TO ALTHEA: FROM PRISON When Love with unconfinèd wings When (like committed linnets) I Stone walls do not a prison make, Few names are preserved with greater reverence by Englishmen than that of Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland, nor is it necessary here to tell the story of his life. Born in 1610, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and St. John's College, Cambridge, he was killed at the first battle of Newbury in 1643, glad to depart from the scene of a strife in which his conscience was unable without reserve to embrace the cause to which the duty of action on the whole inclined him. But some portion of the noble pages which Clarendon devotes to exalting the character of his friend ought not to be omitted from a history of English poetry : He was a great cherisher of wit and fancy and good parts in any man, and, if he found them clouded with poverty or want, a most liberal and bountiful patron towards them, even above his fortune; of which in those administrations he was such a dispenser as if he had been trusted with it to such uses, and if there had been the least of vice in his expense he might have been thought too prodigal. He was constant and pertinacious in whatsoever he resolved to do, and not to be wearied by any pains that were necessary to that end. And therefore having once resolved not to see London (which he loved above all places) till he had perfectly learned the Greek tongue, he went to his own house in the country, and pursued it with that indefatigable industry that it will not be believed in how short a time he was master of it and accurately read all the Greek historians. In this time, his house being within ten miles of Oxford, he contracted familiarity and friendship with the most polite and accurate men of that university; who found such an immenseness of wit and such a solidity of judgment in him, so infinite a fancy bound in a most logical ratiocination, such a vast knowledge that he was not ignorant in anything, yet such an excessive humility as if he had known nothing, that they frequently resorted and dwelt with him as in a college situated in a purer air; so that his house was a university bound in a lesser volume, whither they came not so much for repose as study, and to examine and refine those grosser propositions which laziness and content made current in vulgar conversation. Of his political opinions Clarendon says: In the last short Parliament he was a burgess in the House of Commons; and from the debates, which were then managed with all imaginable gravity and sobriety, he contracted such a reverence to parliaments, that he thought it impossible they could ever produce mischief or inconvenience to the kingdom; or that the kingdom could be tolerably happy in the intermission of them. And from the unhappy and unseasonable dissolution of that convention, he harboured, it may be, some jealousy and prejudice to the Court, towards which he was before not immoderately inclined; his father having wasted a full fortune there in those offices and employments by which other men use to obtain a greater. . . . When he grew better informed what was law, and discerned in them a desire to control that law by a vote of one or both Houses, no man more opposed those attempts and gave the adverse party more trouble in argumentation; insomuch as he was by degrees looked upon as an advocate for the Court, to which he contributed so little that he declined those addresses, and even those invitations, which he was obliged almost by civility to entertain. The character of Falkland is expressed rather in his life and actions than in his verse, though his contemporaries rated him highly as a poet, and Sir John Suckling, in his Session of the Poets, held him worthy to be laureate : He was of late so gone with divinity, Though to say the truth (and Apollo did know it) He might have been both his priest and his poet. He belonged to Ben Jonson's school, and worked mainly in the elegiac vein which that poet had developed, but he had not inspiration enough to make his memorial verses vital and pathetic, and was content, as a rule, to express his feelings in the frigid pastoral form which Milton alone has handled with success. As a not unfavourable specimen of his style, a passage may be cited from his elegy on Lady Hamilton : By fairest Greenwich, whose well-seated towers (Rising to us when he began to set), Would view the downs where we our flocks did keep, Our homely cates and our more homely talk. We can readily believe, after reading Clarendon's character of Falkland, that this formal style represented something of reality to the poet's imagination, and it is worthy of observation that Waller, in his Thyrsis, Galatea, has lamented Lady Hamilton in the same pastoral style. But the fact remains that Falkland fails to convince the reader that he is writing the language of his heart. Far better is his epitaph (written in Ben Jonson's manner) on the Countess of Huntingdon, daughter and co-heiress of Ferdinand, Earl of Derby, and one of the chief female ornaments of the Court of James I. : The chief perfection of both sexes joined, Rome's senate might have wisht, her conclave may : Reader, there is not: Huntingdon lies here. All Falkland's poems were written before the meeting of the Long Parliament: after that date his energies were so entirely absorbed by the necessities of political action, that no time was left him for the expression in verse of the critical and philosophical thought to which his genius was naturally inclined. John Cleveland, the satirist, was a spirited assailant of the Parliamentary party, and a convinced and faithful Cavalier. The son of Thomas Cleveland—at first usher in Burton's Charity School, afterwards assistant to the Rector of Loughborough, finally Vicar of Hinckley-he was born at Loughborough in 1613. His early education was entrusted to Richard Vynes, a Presbyterian, from whose hands he passed to Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1627. Elected Fellow of St. John's College in 1634, he took his M.A. degree in 1635, and afterwards studied both law and physic. He was incorporated M.A. at Oxford in 1637. As a supporter of the Royalist party, he vehemently opposed Cromwell's candidature at Cambridge for the Long Parliament, and when the latter was elected by a majority of one vote, declared that this had ruined both Church and Monarchy. He was ejected, like Crashaw, from his Fellowship in 1643, and joined the Royalist army at Oxford, where the King appointed him to collect college rents in his service. After the surrender of Newark he fell out of employment, but maintained a staunch fidelity to the King, and, when the latter was sold to the Parliament by the Scots, he satirised that nation in his verses entitled The Rebel Scot. Coming to London on the death of the King, he is said by Aubrey to "have held a club there every night" with Samuel Butler, author of Hudibras. In 1655 he was seized at Norwich for conspiring against the Commonwealth; but the only evidence against him was his familiarity with the family of one Cooke, who was known as a disaffected person. This was, however, sufficient to procure his imprisonment at Yarmouth, from which place he wrote an admirable and manly letter to Cromwell, pointing out that he had not had a proper trial. In the course of it he said: For the service of his Majesty (if it be objected) I am so far from excusing it, that I am ready to allege it in my vindication. I cannot conceit that my fidelity to my prince should taint me in your opinion; I should rather expect that it would recommend me to your favour. Had we not been faithful to our king, we should not have given ourselves to be so to your Highness; you had then trusted us gratis, whereas we have now our former loyalty to vouch us. You see, my Lord, how much I presume upon the greatness of your spirit, that dare present my indictment with so frank a confession, especially in this which I may so safely deny, that it is almost arrogancy in me to own it; for the truth is I was not qualified to serve him. All I could do was to bear a part in his sufferings, and to give myself to be crushed with his fall. Thus my charge is doubled, my obedience to my sovereign, and what is the result of that, my want of fortune. Now whatever reflection I have upon the former, I am a true penitent for the latter. My Lord, you see my crimes; as to my defence, you bear it about you. I shall plead nothing in my justification but your Highness's clemency, which, as it is the constant inmate of a valiant breast, if you graciously be pleased to extend it to your suppliant in taking me out of this withering durance, your Highness will find that mercy will establish you more than power, though all the days of your life were as pregnant with victories as your twice-auspicious third of September.2 Cromwell justified the poet's belief in his magnanimity: he felt that he might trust the faith of an open and 1 Lives of Eminent Men (1813), vol. ii. p. 289. Cleveland's Works (1687), pp. 110, 111. |