them and Waller as an adherent to the French school of propriety and precision, some of the happiest of his effusions are remarkable for a cordiality and impetuosity of manner which has nothing foreign about it, but is altogether English, although there is not much resembling it in any of his predecessors any more than of his contemporaries, unless perhaps in some of Skelton's pieces. His famous ballad of The Wedding is the very perfection. of gaiety and archness in verse; and his Session of the Poets, in which he scatters about his wit and humour in a more careless style, may be considered as constituting him the founder of a species of satire, which Cleveland and Marvel and other subsequent writers carried into new applications, and which only expired among us with Swift. We cannot but give the Ballad, often as it has been printed. The subject is the marriage of Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill (afterwards Earl of Orrery), with the Lady Margaret Howard, daughter of the Earl of Suffolk; and the reader will admire the art with which grace and even poetry of expression is preserved throughout along with the forms of speech, as well as of thought, natural to the rustic narrator:-

I tell thee, Dick, where I have been,
Where I the rarest things have seen:
Oh things without compare!
Such sights again cannot be found
In any place on English ground,
Be it at wake or fair.

At Charing Cross, hard by the way
Where we, thou knowest, do sell our hay,
There is a house with stairs: 1

And there did I see coming down
Such folks as are not in our town,
Vorty at least, in pairs.

Amongst the rest, one pestilent fine
(His beard no bigger, though, than thine)
Walked on before the rest:

Our landlord looks like nothing to him;
The King (God bless him) 'twould undo him
Should he go still so drest.

At course-a-park, withouten doubt,

He should have first been taken out

1 The present Northumberland House, then called Suffolk House, the seat

of the lady's father.

By all the maids i' the town;
Though lusty Roger there had been,
Or little George upon the Green,
Or Vincent of the Crown.

But wot you what? The youth was going
To make an end of all his wooing;
The parson for him staid;
Yet, by his leave, for all his haste,
He did not so much wish all past,
Perchance, as did the maid.

The maid-and thereby hangs a tale -
For such a maid no Whitsun ale

Could ever yet produce;

No grape that 's lusty ripe could be
So round, so plump, so soft as she,
Nor half so full of juice.

-

Her finger was so small, the ring
Would not stay on which they did bring,
It was too wide a peck;

And to say truth (for out it must)
It looked like the great collar, just,
About our young colt's neck.

Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice stole in and out
As if they feared the light;

But oh! she dances such a way

No sun upon an Easter day1

Is half so fine a sight.

He would have kissed her once or twice,

But she would not, she was so nice,

She would not do 't in sight;

And then she looked as who should say,

I will do what I list to day,

And you shall do 't at night.

Her cheeks so rare a white was on,
No daisy makes comparison;

Who sees them is undone;

For streaks of red were mingled there
Such as are on a Katharine pear,

The side that 's next the sun.

1 It was formerly believed that the sun danced on Easter-day. See Brand, Popular Antiquities (edit. of 1841), i. 95; where the present verse is strangely quoted in illustration of this popular notion from "a rare book entitled Recreation for Ingenious Head Pieces, &c., 8vo. Lon. 1667."

Her lips were red, and one was thin
Compared to that was next her chin;
Some bee had stung it newly.

But, Dick, her eyes so guard her face,
I durst no more upon them gaze

Than on the sun in July.

Her mouth so small when she does speak, Thou 'dst swear her teeth her words did break That they might passage get:

But she so handled still the matter,

They came as good as ours, or better,
And are not spent a whit.

Passion o' me! how I run on!

There's that that would be thought upon,
I trow, besides the bride:

The business of the kitchen's great,

For it is fit that men should eat,
Nor was it there denied.

Just in the nick the cook knocked thrice,
And all the waiters in a trice

His summons did obey;

Each serving-man with dish in hand
Marched boldly up, like our train-band,
Presented and away.

When all the meat was on the table,
What man of knife, or teeth, was able
To stay to be entreated?

And this the very reason was,
Before the parson could say grace

The company was seated.

Now hats fly off, and youths carouse
Healths first go round, and then the house;
The bride's came thick and thick;
And, when 'twas named another's health,
Perhaps he made it her's by stealth,
And who could help it, Dick?

O' the sudden up they rise and dance;
Then sit again and sigh and glance;

Then dance again and kiss:
Thus several ways the time did pass,
Whilst every woman wished her place,
And every man wished his.

By this time all were stolen aside
To counsel and undress the bride;
But that he must not know:

But yet 'twas thought he guessed her mind,
And did not mean to stay behind

Above an hour or so.

When in he came, Dick, there she lay,
Like new-fallen snow melting away :

"Twas time, I trow, to part:

Kisses were now the only stay,

Which soon she gave, as who would say,
Good bye, with all my heart.

But, just as heavens would have to cross it,
In came the bride-maids with the posset:
The bride-groom ate in spite;

For, had he left the women to 't,
It would have cost two hours to do 't,
Which were too much that night.

DENHAM.

To this date belongs a remarkable poem, the Cooper's Hill of Sir John Denham, first published in 1642. It immediately drew universal attention. Denham, however, had the year before made himself known as a poet by his tragedy of The Sophy, on. the appearance of which Waller remarked that he had broken out like the Irish rebellion, threescore thousand strong, when nobody was aware or in the least suspected it. Cooper's Hill may be considered as belonging in point of composition to the same school with Sir John Davies's Nosce Teipsum; and, if it has not all the concentration of that poem, it is equally pointed, correct, and stately, with, partly owing to the subject, a warmer tone of imagination and feeling, and a fuller swell of verse. The spirit of the same classical style pervades both; and they are the two greatest poems in that style which had been produced down to the date at which we are now arrived. Denham is the author of a number of other compositions in verse, and especially of some songs and other shorter pieces, several of which are very spirited; but the fame of his principal poem has thrown everything else he has written into the shade. It is remarkable that

many biographical notices of this poet make him to have survived nearly till the Revolution, and relate various stories of the miseries of his protracted old age; when the fact is, that he died in 1668, at the age of fifty-three.*

CLEVELAND.

But, of all the cavalier poets, the one who did his cause the heartiest and stoutest service, and who, notwithstanding much carelessness or ruggedness of execution, possessed perhaps, even considered simply as a poet, the richest and most various faculty, was John Cleveland, the most popular verse-writer of his own day, the most neglected of all his contemporaries ever since. Among the one hundred and sixty-one poets, from Robert of Gloucester to Sir Francis Fane, whose choicest relics furnish out Ellis's three volumes of Specimens, the name of Cleveland does not occur. Nor is his poetry included either in Anderson's or in Chalmers's collection. Yet for nearly twenty years he was held to be the greatest among living English poets. Cleveland was the eldest son of the Rev. Thomas Cleveland, vicar of Hinckley and rector of Stoke, in Leicestershire, and he was born at Loughborough in that county in 1613. Down to the breaking out of the civil war, he resided at St. John's College, Cambridge, of which he was a Fellow, and seems to have distinguished himself principally by his Latin poetry. But, when every man took his side, with whatever weapons he could wield, for king or parliament, Anthony Wood tells us that Cleveland was the first writer who came forth as a champion of the royal cause in English verse. To that cause he adhered till its ruin; at last in 1655, after having led for some years a fugitive life, he was caught and thrown into prison at Yarmouth; but, after a detention of a few months, Cromwell, on his petition, allowed him to go at large. The transaction was honourable to both parties. Cleveland's character, which may be mistaken by those who

* The readers of the Mémoires de Grammont will remember the figure he makes in that work, where he is described as "Le Chevalier Denham, comblé de richesses, aussi bien que d'années," and as having for the first time entered into the marriage state, at the age of seventy-nine, with Miss Brook, a famous court beauty, then only eighteen. The fact is, that this was a second marriage, and that, whatever was the lady's age, Denham himself was then only about fifty. His load of riches is probably as much exaggerated by the lively historian of the Comte de Grammont as his load of years.