Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/211

Rh Oxford, made Poet-Laureate in 1638, and like Cowley and Denham in the service of the exiled Stuarts, was a prolific dramatist, and wrote one or two delightful songs; but his most ambitious work was a fragment of a romantic epic, Gondibert, published in 1650 with an elaborate letter to Hobbes and a reply from that not very romantic philosopher. William Chamberlayne (1619-1689), of whom we know very little beyond the fact that he was a physician at Shaftesbury, began about 1642 a long romantic epic, Pharonnida, an Heroick Poem, published in 1659. In both of these we see the influence not so much of the Italian romantic epic as of the French heroic romance in prose. The central feature is a love-story, and the supernatural machinery which had been such a feature of the epic has disappeared. Davenant reveals his model when he declares his intention of dividing his poem into books and cantos corresponding to the acts and scenes of a play, for this had been, Baro says, D'Urfé's design in the Astrée. Chamberlayne's poem has all the features of the kind—the unknown hero loved at first sight by the princess, whose passion is combated by her sense of what befits her rank, the endless whirl of incidents, and the final "recognition" and marriage. There is little or no dramatic interest in the Pharonnida; the style is tortured; and the verse overflows the line and couplet pause till it is hardly verse at all. But there was far more poetry in Chamberlayne than in most of his contemporaries; picturesqueness, pathos, and passion gild