The soul which answered best to all well said With sorrow here, with wonder on his book. Elsewhere he thus expresses his preference for Jonson, as a dramatist, over the greatest of his contemporaries : Shakespeare may make griefs, merry Beaumont's style In winter nights or after meals they be, In a third elegy he rises to a more rapturous strain : What thou wert, like the hard oracles of old, We must be ravished first; thou must infuse Else, though we all conspired to make thy hearse Our works, so that it had been but one great verse; The Liturgy, and buried thee in rhyme; So that in metre we had heard it said, Poetic dust is to poetic laid; And though, that dust being Shakespeare's, thou might'st have, So that, as thou didst prince of numbers die, And live, so thou mightest in numbers lie; "Twere frail solemnity :-verses on thee, And not like thine, would but kind libels be; And we, not speaking thy whole worth, should raise Worse blots than they that envied thy praise. Of several elegies by this poet upon Charles I. the following is perhaps the most striking: Charles!-ah! forbear, forbear, lest mortals prize His name too dearly, and idolatrize. This may be compared with what Corbet says in describing his landlady at Warwick. See ante, p. 13. His name! our loss! Thrice cursed and forlorn Charles our dread sovereign!-hold! lest outlawed sense Heaven can behold such treason and prove just. Charles our dread sovereign's murdered !—tremble, and Charles our dread sovereign's murdered at his gate! Charles of Great Britain! He! who was the known No more! no more! Fame's trump shall echo all The blow struck Britain blind; each well-set limb By dislocation was lopt off in him; And, though she yet lives, she lives but to condole Three bleeding bodies left without a soul. Religion puts on black; sad Loyalty Blushes and mourns to see bright Majesty Butchered by such assassinates; nay both 'Gainst God, 'gainst Law, Allegiance, and their Oath. Farewell, sad Isle! farewell! Thy fatal glory Is summed, cast up, and cancelled in this story. Cleveland, however, after all, is perhaps most in his element when his chief inspiration is scorn, and facit indignatio versum. The most elaborate of his satires or invectives is that which he calls The Rebel Scot. It is rather too long to be given entire; and in truth a good deal of it is more furious than forcible; but Commonly printed : "Who lived and Faith's defender stood." we will transcribe the commencing portion, which contains the most effective passages :— How! Providence! and yet a Scottish crew! Unto a land that truckles under us? Shall quench my rage. A poet should be feared To such pig-widgeon myrmidons as they? But that there's charm in verse, I would not quote The name of Scot without an antidote; Unless my head were red,1 that I might brew I must, like Hocus, swallow daggers first. Come, keen Iambics, with your badger's feet, With all the scorpions that should whip this age. Scots are like witches; do but whet your pen, Scratch till the blood come, they'll not hurt you then. Now, as the Martyrs were enforced to take The shapes of beasts, like hypocrites, at stake, No more let Ireland brag her harmless nation Since they came in, England hath wolves again. 1 Red hair was in the worst repute formerly, and was attributed alike to Cain, to Judas, and to the devil. The leopard and the panther, and engrossed A land where one may pray with cursed intent, O may they never suffer banishment! Had Cain been Scot, God would have changed his doom, Not forced him wander, but confined him home. Like Jews they spread, and as infection fly, As if the Devil had ubiquity. Hence 'tis they live as rovers, and defy This or that place, rags of geography: They 're citizens o' the world, they 're all in all; The poem is accompanied by a Latin version on the opposite. page, which however is not by Cleveland, but by Thomas Gawen, a Fellow of New College, Oxford. This may be fitly followed up by the verses headed The Definition of a Protector : What's a Protector? He's a stately thing That apes it in the non-age of a king: A tragic actor, Cæsar in a clown; He's a brass farthing stamped with a crown: Perhaps this should be high-lows-that is, rustics. Fantastic image of the royal head, The brewer's with the king's arms quartered: In fine, he 's one we must Protector call;— And we fear the still more bitter bile of the following effusion On O. P. Sick, with which we shall conclude our extracts, must be understood to be directed against the same illustrious quarter: Yield, periwigged impostor, yield to fate, That night does own; that so the earth thou 'st made Loathsome by thousand barbarisms may be Delivered from heaven's vengeance, and from thee. The reeking steam of thy fresh villanies Would spot the stars, and menstruate the skies; Force them to break the league they 've made with men, Thy bays are tarnished with thy cruelties, In one of his prose pieces, The Character of a London Diurnal, Cleveland introduces other personal peculiarities of Cromwell besides his fiery nasal organ. "This Cromwell," he observes, "is never so valorous as when he is making speeches for the Association; which, nevertheless, he doth, somewhat ominously, with his neck awry, holding up his ear as if he expected Mahomet's pigeon to come and prompt him. He should be a bird of prey, too, by his bloody beak;" &c. It is probable enough that this attitude of one threading a needle, or trying to look round a corner, may have been customary with Cromwell in speaking at the early date to which the description refers, as it appears to have been with his sect in general: in another poem Cleveland depicts the Puritan preacher as 1 Misprinted "fate" in the edition before us. |