Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/161

Rh In Phineas Fletcher's poetry there were apparently the two distinct strains of which we have spoken above. His Sicelides, a comedy performed before James in 1614, mingles pastoral love-story with comic scenes not devoid of coarseness; and Grosart conjectured that he was the author of Britain's Ida (1627), a frank and voluptuous Ovidian idyll. On the other hand, the Spenserian pastorals and allegories which he published in 1627 and 1633—describing them as "these raw essays of my very unripe years and almost childhood"—are without exception religious, and so was all his subsequent work in verse and prose. The Locustæ vel Pietas Jesuitica: The Locusts or Appolyonists is a strange poem—the first part in Latin, the second in English—describing allegorically the rise of the Jesuits and the Gunpowder Plot. Milton borrowed from it for his allegory of Sin and Death. The Piscatorie Eclogues is a fluent imitation of Spenser's pastorals with borrowings from Sannazaro, full of the poet's views and woes. His most ambitious poem, The Purple Island, elaborates the suggestion given by Spenser's description of the Castle of Alma (Faerie Queene, ii. 8), portraying in a minutely detailed allegory the constitution of man, physical and mental, and enlarging in characteristically theological manner the strife between Temperance and her foes into the Christian warfare between Voletta (the will) and Satan.

This is the way in which his seventeenth-century followers dealt with Spenser's great poem. They cared nothing for his romance—whose influence was