Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 47.djvu/102

 was adorned with illustrations in the edition of 1656, was reissued in 1631, 1647, 1656, 1677, 1684, 1687, 1708, and 1726. The ‘Divine Poems,’ a collection of the paraphrases and some minor pieces, reappeared in 1664, 1669, 1674 (illustrated), 1706, 1714, and 1717; and the ‘Divine Fancies’ in 1652, 1657, 1660, 1664, 1671, 1675 (‘seventh edition’), 1679, and 1687. Of the ‘Emblems’ the reissues were far more numerous, but the plates in the first edition are alone of any value: the chief reissues are those of 1643 (Cambridge), 1660, 1663, 1696 (with the ‘Hieroglyphikes’), 1717, 1736, 1777 (edited by De Coetlogon with the ‘Hieroglyphikes’ and the ‘School of the Heart’); 1812 (Chiswick Press), 1814 (edited by the Rev. R. Wilson), 1839 (with notes by Toplady and Ryland), in 1845 (edited by S. W. Singer), in 1860 and 1871 (with new illustrations based on the old cuts by C. Bennett and W. H. Rogers). Of his pious manuals in prose, ‘Barnabas and Boanerges, or Judgment and Mercy’ reappeared in 1646, 1651, 1671, 1679, 1807 (edited by Reginald Wolfe—i.e. T. F. Dibdin), 1849, 1855; and the ‘Enchiridion’ in 1654, 1670, 1681, 1822, 1841, and 1856; a Swedish translation of the last appeared at Stockholm in 1656. A complete collection of Quarles's ‘Works,’ edited by Dr. A. B. Grosart, appeared in 1874 in the ‘Chertsey Worthies Library’ (3 vols.)

A painting of Quarles by William Dobson is in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Besides the engraved portrait by Marshall in ‘Solomon's Recantation’ (1645), which is often introduced into editions of the ‘Enchiridion’ and ‘Boanerges,’ there is another engraved portrait by Thomas Cross.

The wretchedness of man's earthly existence was the main topic of Quarles's muse, and it is exclusively in religious circles that the bulk of his work has been welcomed with any enthusiasm. In his own day he found very few admirers among persons of literary cultivation, and critics of a later age treated his literary pretensions with contempt. Anthony à Wood sneered at him as ‘an old puritanicall poet … the sometime darling of our plebeian judgment.’ Phillips, in his ‘Theatrum Poetarum’ (1675), wrote that his verses ‘have been ever, and still are, in wonderful veneration among the vulgar;’ Pope, who criticised his ‘Emblems’ in detail in a letter to Atterbury, denounces the book in the ‘Dunciad’ (bk. i. ll. 139–40) as one

Horace Walpole wrote that ‘Milton was forced to wait till the world had done admiring Quarles.’ But Quarles is not quite so contemptible as his seventeenth- and eighteenth-century critics assumed. Most of his verse is diffuse and dull; he abounds in fantastic, tortuous, and irrational conceits, and he often sinks into ludicrous bathos; but there is no volume of his verse which is not illumined by occasional flashes of poetic fire. Charles Lamb was undecided whether to prefer him to Wither, and finally reached the conclusion that Quarles was the wittier writer, although Wither ‘lays more hold of the heart’ (Letters, ed. Ainger, i. 95). Pope deemed Wither a better poet but a less honest man. Quarles's most distinguished admirer of the present century was the American writer, H. D. Thoreau, who asserted, not unjustly, that ‘he uses language sometimes as greatly as Shakespeare’ (Letters, 1865). Quarles's ‘Enchiridion,’ his most popular prose work, contains many aphorisms forcibly expressed.

 QUARLES, JOHN (1624–1665), poet, one of the eighteen children of  [q. v.], is said to have been born in Essex in 1624. He was educated under the care of Archbishop Ussher, and matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford, on 9 Feb. 1643 (Register-book of the University), but does not seem to have taken a degree. He bore arms for the king in the garrison at Oxford, and was imprisoned and banished, apparently in consequence of his adherence to the royal cause. While in banishment in Flanders he wrote the poems contained in his first published volume, ‘Fons Lachrymarum.’ He was in England in 1648, but his ‘occasions beyond sea’ compelled him to leave in the following year, and the date of his ultimate return to this country is unknown.