Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/195

Rh preachers and divines in giving to the English Church of the seventeenth century that character which, when she had disappeared from sight, kept her alive in the hearts of many as an ideal of sweet reasonableness and decent order—

"Beauty in thee takes up her place,                   And dates her letters from thy face."

The more worldly, not to say dissolute, temper of the cavaliers colours, as well as the drama of Fletcher and Shirley, the light lyrics and adulatory eulogies of quite a number of poets about the court or in the universities, imitators in various ways and degrees of Jonson's classical and Donne's scholastic wit.

Of them all, Thomas Carew (1578-1639?), sewer-in-ordinary to Charles, whose favour he seems to have gained more by wit than worth, was, with the exception of Herrick, the most finished artist. His masque, the Cœlum Britannicum, an elaborate compliment to the mutual fidelity of Charles and Henrietta Maria, based on Bruno's Spaccio della Bestia, was produced in 1633, and his verses were collected and issued posthumously in 1640. He wrote an elegy on Donne—

"A king that ruled as he thought fit                The universal monarchy of wit"—

in which he commends the emancipation from convention and imitation which Donne brought to English poetry. There is, however, a good deal that is conventional in Carew's own imagery. He does not