ng in
Hopton's army, had no time to do much; but he has been magnificently
celebrated by no less authorities than Clarendon and Hobbes, and fragments
of his work, which has only recently been collected, have long been known.
None of it, except a commendatory poem or two, was printed in his own time,
and very little later; while the MSS. are not in very accomplished form,
and show few or no signs of revision by the author. Some, however, of
Godolphin's lyrics are of great beauty, and a couplet translation of the
_Fourth AEneid_ has as much firmness as Sandys or Waller. Another precocious
poet whose life also was cut short, though less heroically, and on the
other side of politics, was John Hall, a Cambridge man, who at barely
twenty (1645-6) issued a volume of poems and another, _Horae Vacivae_, of
prose essays, translated Longinus, did hack-work on the Cromwellian side,
and died, it is said, of loose and lazy living. Hall's poems are of mixed
kinds--sacred and profane, serious and comic--and the best of them, such as
"The Call" and "The Lure," have a slender but most attractive vein of
fantastic charm. Patrick Carey, again, a Royalist and brother of the famous
Lord Falkland, brought up as a Roman Catholic but afterwards a convert to
the Church of England, left manuscript pieces, human and divine, which were
printed by Sir Walter Scott in 1819, and are extremely pleasant; while
Bishop King, though not often at the height of his well-known "Tell me no
more how fair she is," never falls below a level much above the average.
The satirist John Cleveland, whose poems were extremely popular and exist
in numerous editions (much blended with other men's work and hard to
disentangle), was made a sort of "metaphysical helot" by a reference in
Dryden's _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ and quotations in Johnson's _Life of
Cowley_. He partly deserves this, though he has real originality of thought
and phrase; but much of his work is political or occasional, and he does
not often rise to the quintessential exquisiteness of some of those who
have been mentioned. A few examples of this class may be given:--

"Through a low
Dark vale, where shade-affecting walks did grow
Eternal strangers to the sun, did lie
The narrow path frequented only by
The forest tyrants when they bore their prey
From open dangers of discovering day.
Passed through this desert valley, they were now
Climbing