Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 47.djvu/101

 wife states in error that he was buried in St. Leonard's Church, Foster Lane. Letters of administration, in which he was described as ‘late of Ridley Hall, Essex,’ were granted to his widow on 4 Feb. 1644–5. On the margin appears the word ‘pauper’ (Wills from Doctors' Commons, Camd. Soc. p. 159).

Pope's contemptuous reference to Quarles as a pensioner of Charles I in the lines (Imitations of Horace, Ep. i. ll. 386–7): The hero William and the martyr Charles, One knighted Blackmore, and one pensioned Quarles, seems based on no authentic testimony. Quarles dedicated many of his books to Charles I; and, after his death, a publisher, Richard Royston, dedicated to the king a second part of his ‘Barnabas and Boanerges,’ which bore the alternative title ‘Judgment and Mercy for Afflicted Soules’ (1646). There Royston speaks of Quarles as sacrificing his utmost abilities to the king's service ‘till death darkened that great light in his soul;’ but the implication seems to be that he went without reward.

On 28 May 1618 Quarles married at St. Andrew's, Holborn, Ursula (b. 1601), daughter of John Woodgate of the parish of St. Andrew's. By her he had eighteen children. The eldest son, John, is noticed separately. The baptisms of four younger children are entered in the parish register of Roxwell; but of these Joanna and Philadelphia only survived infancy.

Great as was Quarles's popularity in his lifetime, it was largely increased by his posthumous publications. The earliest of these was ‘Solomons Recantation, entituled Ecclesiastes paraphrased. With a Soliloquie or Meditation upon every Chapter, &c. By Francis Quarles. Opus posthumum. Never before imprinted. London, printed by M. F. for Richard Royston, 1645,’ 4to. A portrait, ‘ætatis suæ 52,’ by William Marshall, forms the frontispiece; verses by Alexander Ross are subscribed. ‘Vrsula Quarles his sorrowful widow’ prefixed a sympathetic ‘short relation’ of Quarles's life and death, with a postscript by Nehemiah Rogers [q. v.]; and there are elegies by James Duport in Latin, and by R. Stable in English. Shortly afterwards there appeared another volume of verse, ‘The Shepheard's Oracles, delivered in certain Eglogues,’ 1646, 4to. This versifies the theological controversies of the times. The interlocutors include persons named Orthodoxus, Anarchus, Catholicus, Canonicus, and the like; and the volume concludes with a spirited ballad, sung by Anarchus, ironically denouncing all existing institutions in church and state. The address to the reader, dated 26 Nov. 1645 and signed John Marriott, who, with Richard Marriott, published the volume, gives a charmingly sympathetic picture of Quarles's peaceful pursuits, and describes him as an enthusiastic angler, which several passages in the book confirm. Internal evidence proves the author of the address to have been Izaak Walton, who was on friendly terms with the publisher Marriott (Compleat Angler, ed. Nicolas, pp. 36, 37). In 1646 Quarles's wife issued at Cambridge a second part of the popular ‘Barnabas and Boanerges’ under the title of ‘Judgment and Mercie for Afflicted Soules;’ she complained that two London editions of the same tract in the same year were unauthorised and inaccurate. ‘A direfull Anathema against Peace-haters, written by Fran. Quarles,’ beginning ‘Peace, vipers, peace,’ appeared as a broadside in 1647. Of different character was a fifth posthumous piece: ‘The Virgin Widow’ (1649, 4to, and 1656), an interlude, which was ‘acted privately at Chelsea, by a company of young gentlemen, with good approvement.’ The publisher describes it as the author's very first essay in that kind, and a proof which few modern readers would admit ‘that he knew as well to be delightfully facetious as divinely serious.’ Langbaine prudently describes it as ‘an innocent, inoffensive play.’ Some of the verses in Fuller's ‘Abel Redevivus’ (1651) are by Quarles; the rest are by his son John.

Quarles has been wrongly credited with ‘Anniversaries upon his Paranete continued’ (1635), a work by Richard Brathwaite; ‘Midnight Meditations of Death, with pious and profitable Observations and Consolations: perused by Francis Quarles a little before his Death, published by E[dward] B[enlowes],’ London, 1646; ‘Schola Cordis, or the Heart of itself gone away from God brought back again to Him and instructed by Him, in XLVII Emblems,’ London, 1647, 8vo (usually quoted as ‘The School of the Heart’). The last work was authoritatively assigned, in the edition of 1675, to the author of the ‘Synagogue’—i.e. Christopher Harvey [q. v.] Yet in a reprint edited by De Coetlogon in 1777, and many later issues, including one published at Bristol in 1808 by ‘Reginald Wolfe, Esq.’ (a pseudonym for Thomas Frognall Dibdin), and the Chiswick Press edition of 1812, it is positively assigned to Quarles. This mistaken ascription was adopted by Southey and by Samuel Weller Singer [q. v.], who edited it and other genuine works of Quarles in 1845.

Quarles's works were constantly reprinted for more than a century after his death. His ‘Argalus and Parthenia’ (1629), which