Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, Vol. III

Transcriber's Note

General Footnotes have been moved to the end of their relevant
sections.

Most of the poems are followed by explanatory notes and lists of
differences between editions (with Line numbers). These Line Notes
have been kept with the Poems to which they refer.

The List of Contents for Thomas Stanley's Poems has been moved from
the general List of Contents to its logical place after the
Introduction to Thomas Stanley.

The rest of the Transcriber's Note is at the end of the book.




  MINOR POETS OF THE CAROLINE PERIOD

  VOL. III CONTAINING

  JOHN CLEVELAND · THOMAS STANLEY
  HENRY KING · THOMAS FLATMAN
  NATHANIEL WHITING

  EDITED BY

  GEORGE SAINTSBURY, M.A.

  OXFORD
  AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
  1921

  Oxford University Press

  _London   Edinburgh   Glasgow   Copenhagen
  New York   Toronto   Melbourne   Cape Town
  Bombay   Calcutta   Madras  Shanghai_

  Humphrey Milford Publisher to the UNIVERSITY.




PREFATORY NOTE


I am afraid that this third and last volume of _Caroline Poets_ must
reverse the famous apology of the second of the monarchs from whom it
derives its title. It has been an unconscionable time in being born;
though I do not, to speak in character with my authors, know
what hostile divinity bribed Lucina. I cannot blame any one else:
and--though for the first ten years after the appearance of Vol. II
I was certainly very busy, professionally and with other literary
work--I do not think I omitted any opportunity of getting on with the
book. I think I may say that if the time I have actually spent thereon
at spare moments could be put together it would represent a full
year's solid labour, if not more. I make neither complaint nor boast
of this; for it has always been my opinion that a person who holds
such a position as I then held should, if he possibly can, do
something, in unremunerative and unpopular ways, to make the treasure
of English literature more easily accessible. I have thoroughly
enjoyed the work; and I owe the greatest thanks to the authorities of
the Clarendon Press for making it possible.

But no efforts of mine, unless I had been able to reside in Oxford or
London, would have much hastened the completion of the task: for the
materials were hard to select, and, when selected, harder to find in
copies that could be used for printing. Some of them we could not get
hold of in any reasonable time: and the Delegates of the Press were
good enough to have bromide rotographs of the Bodleian copies made for
me. I worked on these as long as I could: but I found at last that the
white print on black ground, crammed and crowded together as it is in
the little books of the time, was not merely troublesome and painful,
but was getting really dangerous, to my extremely weak eyesight.

This necessitated, or almost necessitated, some alterations in the
scheme. One concerned the modernization of spelling, which accordingly
will be found disused in a few later pieces of the volume; another,
and more important one, the revision of the text. This latter was most
kindly undertaken principally by Mr. Percy Simpson, who has had the
benefit of Mr. G. Thorn-Drury's unrivalled knowledge of these minors.
I could not think of cramping the hands of scholars so well versed
as these were in seventeenth-century work: and they have accordingly
bestowed rather more attention than had originally formed part of my
own plan on _apparatus criticus_ and comparison of MSS. The reader
of course gains considerably in yet other respects. I owe these
gentlemen, who may almost be called part-editors of this volume as far
as text is concerned, very sincere thanks; and I have endeavoured as
far as possible to specify their contributions.

When the war came the fortunes of the book inevitably received another
check. The Clarendon Press conducted its operations in many other
places besides Walton Street, and with many other instruments besides
types and paper. Nor had its Home Department much time for such mere
_belles lettres_ as these. Moreover the loss of my own library, and
the difficulties of compensating for that loss in towns less rich
in books than Edinburgh, put further drags on the wheel. So I and my
Carolines had to bide our time still: and even now it has been thought
best to jettison a part of the promised cargo of the ship rather than
keep it longer on the stocks.

The poets whom I had intended to include, and upon whom I had bestowed
more or less labour, but who now suffer exclusion, were Heath,
Flecknoe, Hawkins, Beedome, Prestwich, Lawrence, Pick, Jenkyn, and a
certain 'Philander'. Of these I chiefly regret Heath--the pretty title
of whose _Clarastella_ is not ill-supported by the text, and who
would have 'taken out the taste' of Whiting satisfactorily for some
people--Hawkins, Lawrence, and Jenkyn. Henry Hawkins in _Partheneia
Sacra_ has attained a sort of mystical unction which puts him not so
very far below Crashaw, and perhaps entitles him to rank with that
poet, Southwell, and Chideock Tichborne earlier as the representative
quartette of English Roman Catholic poetry in the major Elizabethan
age.