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PAGE JOHN CLEVELAND 1 Introduction 4 Contents 14 To the Discerning Reader, &c. 15

POEMS 19

THOMAS STANLEY 95 Introduction 97 Contents 101

POEMS NOT PRINTED AFTER 1647 101 POEMS PRINTED IN 1647 AND REPRINTED IN 1656 BUT NOT IN 1651 102 1651 POEMS 109 POEMS APPEARING ONLY IN THE EDITION OF 1656 159

POEMS, ELEGIES, PARADOXES, AND SONNETS 169

THOMAS FLATMAN 275 Introduction 277 Dedication 283 To the Reader 284 Commendatory Poems 285 The Contents 294

POEMS AND SONGS 296

NATHANIEL WHITING 423

Introduction 424 Commendatory Poems 428

THE PLEASING HISTORY OF ALBINO AND BELLAMA 439 To those worthy Heroes of our Age, whose noble Breasts are wet and water'd with the dew of Helicon 539 Il Insonio Insonnadado 540

POEMS

J. C.

With Additions, never before Printed.

Printed in the Yeare 1653.

ORATIONS,

EPISTLES,

And other of his Genuine Incomparable Pieces, never before publisht.

WITH

Some other Exquisite Remains of the most eminent Wits of both the Universities that were his Contemporaries.

OR,

CLIEVELAND'S

Genuine POEMS,

Purged from the many

False & Spurious Ones

Which had usurped his Name, and from innumerable Errours and Corruptions in the True.

To which are added many never Printed before.

Published according to the Author's own Copies.

INTRODUCTION TO JOHN CLEVELAND.

He escaped somehow, however: and we hear nothing of his life for another decade. Then he is again in trouble, being informed against, to the Council of State, by some Norwich Roundheads who have, however, nothing to urge against him but his antecedents, his forgathering with 'papists and delinquents', his 'genteel garb' with 'small and scant means', and his 'great abilitie whence he is able to do the greater disservice', this last a handsome testimonial to Cleveland, and a remarkable premium upon imbecility. He was imprisoned at Yarmouth and wrote a very creditable letter to Cromwell, maintaining his principles, but asking for release, which seems to have been granted. Cromwell--to do him justice and to alter a line of his greatest panegyrist save one in verse on another person--

As for his character as a man, the evidence is entirely in his favour. He was an honest and consistent politician on his own side, and if some people think it the wrong side, others are equally positive that it was the right. If we dismiss the encomia on his character as partisan, there remains the important fact that no one on the other side says anything definite against it. If he was abusive, it certainly does not lie with anybody who admires Milton to reproach him with that. But the fact is, once more, that except in so far as there is a vague idea that a cavalier, and especially a cavalier poet, must have been a 'deboshed' person, there is absolutely no evidence against Cleveland and much in his favour. Also, this is not our business, which is with him as a poet.

But Cleveland never failed in it: and unfortunately it wants a failure or two at least of this kind to make a poet. To illustrate what I mean, let me refer readers to Benlowes--comparison of Cleveland with whom would not long ago have been impossible except in a large library. Benlowes is as extravagant as Cleveland, whom he sometimes copied. But he cannot help this kind of poetic 'failure' from breaking in. Cleveland can, or rather I should say that he does not try--or has no need to try--to keep it out. In 'Fuscara', eminently; in 'To the State of Love', perhaps most prettily; in the 'Antiplatonic', most vigorously--in all his poems more or less, he sets himself to work to accumulate and elaborate conceits for their own sake. They are not directly suggested by the subject and still less by each other; they are no spray or froth of passion; they never suggest that indomitable reaching after the infinite which results at least in an infinite unexpectedness. They are merely card-castles of 'wit' in its worst sense; mechanical games of extravagant idea-twisting which simply aim at 'making records'. It is true that people admired them for being this. It is still truer that similar literary exercises may be found, and found popular, at the present day. It is even true, as will be shown later, that it is possible positively to enjoy them still. But these are different questions.

If Cleveland had little or nothing of the poetry of enthusiastic thought and feeling, he had not much more of the poetry of accomplished form, though here also he is exceptionally interesting. His 'Mark Antony' has been indicated as an early example of 'dactylic' metre. It certainly connects interestingly with some songs of Dryden's, and has an historical position of its own, but I am by no means sure that it was meant to be dactylic or even anapaestic.

But, for all that, the Satires give us ample reason for understanding why the Roundheads persecuted Cleveland, and justify their fear of his 'abilities'. He has, though an unequal, an occasional command of the 'slap-in-the-face' couplet which--as has just been said--not impossibly taught something to Dryden, or at least awoke something in him. 'The Rebel Scot', his best thing, does not come so very far short of the opportunity which the Scots had given: and its most famous distich

Had Cain been Scot, God would have changed his doom, Not forced him wander, but confined him home,

was again and again revived till the unpopularity of North with South Britain flamed out last in Bute's time, a hundred years and more after Cleveland's. Of course it is only ignorance which thinks that this form of the couplet was invented by Cleveland, or even in his time. It may be found in Elizabeth's, and in Cleveland's own day was sporadic; nor did he himself ever approach such continuous and triumphant use of it as Dryden achieved only two years after Cleveland's own death. But there is, so to speak, the 'atmosphere' of it, and that atmosphere occasionally condenses into very concrete thunderbolts. Unfortunately he knew no mood but abuse, and such an opportunity as that of the 'Elegy on Laud' is almost entirely lost.

However, such as he is--in measure as full as can with any confidence be imparted; and omitting of course prose work--he is now before the reader, who will thus be able at last to form his own judgement on a writer who, perhaps of all English writers, combines the greatest popularity in his own time with the greatest inaccessibility in modern editions.

Nor should any reader be deterred from making the examination by the strictures which have been given above on Cleveland's purely poetical methods and merits. These strictures were made as cautions, and as a kind of antidote to the writer's own undisguised partiality for the 'metaphysical' style. It is true that Cleveland, like Benlowes, has something of a helot of that style about him: and that his want of purely lyrical power deprives his readers of much of the solace of his sin. But those natures must be very morose, very prosaic, or at best steeled against everything else by abhorrence of 'False Wit' who can withstand a certain tickling of amused enjoyment at the enormous yet sometimes pretty quaintnesses of 'Fuscara' itself; and still more at those of the 'To the State of Love', which is his happiest non-satirical thing. From the preliminary wish to be a 'Shaker' to the final description of Chanticleer as

That Baron Tell-Clock of the night,

the thing is a kind of a carnival of conceit, a fairy-tale of the fantastic. 'To Julia to expedite her Promise' is somewhat more laboured and so less happy: and the loss of the lyric form in 'The Hecatomb to his Mistress' is considerable. The heroic couplet squares ill with this sort of thing: but the octasyllabic admits it fairly, and so 'The Antiplatonic' with its greater part, and 'Upon Phillis walking' with the whole in this metre, are preferable. Yet it must be acknowledged that one heroic couplet in the former--

Like an ambassador that beds a queen With the nice caution of a sword between,

If any one not previously acquainted with the piece or the discussions about it will turn to the text of 'Mark Antony' and read it either aloud or to himself, I should say that, in the common phrase, it is a toss-up what scansion his voice will adopt supposing that he 'commences with the commencement'. The first stanza can run quite agreeably to the usual metrical arrangements of the time, thus:

When the reader comes to the fourth stanza, or if, like some irregular spirits, he takes the last first and begins with it, the most obvious scansion, though the lines are syllabically the same, will be different.

And this may have occurred to him even with the first as thus:

When ? as the | night?ingale | chan?ted her | ves?pers.

Now which of these is to be preferred? and which did the author mean? . My own answer, which I have already given elsewhere, is that both are uncertain, and that he probably had each of the rhythms in his head, but confusedly.

The problem is scarcely one for dogmatic decision, but it is one of some interest, and of itself entitles Cleveland to attention of the prosodic kind. For these pieces are quite early--before 1645--and a third, 'How the Commencement grows new' , is undeniably trisyllabic and meant for some such a tune as the 'Sellenger's Round' which it mentions.

With such a combination of interests, political, historical, poetical , and prosodic, it will hardly be denied that Cleveland deserves his place here. But I must repeat that I am here endeavouring to deal with him strictly on the general principles of this Collection, and am in no way trying to occupy the ground so as to keep out a more elaborate edition. I have had help from my friends Professors Firth and Case in information and correction of contemporary facts; but full comment on Cleveland, from the historical side, would nearly fill this volume: and the problems of the work attributed to him would suffice for a very substantial bibliographical monograph. Neither of these, nor any exhaustive apparatus, even of the textual kind, do I pretend to supply. I simply endeavour--and have spent not a little time and trouble in endeavouring--to provide the student and lover of English literature with an accessible copy, sufficient in amount and fairly trustworthy in substance, of a curious and memorable figure in English verse.

PAGE

POEMS IN 1677 BUT NOT IN 1653: Upon Princess Elizabeth, born the night before New Year's Day 85 The General Eclipse 85 Upon the King's Return from Scotland 86

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