Page:Works of Sir John Suckling.djvu/17

 round it for his readers. ''Tis now since I sat down' may recall Donne's favourite figures of thought; but its ready ease and smoothness, its conciseness of phrase, are very different from Donne's ponderousness and jerkiness, amid which effects are achieved, either by a sudden and apparently accidental digression into short-lived melody, or by a piece of forcible abruptness that arrests the attention and remains fast in the memory. Suckling is clear and easy with no apparent effort. There is no depth of feeling in his poetry; he evidently prided himself on its absence. The deep emotions of the poet were no part of the equipment of a gentleman. In depth of abstract thought, too, he is deficient. Donne's least graceful verses usually have the merit that their thought, while not always profound, is at least novel. Suckling's thought was commonplace, and had little fertility. Again and again, in his plays and letters, we find old ideas re-used from his poems without more alteration than a careless memory admits. His Account of Religion by Reason, a prose pamphlet written during a holiday at Bath, or West Kington, is a clever performance, with a comparative grace and clearness of style that, from the point of view of purely literary merit, place it somewhat in advance of most of the prose of Suckling's age. But its treatment of its subject—a man of the world's apology for Christianity—is merely a light resume of arguments commonly advanced by other writers; and little original thought has come into being from the perusal of the 'cart-load of books' which, as Aubrey tells us, Suckling brought down to Bath with him. His ready and superficial intelligence of abstract subjects was consistent with real earnestness and foresight where practical issues were at stake. The letter already alluded to, addressed to Henry Jermyn, and evidently intended for the eye of Charles I., discusses with great clearness and wisdom the proper attitude of the King to Parliament, and the advisability of the surrender of Strafford. Suckling eventually clave whole-heartedly to the royal cause, and Strafford's liberty was the rock on which he made shipwreck; but it seems clear that his subsequent actions must have been in defiance of his better judgment, and that his end, whatever its manner, was probably hastened by the