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INTRODUCTION.

such effusions, is indispensably required in the poetical addresses of the present times.

II.

During the reign of Henry the Eighth, by whose example the current of fashion became diverted in favour of gallantry, Petrarch was accordingly studied, and not unsuccessfully imitated, by Surrey and Wyat. Suckling, deviating notwithstanding from the general practice, though with questionable merit, gave a novel turn to familiar feelings; and, if he failed to gratify the votaries of sensibility, he at least amused the admirers of humour and ingenuity. Perhaps it is to be suspected that he was not innocent of designing to ridicule the serious productions of his contemporaries.

III.

Queen Elizabeth, while she fettered the originality of description, by expecting adulatory allusions to herself, nevertheless encouraged the prevailing predilection for love verscs. Harrington, Sidney, Raleigh, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Shakspere, Donne, Jonson, assiduously courted, under her auspices, the smiles of the softer muse. Cowley, in a succeeding age, affirms that

"pocts are scarcely thought freemen of their company without paying some duties, or obliging themselves to be true to love." He might have added, however, that it was not every freeman who was qualified to take up his livery.

IV.

Neither the pedantry of James the First, nor the turbulence experienced under his unfortunate Successor in the throne, appear to have silenced the strains dedicated by genius to beauty. Drummond, Carew, Waller, Habington, Lovelace, Herrick, and Cowley, exhibit the progressive improvement of this species of literary homage, and, perhaps, the perfection of the style in which it should be conveyed.

But it is not sufficient merely to have enumerated such writers as Spenser, Daniel, Drummond, Carew, Waller, and Habington.

Among these poets who successively advanced the refinement of our language, and ameliorated our taste, it will be found that Danicl, possessing the pathetic delicacy of Spenser, anticipated the melodious simpli. city of Drummond. On the merits of Drummond, whose sonnets are so extensively read, and so gencrally ad.

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INTRODUCTION.

mired, it were superfluous to enlarge.

Nothing is more capricious than the customary distribution of fame. After the perusal of Spenser, Daniel, and Drummond, by whom he was preceded, and an attentive consideration of the pretensions of Carew and Habington, with whom he was contemporary, who can avoid expressing some surprise at the predominating reputations enjoyed by Waller?—a poet, whatever estimable qualities he otherwise possessed, who must be pronounced essentially deficient in the chief constituents of amatory excellence; whose compliments were often hyperbolical and unnatural, whose passion was destitute of tenderness, and whose wit was sometimes disgraced by indelicacy. To Carew, however censurable for moral discrepancies, the praise of unaffected thinking, of a considerable portion of originality, and of fascinating numbers, is not to be denied. Habington is among the last of those poets in whose writings pleasure is wholly divested of licentiousness, and where the imagination is sublimed by the heart.

V.

The dissoluteness of manners introduced by the Restoration was not unproductive of concomitant effects

on the minds of men of talent. Under the ruins of the ld monarchy seems to have been buried the spirit of chivalric feeling: the wits of the court of Charles the Second evince neither the vigour nor pathos of those who ornamented a former reign; with few exceptions, all is elegant trifling, or disgusting voluptuousness. It is an immutable truth, nor can it be too often reiterated that whatever contaminates the morals has a tendency to impoverish the mental resources.

VI.

Partly owing to the prevalence of political disquisition and partly to the fluctuations of fashion, the encouragement before extended towards amatory writing seems rapidly to have declined subsequently to the Revolution. It is not only that such publications as the "Astrophel and Stella" of Sidney, the “Castara” of Habington, or the "Lucasta" of Lovelace, no longer diversify the annals of literature, but personal attachment almost ceased to inspire the impulse of poetic enthusiasm +--our principal poets, as Pope in his "Eloise," frequently adopting either the epistolary or didactic form, for the expressing of amatory emotion.

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INTRODUCTION."

Without derogation from the applause due to intervening poets, it is principally during the last sixty years, but particularly in the present age, that Love can be considered as having regained, with augmented splendour, her empire over Poetry. It is gratifying to bear this honourable testimony to existing merit; and to know, at the same time, that the opinion of the individual will be ratified at the tribunal of the public.