For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. From The Cornhill Magazine. No sketch of the English literature of the middle of the seventeenth century can pretend to be complete if it does not tell us something of that serried throng of poets militant who gave in their allegiance to Laud, and became ornaments and then martyrs of the High Church party. Their piety was much more articulate and objective than that which had inspired the hymn-writers and various divine songsters of an earlier age; an element of political conviction, of anger and apprehension, gave ardor and tension to their song. They were conservative and passive, but not oblivious to the tendencies of the time, and the gathering flood of Puritanism forced them, to use an image that they would not themselves have disdained, to climb on to the very altar-step of ritualism, or even in extreme instances to take wing for the mystic heights of Rome itself. It is from such extreme instances as the latter that we learn to gauge their emotion and their desperation, and it is therefore Crashaw rather than Herbert whom we select for the consideration of a typical specimen of the High Church poets. Nor is it only the hysterical intensity of Crashaw's convictions which marks him out for our present purpose; his position in history, his manhood spent in the last years of the reign of "Thorough," and in the very forefront of the crisis, give him a greater claim upon us than Herbert, who died before Laud succeeded to the primacy, or Vaughan, who was still a boy when Strafford was executed. There are many other points of view from which Crashaw is of special interest; his works present the only important contribution to English literature made by a pronounced Catholic, embodying Catholic doctrine, during the whole of the seventeenth century, while as a poet, although extremely unequal, he rises, at his best, to a mounting fervor which is quite electrical, and hardly rivalled in its kind before or since. Nor is the story of his life, brief and vague though its outline may be, unworthy of having inspired, as it has evidently done, that noble romance of "John Inglesant" which all the world has just been reading with so much curiosity and delight. It has remained for Dr. Grosart to discover that Crashaw, who has hitherto been supposed to have been born in 1616, must really have seen the light in 1612. His father, the Rev. William Crashaw, vicar of Whitechapel and preacher at the Temple, was a notable Puritan divine. Forty years of age when his son was born, William Crashaw had grown up within the vehement and instant fear of papal aggression, and had but become fiercer in his love for a simple Protestantism under the irritating pressure of James the First's decisions. His numerous tracts and sermons are almost entirely devoted to an exposure of what he conceived to be the fatal errors of Rome, and their titles and contents have often been referred to in order to emphasize the difference between their sturdy Protestantism and his son's adoring mysticism. The suggestive title-page of the "Bespotted Jesuit," however, is now proved to have been added by a zealous hand after his death; it is quite plain at the same time, that he would not have shrunk from saying "bespotted," or something far worse, if it had occurred to him so to distinguish a Jesuit, a monk, or a friar. This vigorous personage was the intimate friend of Usher, who is said to have baptized Richard Crashaw, and to have buried a second Mrs. Crashaw, stepmother to the poet, who died at the age of twentyfour, in 1620. It is pleasant to read the great divine's praise of "her singular motherly affection to the child of her predecessor." We learn also that she was a gentlewoman of considerable beauty and accomplishment, a good singer and dancer, and that she gave up the vanities of the world to marry a clergyman who may have been grim and who was certainly elderly. But of Crashaw's own mother we hear not a word, and even her Christian name is missing. The boy was admitted to the Charterhouse. In October, 1626, his father died, leaving him an orphan at fourteen. His childhood is an absolute blank, until we find him elected, at the rather advanced age of nineteen, to be a scholar of Pem broke Hall, Cambridge, on July 6, 1631. | cises, in English and Latin, by the death He became a matriculated pensioner of of William Herries, a promising underPembroke on March 26, 1632, a bachelor graduate of his own college, who seems of arts in 1634, was transferred to Peter- to have died rather suddenly in October, house on November 26, 1636, was elected 1631, when Crashaw had been at Cama fellow of that college in 1637, and be- bridge only three months. Four of these came a master of arts in 1638. He was elegies on a single person pleased their finally ejected, in company with a large author sufficiently to be retained by him number of other Royalist gentlemen, by for a prominent position in his "Delights the Earl of Manchester, on June 11, 1644. of the Muses" fifteen years afterwards, These barren statements give us but little and others exist and have been printed. power of realizing the poet's life at Cam- Genuine grief does not bewail itself with bridge during thirteen years of residence, this fluency, or upon so many stops, and but it is possible to supplement them with indeed all these pieces seem to be diccertain facts and illustrations which en- tated rather by an official than a personal able us to see the progress of this delicate regret. It is interesting, however, to find spirit through a rough and perilous age. in them that at the age of twenty Crashaw The master of Pembroke, Dr. Benjamin already possessed the germ of that fine Lany, was an old friend of Crashaw's metrical skill and colored fancy which father, and there can be little doubt that afterwards distinguished him. The exthe boy was sent to that college to be treme vehemence of praise, the laudation under his personal protection. Lany, as of this youth for wit, learning, piety, and far as we can collect an impression of his physical beauty, was not calculated to views, was a stout Protestant, whose opin- startle any one in the seventeenth cenions had at one time coincided with those tury, and was probably accepted by the of the author of the "Bespotted Jesuit," entire college, from Dr. Lany downwards, but who now was leaning more and more as being the proper and becoming, and in a Laudian direction, and to whom indeed the only possible tone for a young neither ritual nor a flowery poetical dic- poet to adopt on a melancholy occasion of tion was distasteful. We really know Dr. the kind. The alternations of life and Lany almost entirely through a copy of death are dwelt upon in flowing numEnglish verses addressed by him to the elder Crashaw, and through another copy of Latin verses addressed to him by the younger Crashaw. In the latter he is spoken of as one around whom young poets throng with their tributes of verse, as "the dear guardian of the Pierian flock," and as one whose habit it is to encourage and guide the children of the Muses. It is, therefore, not unlikely that the transition between the grim Puritanism of his father's household and the fervid Anglicanism of Cambridge was made easy to the youth by the personal character and guidance of Dr. Benjamin Lany. It would be interesting to know whether or not he had begun to compose poetry before going up to the university. It is at all events certain that he was busy versifying almost immediately on his arrival. He was stimulated into the production, or I am afraid we must say the manufacture, of an extraordinary number of exer bers: For the laurel in his verse, The sullen cypress o'er his hearse; These verses belong to the school of Ben Jonson, but with a difference; there is an indefinable touch of brightness and color about them, which may have suggested to Crashaw's college friends the advent of a new poet. Moreover these elegies on Herries are valuable to us as belonging certainly to the year 1631, when neither Donne, Herbert, nor Habington, although well known in private circles, had been brought before the world as poets. It is very important to observe that Crashaw had already formed the foundation of his lyrical style at a time when it is exceedingly improbable that he can have read a line of Donne's MSS. Certain tendencies were in the air, and poets in various provinces sounded the same note simultaneously and with unconscious unanimity. lishment conducted on purely unaffected principles, and took its peculiar coloring slowly and unconsciously, as these grave persons, all of one mind, and unopposed Crashaw's first public appearance was in their country solitude, found more and made in a little Latin anthology prepared more opportunity of following the natural in 1632 to congratulate Charles I. on the bent of their inclinations. Until the preservation of his health. Repeatedly, beauty of their books and the report of through his college career, he was called their singular devotion had attracted the upon to contribute to those learned gar- personal notice of the king, the colony at lands of respectful song which were all Little Gidding seems to have been but remembered against the university when little distracted by visitors or perturbed that "nest of serpents" fell into the by injudicious praise or blame. But the hands of the Puritans. In 1634 Crashaw | king passed on to Cambridge inflamed published a little volume of his Latin with the holy loyalty of these gentle peoverses, entitled "Epigrammatum Sacro-ple, and his subjects in the university rum Liber," following a fashion which was already antiquated, and of which John Owen's famous collection had been a typical example. One of these epigrams contains the celebrated conceit on the miracle of the water turned into wine, "Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit," which has been very felicitously trans-benefaction which made life busy in the lated, Protestant Nunnery. - The conscious water saw its God and blushed. It would be very interesting, but it is unfortunately impossible, to trace the gradual transformation which the religious nature of Crashaw underwent. He found a very fervid piety maintained by certain young men at Cambridge, and he adopted their doctrines while surpassing them in zeal. He had already, we cannot doubt, passed far from the narrow rigor of his father's faith when he came under the influence of the saintly Nicholas Ferrar, whose famous community at Little Gidding gave a final stamp to his character. It is to be lamented that when John Ferrar wrote his deeply interesting life of his brother it did not occur to him to give us fuller particulars of Crashaw; we must, however, be grateful for what he has given. The family of Ferrars and Colletts retired to their lonely manor-house of Little Gidding, in Huntingdonshire, in 1625. Nicholas, already thirty-four years of age, and weary of a career of action, had determined to abandon the world and to adopt a life of pious retirement. The "Protestant Nunnery," a name given to it in malice by the Puritans, was an estab. woke up to the importance of the ritual and the monastic seclusion practised at Little Gidding. Those who were likeminded contended for the honor of following Nicholas Ferrar from the oratory to the church and from the church to the hospital in that round of devotion and But it was when Mrs. Ferrar died in 1635 that the saintly life at Gidding reached its final ecstasy and fervor. The old lady had watched over the physical welfare of the community, and had preserved sufficient authority over her son Nicholas to prevent him from entirely neglecting what the body craves in sleep and food. But her death released him from all such obligation, and after the day of her funeral he never slept in a bed again, but for the rest of his life wrapped himself in a bear-skin and lay upon the floor when nature overwhelmed him and obliged him to take brief snatches of sleep between his long prayers and vigils. He became more exalted, more unearthly, and of course more attractive than ever to those young ascetics who, like Crashaw, tried to imitate him in the churches and chapels of Cambridge, and who took every opportunity of riding over to Little Gidding to refresh their faith and passion by intercourse with the saintly household. We know that Crashaw was one of these, that he was in constant communion with Nicholas Ferrar until the death of the latter in the winter of 1637, and that when he could not join in the midnight func |