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William Habington lived in the decadence of a great age, the Golden Age of English literature. He was a lad of eleven years when Shakespeare was carried to his grave. He was writing prefatory verses for one of Shirley's dramas as early as 1629—and for the Beaumont and Fletcher folio as late as 1647. But there is a directness, a simplicity in his verse very rare among his contemporaries. Neither the overwrought fancies of the Italian School, nor the subtlety and perversity of the so-called "Metaphysical" poets, would seem to have touched him appreciably. Perhaps that insistent moderation which hampered Habington when he would scale the heights of lyric beauty, saved him, also, from the vices of his age. For in his literary, as in his private life, the man's soul was "like a star and dwelt apart." A modest star it was, yet one from which others have taken light for their pathway. It is impossible, for example, to read his lines on "The Grave," without being conscious that they contain, as it were in embryo, almost the whole of Gray's immortal Elegy.

Professor Saintsbury has remarked that our poet's work is "invaluable as showing the counterside to Milton, the Catholic Puritanism which is no doubt inherent in the English nature." A very just criticism, although the word purity might advantageously be substituted for