When flowing cups run swiftly round, With no allaying Thames, Our careless heads with roses bound, Know no such liberty. When, like committed linnets, I Stone walls do not a prison make, Scattered over Lovelace's poetry are a good many single expressions struck out by a true poetical feeling. Campbell has borrowed from him the line in his Dream of the Exile, "The sentinel stars set their watch in the sky;" which in Lovelace is, in one of his addresses to Lucasta, "Like to the sentinel stars, I watch all night." Lovelace's days, darkened in their close by the loss of everything except honor, were cut short at the age of forty; his contemporary, Sir John Suckling, who moved gayly and thoughtlessly through his short life as through a dance or a merry game, died, in 1641, at that of thirty-two. Suckling, who is the author of a small collection of poems, as well as of four plays, has none of the pathos of Lovelace or Carew, but he equals them in fluency and natural grace of manner, and he has besides a sprightliness and buoyancy which is all his own. His poetry has a more impulsive air than theirs; and while, in reference to the greater part of what he has produced, he must be classed along with 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 gayety and archness in verse; and his Session of the Poets, in which he scatters about his wit and humor 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 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, At Charing Cross, hard by the way And there did I see coming down Amongst the rest, one pestilent fine (His beard no bigger, though, than thine) grace 1 The present Northumberland House, then called Suffolk House, the seat of the lady's father. 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." He would have kissed her once or twice, 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, Who sees them is undone ; For streaks of red were mingled there Her lips were red, and one was thin But, Dick, her eyes so guard her face, 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, Passion o' me! how I run on! There's that that would be thought upon, The business of the kitchen's great, For it is fit that men should eat, 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 |