Is drunk, and staggers on the way. II. While in the refined portion of English society men of a contemplative turn thus showed an increasing tendency to secede from the life of the Court, the Court itself lost more and more of the chivalrous traditions, half feudal, half Catholic, which had preserved some coherence of manners in the reign of James I. The King, a man of serious and devout disposition, was indeed strongly in sympathy with the ecclesiastical movement initiated by Laud, but this was by no means agreeable to the courtiers as such, and Charles I. was not, like his father, of an intellectual force sufficient to impress his own opinions on the minds of reluctant followers. The female influence Instead of the high at Court had changed for the worse. minded and intellectual patronage which noble ladies in the preceding reign had bestowed on poets like Ben Jonson, Drayton, and Daniel, the taste of the time was now directed by the gay frivolity introduced by Henrietta Maria from her native country. The favourite and confidant of the Queen was Lucy, Countess of Carlisle, a woman of great beauty but light manners, and no worthy successor of the Countesses of Pembroke, Bedford, Huntingdon, and Rutland. The taste for classical Euphuism, introduced by Ben Jonson, still prevailed, but Jonson had long passed the meridian of his inventive power, and those whom he had inspired were far from being his equals in weighty thought or manly sentiment. The chief leaders of the courtly youth were Thomas Carew and Sir John Suckling. Of these the former was the younger son of Sir Matthew Carew of Middle Littleton in Worcestershire, and Alice Inkpenny, his wife. Born about 1598, he was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, but apparently left the university without taking a degree. We only know of 1 The Retreat. VOL. III R his early life that it was restless and dissipated, and that in 1616 he was discharged from the post, which his father had procured for him, of secretary to Sir Dudley Carleton. He was a friend of Clarendon, who says of him in The History of the Rebellion: Mr. Carew was a younger brother of a good family, and of excellent parts, and had spent many years of his youth in France and Italy; and returning from travel followed the Court; which the modesty of that time disposed men to do some time before they pretended to be of it; and he was very much esteemed by the most eminent persons in the Court, and well looked upon by the King himself, some time before he could obtain to be sewer to the King; and when the King conferred that place upon him, it was not without the regret even of the whole Scotch nation, which united themselves in recommending another gentleman to it of so just value were those relations held in that age when majesty was beheld with the reverence it ought to be. He was a person of pleasant and facetious wit, and made many poems (especially in the amorous way), which for the sharpness of the fancy and the elegancy of the language in which that fancy was spread, were at least equal, if not superior, to any of that time; but his glory was that after fifty years of his life, spent with less severity or exactness than it ought to have been, he died with the greatest remorse for that license, and with the greatest manifestation of Christianity that his best friends could desire.1 The change in the poet's way of thinking is said to have been effected by the well-known John Hales of Eton. Clarendon is not very accurate in his account of Carew's age, as he died in 1638, when he was barely forty; but what he says as to the remorse of the latter for the licentiousness of some of his poetry is confirmed partly by the religious character of his last compositions, partly by contemporary poetical evidence. In a pasquinade (ascribed to George Wither) published after his death, entitled The Great Assizes holden in Parnassus by Apollo and his Assessors, Carew is arraigned by the public accuser for the immorality of his verse : He said that he, by his luxurious pen, 1 Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1635. Than many now which stood to be arraigned, He said that he in verse more loose had been In obscene portraitures, and that this fellow All this is very much exaggerated, and can apply only to a single poem of Carew's, to which he himself alludes in Court when allowed to make his defence, saying: In wisdom's nonage and unriper years Some lines slipped from my pen, which, since, with tears, If, however, Carew may (except in this one instance) be acquitted of the charge of gross obscenity, he is justly open to the scarcely less serious charge of emasculating taste. He modelled himself upon Ben Jonson, but his imitation was on a puny scale. His works include, like those of his master, elegies, complimentary poems, and love lyrics, but it is only in the last class that he can be reckoned to have achieved success. There is a complete~ absence of Jonson's manly strength of thought in his epistolary addresses. In his Address to Saxham-the seat of his friend, John Crofts-for example, and in his Letter to G. N. from Wrest, Carew borrows all his thoughts and imagery from Ben Jonson's Address to Penshurst. He affected to despise active politics. When Aurelian Townsend sent him an Elegy on Gustavus Adolphus, Carew advised him not to concern himself with such troublesome matters as the affairs of Germany, but to confine himself to the preparation of Court entertainments : These harmless pastimes let my Townsend sing Our halcyon days; what though the German drum They'll hang their arms upon the olive bough, Such lines are sufficient in themselves to explain the overthrow of the Cavaliers within twelve years at Marston Moor. An imagination so shallow, so incapable of penetrating to the heart and movement of things beyond the trivial circle of Court amusements, was of course unable to rise into the region of the noble and pathetic. Carew's elegies, in which he endeavours to imitate Ben Jonson, are frigid and insincere. Being called on to write an inscription for the tomb of the Duke of Buckingham, he feigns that the symbolical images carved on the monument are actually the tears and sighs of the widow, merely moulded into marble by the art of the sculptor : These are the pious obsequies, Dropt from the chaste wife's pregnant eyes In frequent showers, and were alone By her congealing sighs made stone; On which the carver did bestow These forms and characters of woe: So he the fashion only lent, But she wept all the monument. A poet of this order found his proper materials in subjects like those cultivated by the Alexandrian epigrammatists in the decadence of Greek poetry. Carew writes on such matters as One that died of the Wind Colic; A Damask Rose sticking upon a Lady's Breast; The Toothache cured by a Kiss; A Fly that flew into my Mistress her Eye; A Mole in Celia's Bosom, etc. etc. On these he spends all the pains that an ingenious carver gives to the sculpture of heads out of cherrystones; and too often the result is repulsive in proportion as the pettiness and commonplace of the thought is brought into relief by the pains spent in elaborating it. Sir John Suckling, in his Sessions of the Poets, criticised him justly when he said :— Tom Carew was next, but he had a fault That would not well stand with a laureat; His Muse was hard-bound, and the issue of 's brain Examples of this laboriousness abound in his poetry. Take, for instance, his fiction that the fly which perished in Celia's eye was attracted there by love :— At last into her eye she flew ; There, scorcht in heat and drown'd in dew, She fell, and with her dropt a tear; Of which a pearl was straight compos'd, Thus she receiv'd from Celia's eye Funeral flame, tomb, obsequy. Of the snow that melted in his mistress's bosom he pretends that, Overcome with whiteness there, For grief it thaw'd into a tear. The mole in Celia's bosom is a metamorphosed bee-an idea which is worked out with a nauseous minuteness of detail. A not unfavourable specimen of his more ingenious conceits is furnished in the following lines On Sight of a Gentlewoman's Face in the Water: Stand still, you floods, do not deface That image which you bear: So votaries from every place To you shall altars rear. No winds but lovers' sighs blow here To crystal then in haste congeal, And to my cruel fair reveal How cold, how hard she is. |