Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/168

148 Of Wither's later didactic and satirical verse, "pious exercises and political diatribes," which gained him from Milton's schoolmaster, Alexander Gill, the title of "our English Juvenal," it is unnecessary to speak here. Nor can we dwell in detail on the pastorals of other members of the group to which Browne and Wither belonged, or trace the stream of Spenserian allegory as it lost itself in the sand of didactic babble and mysticism. The pastorals of William Basse (1583-1653?), which show the influence of Browne, were published for the first time quite recently; and attention has just been called to the Shepherd's Tales (published first in Nature's Embassie, 1621, and completed in 1623 and 1626) of the voluminous Richard Brathwait (1588-1673). The hitherto unknown poem which Colonel Prideaux reprints adds to many reminders how smoothly the decasyllabic couplet was written at the close of the sixteenth and opening seventeenth century, how much its increasing irregularity was due to the deliberate innovations of Donne and Jonson.

Of religious and moralising poets whose writing is in the Protestant and homely tone of the Spenserians, though with more of conceit, the most popular was Francis Quarles (1592-1644), a native of Essex, educated at Cambridge and Lincoln's Inn, who visited Germany as cup-bearer to the unfortunate Princess Elizabeth. He began in 1620 the publication of an endless succession of paraphrases