Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/172

152 bear comparison with Spenser. Of the genuineness of the religious and moral feeling which animates the noblest of his sonnets and poems there can be no doubt. Their philosophic profundity has perhaps been exaggerated. It was not a very difficult task for a scholar like Drummond to fill Platonic or neo-Platonic conceptions with orthodox sentiment.

Scholarship, thoughtfulness, and careful workmanship form the link which, in Mr Courthope's view, connect Drummond and Sir John Beaumont (1582-1627), elder brother of the dramatist, and author of the Metamorphosis of Tobacco, a humorous didactic and eulogistic poem, Bosworth Field, a short narrative poem, and a number of complimentary and sacred verses. Beaumont seems to me much less of a poet than Drummond. His vein is reflective, and often both his sentiment and style would, as Drayton said of Daniel's, fit prose better than verse. His best verses are the sacred. If he writes couplets with some of the regularity and balance of Dryden, he gets as a rule much less into them, and this was the real crux, for it was the endeavour to give a denser intellectual texture to poetry which gave both harshness and obscurity to the verse of the two poets who began the movement that ended with Dryden.

These two poets, the chief shaping influences of Jacobean and Caroline poetry—John Donne (1573-1631) and Ben Jonson (1573?-1637)—were not only almost exactly contemporary, but were knit together by many common