In

to some place more than twenty miles from London. 1658 he was allowed by Cromwell to live at Bury St. Edmunds. After the Restoration he was rewarded for his loyalty, being made Surveyor-General of Works in 1660. His first wife having died, he married, for his second, Margaret, daughter of Sir William Brooke, but the union proved most unhappy. Lady Denham, who became mistress of the Duke of York, died not long afterwards report said-probably without any truththat she had been poisoned by a cup of chocolate given her by her husband. Denham himself, through the trouble occasioned by his dishonour, lost his reason in 1666, and while he was in this condition was malevolently attacked in a satiric poem by Butler, author of Hudibras. He died in March 1668-69.

As the critics of the Restoration recognised Waller's chief merit to be "smoothness," so they declared the prevailing characteristic of Denham's best poetry to be "strength" and judgment. He carried on the line of didactic composition begun by Sir John Davies and continued by Sir John Beaumont; and, like the latter's, some of his best verse contains literary criticism. Of this kind are his lines to Sir William Fanshaw on the subject of translation, which, according to his own account, were read with interest by Charles I. ::

Nor ought a genius less than his that writ
Attempt translation; for transplanted wit
All the defects of air and soil doth share,
And colder brains like colder climates are ;
In vain thy toil, since nothing can beget
A vital spirit, but a vital heat.
That servile path thou nobly dost decline
Of tracing word by word and line by line.
These are the laboured births of slavish brains,
Not the effect of poetry, but pains;

Cheap vulgar arts, whose narrowness affords

No flights for thoughts, but poorly sticks at words.

A new and nobler way thou dost pursue,

To make translations and translators too.

They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame :

True to his sense, but truer to his fame,

Fording his current where thou find'st it low,
Let'st in thine own to make it rise and flow;
Wisely restoring whatsoever grace

It lost by change of tongue, or time, or place;
Nor, fettered by his numbers or his times,

Betray'st his music to unhappy rhymes.

We have here an early specimen of the apparently unpolished rugged verse" which Dryden with so much. skill made the vehicle of his Religio Laici, "as fittest for discourse and nearest prose." Beaumont, as I have said, attains to something of the same manner, but he lacks Denham's weight. The style of the latter depends for its effect partly on thoughts "familiar but by no means vulgar," compressed within such narrow limits that every otiose word is necessarily excluded, and partly on the skill with which these thoughts are grouped around a central theme. The best examples of the style are to be found in Cooper's Hill, the first English poem written about a particular place, obviously after the model of the Mosella of Ausonius, whom Denham imitates in his description of the Thames. From his centre of observation the poet allows his fancy to range discursively through a variety of themes, suggested by the various objects presented to his view, and his art is shown in the apparently easy naturalness of his transitions. As he looks at the distant smoke of London, rising beneath the recently renovated St. Paul's Cathedral, he is moved to a vein of moral reflection :

Under his proud survey the city lies,

And like a mist beneath a hill doth rise;

Whose state and wealth, the business and the crowd,

Seems at this distance but a darker cloud;

And is, to him who rightly things esteems,

No other in effect than what it seems.

Where, with like haste, through several ways they run,
Some to undo, and some to be undone;

While luxury and wealth, like war and peace,
Are each the other's ruin and increase:

As rivers, lost in seas, some secret vein
Thence reconveys, there to be lost again.
O happiness of sweet retired content,
To be at once secure and innocent!

The ruins of a neighbouring abbey stir in him an indignation like that of Juvenal, as he thinks of the cause of its overthrow :

Tell me, my Muse, what monstrous dire offence,

What crime, could any Christian king incense
To such a rage? Was't luxury or lust?

Was he so temperate, so chaste, so just?

Were these their crimes? They were his own much more;

But wealth is crime enough to him that's poor.

On the other hand, the sight of Runnymede suggests a transition of thought to the contemporary political

situation :

Here was that charter sealed, wherein the Crown
All marks of arbitrary power lays down:
Tyrant and slave, those names of hate and fear,
The happier style of king and subject bear :
Happy where both to the same centre move,
Where kings give liberty, and subjects love.
Therefore not long in force this charter stood;
Wanting that seal, it must be sealed in blood.
The subjects armed, the more their princes gave,
Th' advantage only took the more to crave,
Till kings by giving give themselves away,
And ev❜n that power that should deny betray.

These philosophical meditations are very happily relieved by passages of pure description like that of the staghunt. It will be observed that Denham produces his weighty effects of style sometimes by the repetition of the word which he wishes to emphasise, as for example :

First loves to do, then loves the good he does :

Nature designed

First a brave place, and then as brave a mind:

sometimes by the contrast and antithesis of words or images, as :

Nor with a sudden and impetuous wave,

Like profuse kings, resumes the wealth he gave :

And rather in the dark to grope our way,

Than, led by a false guide, to err by day;

and sometimes by sheer vigour of imagery, as in his description of Strafford's eloquence :

Such was his force of eloquence, to make

The hearers more concerned than he that spake :
Each seemed to act the part he came to see,

And none was more a looker on than he.

Though Denham seldom condescends to the hyperboles or trivial conceits which pleased his age, he is not without them an emphatic example of the contemporary fashionable style is to be found in the finest part of his poem, the description of the Thames :

The stream is so transparent, pure, and clear,
That had the self-enamoured youth gazed here,
So fatally deceived he had not been,

While he the bottom, not his face had seen.

2

The effect produced by Cooper's Hill was marked and lasting. Herrick hailed it with admiration; it is referred to by Vaughan as a poem which had attained universal celebrity; and, two generations later, Swift in his Apollo's Edict complained of the endless stream of poetasters, who tried to imitate the famous passage: "O could I flow like thee, etc." These lines did not appear in the first edition of the poem: they are only one of many proofs of the fineness of Denham's judgment. He altered much, and unlike poets generally, he almost always altered for the better.

1 Lines to M. Denham on his Prospective Poem.
2 Cotswold and Cooper's, both, have met

With learned swains, and echo yet

Their pipes and wit.

Mount of Olives.

CHAPTER XI

CAVALIER AND ROUNDHEAD

MARQUIS OF MONTROSE: RICHARD LOVELACE: LORD FALKLAND: JOHN CLEVELAND: SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT ANDREW MARVELL: GEORGE WITHER: THOMAS MAY.

By the Civil War the great extremes of opinion were in England brought face to face: the vanishing spirit of the Middle Ages confronted the infant genius of the modern world. On the one side stood the power of Absolutism, as it had grown up in the heart of each nation out of the primitive institutions of the tribes which had conquered the Roman Empire: against it was arrayed the power of Democracy, guided and inspired by the civil arts and traditions of Greece and Rome. But this secular opposition was strangely modified by the ecclesiastical element introduced into the strife through the action of the Christian religion the cause of Absolutism being allied with Episcopacy, aided by all the forces of scholastic learning; while Democracy associated itself with the Presbyterian form of Church rule, not less scholastic in its temper, but tending more towards anarchy, through its rejection of the old standards of religious and civil authority. The situation was further perplexed by the mixed interests of the feudal aristocracy, which, though traditionally opposed to the centralising authority of the Crown, nevertheless owed much of its power and independence to the plunder of the Church, and feared the complete triumph of the Presbyterian clergy. The spirit of the age is characteristically expressed in its verse; and I propose to devote this chapter to an account of the poets