Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/183

Rh improvement." French "préciosité" has its source in the same concernment with style; but French preciosity is a malady of growth, not of decay, a phase in the movement towards a greater refinement of manners and speech.  The "précieux" were concerned with what might not be said as well as with what should be said.  Still both Marinism and Preciosity were phases in the Renaissance cult of style.  "Metaphysical wit" marked the passing of interest in English poetry to some extent from style to content.  Donne in his Verse-Epistles and Epicedes is more intent upon the subtle thought or thoughts he wishes to develop than on their lucid and harmonious expression, though ever and again he flashes into a magnificent phrase; and Donne's followers convey ingenious fancies, often not worth the carriage, in an obscure uncouth style, and in verse grating as "a brazen canstick turned." Nor did Jonson's influence counteract this tendency. Though his thought is more natural than Donne's, he, too, is concerned with what he says quite as much as with how he says it, more intent on vigour and compression than beauty of phrase and musical numbers. The first half of the seventeenth century produced more than one poet of singular interest, poets whose work has a deeper personal note than that of most of the Elizabethans, and in Milton and Herrick two, in different ways, consummate artists, but the general level of poetical expression and verse,