THE

LIFE OF ALEXANDER BROME.

BY MR. CHALMERS.

THE turbulent reign of Charles I. was less unfavourable to poetry than might have been expected. In his happier days, the monarch was a friend to learning and the arts, and it is seldom that the natural bias of wits is interrupted by the calamities of their country. Amidst civil convulsions and sanguinary contests, the Muses lent their aid to the hostile parties; and poetical ridicule, though the most harmless, was not the least commonly employed of those means by which they sought to exasperate each other. In this species of warfare, if the loyalists did not exhibit the highest abilities, they were enabled to take the wider range: they were men of gaiety approaching to licentiousness, and opposed psalms and hymns by anacreontics and

satires.

Brome, the writer now before us, has the reputation of ably assisting the royal cause by his poetry, and of even having no inconsiderable hand in promoting the Restoration. Of his personal history, we have only a few notices in the Biographia Dramatica. He was born in 1620 and died June 30, 1666. He was an attorney in the Lord Mayor's Court, and through the whole of the protectorship, maintained his loyalty, and cheered his party by the songs and poems in this collection, most of which must have been sung, if not composed at much personal risk. How far they are calculated to excite resentment, or to promote the cause which the author espoused, the reader is now enabled to judge. His songs are in measures varied with considerable ease and harmony, and have many sprightly turns, and satirical strokes, which the round-heads must have felt. Baker informs us that he was the author of much the greater part of those songs and epigrams which were published against the Rump. Philips styles him the " English Anacreon." Walton has drawn a very favourable character of him in the Eclogue prefixed, the only one of the commendatory poems. which seems worthy of a republication. His translations, and a few of his inferior pieces are also omitted in the present edition, and perhaps it may be thought that some which are retained might have shared the same fate without injury to the reader.