Page:Works of Sir John Suckling.djvu/15

 malice of a manservant, who placed an open razor in his boot.

In the various branches of literature in which Suckling worked he was professedly an amateur, cultivating literary society, bestowing upon it the casual inspiration of his wit, but abstaining from any regular apprenticeship to literature. As a natural result, his poetry suffers from a striking irregularity of execution. Many of the verses printed in the present volume are little better than doggerel, and if the doggerel is sometimes clever, it is often very much the reverse. The Sessions of the Poets (to give it its earliest title), which won for its author considerable fame as a wit, and produced a crop of imitations, has much of Suckling's casual happiness of phrase, and hits off with terse criticism the more conspicuous attributes of the persons who take part in the contest described. But, beyond the amusement aroused by it at the time, and its historical interest for us to-day, it is of no intrinsic poetical value. Suckling approached verse in a condescending spirit, treating it as a pastime, or as an accomplishment within reach of a gentleman, but unsuited to absorb too much of his time and power. He attached himself to no school of poetry in particular. Some of his friends, Carew, for instance, were nominal disciples of Jonson. Suckling's poetry, save for a few epigrammatic pieces and an imitation, written half in burlesque, of a famous song by Jonson, retains little trace of Jonson's influence. He spoke rather scornfully of the poet's notorious boastfulness in the Sessions of the Poets, and caricatured him with a light touch in The Sad One. His inclinations led him rather in the direction which had been pointed so forcibly by Donne. The strong, if artificial, style of Donne, with its elaborately pursued metaphors, and its explosive violence of statement, had leavened most of the non-dramatic poetry of Suckling's age. Such poems as Love's World, a collection of similes by which the lover proves that he and his passion reflect the universe and its elements in detail, or the Farewell to Love, with its gruesome imagery of death's-heads and worms, and the lover's declaration—

A quick corse, methinks, I spy In every woman,'