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who, either by their lives or their writings, help to illustrate the oppositions of English feeling during the Civil War.

Prominent among these was James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, whose life and poetry are alike typical of the genius of a chivalrous aristocracy, animated by a strong instinct of national independence, but opposed to ecclesiastical pretensions, whether of Episcopacy or of Presbyterianism. Born in 1612, he became fifth Earl of Montrose on his father's death in 1626. He was educated at the University of St. Andrews. When Charles sought to establish Absolutism in Scotland by means of the Bishops, Montrose signed the Covenant, and took part in the campaign of 1638-39. But after the treaty of Berwick he opposed no less strongly than, and much on the same grounds as, Drummond, the dominance of the Presbyterian party, and on the outbreak of the Civil War sided enthusiastically with the King. His active and romantic career during the war is too well known to require notice in this History; but the few poems he has left behind him are highly characteristic, particularly his Excellent New Ballad, which expresses the very life of chivalry and of aristocratic dislike to clerical government. Curiously enough, it is not included in The Golden Treasury :

My dear and only love, I pray

That little world of thee
Be governed by no other sway
Than purest monarchy;
For if confusion have a part,

Which virtuous souls abhor,

And call a synod in thine heart
I'll never love thee more.

As Alexander I will reign,

And I will reign alone;

My thoughts did ever more disdain

A rival on my throne.

He either fears his fate too much,
Or his desert is small,

Who fears to put it to the touch,
To gain or lose it all.

And in the empire of thine heart,
Where I should solely be,

If others do pretend a part,
Or dare to vie with me,
Or if committees thou erect,
And go on such a score,
I'll laugh and sing at thy neglect,
And never love thee more.

But if thou wilt prove faithful, then,
And constant of thy word,
I'll make thee glorious by my pen,
And famous by my sword;
I'll serve thee in such noble ways
Was never heard before;

I'll crown and deck thee all with bays,
And love thee more and more.

On hearing the tidings of Charles's death, Montrose is said to have fainted; and his vehement feelings are expressed in the hyperboles of the lines which he wrote -as the story goes, with the point of his sword-upon the occasion :

Great, good, and just! could I but rate

My griefs and thy too rigid fate,

I'd weep the world to such a strain

As it should deluge once again.

But since thy loud-tongued blood demands supplies,
More from Briareus' hands than Argus' eyes,

I'll sing thy obsequies with trumpet sounds,

And write thy epitaph with blood and wounds.

He attempted to carry out his threats in 1650, when he landed with a small force in the Orkneys, but his invasion of Scotland proved a failure: he was taken prisoner in Ross-shire, and, being sent to Edinburgh, was hanged there on 21st May 1650.

Montrose has left behind him too little to enable us to estimate his merits as a poet; but this is not the case with another cavalier of the same chivalrous order, whose reputation rests on two compositions known wherever the English language is studied, but whose other writings have little value. Richard Lovelace, author of the Song to Lucasta: Going to the Wars, and of the lines

To Althea from Prison, was the eldest son of Sir William Lovelace of Woolwich, and was born in 1618. His father, a gallant soldier, and the representative of an old family in Kent, lost his life in the Low Countries, fighting under Sir Horace Vere. Richard was educated at Charterhouse, and afterwards at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1634, "being," says Antony Wood," then accounted the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld, . . . of innate modesty, virtue, and courtly deportment, which made him then, but especially after, when he retired to the great city, much admired and adored by the female sex." 1 So strong was this feeling of admiration, that, when the King and Queen were at Oxford in 1636, Laud, the Chancellor, at the request of one of the ladies of the Court, granted Lovelace his M.A. degree, though he had only been two years at the University. After leaving Oxford he was chosen, at the Maidstone Assizes, to present to the Long Parliament the Kentish petition on behalf of the King, which was a reproduction of an earlier petition that the Parliament had ordered to be burned by the common hangman. For this offence he was imprisoned in the Gate-house at Westminster, and wrote there his song To Althea from Prison. After about seven weeks' captivity, he was released on 21st June 1642, but was not allowed to leave London. In 1645 he took up arms on behalf of the King, whom he joined at Oxford, and after the surrender of that city in 1646, he went to the Continent, and fought in the service of the French king against Spain, receiving a wound at the siege of Dunkirk. On returning to England in 1648 he was committed to prison in Petre House, Aldersgate, where he occupied himself with preparing his poems for the press. These were published under the title of Lucasta in 1649: the volume contained the famous song Going to the Wars. Anthony Wood says that Lucasta was Lucy Sacheverell, who was the affianced wife of Lovelace, but who, on hearing that he had been killed at Dunkirk, married another.2 After the death of the 1 Athena Oxonienses (1817), vol. iii. p. 461. 2 Ibid. vol. iii. p. 462.

King, in whose cause he had spent all his possessions, Lovelace, according to Anthony Wood, "grew very melancholy (which brought him to a consumption); became very poor in body and purse, went in ragged clothes (whereas when he was in his glory he wore cloth of gold and silver), and mostly lodged in obscure and dirty places, more befitting the worst of beggars and poorest of servants." He died in 1658, in a mean dwelling in Gunpowder Lane.

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In the general character of his poetry Lovelace may be described as an inferior Carew or Suckling. He laboured his verse like the former, and followed him in the multitude of his classical allusions, but he did not attain to his smoothness and polish. Like Suckling, he occasionally imitated Donne, whose favourite theme of variety in love is handled, perhaps not unsuccessfully, in The Scrutiny :

Why shouldst thou swear I am forsworn,

Since thine I vowed to be?

Lady, it is already morn,

And 'twas last night I swore to thee
That fond impossibility.

Have I not loved thee much and long,
A tedious twelve-months' space?
I should all other beauties wrong,

And rob thee of a new embrace,
Should I still dote upon thy face.

Not but all joy in thy brown hair
In others may be found;

But I must search the black and fair,
Like skilful minerallists, that sound
For treasure in unploughed-up ground.

Then if, when I have loved my round,
Thou prov'st the pleasant she;
With spoils of meaner beauties crowned,
I laden will return to thee,

Ev'n sated with variety.

He occasionally attempted didactic verse, as in his panegyrical lines on the paintings of his friend, Lely; but

1 Athena Oxonienses, vol. iii. p. 462.

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here his essentially commonplace thought, joined to a struggle after originality in expression, causes him to compare unfavourably with Denham. His fortune is still worse when he emulates the exquisite refinement of Herrick, in poems on such subjects as The Toad and Spider, A Duel; The Snail; and The Grasshopper. In the following stanzas of the last-named poem what is pleasing in the fancifulness of the conception is spoiled by want of finish in the execution :—

O thou, that swing'st upon the waving ear

Of some well-fillèd oaten beard,

Drunk every night with a delicious tear,

Dropt thee from heaven, where now th' art reared:

The joys of earth and air are thine entire,

That with thy feet and wings dost hop and fly;

And, when thy poppy works, thou dost retire

To thy carv'd acorn bed to lie.

Up with the day, the sun thou welcom'st then,
Sport'st in the gilt plats of his beams,

And all these merry days mak'st merry-men,
Thyself, and melancholy streams.

It is interesting to observe how, in the two poems which have made his name immortal, the spirit of action and generous emotion has lifted Lovelace into the ethereal region of poetry, out of the heavier atmosphere of conceit and obscurity, which, as a rule, depress the flight of his Muse:

TO LUCASTA: GOING TO THE WARS

Tell me not (sweet) I am unkind,
That from the nunnery

Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.

True a new mistress now I chase.

The first foe in the field;

And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such,
As you too shall adore;

I could not love thee, dear, so much
Lov'd I not Honour more.

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