Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 4.djvu/527

 CRANGANOR

467

CRASHAW

ventit lal title of " Some Emotions and a Moral ' '. Success waited upon her from the start: "The Sin- ner's Comedy" (1892); "A Study in Temptations" (189:?); " ABuudlcof Life"ilS91): "The Gods, Some Mortals, and Lord Wickenham " (1895); "The Herb Moon" (189(5); "The School for Saints" (1897); "Robert Orange" (1900); "A Serious Wooing" (1901) ; " Love and the Soul Hunters" (1902) ; " Tales About Temperaments" (1902); "The Vineyard" (1904): "TheFluteof Pan" (1905); "The Dream and the Business" (published after her death in 1906); — these with plays like "Journeys End in Lovers Meeting: Proverb," in one act, written for Miss Ellen Terry (1894); "The Ambassador", produced at the St. James's theatre in London (1898); "Osbern ind Ursyne", a tragedy in three acts, published in the "Anglo-Saxon Review" (1899); "A Repentance", a irama in one act, produced at the St. James's Theatre ind afterwards at Carisbrooke Castle (1899); "The Wisdom of the Wise", produced at the St. James's rheatre (1900); and "The Bishop's Move" (1902), )f which she was author only in part, represent the mm of her considered work, the output she preferred ler art, the religious quality which seems to lie inevi- tably behind all her theory of life emerged more and nore into prominence. It readied its height in "The School for Saints" and its sequel "Robert Orange". IVhether in literary form or in artistic intention she lever rose beyond the achievement of these two jooks. They are intensely serious, intensely human, md almost too religious; yet they are modern and ilive. Mrs. Craigie was in the full enjojnnent of a well leserved fame, yet hardly at the acme of her powers, vhen death came to her suddenly from heart disease. Cornelius Clifford.
 * o be judged by. As she grew older in the wisdom of

Cranganor. See Damao.

Craniotomy. See Abortion; Embryotomy.

Crashaw, Richard, poet, Cambridge scholar and •onvtTt ; d. 1049. The date of hLs birth is uncertain. Ul that can be affirmed positively is that he was the )nly child of a one-time famous Puritan divine, William !^rashaw, by a first marriage, and that he was born in jondon, probably not earlier than the year 161.3. Of he mother nothing is known except that she died in ler child's infancy, while his father was one of the )reachers in the Temple ; and not even her family name las been preserved to us. William Crashaw, the ather, was born in York.shire of a prosperous stock, rliich had been settled for some generations in or ibout Handsworth, a jilace some few miles to the east if the present town of Sheffield. He was a man of un- ihallenged repute for learning in his day, an argumen- ative but eloquent preacher, strong in his Protes- antism, and fierce in his denunciation of "Romish alsifications" and "besotted Jesuitries". He mar- led a second time in llilO, and was once more made a fidower in the following year. Richard, the future Kiet, could scarcely have been more than a child of six phen this event took place; but the relations between he boy and his ste|>-mother, brief as they must have leen, were affectionate to an unusual degree. She ras but four and twenty when she died in child-birth arly in October, 1620, and she was buried in White- hapel. No other details of this period of Crashaw's ife have come down to us, but the few to which refer- nce has been made make it abundantly evident that leither his jioetic gifts nor the strange bias which he fterwards displayed for the more mystical side of Siristianity can be explained altogether by heredity ir even by early environment.

Owing to the elder Crashaw's fame as a Temple (readier and the scarcely less notable distinction chich must have attached to him as a hard-hitting 'rotestant pamphleteer, it was only natural that, in

the then state of public opinion, a career should in time be opened to his promising son. On the nomina- tion of Sir Randolph Crewe and Sir Henry Velverton, the latter one of the judges of the King's Bench, the boy was placed on a foundation in the Charterhouse School where he was brought under the influence of Robert Brooke, a master of high itlcals and great prac- tical success. The elder Crasha%v died in 1626, leaving his son improvided for; but the influence of his friends was exerted in the boy's behalf, and on 6 July, 1631, some five years after his father's death, Richard en- tered Pembroke Hall in Cambridge. He did not form- ally matriculate as a scholar until 26 March of the fol- lowing year, when he succeeded in getting elected to a pensionership. That he had lived for some time at Pembroke previous to his actual election on one of the foundations there seems to be proved by the poems composed on the death of William Herrys (or Harris) which took place in October, 1631. Life at Cambridge was not niggardly to Crashaw in spite of the improvi- dence which led him to deplete his uncertain resources by spending his little all on books. From this time forth books and friends and religion were to make up the staple of existence for him.

It is significant of the essential aloofness of his spirit, during even the chief formative years of his life, that his poems contain no reference to his early London house or to his family. Brooke, his kindly Charterhouse master, however, he commemorates more than once in affectionate terms both in Latin and in English; and the ties of university friendship seem ever to have been strong with him. Benjamin Laney, the Master of Pembrooke, a man of Laudian views, who came into his own, after the Cromwellian troubles were over, by being appointed successively to the Sees of Peter- borough, Lincoln, and Ely; John Tournay, the High Churchman, tutor of his college, who was refused a divinity degree because of his temerity in attacking the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone; Nicholas Ferrer, the enthusiast who dreamed of reviv- ing the cenobitical idea in the Anglican Church in his home at Little Gidding; Cosin, the Royalist master of Peterhouse ; John Beaumont, the author of " Psyche "; and most characteristic of all, perhaps tenderest of all, and certainly not the least notable of the " Metaphysi- cians", the poet, Abraham Cowley; — these were the intimates who watched the ripening of tho.se Cam- bridge years during which Crashaw achievetl his titles to permanent fame. His feeling for the remote and more learned sense of words, which accounts in part for the defects as well as for the felicities of his poetic style, had manifested itself early in his academic ca- reer; and he had been but a short while at the univer- sity before he was known as an adept in five lan- guages. His knowletlge of Greek and Latin was above the average, even for a generation distinguished in no small degree for its classical scholarship, and one fa- mous line on the Miracle of the Marriage Feast of Cana in his " Epigrammatum Sacroruni Liber", issued from the LTniversity Press in Ui34, will probably be quoted as long as the Latin tongue retains its spell ovor West- ern Christianity: " Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et eru- buit". (The conscious water saw its Lord, and blushed.) Cf. Aaron Hill's translation, 1688-1750. The year in which the "Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber" appeared was the year in which Crashaw took his bachelor's degree. He could scarcely have been morethan twenty-oneat the time, and two years later, possibly on the promise of a more lucrative fellowship, he joined his friend Dr. Cosin at Peterhouse and proceeded M..\. in 1638.

For the details of his life during the next ten or eleven years we are indebted largely to the conjectures of the late Dr. Grosart, based upon the chance statements of his friends and an entry here and there in registers and diplomatic correspondence ; that it was a life sincerely devoted to religious meditation is proved by the pre-