The royal maid th' applause disdains Europa among the Flowers. In a note to Moschus, Stanley translates the following from Marini, in which the Italian poet imitates the second idyll of Moschus. Along the mead Europa walks, To choose the fairest of its gems, Where'er the beauteous virgin treads, 'Twixt whom ambitious wars arise, Which to the queen shall first present A gift Arabian spice outvies, The votive offering of their scent, When deathless Amaranth, this strife, Pliant Acanthus now the vine And ivy enviously beholds, Wishing her odorous arms might twine About this fair in such strict folds. The Violet, by her foot oppressed, Doth from that touch enamoured rise, But, losing straight what made her blest, Hangs down her head, looks pale, and dies. Clitia, to new devotion won, Doth now her former faith deny, The Gillyflower, which mocks the skies— A brighter lustre from her eyes, A richer scarlet from her cheeks. The jocund Flower-de-luce appears, Narcissus in her eyes, once more, Seems his own beauty to admire ; The Crocus, who would gladly claim The hand of Nature writ his fate, With a glad smile his sigh deceives, In hopes to be more fortunate. His head the drowsy Poppy raised, Awaked by this approaching morn, And viewed her purple light amazed, Though his, alas! was but her scorn. None of this aromatic crowd, But for their kind death humbly call, Courting her hand, like martyrs proud, By so divine a fate to fall. Of vulgar flowers, and only chose The bashful glory of the plains, Sweet daughter of the Spring, the Rose. She, like herself, a queen appears, Raised on a verdant thorny throne, Guarded by amorous winds, and wears A purple robe, a golden crown. SIR JOHN DENHAM. SIR JOHN DENHAM (1615-1668) was the son of the chief-baron of exchequer in Ireland, and was born at Dublin, but educated at Oxford, then the chief resort of all the poetical and high-spirited cavaliers. Denham was wild and dissolute in his youth, and squandered great part of his patrimony at the gaming-table. He was made governor of Farnham Castle by Charles I.; and after the monarch had been delivered into the hands of the army, his secret correspondence was partly carried on by Denham, who was furnished with nine several ciphers for the purpose. Charles had a respect for literature as well as the arts; and Milton records of him that he made Shakspeare's plays the closet-companion of his solitude. It would appear, however, that the king wished to keep poetry apart from state affairs; for he told Denham, on seeing one of his pieces, 'that when men are young, and have little else to do, they may vent the overflowings of their fancy in that way; but when they are thought fit for more serious employments, if they still persisted in that course, it looked as if they minded not the way to any better.' The poet stood corrected, and bridled in his muse. In 1639, he succeeded to his father's estate, and returned again to the gaming-table. In 1648, he was employed to convey the Duke of York to France, and resided in that country some time. His estate was sold by the Long Parliament; but the Restoration revived his fallen dignity and fortunes. He was made surveyor of the king's buildings, and a Knight of the Bath. In domestic life, the poet does not seem to have been happy. He had freed himself from his early excesses and follies, but an unfortunate marriage darkened his closing years, which were unhappily visited by insanity. He recovered, to receive the congratulations of Butler, his fellow-poet, and to commemorate the death of Cowley in one of his happiest effusions. Cooper's Hill, the poem by which Denham is now best known, was first published in 1642, but afterwards corrected and enlarged. It consists of between three and four hundred lines, written in the heroic couplet. The descriptions are interspersed with sentimental digressions, suggested by the objects around-the river Thames, a ruined abbey, Windsor Forest, and the field of Runnymede. The view from Cooper's Hill is rich and luxuriant, but the muse of Denham was more reflective than descriptive. Dr Johnson assigns to this poet the praise of being the author of a species of composition that may be denominated local poetry, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection or incidental meditation.' Ben Jonson's fine poem on Penshurst may dispute the palm of originality on this point with Cooper's Hill, but Jonson could not have written with such correctness, nor with such pointed expression, as Denham. The versification of this poet is generally smooth and flowing, but he had no pretensions to the genius of Cowley, or to the depth and delicacy of feeling possessed by the old dramatists, or the poets of the Elizabethan period. He reasoned fluently in verse, without glaring faults of style, and hence obtained the approbation of Johnson far above his deserts. Denham could not, like his contemporary, Chamberlayne, have described the beauty of a summer morning: The Morning hath not lost her virgin blush; Nor step, but mine, soiled the earth's tinselled robe. How full of heaven this solitude appears, By a full quire of feathered choristers, Here Nature in her unaffected dress Plaited with valleys, and embossed with hills Enchased with silver streams, and fringed with woods, Sits lovely in her native russet.* Chamberlayne is comparatively unknown, and has never been included in any edition of the poets, yet every reader of taste or sensibility must feel that the above picture far transcends the cold sketches of Denham, and is imbued with a poetical spirit to which he was a stranger. 'That Sir John Denham began a reformation in our verse,' says Southey, 'is one of the most groundless assertions that ever obtained belief in literature. More thought and more skill had been exercised before his time in the construction of English metre, than he ever bestowed on the subject, and by men of far greater attainments and far higher powers. To improve, indeed, either upon the versification or the diction of our great writers, was impossible; it was impossible to exceed them in the knowledge or in the practice of their art, but it was easy to avoid the more obvious faults of inferior authors: and in this way he succeeded, just so far as not to be included in The mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease; nor consigned to oblivion with the "persons of quality" who contributed their vapid effusions to the miscellanies of those days. His proper place is among those of his contemporaries and successors who called themselves wits, and have since been entitled poets by the courtesy of England.' + Denham, nevertheless, deserves a place in English literature, though not that high one which has heretofore been assigned to him. The traveller who crosses the Alps or Pyrenees, finds pleasure in the contrast afforded by level plains and calm streams; and so Denham's correctness pleases, after the wild imaginations and irregular harmony of the greater masters of the lyre who preceded him. In reading him, we feel that we descending into a different scene-the romance is over, and we must be content with smoothness, regularity, and order. Chamberlayne's Love's Victory. ↑ Southey's Life of Cowper. are The Thames and Windsor Forest.—From 'Cooper's Hill!' Though with those streams he no remembrance hold, Whose foam is amber and their gravel gold, The mower's hopes, nor mock the ploughman's toil, But his proud head the airy mountain hides This scene had some bold Greek or British bard Of fairies, satyrs, and the nymphs their dames, The four lines printed in italics have been praised by every critic from Dryden to the present day. The Reformation-Monks and Puritans. Here should my wonder dwell, and here my praise, But my fixed thoughts my wandering eye betrays. Viewing a neighbouring hill, whose top of late A chapel crowned, till in the common fate Th' adjoining abbey fell. May no such storm Fall on our times, where ruin must reform ! 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, Who having spent the treasures of his crown, Condemns their luxury to feed his own. And yet this act, to varnish o'er the shame And like the block unmoved lay; but ours, Can knowledge have no bound, but must advance Denham had just and enlightened notions of the duty of a translator. 'It is not his business alone,' he says, 'to translate language into language, but poesy into poesy; and poesy is so subtle a spirit, that, in pouring out of one language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the translation, there will remain nothing but a caput mortuum; there being certain graces and happinesses peculiar to every language, which give life and energy to the words.' Hence, in his poetical address to Sir Richard Fanshawe, on his translation of Pastor Fido, our poet says: On Poetical Translations. That servile path thou nobly dost decline The last two lines are very happily conceived and expressed. Denham wrote a tragedy, the Sophy, which is but a tame commonplace plot of Turkish jealousy, treachery, and murder. Occasionally, there is a vigorous thought or line, as when the envious king asks Haly: Have not I performed actions As great, and with as great a moderation? On Mr Abraham Cowley. His Death and Burial amongst the Ancient Poets. Old Chaucer, like the morning-star, His light those mists and clouds dissolved Till time had blasted all their bays; That plucked the fairest, sweetest flower And amongst withered laurels threw. None knows which bears the happiest share. Horace his wit and Virgil's state Nature, alas! why art thou so WILLIAM CHAMBERLAYNE, WILLIAM CHAMBERLAYNE (1619-1689) describes himself in the title-page to his works as 'of Shaftesbury, in the county of Dorset.' The poet practised as a physician at Shaftesbury; but he appears to have wielded the sword as well as the lancet, for he was present among the royalists at the battle of Newbury. His circumstances must have been far from flourishing, as, like Vaughan, he complains keenly of the poverty of poets, and states that he was debarred from the society of the wits of his day. The works of Chamberlayne consist of two poems-Love's Victory, a tragi-comedy, published in 1658; and Pharonnida, a Heroic Poem, published in 1659. The scene of the first is laid in Sicily; and that of Pharonnida is also partly in Sicily, but chiefly in Greece. With no court connection, no light or witty copies of verses to float him into popularity, relying solely on his two long and comparatively unattractive worksto appreciate which, through all the windings of romantic love, plots, escapes, and adventures, more time is required than the author's busy age could afford-we need hardly wonder that Chamberlayne was an unsuccessful poet. His works were almost totally forgotten, till Campbell, in his Specimens of the Poets, in 1819, by quoting largely from Pharonnida, and pointing out the 'rich breadth and variety of its scenes,' and the power and pathos of its characters and situations, drew attention to the passion, imagery, purity of sentiment, and tenderness of description, which lay, 'like metals in the mine,' in the neglected volume of Chamberlayne. We cannot, however, suppose that the works of this poet can ever be popular; his beauties are marred by infelicity of execution; though not deficient in the genius of a poet, he had little of the skill of the artist. The heroic couplet then wandered at will, sometimes into a 'wilderness of sweets,' but at other times into tediousness, mannerism, and absurdity. The sense was not compressed by the form of the verse, or by any correct rules of metrical harmony. Chamberlayne also laboured under the disadvantage of his story being long and intricate, and his style such-from the prolonged tenderness and pathos of his scenes-as could not be appreciated except on a careful and attentive perusal. Denham was patent to all-short, sententious, and perspicuous. The dissatisfaction of the poet with his obscure and neglected situation, depressed by poverty, breaks out in the following passage, descriptive of a rich simpleton: How purblind is the world, that such a monster, Souls that make worth their centre, and to that Had spun rich threads of fancy from the brain : But they are souls too much sublimed to thrive. The following description of a dream is finely executed, and seems to have suggested, or at least bears a close resemblance to, the splendid opening lines of Dryden's Religio Laici: A Prophetic Dream. A strong prophetic dream, An adamantine world she sees, more pure, Chamberlayne, like Milton and the earlier poets, was fond of describing the charms of morning. We have copied one passage in the previous notice of Denham; and numerous brief sketches are interspersed throughout Chamberlayne's works. For example: When lowly swains, knowing no parent's voice Termed uncommanded lust-sharp poverty, As those far more malignant powers that stand, EDMUND WALLER. EDMUND WALLER (1605-1687) was a courtly and amatory poet. His poems have all the smoothness and polish of modern verse, and hence a high, perhaps too high, rank has been claimed for him as one of the first refiners and improvers of poetical diction. One cause of Waller's refinement was doubtless his early and familiar intercourse with the court and nobility. He wrote for the world of fashion and of taste consigning The noon of manhood to a myrtle shadeand he wrote in the same strain till he was upwards of fourscore! His life has more romance than his poetry. Waller was born at Coleshill, in Hertfordshire, and in his infancy was left heir to an estate of £3500 per annum. His mother was of the Hampdens of Buckinghamshire, and the poet was cousin to the patriot Hampden, and also related to Oliver Cromwell. His mother was a royalist in feeling, and used to lecture Cromwell for his share in the death of Charles I. Her son, the poet, was either a Roundhead or a royalist, as the time served. He entered parliament and wrote his first poem when he was eighteen. At twenty-five, he married a rich heiress of London, who died the same year, and the poet immediately became a suitor of Lady Dorothea Sidney, eldest daughter of the Earl of Leicester. To this proud and peerless fair one, Waller dedicated the better portion of his poetry, and the groves of Penshurst echoed to the praises of his Sacharissa. Lady Dorothea, however, was inexorable, and bestowed her hand, in her twenty-second year, on the Earl of Sunderland. It is said that, meeting her long afterwards, when she was far advanced in years, the lady asked him when he would again write such verses upon her. 'When you are as young, madam, and as handsome, as you were then,' replied the ungallant poet. The incident affords a key to Waller's character. He was easy, witty, and accomplished, but cold and selfish; destitute alike of high principle and deep feeling. As a member of parliament, Waller distinguished himself on the popular side, and was chosen to conduct the prosecution against Judge Crawley for his opinion in favour of levying ship-money. His speech, on delivering the impeachment, was printed, and 20,000 copies of it sold in one day. Shortly afterwards, however, Waller joined in a plot to surprise the city militia, and let in the king's forces, for which he was tried and sentenced to one year's imprisonment, and to pay a fine of £10,000. His conduct on this occasion was mean and abject. At the expiration of his imprisonment, the poet went abroad, and resided, amidst much splendour and hospitality, in France. He returned during the Protectorate, and when Cromwell died, Waller celebrated the event in one of his most vigorous and impressive poems. The image of the Commonwealth, though reared by no common hands, soon fell to pieces under Richard Cromwell, and Waller was ready with a congratulatory address to Charles II. The royal offering was considered inferior to the Panegyric on Cromwell, and the king himself-who admitted the poet to terms of courtly intimacy-is said to have told him of the disparity. Poets, sire,' replied the witty, self-possessed Waller,succeed better in fiction than in truth.' In the first parliament summoned by Charles, Waller sat for the town of Hastings, and he served for different places in all the parliaments of that reign. Bishop Burnet says he was the delight of the House of Commons. At the accession of James II. in 1685, the venerable poet, then eighty years of age, was elected representative for a borough in Cornwall. The mad career of James, in seeking to subvert the national church and constitution, was foreseen by this wary and sagacious observer: 'He will be left,' said he, 'like a whale upon the strand.' The editors of Chandler's Debates and the Parliamentary History ascribe to Waller a remarkable speech against standing armies, delivered in the House of Commons in 1685; but according to Lord Macaulay, this speech was really made by Windham, member for Salisbury. It was with some concern,' adds the historian, 'that I found myself forced to give up the belief that the last words uttered in public by Waller were so honourable to him.' Feeling his long-protracted life drawing to a close, Waller purchased a small property at Coleshill, saying: He would be glad to die like the stag, where he was roused.' The wish was not fulfilled; he died at Beaconsfield, on the 21st of October 1687; and in the churchyard of that place-where also rest the ashes of Edmund Burke-a monument has been erected to his memory. The first collection of Waller's poems was made by himself, and published in the year 1664. It went through numerous editions in his lifetime; and in 1690 a second collection was made of such pieces as he had produced in his latter years. In a poetical dedication to Lady Harley, prefixed to |