'
We may give a further word of mention to the voluminous Francis Quarles,
who in his own day and long after enjoyed enormous popularity, especially
among members of the Church of England and especially for his 'Emblems,' a
book of a sort common in Europe for a century before his time, in which
fantastic woodcuts, like Vaughan's 'Silex Scintillans,' were illustrated
with short poems of religious emotion, chiefly dominated by fear. But
Quarles survives only as an interesting curiosity.
Three other poets whose lives belong to the middle of the century may be
said to complete this entire lyric group. Andrew Marvell, a very moderate
Puritan, joined with Milton in his office of Latin Secretary under
Cromwell, wrote much poetry of various sorts, some of it in the Elizabethan
octosyllabic couplet. He voices a genuine love of Nature, like Wither often
in the pastoral form; but his best-known poem is the 'Horatian Ode upon
Cromwell's Return from Ireland,' containing the famous eulogy of King
Charles' bearing at his execution. Abraham Cowley, a youthful prodigy and
always conspicuous for intellectual power, was secretary to Queen Henrietta
Maria after her flight to France and later was a royalist spy in England.
His most conspicuous poems are his so-called 'Pindaric Odes,' in which he
supposed that he was imitating the structure of the Greek Pindar but really
originated the pseudo-Pindaric Ode, a poem in irregular, non-correspondent
stanzas.
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