Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/200

180 It was in the year following the publication of Donne's Poems and Herbert's Temple, the year of Crashaw's Epigrammata and Carew's Cœlum Britannicum, that Comus was presented before the Earl of Bridgewater; and its publication with Lawe's music followed in 1637. It was the first indication that, among those who regarded with an ever-increasing hatred the ecclesiastical policy of Laud, and to whom the courtly lyrical and dramatic poetry was as the dissonant music of Comus and his rout, there had been growing up, in the person of the delicate, studious, and carefully educated son of a Puritan scrivener, who had just after seven years' study quitted Cambridge, "church-outed by the prelate," unable to take orders in an Anglican Church reformed by Laud, and was living in bookish seclusion at Horton, a poet after the order of the few greatest the world has produced, a poet who, combining the high seriousness of the Spenserians with the classical culture and regard for form of Jonson, was destined to add to Elizabethan achievement in drama and song equally high achievement in epic, while imparting a new grandeur of diction and evolution to the ode or sustained and elaborate lyric, and making in the drama experiments of singular interest and beauty.