical merit, Beaumont rose into high favour at Court, and in 1626 was created a baronet; but he died after having barely enjoyed his new dignity for a year, and, as the Register of Burials in Westminster Abbey records, was "buried in y broad Ile on ye South," 29th April 1627.

Beaumont's genius was naturally turned to didactic verse, and his style in this order forms the link between the styles of Sir John Davies and Dryden. The Metamorphosis of Tobacco is written in the light didactic manner invented by the author of Orchestra, but the metrical vehicle is the heroic couplet, which Beaumont, using it in the style of Drayton's Heroical Epistles, manages with an ease only inferior to that of Dryden, as may be seen from the following lines:

Had but the old heroic spirits known

The news, which Fame unto our ears hath blown,
Colchis and the remote Hesperides

Had not been sought for half so much as these.
Nor had the fluent wits of ancient Greece
Praised the rich apples or the Golden Fleece:
Nor had Apollo's garland been of bays,
Nor Homer writ of sweet Nepenthe's praise:
Nor had Anacreon, with a sug'red glose,
Extolled the virtues of the fragrant rose;
Nor needed Hermes, with his fluent tongue,