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Title: The Complete Works of Richard Crashaw, Volume II (of 2)

Author: Richard Crashaw

Editor: Alexander Balloch Grosart

Release Date: January 13, 2012 [eBook #38550]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COMPLETE WORKS OF RICHARD CRASHAW, VOLUME II (OF 2)***

E-text prepared by Taavi Kalju, Rory OConor,
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The Fuller Worthies' Library.

THE
COMPLETE WORKS OF RICHARD CRASHAW.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II.

ESSAY ON LIFE AND WRITINGS.
EPIGRAMMATA ET POEMATA LATINA: TRANSLATED FOR THE
FIRST TIME. GLOSSARIAL INDEX.

LONDON:
ROBSON AND SONS, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.

The Fuller Worthies' Library.

THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
RICHARD CRASHAW.

FOR THE FIRST TIME COLLECTED
AND COLLATED WITH THE ORIGINAL AND EARLY EDITIONS,
AND MUCH ENLARGED WITH

I. Hitherto unprinted and inedited Poems from Archbishop Sancroft's mss. &c. &c.
II. Translation of the whole of the Poemata et Epigrammata.
III. Memorial-Introduction, Essay on Life and Poetry, and Notes.
IV. In Quarto, reproduction in facsimile of the Author's own Illustrations of 1652, with others specially prepared.

EDITED BY THE

REV. ALEXANDER B. GROSART,

ST. GEORGE'S, BLACKBURN, LANCASHIRE.

IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II.

PRINTED FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION.
1873.

156 copies printed.

PREFACE.

In our Essay and Notes in the present Volume we so fully state such things as it seemed expedient to state on the specialties of our collection of Crashaw's Latin and Greek Poetry, in common with our like collection of his English Poetry in Vol. I., that little remains for preface here, beyond our wish renewedly to express our gratitude and obligations to our fellow-workers on the Translations now submitted. The names given at p. 4 herein, and the markings on the margin of the Contents, will show how generously my own somewhat large proportion of the task of love has been lightened by them; and throughout I have been aided and animated by the cordiality with which the friends have responded to my demands, or spontaneously sent their contributions. Preëminently I owe thanks to my 'brother beloved,' the Rev. Richard Wilton, M.A., Londesborough Rectory, Market Weighton.

On the text of the Latin and Greek I refer to the close of our Essay; but I must acknowledge willing and scholarly help, on certain points whereon I consulted them, from Rev. Dr. Holden, Ipswich, Rev. Dr.vi Jessopp, Norwich, and W. Aldis Wright, Esq. M.A. Cambridge (as before); albeit the inevitable variety of suggested emendations, as onward, compelled me to limit myself to as accurate a reproduction as possible of the text of Crashaw himself, obvious misprints excepted.

I have now to record the various University Collections wherein Crashaw's earliest poetical efforts appeared—all showing a passionate loyalty, which indeed remained with him to the end.

(a) Anthologia in Regis exanthemata; seu gratulatio Musarum Cantabrigiensium de felicissime conservata Regis Caroli valetudine, 1632.

(b) Ducis Eboracensis Fasciae a Musis Cantabrigiensibus raptim contextae, 1633.

(c) Rex Redux; sive Musa Cantabrigiensis Voti
... et felici reditu Regis Caroli post receptam coronam
comitaque peracta in Scotia, 1633.

(d) Carmen Natalitium ad cunas illustrissimae Principis Elizabethae decantatum intra Nativitatis Dom. solemnia per humiles Cantabrigiae Musas, 1635.

(e) Συνῳδία, sive Musarum Cantabrigiensium concentus et congratulatio ad serenissimum Britanniarum Regem Carolum de quinta sua sobole clarissima Principe sibi nuper felicissime nata, 1637.

(f) Voces votivae ab Academicis Cantabrigiensibus pro novissimo Caroli et Mariae Principe Filio emissae, 1640.

vii

It is a noticeable fact, that Crashaw while still so young should have been invited to contribute to these University Collections along with Wren, Henry More, Edward King ('Lycidas'), Joseph Beaumont, Edward Rainbow, and kindred. His pieces in each are recorded in the places in our Volumes. They invite critical comment; but our space is fully exhausted.

By the liberality of F. Madox-Brown, Esq. R.A. I am enabled to furnish (in the 4to) in this our Second Volume an admirable photograph, by Hollyer of London, of his cartoon for the memorial-window in Peterhouse, Cambridge. Peterhouse is at late-last doing honour to some of her sons thus. Professor Ward, of Owens' College, Manchester, has the praise, as the privilege, of presenting the Crashaw portion of the fine Window. The figure is full of dignity and impressiveness; we may accept the creation of the Painter's genius for a Portrait. The accessories are suggestive of familiar facts in the life and poetry of Crashaw. Vignette-illustrations from W.J. Linton, Esq. and Mrs. Blackburn again adorn our volume (in 4to). I regard that to the 'Captive Bird' (p. xxi.) as a gem. Finally, I cannot sufficiently acknowledge the cultured sympathy with which Mr. Charles Robson (of my Printers), one of the old learned school, has coöperated with me in securing accuracy. To 'err is human,' but I believe our Volumes will be found as little blemished as most. One misprint, however, caught our eye, just when ourviii completed Vol. I. was sent out, which troubled us as much as ever it would have done Ritson, viz. 'anchor' for 'arrow' in Cowley's 'Hope' (p. 176, l. 23). Gentle Reader, be so good as correct this at once.

A.B.G.

Park View, Blackburn, Lancashire,
March 4, 1873.

P.S. Three small overlooked items bearing on Crashaw having been recovered from a missing Note-book, I add them here.

(a) The 1670 edition of the 'Steps,' &c. (whose title-page is given in Vol. I. xliv.) was re-issued with an undated title-page as 'The Third Edition. London, Printed for Richard Bently, Jacob Tonson, Francis Saunders, and Tho. Bennett.' It is from the same type, and identical in every way except the fresh title-page, with the (so-called) '2d Edition.'

(b) In Thomas Shipman's 'Carolina, or Loyal Poems' (1683) there is a somewhat scurril piece entitled 'The Plagiary, 1658. Upon S.C., Presbyterian Minister and Captain, stealing forty-eight lines from Crashaw's Poems, to patch-up an Elegy for Mr. F. P[ierpont].' A very small specimen must suffice:

Another piece, 'The Promise. To F.L. Esq., with Crashaw's Poems (1653),' has nothing quotable.

(c) In Aylett's Poems, 'Peace with her Fowre Gardens,' &c. (1622), there are three little commendatory poems signed 'R.C.,' and these have been assigned to Crashaw; but '1622' forbids this, as he was then only in his 9-10th year. G.

CONTENTS.

As neither Crashaw nor his early Editors furnished Contents to the Epigrammata et Poemata, we are left free to decide thereon; and inasmuch as (a) our translations are intended to make Vol. II. as generally accessible and understood as Vol. I, and as (b) very few of those here first printed have headings, or the Scripture-texts only—we have deemed it expedient to give as Contents the subjects in English. The Scholar-student will find the Latin headings of the Author in their places. In the right-hand margin the initials of the respective Translators are given; on which see pp. 4-5, and Notes to the successive divisions. [*] on left-hand margin indicates there is a Greek version also: [†] printed for first time: [‡] translated for first time. G.

Illustrations in Vol. II. 4to.

xxi

ESSAY ON THE LIFE AND POETRY OF CRASHAW.[2]

In our Memorial-Introduction (vol. i. p. xxvi.) we make two promises, which fall now to be redeemed:

(a) A Study of the Life and Poetry of Richard Crashaw.

(b) A Memoir of William Crashaw, B.D., his Father.

The latter is in so many ways elucidative and illuminative of the former, outwardly and inwardly, that I deem it well to give it first.

I. Memoir of William Crashaw, B.D.

The late laborious and accurate Joseph Hunter, in his MS. collections yclept Chorus Vatum, which by rare good fortune are preserved in the British Museum (Addl. mss. 24.487, pp. 34-39), thus begins, s.n.

'I am here introducing a name which may be said to be hitherto unknown in the regions of Poetry, and which has been unaccountably passed over by biographical writers of every class; yet one who has just claims on our attention of his own as well as in being the father of Richard Crashaw, whose merits are admitted;' and hexxii continues with a pleasant egotism that one can readily pardon, 'and he has particular claims upon me, as having been a native of the part of the kingdom from which I spring, and bearing a name which is that of a numerous family from whom I descend.'

We shall find onward, that the elder Crashaw had a unique gift of Poetry; but independent of that, a somewhat prolonged acquaintance with his numerous books enables us emphatically to ratify the 'claims' of 'his own' otherwise—though in strong, even fierce, antagonism as Divine and Writer to his gentle-natured son's after-opinions.

Hitherto, in the brief and meagre notices of his son, and of the paternal Crashaw, it has simply been stated that he was a 'Yorkshireman.' This is mentioned incidentally in various places. We are now enabled by the interest in our researches of local Antiquaries, together with aid from the Hunter and Cole mss., to give for the first time family-details. Handsworth, sometimes spelled Hansworth, near Sheffield, one of the hamlets of England in the 'Black Country'—once couched among green fields and hedge-row 'lanes,' though now blighted and begrimed—was the 'nest' of the Crashaws; and there and in the neighbourhood the name is met with until comparatively recent times.[3] The Church-Register goes back to 1558, and under Baptisms, Aug. 24th, 1568, is this entry, 'Thomas, son of Richard Crawshaw, baptised;' and, alas, under the following 'November 14th,' 'Thomas, son of Richard Crawshaw, buried.' Next comes our Worthy:

'1572, October 26th, Will., son of Richard Crawshaw, baptised.' There follow: January 12th, 1574, 'Francis;' November 24th, 1577, 'Ann'—both baptised; April 26th 1585, 'Richard,' son of Richard, buried; 1591, 'Robertxxiii Eairl [sic] and Dorothy Crawshaw married;' 1608, November 20th, 'Hellen Crawshaw, widow, buried.' Then in 1609, 1611, 1613, 1615, 1619, 1623, 1627, entries concerning the 'Francis' of 1574 and his household. The name does not reappear until 1682, January 1st, when 'William, son of William Crawshaw, is 'baptised;' and so the usual record of the light and shadow of 'Births and Marriages and Deaths' goes on until July 22d, 1729.

It appears from these Register-data that the father of our William Crashaw was named 'Richard,' and that he died in April 1585, when Master William was passing his 13th year. It also appears that his mother was named 'Hellen,' and that she died as 'a widow' in November 1608. In addition to these entries, I have discovered that this 'Hellen' was daughter of John Routh, of Waleswood; a name of mark in Yorkshire, in itself and through marriages.[4] That we are right in all this is made certain by his Will, wherein our Crashaw (pater) leaves 'to the parishe of Hansworth, in Com. Ebor., where I was borne, my owne works, all to be bounde together, to lye in the churche; and fourty shillings in monye to the stocke of the poor of that parishe.'[5] So far as I can gather fromxxiv several family-tables which have been furnished to me, the Richard Crashaw, father of our William Crashaw, was son of another Richard Crashaw, who in turn was Rector of Aston, next parish to Handsworth, in 1539. Thus, if not of 'blue blood' in the heraldic sense, the Crashaws must have been well-to-do; for they are found not only intermarrying with good Yorkshire families, but also occupying considerable social status: e.g. a son of Francis—described as of Hansworth-Woodhouse, a hamlet of Hansworth—brother of William, was admitted to the freedom of the Cutlers' Company of Sheffield in 1638, and was Master in 1675. I have lineal descents brought down to the present year; and the annals of the House may hold their own in family-histories.[6] Our Worthy had life-long intercourse and life-long friendships with the foremost in Yorkshire, as his Will genially and quaintly testifies.

Fatherless in his 13th-14th year, his widowed mother must have been in circumstances pecuniarily that enabled her to have William, at least, 'prepared' for the University. He was of renowned 'St. John's,' Cambridge, designated by him his 'deere nurse and spirituall mother.'[7] A MS. note by Thomas Baker, in his copy of 'Romish Forgeries and Falsifications' (1606), now in the Library of St. John's, furnishes almost the only definite notice of his University career that I have met with, as follows: 'Guil. Crashawe Eboracensis admissus socius Coll. Jo. pro Dña Fundatrice, authoritate Regia, sede vacante Epi. Elien. 19 Jan. 1593.'[8] Such is the 'entry' as given by Baker;xxv but in the original it is as follows: 'Gulielmus Chrashawe Eboracensis admissus sum sisator pro Mr°. Alveye Maij 1°, 1591.' The Master and each senior Fellow chose sizars at this date. Again: 'Ego Gulielmus Crashawe Eboracensis admissus sum socius huius Collegij pro domina fundatrice, Authoritate regia, sede vacante Episcopi Eliensis, 19° Januarij 1593' [i.e. 1593-4]. The Bishop of Ely had the right of nominating one Fellow.[9] The See of Ely was vacant from the death of Bishop Richard Cox, 22d July 1581, to the occupancy of Martin Heton in 1598-9. Hence it came that the Queen presented Crashaw to the fellowship of St. John's. (See Baker's St. John's, by Mayor (vol. i. p. 438), for more details.) This was somewhat late. How he obtained the patronage of Elizabeth does not appear. The entry in 'White Vellum Book' of the College Treasury runs simply, 'Being crediblie informed of the povertie and yet otherwise good qualities and sufficiencie of Wm. Crashaw, B.A.' &c. The opening paragraphs of his Will characteristically recount his successive ecclesiastical appointments and preferments, and hence will fittingly come in here. 'In the name of the true and everlivinge God, Amen. I William Crashawe, Bachelor in Divinitie, Preacher of God's Worde. Firste at Bridlington, then at Beverley in Yorkshire. Afterwards at the Temple; since then Pastor of the Churche of Ag[nes] Burton, in the diocese of Yorke; nowe Pastor of that too greate Parishe of White-Chappell in the suburbs of London: the unworthye and unprofitable servante of God, make and ordaine this my last Will and Testament.' Previous to the death of Elizabeth he had been 'deprived' of a 'little vicarage' ('A Discourse on Popish Corruptions requiring a Kingly Reformation:' MS. in Royal Library). Inquiries at Bridlington,xxvi formerly Burlington, and the several places named, have resulted in nothing, from the destruction of muniments, &c. In the earlier he must have been 'Curate' only. His many legacies of his 'owne workes,' which were to 'lye' in many churches, have all perished, or at least disappeared; and equally so his various 'monyes' for the 'poore.' It is sorrowful to find how so very often like provisions are discovered to have gone out of sight, to an aggregate few indeed suspect.

With Agnes Burton he had closer relations, inasmuch as one 'item' of his Will runs: 'The next avoydance of Ag. Burton, taken in my brother's name (for which he knoweth what hath byn offered), I give and bequeathe the same to my said brother Thomas, to be by him disposed to some worthy man.'

He describes 'Mr. Henry Alvay,' 'the famous Puritan,' as his 'ffather in Christ,' in bequeathing him 'one siluer pott with a cover loose, parcell guilt, of about 13 ounces.'[10] When, or from whom, he received 'orders' and ordination does not appear, but what our Worthy became as a Preacher his 'Sermons' remain to attest. They attest his evangelical fervour even to passion, his intense convictions, his wistful tenderness alternated with the most vehement rebuke of fashionable sins and worldliness, his deep personal love for the Lord Jesus, and a strangely pathetic yearning for all men to be 'safe' in Him. He had a kind of holy ubiquity of zeal in occupying pulpits where 'witness' was to be borne 'for the Truth.' His motto, found in a copy of Valerius Maximus, and elsewhere, was 'Servire Deo regnare est' (Notes and Queries, 3d S. vii. 111). America ought to prize his Sermon 'Preached in London before the Right Honourable the Lord Lawarre, Lord Governour and Captaine Generall of Virginia, and others of his Maiestie's Counsell for that Kingdome, and the restxxvii of the Adventurers in that Plantation. At the said Lord Generall his leaue-taking of England, his natiue countrey, and departure for Virginia, February 21, 1609. By W. Crashaw, Bachelar of Divinitie, and Preacher at the Temple. Wherein both the lawfulnesse of that Action is maintained, and the necessity thereof is also demonstrated, and so much out of the grounds of Policie, as of Humanity, Equity and Christianity. Taken from his mouth, and published by direction.' 1610. The running heading is 'A New Yeere's Gift to Virginea.' The text is St. Luke xxii. 32: 'I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.' There is no nobler Sermon than this of the period; and it is only one of various equally eloquent, impressive, and powerful. Politically the Preacher saw far ahead, and his patriotism is chivalrous as Sidney's. Dr. Donne later preached for the same Virginia Company. He had 'sought' to go as secretary in the outset.

Our Worthy was twice married. Of his first wife—mother of Richard, our 'sweet Singer'—I have failed utterly to get so much as her name. Of his second wife there remains a privately-printed tractate entitled 'The Honovr of Vertve, or the Monument erected by the sorowfull Husband, and the Epitaphes annexed by learned and worthy men, to the immortall memory of that worthy gentlewoman Mrs. Elizabeth Crashawe. Who dyed in child-birth, and was buried in Whit-Chappell, October 8, 1620. In the 24 yeare of her age.' Of inconceivable interest would this remarkable tractate have been, had this been the Poet's mother; but the date shows that Hunter, in his 'Chorus Vatum,' and others, are mistaken in their statement that she was such. Richard Crashaw was born in 1612-3, while the 'Epitaphes' and other allusions touchingly inform us that this fatal 'child-birth' was, 'as she most surely expected,' of her only child. The great Usherxxviii preached her funeral-sermon, 'at which Sermon and Funerall was present one of the greatest Assemblies that ever was seene in man's memorie at the burial of any priuate person.' The illustrious Preacher—who 'vseth,' the Memorial says, 'to be very wary and modeste in commendation'—is very full and articulate in his praises of the dead. One bit we read with wet eyes; for among other traits Usher praises 'her singular motherly affection to the child of her predecessor—a rare vertue [as he noted] in step-mothers at this day.'[11] One can scarcely avoid a sigh that such a 'step-mother' was not spared to such a 'child.' No 'quick' name is found to any of the Verse, nor is the Verse intrinsically very memorable, except for its wealth of sympathy towards the Widower.[12]

xxix

Of our Worthy's numerous Writings I have made out a careful enumeration, inasmuch as the usual bibliographical authorities (as Lowndes and Hazlitt) are exceedingly empty; but I must utilise it elsewhere, seeing that such a catalogue of (for the most part) violent invective against Popery were incongruous in an edition of the Poetry of his so opposite-minded son. These three out of our collection will show that Popery was the supreme object of his aversion; and even the full title-pages give but a poor idea of the out-o'-way learning—for he was a scholar among scholars—the grave wit, the sarcasm, the shrewd sense, and, alas, the uncharity of these and kindred sermons and books. The first is this, but from a later edition, for a reason that will appear: 'Loyola's Disloyalty; or the Iesvites' open Rebellion against God and His Church. Whose Doctrine is Blasphemie, in the highest degree, against the blood of Christ, which they Vilifie, and under-valew, that they might uphold their Merits. By Consequent, encouraging all Traytors to kill their lawfull Kings and Princes. With divers other Principles and Heads of their damnable and erronious Doctrine. Worthy to be written and read in these our doubtfull and dangerous times. 1643' (4to). This was originally issued as 'The Iesvites' Gospell' (1610), and in 1621 and 1641 as 'The Bespotted Jesuit.' Be it specially noted that Crashaw himself must not be made responsible for the after title-pages.[13] Next is this: 'The Parable of Poyson. In Fivexxx Sermons of Spirituall Poyson, &c. Wherein the poysonfull Nature of Sinne, and the Spirituall Antidotes against it, are plainely and brefely set downe. Begun before the Prince his Highnesse. Proceeded in at Greye's Inne and the Temple, and finished at St. Martin's in the fields. By William Crashaw, Batcheler of Diuinity, and Preacher of God's word. 1618' (4to). The Epistle-dedicatory is dated from Agnes Burton, Yorkshire. 'The ioyfull 5 of Nouember, the day neuer to be forgotten.' The third is this: 'The New Man, or a Svpplication from an vnknowne Person, a Roman Catholike, vnto Iames, the Monarch of Great Brittaine, and from him to the Emperour, Kings, and Princes of the Christian World. Touching the causes and reasons that will argue a necessity of a Generall Councell to be fortwith assembled against him that now vsurps the Papall Chaire vnder the name of Paul the fifth. Wherein are discouered more of the secret Iniquities of that Chaire and Court, then hitherto their friends feared, or their very aduersaries did suspect. Translated into English by William Crashaw, Batchelour in Diuinity, according to the Latine Copy, sent from Rome into England. 1622' (4to). Other of these controversial tractates, or 'Flytings' (Scoticè), are more commonly known, and need not detailed notice from us. That the 'ruling passion' was 'strong' to the end, appears by the already repeatedly named Will, the opening of which has been given, and which thus continues: 'For my religion, I professe myself in lief and deathe a Christian, and the crosse of Jesus Christ is my glorye, and His sufferings my salvation. I renounce and abhorre Atheisme, Iudaisme, Turcisme, and all heresies against the Holy and Catholike faithe, oulde and newe, and (namelye) Poperie, beinge as nowe it is established by the canons of Trent and theyr present allowed decrees and doctors, lyke a confused body of allxxxi heresies.' And again: 'I accounte Poperie (as it nowe is) the heape and chaos of all heresies, and the channell whereunto the fowlest impieties and heresies that have bene in the Christian worlde have runne and closelye emptied themselves. I beleeve the Pope's seate and power to be the power of the greate Antichrist, and the doctrine of the Pope (as nowe it is) to be the doctrine of Antichrist; yea, that doctrine of devills prophesied of by the Apostles, and that the trve and absolute Papist, livinge and dyeinge, debarres himself of salvation for oughte that we knowe. And I beleve that I am bounde to separate myself from that sinagogue of Rome if I wil be saved. And I professe myselfe a member of the true Catholike Churche, but not of the Roman Churche (as nowe it is), and to looke for salvation, not by that faith nor doctrine which that Churche nowe teacheth, but that which once it had, but now falne from it.' And then follow 'groundes' in burning and 'hard' words, intermingled with strange outbursts of personal humiliation before God and an awful sense of His scrutiny.

These Title-pages and Will-extracts must suffice to indicate the Ultra-Protestantism of the elder Crashaw. To qualify them—in addition to our note of the intensified after title-pages by others—it must be remembered that the Armada of 1588 flung its scaring shadow across his young days, and that undoubtedly the descendants of Loyola falsified their venerable Founder's intentions by political agitations and plottings. These coloured our ecclesiastical polemique's whole ways of looking at things. His Will and codicil are dated in 1621-2, and during these years and succeeding, his most fiery and intense 'Sermons' and tractates were being published. Richard was then growing up into his teens, and without his 'second' mother. As Crashaw senior died in 1626—his Will having been 'proved' 16th October in that year—our Poet-saintxxxii was only about 13-14 when he lost his father, scarcely ten when appointed by him executor, the words being: 'I ordaine and make Mr. Robert Dixon and my sonne Richarde executors of my Will' (10th June 1622).[14]

His Epistles-dedicatory and private Letters (several of which are preserved in the British Museum, and of which I have copies—one very long to Sir Julius Cæsar on his brother's illness) and his Will, make it plain that our Worthy mingled in the highest society, and was consulted in the most delicate affairs. His dedication of one of his most pronounced books, 'Consilium quorundam Episcop. Bononiæ &c.' (1613), to Shakespeare's Earl of Southampton, as to a trusted friend, settles, to my mind, the (disputed) fact as to the Earl having become a Protestant. So too the translation of Augustine's 'City of God' (1620, 2d edition) is dedicated to William Earl of Pembroke, the Earl of Arundel, and the Earl of Montgomery.

The last matter to be touched on is the Verse of the paternal Crashaw, which has a unique character of its own. It consists of translations from the Latin. His 'Loyola's Disloyalty' is based on a rendering of a Latin poem in super-exaltation of the Virgin Mary by Clarus Bonarscius ( = Carolus Scribanius); and Crashaw animadverts on such 'pointes' as these: 'That the milke of Mary may come into comparison with the blood of Christ;' 'that the Christian man's faith may lawfully take hold of both as well as one;' 'that the best compound for a sicke soule is to mix together her milke and Christ's blood;'xxxiii 'that Christ is still a little child in His mother's armes, and so may be prayed unto;' 'that a man shall often-times be sooner heard at God's hand in the mediation of Mary than Jesus Christ;' and so on. I give the opening, middle, and closing lines.

TO OUR LADY OF HALL AND THE CHILD JESUS.

Again:

Finally:

Rhythm, epithet, and the whole ring of these Verses remind us of the younger Crashaw. But the most remarkable Verse-production of the elder Crashaw is his translation of the 'Querela, sive Dialogvs Animæ et Corporis damnati,' ascribed to St. Bernard. It originally appeared in 1616, and has been repeatedly reprinted since. Those of 1622 and 1632 are now before me, and the English title-page runs: 'The Complaint, or Dialogve betwixt the Soule and the Bodie of a damned man. Each laying the fault vpon the other. Supposed to be written by S. Bernard, from a nightly vision of his; and now published out of an ancient manuscript copie. By William Crashaw.' The Dialogue thus opens:

Again, st. 79-81:

In a 'Manvall for true Catholicks, or a Handfvll, or rather a Heartfull of holy Meditations and Prayers, gathered out of certaine ancient Manuscripts, written 300 yeeres agoe, or more,' which is usually bound up with the 'Querela,' there is no little striking thought and word-painting, combined with a parsimony of epithet, and a naked and yet imaginative echo of the monkish Latin, singularly impressive. Passing the 'Orthodoxall Confessions of God the Father' and 'Sonne' and 'Holy Ghost,' though all have many memorable things—I would close our specimens with one complete poem from the 'Manvall.' It is entitled 'The Conclusion, with a devout and holy prayer;' the word 'prayer' reminding us that in his Prayers herein and in his 'Milke for Babes' (1618, and several later), Crashaw is lowly and devout, and simply a sinner holding the Christian's hope. The remark applies also to much of his celebration of 'Carraciolo,' the Italian convert and 'Second Moses' (1608).

Surely this is a very noteworthy transfusion of old Latin pieties into vivid English. 'Visions' of Jerusalem the Golden transfigure even the austere words towards the close. One can picture Master Richard's eyes kindling over his Father's verses when he was gone.

So endeth what I have thought it needful to tell of the elder Crashaw. As hitherto almost nothing has been told of him, even our compressed little Memorial—keeping back many things and notices that have gathered in our note-books—may be welcome to some. I pass now to

II. A Study of the Life and Poetry of Richard Crashaw.

The outward facts of our 'sweet Singer's' story are given with comparative fulness in our Memorial-Introduction (vol. i. pp. xxvii.-xxxviii.). In the present brief Essay we wish to look into some of these, so as to arrive at a true estimate of them and of the Poetry, now fully (and for the first time) collected.

I think I shall be able to say what has struck myself as worth saying about Crashaw, under these three things:

xl

I. His change from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism, using the terms as historic words, not polemically.

II. His friends and associates, as celebrated in his Writings.

III. His characteristics and place as a Poet. These successively.

I. His change from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism. From our Memoir of his Father it will be apparent to all that he was a Protestant of Protestants; and it is an inevitable assumption that his son from infancy would be indoctrinated with all vigilance and fervour in the paternal creed, which may be designated Puritan, as opposed to Laudian High-Churchism within the Church of England.[15] I think we shall not err either, in concluding that the younger Crashaw had a very impressionable and plastic nature; so that the strong and self-assertive character of his Father could not fail to mould his earliest thinking, opinions, beliefs, and emotion. Still it will not do to pronounce our Poet's change to have been a revolt and rebound from the narrowness of the paternal teaching and writing, seeing that his Father died in 1626, when he was only passing into his 13-14th year.[16] It is palpable that the elder Crashaw was spared the distress of the apostacy (as he should most trenchantly have named it) of his only son. Moreover, the very notable poems from the Tanner mss. on the Gunpowder Treason (vol. i. pp. 188-194) arexli pronounced and intense in their denunciations of (to quote from them) that 'vnmated malice,' that 'vnpeer'd despight' and 'very quintessence of villanie,' for 'singing' of which he feels he must have not 'inke' but 'the blood of Cerberus, or Alecto's viperous brood,' and demonstrate that he carried with him to, and kept in, Cambridge all his father's wrath, and more than even his father's vocabulary of vituperation, with too his own after-epithets, instinct with poetic feeling, as a thoughtful reading reveals. These poems belong to 1631-3. Even in the Latin Epigrams of 1634 there is (to say the least) a 'slighting' allusion to the Pope in the 'Umbra S. Petri,' being 'Nunc quoque, Papa, tuum sustinet illa decus' (see Epigram xix. p. 47). That volume, also, is dedicated in the most glowing words of affection and indebtedness to Dr. Benjamin Lany (vol. ii. pp. 7-15), afterwards, as we shall find onward, a distinguished bishop in the Church of England. And he was a man after the elder Crashaw's own heart, as we shall now have revealed in a little overlooked poem addressed to Crashaw senior, which is appended to the 'Manvall for True Catholicks' (as before). Here it is; and let the Reader ponder its anti-papal sentiment:

A CONCLUSION TO THE AUTHOR AND HIS BOOKE.

There is some obscurity in these Donne- or Ben-Jonson-like rugged lines, but none as to the opinions of their writer on Popery. Thus up to 1634 at least, or until his twenty-second or twenty-third year, Crashaw the younger was as thoroughly Protestant, in all probability, as his father could have desired. The 'change' accordingly was a radical one when he left his mother-Church, and one laments that our light is so dim and our view so distant. Anthony a-Wood (as before) and the usual authorities state that our Crashaw became famous as a preacher: he became, says Willmott, 'a preacher of great energy and power,' id est, in England, and therefore while still belonging to the Church of England. I have an impression that somehow the son has been confounded with the father, whose renown as a preacher was lasting; just as it seems certain that son and father have been confounded by the continuous editors of Selden's 'Table-Talk,'xliii wherein the illustrious Thinker recounts somewhat proudly that he had converted Crashaw from his opposition to stage-plays. We may as well expiscate this point here. The younger Crashaw, then, never expressed himself, so far as is known, against stage-plays: contrari-wise, in his fine Epigram on Ford's 'Love's Sacrifice' and 'Broken Heart' he is in sympathy with these 'stage-plays.' On the other hand, in one of his most impassioned sermons, his father had, with characteristic pungency, condemned 'Plaies and Players'—as given below.xliv[17] To return: be this as it may in the matter of 'preaching,' the matter-of-fact is, that our Crashaw retained his Fellowship up to his ejection on the 11th of June 1644 (vol. i. pp. xxxiii.-iv.), or when he was in his 32d-33d year; or, as gentle Father Southwell gently put it, about his 'dear Lord's' age. We get a glimpse of his religious life while a Protestant, in the original 'Preface to the Reader' of 'Steps to the Temple,' &c. as follows: 'Reader, we stile his Sacred Poems, Steps to the Temple, and aptly; for in the Temple of God, under His wing, he led his life, in St. Marie's Church neere St. Peter's Colledge: there he lodged under Tertullian's roofe of angels; there he made his nest more gladly than David's swallow neere the house of God, where, like a primitive saint, he offered more prayers in the night than others usually offer in the day; there he penned these poems, Steps for happy soules to climbe heaven by' (vol. i. p. xlvii.). Coinciding with this is the love he had for the writings of 'Sainte Teresa,' when (in his own words) 'the Author'xlv of 'A Hymn to the Name and Honor of the admirable Sainte Teresa' was 'yet among the Protestants.' In his 'Apologie for the foregoing Hymn'—than which, for subtle, delicate, finest mysticism, in words that are not so much words as music, and yet definite words too, changing with the quick bright changes of a dove's neck, there is hardly anything truer—the Poet traces up his devotion to her to his 'reading' of her books; as thus:

The words of the Preface (as above) remind us also that Crashaw took his part in the Fasts and Vigils and austerities of the Ferrars and the saintly, if ascetic, 'Little Gidding' group.[18] Going back on the 'Hymn,' such lines as these show how even then the Poet had drunk-in the very passion of Teresa: e.g.

It is deeply significant to find such a Hymn as that written while 'yet among the Protestants.' Putting the two things together—(a) his recluse, shy, meditative life 'under Tertullian's roofe of angels,' and his prayers THERE in the night; (b) his passionately sympathetic reading, as of Teresa, and going forth of his most spiritual yearnings after the 'sweet and subtle pain,' and Love's death 'mystical and high'—we get at the secret of the 'change' now being considered. However led to it, Crashaw's reading lay among books that were as fuel to fire brought to a naturally mystical and supersensitive temperament; and however formed and nurtured, such self-evidently was his temperament. His innate mysticismxlvii drew him to such literature, and the literature fed what perchance demanded rather to be neutralised.[19] I feel satisfied one main element of the attraction of Roman Catholicism for him was the nutriment and nurture for his profoundest though most perilous spiritual experiences in its Writers. His great-brained, strong-thewed father would have dismissed such 'intolerable ioyes' as morbid sentimentalism; but the nervous, finely and highly-strung organisation of his son was as an Æolian harp under their touch. To all this must be added certain local influences, and ultimately the crash of the Ejection. The history of the University during the period of Crashaw's residence makes it plain that there was then, as later, a revival of what may be technically called Ritualism—as an intended help-meet to Faith—and that by some of the most cultured and gracious scholars of the Colleges. I am not vindicating, much less judging such, any more than would I 'sit in judgment' on the Ritualist revival of our own day, i.e. of its adherents. For myself, I find it a diviner and grander thing to 'walk by faith' rather than by 'sight,' and not 'bodied' but 'disembodied truth' the more spiritual. But to not a few—and to such as Crashaw—the sensible, the visible, the actually looked-at—sanctified with the hoar of centuries—light up and etherealise. Contemporary records show that the chapel of Peterhouse—Crashaw's college—which was built in 1632, and consecrated by Francis White, Bishop of Ely, was a 'handsome' one, having a beautiful ceiling and a noble east window—its glass 'hid away in the troublesome times.' Among the benefactors to its building were (afterwards bishops) Cosin and Wren, and also Shelford, whose 'Five learnedxlviii Discourses' were graced with a noticeable 'commendatory poem' by Crashaw (vol. ii. pp. 162-5). Before this chapel was built the society made use of the chancel of the adjacent church of Little St. Mary's, into which there was a door from Peterhouse College. The reader may at this point turn to our poet's heart-broken 'pleadings' for the 'restoration' of his College, now made 'to speak English.' On all which, and the like, dear old Fuller, in his History of the University, thus speaks, under a somewhat later date (1642), but the very turning-period with Crashaw: 'Now began the University to be much beautified in buildings; every college, after casting its skin with the snake, or renewing its bill with the eagle, having their courts, or at least their fronts and gatehouse, repaired and adorned. But the greatest attention was in their chapels, most of them being graced with the accession of organs,' &c.

Contemporary records farther lead us to Peterhouse and Pembroke Colleges as specially 'visited' and 'spoiled' in the Commission from the Parliament in 1643 to remove crosses. We may read one 'report' out of many. 'Mr. Horscot: We went to Peterhouse, 1643, Dec. 21, with officers and soldiers, and [in] the presence [of] Mr. Wilson, of the president Mr. Francis, Mr. Maxy and other Fellows, Dec. 20 and 23, we pulled down two mighty great angells with wings, and divers other angells and the four Evangelists and Peter with his keies, over the Chappell Dore, and about a hundred cherubims and angells and divers superstitious letters in gold; and at the upper end of the chancel these words were written as followeth: "Hic locus est Domini Dei, nil aliud et Porta cœli." Witness, Will. Dowsing, Geo. Long.' Farther: 'These words were written at Keie's Coll. and not at Peterhouse, but about the walls were written in Latin, "We prays thee ever;" and on some of the images was written "Sanctus, Sanctus,xlix Sanctus;" or other, "Gloria Dei et Gloria Patri," and "Non nobis Domine;" and six angells in the windowes.' So at Pembroke, 'We brake and pulled down 80 superstitious pictures;' and so at Little St. Mary's, 'We brake down 60 superstitious pictures, some Popes and crucifixes and God the Father sitting in a chayer and holding a glass in his hand.' Looking on the since famous names of Peterhouse and Pembroke (Spenser's college)—Cosin, Wren, Shelford, Tournaye, Andrewes—they at once suggest ritualistic, if not Roman Catholic, proclivities.

Thus from all sides came potent influences of personal friendship—of his friends and associates more onward—to give impulse and momentum to Crashaw's mystical Roman-Catholic sympathies. The 'Ejection' of 1644 found Crashaw in the very heart of these influences, not swayed simply, but mastered by them. To one so secluded and unworldly, a crisis in which the pillars of the throne were shattered, and in which not the many for the one, but the one rather than the many, must be sacrificed, was a dazing bewilderment, and terror, and agony. All was chaos and weltering confusion; no resting-place in England for his dove-feet: dissonance, blasphemy as he weened, came to his shuddering heart: he saw the lifting-up of anchors never before lifted, and the Church drifting, drifting away aimlessly and helplessly (as he misjudged). Moses-like, he looked this way and that way, and saw no man—saw not The Man—and failed, I fear, to look UP, because of his very agony of looking down and in. And so, in his tremor and sorrow and weariness, he passed over to Roman Catholicism as the 'ideal' of his reading, and as the 'home' of the sainted ones whose words were as manna to his spirit. Not a strong, defiant, masterful soul, by any means—frail, timorous, shrinking, rather—he would 'fly away,' even if out to the wilderness, to be 'at rest.' The very 'inner life' of God was in his soft gentle heart, andl that he carried with him through after-years, as Cowley bore brave witness by his magnanimous title of 'Saint.' Conscience too—ill-instructed possibly, yet true to its light, if true also to feelings that ought to have been wrestled with, not succumbed to—went with him: and what of God's grace is in a man keeps him, wherever ecclesiastically he may abide.

Such is our solution of the 'change' of Crashaw from Protestantism to Catholicism. It is sheer fanaticism to rave against the 'change,' and to burrow for ignoble motives. Gross ignorance of the facts of the period is betrayed by any one who harshly 'judges' that the humble 'ejected Fellow' made a worldly 'gain' by his 'change.' Nay verily, it was no 'gain,' in that paltry sense, for an Englishman then to become a Roman Catholic. It was to invite obloquy, misconstruction, 'evil-speaking.' In Crashaw's case he had wealthy uncles and aunts, and other relatives, who should have amply provided for him, and 'sheltered' him through the 'troublous times.' Prynne's 'Legenda Lignea, with an Answer to Mr. Birchley's Moderator (pleading for a Toleration of Popery) and a Character of some hopeful saints revolted to the Church of Rome' (1653), is brutal as it is inaccurate; but it must be adduced as an example of what 'Revolters' (so called) had to endure, albeit Crashaw was gone into the silences whither no clamour reaches, when the bitter book came forth. 'Master Richard Crashaw (son to the London divine, and sometime Fellow of St. Peterhouse in Cambridge) is another slip of the times that is transplanted to Rome. This peavish sillie seeker glided away from his principles in a poetical vein of fancy and impertinent curiosity, and finding that verses and measured flattery took and much pleased some female wits, Crashaw crept by degrees into favour and acquaintance with some court ladies, and with the gross commendationsli of their parts and beauties (burnished and varnished with some other agreeable adulations) he got first the estimation of an innocent, harmless convert; and a purse being made by some deluded, vain-glorious ladies and their friends, the poet was despatched on a pilgrimage to Rome, where, if he had found in the see Pope Urban the Eighth instead of Pope Innocent, he might possibly have received a greater quantity and a better number of benedictions; for Urban was as much a pretender to be prince and œcumenical patron of poets as head of the Church; but Innocent being more harsh and dry, the poor small poet Crashaw met with none of the generation and kindred of Mecænas, nor any great blessing from his Holiness; which misfortune puts the pitiful wier-drawer to a humour of admiring his own raptures; and in this fancy (like Narcissus) he is fallen in love with his own shadow, conversing with himself in verse, and admiring the birth of his own brains; he is only laughed at, or at most but pitied, by his few patrons, who, conceiving him unworthy of any preferment in their Church, have given him leave to live (like a lean swine almost ready to starve) in a poor mendicant quality; and that favour is granted only because Crashaw can rail as satirically and bitterly at true religion in verse as others of his grain and complexion can in prose and loose discourses: this fickle shuttlecock, so tost with every changeable puff and blast, is rather to be laughed at and scorned for his ridiculous levity than imitated in his sinful and notorious apostacy and revolt' (cxxxviii.).

The short and crushing answer to all this Billingsgate is: The poems of Crashaw are now fully before the reader, and he will not find, from the first page to the last, one line answering to Prynne's jaundiced representations: 'flatteries,' 'adulations,' 'railings,' you look for in vain. The wistfulness of persuasion of the Verse-Letter to the Countess of Denbigh would have been trampled on as alii blind man or a boor tramples on a bed of pansies, by the grim lawyer-Puritan. Then, the very lowliness and (alleged) mendicancy of his post in the Church of Rome might have suggested a grain of charity, seeing that worldly advancement could not be motive to an all-but friendless scholar. As to the 'birth of his own brains,' and 'conversing with himself in verse,' would that we had more such 'births' and 'conversings'! Other accusations are malignant gossip, where they are not nonsense. Far different is the spirit of Dr. John Bargrave; whose MS. has at last been worthily edited and published for the Camden Society.[20] His notice of Crashaw at Rome is as follows: 'When I went first of my four times to Rome, there were there four revolters to the Roman Church that had been Fellows of Peterhouse in Cambridge with myself. The name of one of them was Mr. R. Crashaw, who was one of the Seguita (as their term is): that is, an attendant or of the followers of this Cardinal, for which he had a salary of crowns by the month (as the custom is), but no diet. Mr. Crashaw infinitely commended his Cardinal, but complained extremely of the wickedness of those of his retinue; of which he, having the Cardinal's ear, complained to him. Upon which the Italians fell so far out with him that the Cardinal, to secure his life, was fain to put him from his service, and procuring him some small employ at the Lady's of Loretto; whither he went on pilgrimage in summer time, and, overheating himself, died in four weeks after he came thither, and it was doubtful whether he was not poisoned' (p. 37). That brings before us a true, white-souled Man 'of God,' resolute toliii 'speak out,' whoever sinned in his sight; and it is blind sectarianism to deny that, from the noble and holy Loyola to our own Faber and Spencer and the living Newman, the Church of Rome has never been without dauntless preachers of the very righteousness of God, or unhesitant rebukers of the wickedness, immoralities, and frivolities of their co-religionists. The suspicion of 'poyson' I am unwilling to accept. Onward I shall give our recovered record of his death. Summarily, then, the 'change' of Crashaw from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism had its root and carries its solution in his 'mystical' dreamy temperament and yearnings, as these were over-encouraged instead of controlled; and as formative influences there were—(a) his reading in Teresa and kindred literature, until not 'hands,' but brain and heart, imagination and fancy, grew into the elements wherein they wrought—as one finds sprays of once-green moss and delicate-carven ferns changed by the dripping limestone into limestone: (b) the ritualistic revival being in the hands of those most loved and trusted, and from whom he fetched whatever of spiritual life and peace and joy and hope was in him—these too being of stronger will, and decisive in opinion and action—his vague 'feeling-after' rest was centred in the Rest of ideal Roman Catholicism: (c) the confusions and strifes of the transition-period of the Commonwealth terrified and wounded him; he mistook the crash of falling scaffolding, whose end was served, for the falling of the everlasting skies; saw not their serene shining beyond the passing clouds, lightning-charged for divine clarifying; and a 'quiet retreat,' which Imagination beckoned him to, won him to 'hide' there his weeping and dismay. Nothing sordid or expedient, or facing-both-ways, or unworthy, moved him to 'change.' Every one who has self-respect based on self-knowledge, and who thus has experienced the mystery of his deepestliv beliefs, will make all gentlest allowances, hold all tenderest sympathies with him, and feel the coarse abuse of Prynne and later as a personal wrong. Richard Crashaw was a true 'man of God,' and acted, I believe, in sensitive allegiance to his conscience as it spake to him. 'Change,' even fundamental change, in such a man is to be accepted without reserve as 'honest' and righteous and God-fearing. He dared not sign the 'Solemn League and Covenant,' however 'solemn' it might be to others; and so he went out.[21] I pass to—

II. His friends and associates, as celebrated in his writings. I use the word 'Writings' here rather than 'Poems,' because in his Epistles, e.g. to the 'Epigrammata' and those printed by us for the first time, as well as in his Poetry, names are found over which one pauses instinctively. Commencing with his school-days at the Charterhouse, there is Robert Brooke, 'Master' ('Preceptor') from 1628 to 1643.[22] Very little has come down to us concerninglv him, and the present head of the renowned School has been unable to add to Alexander Chalmers' testimony, 'A very celebrated Master.' All the more have I pleasure in inviting attention to the new 'Epistola' and related poems addressed to him, and which must be studied along with the previous poem, 'Ornatissimo viro præceptori suo colendissimo, Magistro Brook' (vol. ii. pp. 319); and perhaps the humorous and genial serio-comic celebration of 'Priscianus' grew from some school-incident (vol. ii. pp. 308, 315) having in the latter year, like Crashaw, been 'ejected' from the Charterhouse for not taking the 'Solemn League and Covenant.' He had been usher from 1626 to 1628. An apartment in the building is still called from him Brooke Hall ('Chronicles,' pp. 129, 159).

The next prominent name is that of Benjamin Lany—sometimes Laney, as in Masson's Milton (i. 97)—afterwards successively Bishop of Peterborough and Lincoln and Ely. We have already noted his marked Protestantism in the verse-eulogy of the elder Crashaw, so that probably it was as his father's son, Lany, then Master of Pembroke, received our Worthy there. Lany was of the 'ejected' in 1644. The present Bishop of Ely, with all willingness to help us, found no mss. or biographic materials in his custody. When may we hope each bishopric will find a qualified historian-biographer? A portrait of Lany is in the Master's Lodge at the Charterhouse ('Chronicles,' 1847, p. 140).

Crashaw's tutor at Pembroke was 'Master Tournay,' to whose praise and friendship he dedicates a Latin poem (vol. ii. pp. 371 et sqq.). Dr. Ward, Master of Sidney College, writes to Archbishop Usher thus of him: 'We havelvi had some doings here of late about one of Pembroke Hall, who, preaching in St. Mary's, about the beginning of Lent, upon that text, James ii. 22, seemed to avouch the insufficiency of faith to justification, and to impugn the doctrine of our 11th Article, of Justification by faith only; for which he was convented by the Vice-Chancellor, who was willing to accept of an easy acknowledgment; but the same party preaching his Latin sermon, pro Gradu, the last week, upon Rom. iii. 28, he said he came not palinodiam canere, sed eandem cantilenam canere; which moved our Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Love, to call for his sermon, which he refused to deliver. Whereupon, upon Wednesday last, being Barnaby Day, the day appointed for the admission of the Bachelors of Divinity, which must answer Die Comitiorum, he was stayed by the major part of the suffrages of the Doctors of the faculty.... The truth is, there are some Heads among us that are great abettors of M. Tournay, the party above mentioned, who, no doubt, are backed by others' (June 14, 1643. Life of Parr, p. 470: Willmott, 1st series, pp. 302-3). In relation to Tournay's heresy on 'Justification,' it is profoundly interesting, biographically, to remember Crashaw's most striking Latin poems—so carelessly overlooked, if not impudently suppressed, by Turnbull—first published by Crashaw in the volume of 1648, viz. 'Fides, quæ sola justificat, non est sine spe et dilectione,' and 'Baptismus non tollit futura peccata.' The student will do well to turn to these two poems in their places (vol. ii. pp. 209, 216).[23]

Robert Shelford, 'of Ringsfield in Suffolk, Priest,' waslvii another 'suspect:' as in Huntley's [ = Prynne] Breviate (3d ed. 1637, p. 308) we read, 'Master Shelford hath of late affirmed in print, that the Pope was never yet defined to be the Antichrist by any Synods.' More vehemently writes Usher to Dr. Ward (Sept. 15, 1635): 'But while we strive here to maintain the purity of our ancient truth, how cometh it to pass that you at Cambridge do cast such stumbling-blocks in our way, by publishing unto the world such rotten stuff as Shelford hath vented in his Five Discourses; wherein he hath so carried himself ut famosi Perni amanuensem possis agnoscere. The Jesuits of England sent over the book hither to assure them that we are now coming home to them as fast as we can. I pray God this sin be not deeply laid to their charge, who give an occasion to our blind thus to stumble' (as before). It was to these 'Five Discourses' our Poet furnished a 'commendatory' poem—given by us unmutilated from the volume (vol. i. pp. 162-5). Shelford, like his friend, was of Peterhouse. Another college-friend was William Herrys (or Herries or Harris), who was of Essex. He died in October 1631. He was of Pembroke and Christ's. The poems and 'Epitaph' consecrated to his memory are in various ways remarkable. But beyond a few college-dates, I have failed to recover notices of him. He seems to have been to Crashaw what young King was to Milton and his fellow-students (vol. i. pp. 220-30; vol. ii. pp. 378 et sqq.).[24] So with James Stanninow (or Staninough), 'fellow of Queene'slviii Colledge'—the poem on whose death was first printed by us (vol. i. pp. 290-92). He has a Latin poem prefixed to Isaacson's 'Chronology' (our vol. i. pp. 246-49).[25] So too with 'Master Chambers,' of the fine pathetic hitherto anonymous poem 'Vpon the death of a Gentleman' (vol. i. pp. 218-19). Neither have I been able to add one syllable to the name and heading: 'An Epitaph vpon Mr. Ashton, a conformable citizen.' Wren, Cosin, and others of Cambridge, not being named by Crashaw, do not come under these remarks. The new poems on Dr. Porter (vol. i. pp. 293-4), Dr. Mansell (vol. ii. p. 323), and others, explain themselves—with our notes. Of Cardinal Palotta, or Palotto, we get most satisfying glimpses in Dr. Bargrave's volume (already quoted). The Protestant Canon's testimony is: 'He is very papable [placable], and esteemed worthy by all, especially the princes that know his virtue and qualities, being a man of angelical life; and Rome would be glad to see him Pope, to pull down the pride of the Barberini. Innocent the Xth, now reigning, hath a great regard for him, though his kindred care not for him, because he speaketh his mind freely of them to the Pope' (p. 36).[26]

lix

It only remains that I notice our Crashaw's friendship with (a) Abraham Cowley; (b) the Countess of Denbigh.

(a) Abraham Cowley. Of the alternate-poem on Hope, composed by Cowley and Crashaw (vol. i. pp. 175-181), and that 'Vpon two greene Apricockes sent to Cowley by Sir Crashaw' (ib. pp. 269-70), more in our next division. These remain as the ever-enduring 'memorial' of their friendship, while the thought-full, love-full 'Elegy,' devoted by the survivor to the memory of his Friend, can never pale of its glory (vol. i. pp. xxxvi.-viii.). All honour to Cowley that he kept the traduced 'Apostate' and 'Revolter' in his heart-of-hearts, and 'sought' him out in his lowly 'lodgings' in the gay, and yet (to him) sad Paris. It is my purpose one day worthily to reproduce the Works of this in form fantastic, but in substance most intellectual, of our Poets; and I shall have then, perhaps, something additional to communicate on this beautiful Friendship. They had appeared together as Poets in the 'Voces Votivæ.' The various readings show that Cowley's portion of Hope was revised in Paris; and this, with the gift of the 'apricockes,' expresses that they had some pleasant intercourse.[27]

(b) Countess of Denbigh. By the confiding goodness of the present Earl and Countess of Denbigh, I have, among my 'Sunny Memories,' most pleasant hours of a long summer day spent in examining the Library and family mss. and portraits at Newnham Paddox, and a continued and sympathetic correspondence, supplemented with kindred helpfulness on the part of the good Father-priest of the house. It is one of the anomalies of our national historic Biography that the sister of Buckingham—Susan, daughter of Sir George Villiers, of Brokesby, firstlx Countess of Denbigh—should have died and made no 'sign,' and left no memorial; for it is absolutely unknown when or where she did die. But as it is known that she became a Roman Catholic,[28] while it is not known that Elizabeth, daughter and co-heir of Edward Bourchier, Earl of Bath, who became third wife (of four) of Basil, second Earl of Denbigh, so 'changed,' we must conclude that Turnbull and others are mistaken in regarding the latter as Crashaw's 'patron' and friend. The family-papers show that Susan Countess of Denbigh was a lady of intellect and force; equally do they show that Elizabeth Bourchier was (to say the least) un-literary. I have from Newnham Paddox a sheaf of rarely-vivid and valuable Letters of 'Susan'—with some of 'Elizabeth;' and if I can only succeed in discovering the date of the former's death, so as to determine whether she was living up to Crashaw's death in 1650, or thereby—as dowager-countess—I intend to prepare a short Monograph on her, wherein I shall print, for the first time, such a series of Letters as will compare with any ever given to the world; and I should greatly like to engrave her never-yet engraved magnificent face at Newnham Paddox. For the present, a digression may be allowed, in order to introduce, as examples of these recovered Letters, a short and creditable one from Buckingham to his mother, and one from Susan, Countess of Denbigh, to her son; others, that are long and fact-full, hereafter (as supra). These in order:

I. Buckingham to his Mother [undated]:

lxi

Dere Mother,—Give me but as many blessings and pardons as I shall make falts, and then you make happie

Your most obedient Sonne,

For my Mother.

Buckingham.

II. Susan, Countess of Denbigh, to Lord Fielding:

My deere Sone,—The king dothe approve well of your going into Spane, and for my part I thinke it will be the best of your traviles by reson that the king doth discours moust of that plase. I am much afflicted for feare of Mr. Mason, but I hope our Lord well send him well home againe. I pray do not torment me with your going into the danger of the plauge any more. So with my blessing I take my leave.

Your loveing Mother,

For my deare Sonne theise.

Su. Denbigh.

The Verse-Letters to the Countess of Denbigh (vol. i. pp. 295-303) will be read with renewed interest in the light of the all-but certain fact that it was Susan, sister of Buckingham—every way a memorable woman—who was 'persuaded' by Crashaw to 'join' Roman Catholicism, as did her mother.[29] Reverting to the names which I have endeavoured to commemorate, where hitherto scarcely anything has been known, it will be perceived that the circle of Crashaw's friendships was a narrow one, and touched mainly the two things—his University career, and his great 'change' religiously or rather ecclesiastically. Of the Poets of his period, except Cowley and Ford, no trace remains as known to or influential over him. When Crashawlxii entered Cambridge, Giles Fletcher had been dead ten years; Phineas Fletcher and Herrick had left about the same number of years; Herbert, for four or five; and Milton was just going. His most choice friends were among the mighty dead. Supreme names later lay outside of his access. I wish he had met—as he might have done—Milton. I pass next to

III. His characteristics and place as a Poet. It is something 'new under the sun' that it should be our privilege well-nigh to double the quantity of the extant Poetry of such a Singer as Richard Crashaw, by printing, for the first time, the treasure-trove of the Sancroft-Tanner mss.; and by translating (also for the first time) the whole of his Latin poetry. Every element of a true poetic faculty that belongs to his own published Poems is found in the new, while there are new traits alike of character and genius; and our Translations must be as the 'raising' of the lid of a gem-filled casket, shut to the many for these (fully) two hundred years. The admirer of Crashaw hitherto has thus his horizon widened, and I have a kind of feeling that perchance it were wiser to leave the completed Poetry to make its own impression on those who come to it. Nevertheless I must, however briefly, fulfil my promise of an estimate of our Worthy. Four things appear to me to call for examination, in order to give the essentials of Crashaw as a Poet, and to gather his main characteristics: (a) Imaginative-sensuousness; (b) Subtlety of emotion; (c) Epigrams; (d) Translations and (briefly) Latin and Greek Poetry. I would say a little on each.

(a) Imaginative-sensuousness. Like 'charity' for 'love,' the word 'sensuous' has deteriorated in our day. It is, I fear, more than in sound and root confused with 'sensual,' in its base application. I use it as Milton did, in the well-known passage when he defined Poetry to be 'simple, sensuous, and passionate;' and I qualify 'sensuousness'lxiii with 'imaginative,' that I may express our Poet's peculiar gift of looking at everything with a full, open, penetrative eye, yet through his imagination; his imagination not being as spectacles (coloured) astride the nose, but as a light of white glory all over his intellect and entire faculties. Only Wordsworth and Shelley, and recently Rossetti and Jean Ingelow, are comparable with him in this. You can scarcely err in opening on any page in your out-look for it. The very first poem, 'The Weeper,' is lustrous with it. For example, what a grand reach of 'imaginative' comprehensiveness have we so early as in the second stanza, where from the swimming eyes of his 'Magdalene' he was, as it were, swept upward to the broad transfigured sky in its wild ever-varying beauty of the glittering silver rain!

How grandly vague is that 'counter-shine whatever,' as it leads upwards to the 'forehead'—superb, awful, God-crowned—of the 'heauns'! Of the same in kind, but unutterably sweet and dainty also in its exquisiteness, is stanza vii.:

Wordsworth's vision of the 'flashing daffodils' is not finer than this. A merely realistic Poet (as John Clare or Bloomfield) would never have used the glorious singular,lxiv 'thy tear,' with its marvellous suggestiveness of the multitudinous dew regarding itself as outweighed in everything by one 'tear' of such eyes. Every stanza gives a text for commentary; and the rapid, crowding questions and replies of the Tears culminate in the splendid homage to the Saviour in the conclusion, touched with a gentle scorn:

'Feet' at highest; mark the humbleness, and the fitness too. Even more truly than of Donne (in Arthur Wilson's Elegy) may it be said of Crashaw, here and elsewhere, thou 'Couldst give both life and sense unto a flower,'—faint prelude of Wordsworth's 'meanest flower.'

Dr. Macdonald (in 'Antiphon') is perplexingly unsympathetic, or, if I may dare to say it, wooden, in his criticism on 'The Weeper;' for while he characterises it generally as 'radiant of delicate fancy,' he goes on: 'but surely such tones are not worthy of flitting moth-like about the holy sorrow of a repentant woman! Fantastically beautiful, they but play with her grief. Sorrow herself would put her shoes off her feet in approaching the weeping Magdalene. They make much of her indeed, but they show her little reverence. There is in them, notwithstanding their fervour of amorous words, a coldness, like that which dwells in the ghostly beauty of icicles shining in the moon' (p. 239). Fundamentally blundering is all this:lxv for the Critic ought to have marked how the Poet's 'shoes' are put off his feet in approaching the weeping Magdalene; but that she is approached as far-back in the Past or in a Present wherein her tears have been 'wiped away,' so that the poem is dedicate not so much to The Weeper as to her Tears, as things of beauty and pricelessness. Mary, 'blessed among women,' is remembered all through; and just as with her Divine Son we must 'sorrow' in the vision of His sorrows, we yet have the remembrance that they are all done, 'finished;' and thus we can expatiate on them not with grief so much as joy. The prolongation of 'The Weeper' is no 'moth-like flitting about the holy sorrow of a repentant woman,' but the never-to-be-satisfied rapture over the evidence of a 'godly sorrow' that has worked to repentance, and in its reward given loveliness and consecration to the tears shed. The moon 'shining on icicles' is the antithesis of the truth. Thus is it throughout, as in the backgrounds of the great Portrait-painters as distinguished from Land-scapists and Sea-scapists and Sky-scapists—Crashaw inevitably works out his thoughts through something he has looked at as transfigured by his imagination, so that you find his most mystical thinking and feeling framed (so to say) with images drawn from Nature. That he did look not at but into Nature, let 'On a foule Morning, being then to take a Journey,' and 'To the Morning; Satisfaction for Sleepe,' bear witness. In these there are penetrative 'looks' that Wordsworth never has surpassed, and a richness almost Shakesperean. Milton must have studied them keenly. There is this characteristic also in the 'sensuousness' of Crashaw, that while the Painter glorifies the ignoble and the coarse (as Hobbima's Asses and red-cloaked Old Women) in introducing it into a scene of Wood, or Way-side, or Sea-shore, his outward images and symbolism are worthy in themselves, and stainless as worthy (passinglxvi exceptions only establishing the rule). His epithets are never superfluous, and are, even to surprising nicety, true. Thus he calls Egypt 'white Egypt' (vol. i. p. 81); and occurring as this does 'In the glorious Epiphanie of ovr Lord God,' we are reminded again how the youthful Milton must have had this extraordinary composition in his recollection when he composed his immortal Ode.[30] Similarly we have 'hir'd mist' (vol. i. p. 84); 'pretious losse' (ib.); 'fair-ey'd fallacy of Day' (ib. p. 85); 'black but faithfull perspectiue of Thee' (ib. p. 86); 'abasèd liddes' (ib. p. 88); 'gratious robbery' (ib. p. 156); 'thirsts oflxvii loue' (ib.); 'timerous light of starres' (ib. p. 172); 'rebellious eye of Sorrow' (ib. p. 112); and so in hundreds of parallels. Take this from 'To the Name above every Name' (ib. p. 60):

Comparing Cowley's and Crashaw's 'Hope,' Coleridge thus pronounces on them: 'Crashaw seems in his poems to have given the first ebullience of his imagination, unshapen into form, or much of what we now term sweetness. In the poem Hope, by way of question and answer, his superiority to Cowley is self-evident;' and he continues, 'In that on the Name of Jesus, equally so; but his lines on St. Teresa are the finest.' 'Where he does combine richness of thought and diction, nothing can excel, as in the lines you so much admire,

And then as never-to-be-forgotten 'glory' of the Hymn to Teresa, he adds: 'these verses were ever present to my mind whilst writing the second part of the Christabel; if indeed, by some subtle process of the mind, they did notlxviii suggest the first thought of the whole poem' (Letters and Conversations, 1836, i. 196). Coleridge makes another critical remark which it may be worth while to adduce and perhaps qualify. 'Poetry as regards small Poets may be said to be, in a certain sense, conventional in its accidents and in its illustrations. Thus [even] Crashaw uses an image "as sugar melts in tea away;" which although proper then and true now, was in bad taste at that time equally with the present. In Shakespeare, in Chaucer, there was nothing of this' (as before). The great Critic forgot that 'sugar' and 'tea' were not vulgarised by familiarity when Crashaw wrote, that the wonder and romance of their gift from the East still lay around them, and that their use was select, not common. Thus later I explain Milton's homeliness of allusion, as in the word 'breakfast,' and 'fell to,' and the like; words and places and things that have long been not prosaic simply, but demeaned and for ever unpoetised. I am not at all careful to defend the 'sugar' and 'tea' metaphor; but it, I think, belongs also to his imaginative-sensuousness, whereby orient awfulness almost, magnified and dignified it to him.

Moreover the canon in 'Antiphon' is sound: 'When we come, in the writings of one who has revealed master-dom, upon any passage that seems commonplace, or any figure that suggests nothing true, the part of wisdom is to brood over that point; for the probability is that the barrenness lies in us, two factors being necessary for the result of sight—the thing to be seen, and the eye to see it. No doubt the expression may be inadequate; but if we can compensate the deficiency by adding more vision, so much the better for us' (p. 243).

I thank Dr. George Macdonald[32] (in 'Antiphon') forlxix his quaint opening words on our Crashaw, and forgive him, for their sake, his blind reading of 'The Weeper.' 'I come now to one of the loveliest of our angel-birds, Richard Crashaw. Indeed, he was like a bird in more senses than one; for he belongs to that class of men who seem hardly ever to get foot-hold of this world, but are ever floating in the upper air of it' (p. 238). True, and yet not wholly; or rather, if our Poet ascends to 'the upper air,' and sings there with all the divineness of the skylark, like the skylark his eyes fail not to over-watch the nest among the grain beneath, nor his wings to be folded over it at the shut of eve. Infinitely more, then, is to be found in Crashaw than Pope (in his Letter to his friend Henry Cromwell) found: 'I take this poet to have writ like a gentleman; that is, at leisure hours, and more to keep out of idleness than to establish a reputation: so that nothing regular or just can be expected of him. All that regards design, form, fable (which is the soul of poetry), all that concerns exactness, or consent of parts (which is the body), will probably be wanting; only pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse (which are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry), may be found in these verses.' Nay verily, the form is often exquisite; but 'neat' and 'pretty conceptions' applied to such verse is as 'pretty' applied to Niagara—so full, strong, deep, thought-laden is it. I have no wish to charge plagiarism on Pope from Crashaw, as Peregrine Phillips did (see onward); but neither is the contemptuous as ignorant answer by a metaphor of Hayley to be received. The two minds were essentially different: Pope was talented, and used his talents to the utmost; Crashaw had absolute as unique genius.[33]

lxx

(b) Subtlety of emotion. Dr. Donne, in a memorable passage, with daring originality, sings of Mrs. Drury rapturously:

I have much the same conception of Crashaw's thinking. It was so emotional as almost always to tremble into feeling. Bare intellect, 'pure' (= naked) thought, you rarely come on in his Poems. The thought issues forth from (in old-fashioned phrase) the heart, and its subtlety is something unearthly even to awfulness. Let the reader give hours to the study of the composition entitled 'In the glorious Epiphanie of ovr Lord God, a Hymn svng as by the three Kings,' and 'In the holy Nativity of ovr Lord God.' Their depth combined with elevation, their grandeur softening into loveliness, their power with pathos, their awe bursting into rapture, their graciousness and lyrical music, their variety and yet unity, will grow in their study. As always, there is a solid substratum of original thought in them; and the thinking, as so often in Crashaw, is surcharged with emotion. If the thought may belxxi likened to fire, the praise, the rapture, the yearning may be likened to flame leaping up from it. Granted that, as in fire and flame, there are coruscations and jets of smoke, yet is the smoke that 'smoak' of which Chudleigh in his Elegy for Donne sings:

or, rather, that 'smoke' which filled the House to the vision of Isaiah (vi. 4). The hymn 'To the admirable Sainte Teresa,' and the 'Apologie' for it, and related 'Flaming Heart,' and 'In the glorious Assvmption of our Blessed Lady,' are of the same type. Take this from the 'Flaming Heart' (vol. i. p. 155):

His homage to the Virgin is put into words that pass the bounds which we Protestants set to the 'blessed among women' in her great renown, and even while a Protestant Crashaw fell into what we must regard as the strange as inexplicable forgetfulness that it is The Man, not The Child, who is our ever-living High-Priest 'within the veil,' and that not in His mother's bosom, but on the Throne of sculptured light, is His place. Still, you recognise that the homage to the Virgin-mother is to the Divine Son through her, and through her in fine if also mistaken humility. 'Mary' is the Muse of Crashaw; the Lord Jesus his 'Lord' and hers. I would have the reader spend willing time, in slowly, meditatively readinglxxii the whole of our Poet's sacred Verse, to note how the thinking thus thrills into feeling, and feeling into rapture—the rapture of adoration. It is miraculous how he finds words wherewith to utter his most subtle and vanishing emotion. Sometimes there is a daintiness and antique richness of wording that you can scarcely equal out of the highest of our Poets, or only in them. Some of his images from Nature are scarcely found anywhere else. For example, take this very difficult one of ice, in the Verse-Letter to the Countess of Denbigh (vol. i. p. 298, ll. 21-26), 'persuading' her no longer to be the victim of her doubts:

Young is striking in his use of the ice-metaphor:

(Night-Thoughts, N. II. l. 522-3.)

But how strangely original is the earlier Poet in so cunningly working it into the very matter of his persuasion! Our quotation from Young recalls that in the 'Night-Thoughts' there are evident reminiscences of Crashaw: e.g.

(Night IV. ll. 246-250.)

So in 'Gilt was Hell's gloom' (N. VII. l. 1041), and in this portrait of Satan:

and

and

we have the impress and inspiration of our Poet.

How infinitely soft and tender and Shakesperean is the 'Epitaph vpon a yovng Married Covple dead and bvryed together' (with its now restored lines), thus!—

The hush, the tranquil stillness of a church-aisle, within which 'sleep' old recumbent figures, comes over one in reading these most pathetically beautiful words. Of the whole poem, Dodd in his 'Epigrammatists' (as onward) remarks, 'after reading this Epitaph, all others on the same subject must suffer by comparison. Yet there is much to be admired in the following by Bishop Hall, on Sir Edward and Lady Lewkenor. It is translated from the Latin by the Bishop's descendant and editor, the Rev. Peter Hall (Bp. Hall's Works, 1837-9, xii. 331):

There is much beauty also in an anonymous epitaph in the 'Festoon' 143, 'On a Man and his Wife:'

His 'Wishes to his (supposed) Mistresse' has things in it vivid and subtle as anything in Shelley at his best; and I affirm this deliberately. His little snatch on 'Easter Day' with some peculiarities, culminates in a grandeur Milton might bow before. The version of 'Dies Irae' is wonderfully severe and solemn and intense. Roscommon undoubtedly knew it. And so we might go on endlessly. His melody—with exceptional discords—is as the music of a Master, not mere versification. Once read receptively, and the words haunt almost awfully, and, I must again use the word, unearthlily. Summarily—as in our claim for Vaughan, as against the preposterous traditional assertions of his indebtedness to Herbert poetically, while really it was for spiritual benefits he was obligated—we cannot for an instant rank George Herbert as a Poet with Crashaw. Their piety is alike, or the 'Priest' of Bemerton is more definite, and clear of the 'fine mist' of mysticism of the recluse of 'Little St. Mary's;' but only very rarely have you in 'The Temple' that light of genius which shines as a very Shekinah-glory in the 'Steps to the Temple.' These 'Steps' have been spoken of as 'Steps' designed to lead into Herbert's 'Temple,' whereas they were 'Steps' to the 'Temple' or Church of the Livinglxxv God. Crashaw 'sang' sweetly and generously of Herbert (vol. i. pp. 139-140); but the two Poets are profoundly distinct and independent. Clement Barksdale, probably, must bear the blame of foolishly subordinating Crashaw to Herbert, in his Lines in 'Nympha Libethris' (1651):

'HERBERT AND CRASHAW.

(c) Epigrams. The title-page of the Epigr. Sacra of 1670 marks out for us their main dates; that is to say, as it designates him 'Collegii Petrensis Socius,' which he was not until 1637, the only portion that belongs to that period must be the additions made in the 1670 edition (see vol. ii. pp. 3-4). Dr. Macdonald (in 'Antiphon') observes: 'His Divine Epigrams are not the most beautiful, but they are to me the most valuable, of his verses, inasmuch as they make us feel afresh the truth which he sets forth anew. In them some of the facts of our Lord's life and teaching look out upon us as from clear windows of the Past. As epigrams, too, they are excellent—pointed as a lance' (p. 240). He limits himself to the 'English' Epigrams, and quotes after above, Nos. LIV. (2) and XI.; and continues with No. XIV., and next LIV. (1); on which he says: 'I value the following as a lovely parable. Mary is not contented; to see the place is little comfort. The church itself, with all its memories of the Lord, the Gospel-story, and all theory about Him, is but His tomb until we find Himself;' and he closes with one which he thinks is 'perhaps his best,' viz. No. I.[34] We too may give it:

lxxvi

The admiring critic on this proceeds: 'This appears to me perfect. Here is the true relation between the forms and the end of religion. The priesthood, the altar and all its ceremonies, must vanish from between the sinner and his God. When the priest forgets his mediation of a servant, his duty of a door-keeper to the temple of truth, and takes upon him the office of an intercessor, he stands between man and God, and is a satan, an adversary. Artistically considered, the poem could hardly be improved' (p. 241). 'Artistically,' nevertheless, it is a wonder Dr. Macdonald did not detect Turnbull's mis-reading of 'lend' for 'send' (l. 4). Bellew in his Poet's Corner reads 'bend,' which is equally poor for 'tendit.' There follows No. XLII., 'containing a similar lesson;' and finally No. XLV. p. 196, whereof he says: 'The following is a world-wide intercession for them that know not what they do.lxxvii Of those that reject the truth, who can be said ever to have truly seen it? A man must be good to see truth. It is a thought suggested by our Lord's words, not an irreverent opposition to the truth of them' (p. 242).

Now that, besides the (relatively) few Epigrams which were translated by Crashaw himself, the whole are translated (for the first time), and now too that, exclusive of longer Latin poems, a goodly addition has been made by us to them, the reader will find it rewarding to turn and return on this remarkable section of Crashaw's poetry. Conceits there are, grotesque as gargoyles of a cathedral, oddities of symbolism, even passing into unconscious playing with holy words and things never to be played with; but each has a jewel of a distinct thought or sentiment, and often the wording is felicitous, albeit, as in all his Latin verse, not invariably without technical faults of quantity and even syntax. I had marked very many for specific criticism; but I must refrain. Our translation is perhaps a better commentary. To my co-workers and myself it has been a labour of love. I must close our notice of Crashaw as an Epigrammatist with some parallels from 'The Epigrammatists' of the Rev. Henry Philip Dodd, M.A. (1870). Under No. CXVII., 'On Pontius Pilate washing his hands,' he has this: 'In Elsum's Epigrams on Paintings, 1700, is one on a picture by Andrea Sacchi of Pilate washing his hands, translated from Michael Silos, De Romana Pictura et Sculptura' (Ep. 17):

Similarly, under No. LI. 'On the Blessed Virgin's Bashfulness,' he has this: 'Some lines "To the Blessed Virgin at her Purification," by the old epigrammatist Bancroft,lxxviii are almost as beautiful in sentiment as this exquisite piece (Book ii. 86):

Of the exceptionally celebrated, not exceptionally superior Epigram on 'The Water turned Wine,' which somehow has been given by a perverse continued blunder to Dryden, Aaron Hill's masterly translation may be read along with those given by us in the place (vol. ii. pp. 96-7):

Dryden's 'The conscious water saw its God, and blush'd,' is a mere remembrance of Crashaw.[35]

(d) Translations and (briefly) Latin and Greek Poetry. It may seem semi-paradoxical to affirm it, but in our opinion the genius of Crashaw shines with its fullest splendour in his Translations, longer and shorter. Even were there not his wonderful 'Suspicion of Herod' and 'Musick's Duell,' this might be said; for in his 'Dies Irae,' and 'Hymnelxxix out of Sainte Thomas,' and others lesser, there are felicities that only a genuine Maker could have produced. His 'Dies Irae' was the earliest version in our language. Roscommon and Scott alike wrote after and 'after' it. But it is on the two truly great Poems named we found our estimate. Turning to 'Musick's Duell,' as we ask the reader to do now (vol. i. 197-203), we have only to read critically the Latin of Strada, from whence it is drawn, to discern the creative gift of our Poet. Here it is:

It will be noted by the student that such word-painting as in these lines belongs to Crashaw, not Strada:

In the words of Willmott (as before), 'We shall seek in vain in the Latin text for the vigour, the fancy, and the grandeur of these lines. These remain with Crashaw, of whose obligations to Strada we may say, as Hayley [stupidly, if picturesquely] remarked of Pope's debt to Crashaw, that if he borrowed anything from him in this article, it was only as the sun borrows from the earth, when, drawing from thence a mere vapour, he makes it the delight of every eye, by giving it all the tender and gorgeous colouring of heaven' (vol. i. p. 323). The richness and fulness of our Poet as a Translator becomes the more clear when we place beside his interpretation of Strada the 'translations' of others, as given in the places (vol. i. pp. 203-6). A third (anonymous) version we discovered among the Lansdowne mss. 3910, pt. lxvi., from which we take a specimen:

And so to the end (MS. 3910, pp. 114-17). We have reserved until now incomparably the second, but only a far-off second, to Crashaw's, from John Ford's 'Lover's Melancholy' (1629); which probably was our Poet's guide to Strada. Here is the substance of the fine reminiscent version, from act i. scene 1:

Comment is needless on such pale, empty literality, as compared with the vitality and élan of Crashaw, in all but Ford's; while even Ford's is surpassed in every way by the 'Musick's Duell.'

The 'Suspicion of Herod,' by Marino (c. i.), is a grand poem in the original. Milton knew it, and was taken by it. Our Poet had glorious materials whereon to work, accordingly, when he turned Translator of this all-too-little known Singer of Italy. But Crashaw's soul was more spacious, his imagination more imperial, his vocabulary wealthier, than even Marino's. The greatness and grandeur and force of the Italian roused the Englishman to emulation. Willmott (as before) has placed the original Italian beside Crashaw's interpretation, and the advance in the Translator on his original is almost startling.lxxxiv We prefer adducing Crashaw, and then giving a close rendering of the original: e.g.

literally in Marino:

Again:

literally in Marino:

Once more: when Alecto, the most terrible of the infernal sisters, ascends to Earth at the command of Satan:

for

literally:

This naked simplicity of wording is very fine: yet do Crashaw's adornments bring new charm to Marino. The soliloquy of Satan, though close as the skin to the body,lxxxv has a ruddiness (so-to-say) from Crashaw. Nothing in Milton is grander than st. xxv. to xxx.; and in all there are touches from the cunning hand of Crashaw: e.g.

for Marino's

literally:

Again:

for Marino's

literally:

Compare also st. x. in Crashaw with the original as literally rendered:

Literally in Marino:

Milton takes from Crashaw, not Marino, in his portrait of the Destroyer:

Literally in Marino:

Well-nigh innumerable single lines and words are inevitably marked: e.g.

So the eyes of Satan:

for Marino's

literally:

Again: the sun is seen by the Tempter to

for 'la Reggia Oriental.' Crashaw has the same vivid fancy in the Hymn for Epiphany:

Finally, to show that even where our Translator keeps closest to the original, he yet gives the creative touches of which I have already spoken, read his st. v. beside this literal translation:

Thus we might go over the entire poem, and everywhere we should gather proofs that he was himself all he conceived in his splendid portraiture of the true Poet's genius:

Fully to estimate Crashaw's own grander imaginative faculty the Reader must study here the now-first-printed and very Miltonic poems on Apocalypse xii. 7 (Vol. II. pp. 231-3) and 'Christe, veni' (ib. pp. 223-5). It is profoundly to be regretted that our Poet should have limited himself to Book I. of the 'Strage degli Innocenti,' viz. 'Sospetto d'Herode.' Book VII. especially, 'Della Gerusalemme Distruta,' would have demanded all his powers. The entire poem was 'done in English,' and it is 'done' (by T.R. 1675).

lxxxviii

With reference to our own Translations of Crashaw, if in some instances we have enlarged on our original, and adventured to fill-in what in the Latin the Poet is fettered in uttering, may we apologise by pleading his own example as a Translator, though with unequal steps and far off? I would specify the very remarkable 'Bulla,' in which, indeed, I find Crashaw's highest of pure poetic faculty within the region of Fancy in its delicatest and subtlest symbolisms; also the scarcely less remarkable address 'To the Reader' ('Lectori'); and his 'Fides &c. &c.' and his classical legends of 'Arion,' and his University 'Laments' and 'Appeals' for Peterhouse. Throughout, my co-workers and myself have aimed to give the thought of Crashaw; and, unless I egregiously mistake, we have together earned some gratitude from admirers of our Worthy.

I leave to other Scholars to deal critically with the Latin and Greek of these Poems and Epigrams now first translated. Read unsympathetically, I fear that very often his quantities and versification will be regarded as barbarous; but we have done something, it is believed, to neutralise Turnbull's most discreditable misprints herein, as in the English Poems. In the places (vol. ii. pp. 5-6, 244, and 332) we have recorded some of his more flagrant blunders; but besides we have silently corrected as many more of the original and early editions.

That Crashaw was not an accurate scholar the Greek Epigrams (as well as some of the Latin ones) furnish sufficient proof. Of the many obvious errors in quantity and construction, I have only corrected such as may have been mere oversights, some of them perhaps caused by his MS. having been misread; in other cases I have followed the original editions, and corrected the numerous errors made by Turnbull from his not being able to read the Greek ligatures &c. It may be well to indicate a few oflxxxix the typical corrections that I felt obliged to make, and note other lapses which I did not feel justified in altering.

In XI. last line, ἀπέῤῥιπτον for ἀπόῤῥιπτον; CXXI. last line, ἔην for ἔη; CXXV. line 5. κεῖν' for κεῖν; CLXXX. line 1 has πλάνη as if the penult were long instead of short, and ἄλημι an unused form, so that the line offends both quantity and usage—it might be amended thus, Εἷς μὲν ἐγὼ, ᾗ μού τε πλάνη περιῆγεν, ἀλῶμαι; CLXXXII. line 1, ἐπέβαλλεν for ἐπίβαλλεν; CLXXXIII. line 2, συκόμωρε should be συκόμορε, but altered for scansion; line 3, ἐκκρήμνης should perhaps be ἐκκρημνὰς; line 4, unscanable; and in CXXV. line 4, δασίοις should be δασέσιν. οὐρανὸς, the penult of which is short, he uses as either long or short.

I must add, that the accentuation was as often wrong as right. I have carefully corrected it throughout. And this seems to me to be the only allowable way of reproducing Crashaw. An Editor cannot be held responsible for his Author writing imperfect Greek or Latin, any more than for his mistakes either in opinion or in matters-of-fact or taste.

Anderson's and Chalmers' Poets, and Peregrine Phillip's Selections, and Turnbull's edition in Russell Smith's 'Old Authors' and that in Gilfillan's Poets (a selection only), are our predecessors in furnishing Crashaw's Poetry. We confess to a feeling of just pride (shall we say?) in being the first worthily and adequately to present as remarkable Poetry, in its own region, as is anywhere to be found. Richard Crashaw has assuredly not yet gathered all his fame.[39]

Alexander B. Grosart.

xc

Latin Poems.

PART FIRST. SACRED.

I.

EPIGRAMMATA SACRA.

(1634-1670.)

2

NOTE.

The earliest appearance of Crashaw as a poet was in the University Collections of Latin Verse on the (then) usual conventional occasions of royal births and deaths, and the like. These pieces will be found in their places in the present volume. The place of honour herein we assign to his own published volume of 1634, of which the following is the title-page, within a neat woodcut border:

EPIGRAM-
MATUM
SACRORUM
LIBER.

University Printer's ornament,
with legend, 'Hinc. Lvcem. Et.
Pocula. Sacra.' and 'Alma Mater.'

Cantabrigiæ,
Ex Academiæ celeberrimæ
typographeo. 1634.

This is a small duodecimo. Collation: Title-page—Epistle-dedicatory to Lany, with the poems, 'Salve, alme custos Pierii gregis,' &c.—Venerabili viro Magistro Tournay, Tutori suo summe observando—Ornatissimo viro Præceptori suo colendissimo, Magistro Brook—Lectori (verse and prose), seven leaves: Epigrammata Sacra, pp. 79.

3

A second edition of this volume appeared in 1670. Its title-page is as follows:

RICHARDI CRASHAWI
POEMATA
et
EPIGRAMMATA,

Quæ scripsit Latina & Græca,
Dum Aulæ Pemb. Alumnus fuit,
Et
Collegii Petrensis Socius.

Editio Secunda, Auctior & emendatior.

Εἵνεκεν εὐμαθίης πινυτόφρονος, ἥν ὁ Μελιχρὸς
Ἤσκησεν, Μουσῶν ἄμμιγα καὶ Χαρίτων. Ἀνθολ.

[Printer's ornament, as before.]

Cantabrigiæ,
Ex Officina Joan. Hayes, Celeberrimæ Academiæ
Typographi. 1670.

This is an 8vo. Collation: Title-page—and to Brook, as before; then these additional Latin poems: In Picturam Reverendissimi Episcopi D. Andrews—Votiva Domûs Petrensis pro Domo Dei—In cæterorum Operum difficili Parturitione Gemitus—Epitaphium in Gulielmum Herrisium—In Eundem—Natalis Principis Mariæ—In Serenissimæ Reginæ partum hyemalem—Natalis Ducis Eboracensis—In faciem Augustiss. Regis a morbillis integram—Ad Carolum Primum, Rex Redux—Ad Principem nondum natum, Reginâ gravidâ. Bastard-title,4 'Epigrammata Sacra, quæ scripsit Græca et Latina'—Lectori (as before), nine leaves: Epigrammata Sacra, pp. 67.

The additions to the second edition—besides the Latin poems enumerated—were in the Epigrams these: No. 1, Pharisaeus et Publicanus, Greek version—No. 11, Obolum Viduæ, ib.—No. 53, Ecce locus ubi jacuit Dominus, ib.—No. 120, In descensum Spiritûs sancti, ib.—No. 124, In S. Columbam ad Christi caput sedentem, ib.—No. 141, Ad D. Lucam medicum, ib.—No. 148, In stabulum ubi natus est Dominus, ib.—No. 161, Hic lapis fiat panis, ib.—No. 177, In die Ascensionis Dominicæ, ib.—No. 178, Cæcus implorat Christum, Latin and Greek—No. 179, Quis ex vobis, &c. ib.—No. 180, Herodi D. Jacobum obtruncati, ib.—No. 181, Cæci receptis, &c. ib.—and No. 182, Zaccheus in sycomoro.

A third edition was issued in 1674. It is identical with that of 1670, save in the date on title-page, printer's ornament, and this line at bottom: 'Prostant venales apud Joann. Creed.' Probably consisted of 'remainders' of 1670 edition.

As the edition of 1634 was published during the author's residence in the University, and so under his own eye, I have made it the basis of our text, though with a vigilant eye on the later corrections; but have given from the edition of 1670 the Greek versions of certain of the Epigrams, and those added (as above). The Epistle-dedicatory to Lany, and related introductory poems of 1634, alone, I prefix to the Epigrammata Sacra, assigning the other poems more fittingly to the Secular Poems (as annotated in the places). The Editor of the second edition, 'auctior et emendatior,' has not been transmitted. For more on the editions of the Epigrammata Sacra, see our Essay and Notes and Illustrations. As explained in our Prefatory Note, the translations of the Latin Poemata et Epigrammata, as of the others, follow the originals successively. A. denotes the translator to be Thomas Ashe, M.A., Ipswich; B., Clement Barksdale (from 'Epigrammata Sacra selecta, cum Anglicâ Versione. Sacred Epigrams Englished. London: Printed for John Barksdale, Bookseller in Cirencester. 1682.' 12mo); Cl., Rev. J.H. Clark, M.A., West Dereham, Norfolk; Cr., Crashaw himself; G., myself; W., Rev. W. Aris Willmott (from his 'Lives of the Sacred Poets,' s.n. Crashaw); and R. Wi., Rev. Richard Wilton, M.A., Londesborough Rectory, Market Weighton. In the present and succeeding division those5 Epigrams translated by Crashaw himself are given under the related Latin—all from the original text of 1646, as before. They consist of Nos. 1, 2, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 20, 21, 26, 29, 36, 40, 42, 43, 47, 49, 51, 54 (two), 56, 57, 63, 64, 68, 85, 91, 93, 101, 104, 106, 108, 115, 117, 140, 157, 160, 164, 169, 184, and 185 in the present, and of Nos. 21, 22, 28, 42, 46, and 55 in next section.

It only remains that I add here, instead of noticing in their places, the following more flagrant errors of Turnbull in the 'Epigrammata' and related 'Poemata Latina et Græca.' Similar lists will be found in the introductory notes to the several divisions of this volume.

In the Epistle to Lany, line 18, avidi for avide; line 29, amore for amare; in the Ode, st. ii. line 1, ipsi for ipse. In the address 'Lectori,' line 7, abi for alis; line 29, putre for putri; line 48, mens for meus; line 53, fingit for finget; line 70, graves for gravis; line 97, tota dropped out; line 120, negat for neget; in succeeding prose, line 29, Acygmanos for acygnianos.

The misprints in the Epigrammata are so numerous, that it is deemed expedient to tabulate them according to our numbering. On the errors in the Greek, see our Preface to the present Volume.

The whole of these, with others belonging to Crashaw himself and his first editors, are carefully corrected in our edition. G.

7

REVERENDO ADMODUM VIRO
BENJAMINO LANY,[40]
SS. THEOLOGIAE PROFESSORI, AULAE PEMBROCHIANAE CUSTODI DIGNISSIMO, EX SUORUM MINIMIS MINIMUS,
R. C[RASHAW]
CUSTODIAM COELESTEM
P.

Suus est et florum fructus; quibus fruimur, si non utilius, delicatius certe. Neque etiam rarum est quod ad spem Veris, de se per flores suos quasi pollicentis, adultioris anni, ipsiusque adeo Autumni exigamus fidem. Ignoscas igitur, vir colendissime, properanti sub ora Apollinis sui, primaeque adolescentiae lascivia exultanti Musae. Tenerae aetatis flores adfert, non fructus serae: quos quidem exigere ad seram illam et sobriam maturitatem, quam in fructibus expectamus merito, durum fuerit; forsan et ipsa hac praecoci importunitate sua placituros magis: tibi praesertim quem paternus animus, quod fieri solet, intentum tenet omni suae spei diluculo, quo tibi de tuorum indole promittas aliquid. Ex more etiam eorum, qui in praemium laboris sui pretiumque8 patientiae festini, ex iis quae severunt ipsi et excoluerunt, quicquid est flosculi prominulum, prima quasi verecundia auras et apertum Jovem experientis arripiunt avide, saporemque illi non tam ex ipsius indole et ingenio quam ex animi sui affectu, foventis in eo curas suas et spes, affingunt. Patere igitur, reverende custos, hanc tibi ex istiusmodi floribus corollam necti; convivalem vero: nec aliter passuram sidus illud oris tui auspicatissimum, nisi, qua est etiam amoenitate, remissiore radio cum se reclinat, et in tantum de se demit. Neque sane hoc scriptionis genere, modo partes suas satis praestiterit, quid esse potuit otio theologico accommodatius, quo nimirum res ipsa theologica poetica amoenitate delinita majestatem suam venustate commendat. Hoc demum quicquid est, amare tamen poteris, et voles, scio: non ut magnum quid, non ut egregium, non ut te dignum denique, sed ut tuum: tuum summo jure, utpote quod e tua gleba, per tuum radium, in manum denique tuam evocatum fuerit. Quod restat hujus libelli fatis, exorandus es igitur, vir spectatissime, ut quem sinu tum facili privatum excepisti, eum jam ore magis publico alloquentem te non asperneris. Stes illi in limine, non auspicium modo suum, sed et argumentum. Enimvero Epigramma sacrum tuus ille vultus vel est, vel quid sit docet; ubi nimirum amabili diluitur severum, et sanctum suavi demulcetur. Pronum me vides in negatam mihi provinciam; laudum tuarum, intelligo: quas mihi cum modestia tua abstulerit, reliquum9 mihi est necessario ut sim brevis; imo vero longus nimium; utpote cui argumentum istud abscissum fuerit, in quo unice poteram, et sine taedio, prolixus esse. Vale, virorum ornatissime, neque dedigneris quod colere audeam Genii tui serenitatem supplex tam tenuis, et, quoniam numen quoque hoc de se non negat, amare etiam. Interim vero da veniam Musae in tantum sibi non temperanti; quin in hanc saltem laudis tuae partem, quae tibi ex rebus sacris apud nos ornatis meritissima est, istiusmodi carmine involare ausa sit, qualicunque:

[TRANSLATION. Prose G.; verse Cl.]

To the very reverend man Benjamin Lany, Doctor of Divinity, most worthy Master of Pembroke College [Cambridge], the least of the least of those that are his, R[ichard] C[rashaw] implores the divine protection.[41]

Even flowers have their own peculiar fruit, which we enjoy, if not so profitably, yet in a manner more refined. Nor is it unusual that, in accordance with the hope of Spring, making promises for herself as it were by her flowers, we demand credit for the maturer year, and even for Autumn itself. Forgive, then, most Reverend Sir, the Muse hastening into the presence of her Apollo, and exulting in the wantonness of earliest youth. She offers the flowers of a tender age, not the fruits of a late one, which flowers indeed it12 were unreasonable to demand in accordance with that late and sober maturity which we rightly look for in fruits—flowers which are more likely to be pleasing from the very fact of their precocious importunity,—to thee above all, whom a fatherly mind, as it is wont to happen, holds watching for every dawning of its hope, by which you may give yourself assurance of anything respecting the genius of your sons; after the manner also of those who, in haste for the reward of their labour and the price of their patience, from what they have themselves sown and tended, snatch greedily whatever part may project a little of a floweret, which, as with early bashfulness, is making trial of the airs and the open sky, and attach an odour to it, not so much from its own nature and character as from the inclination of their own mind, which fosters in it their own anxieties and hopes. Suffer then, Reverend Master, this little garland, made of flowers of such a sort, to be bound on thee; a festal one assuredly, and not able to endure that most auspicious star of thy countenance in any other way than—for it is even of such a graciousness—when it draws back with milder ray, and so far subtracts from itself. Nor assuredly than this kind of writing, provided it have sufficiently discharged its proper functions, could anything be more suitable to theological leisure; for in it without doubt the very substance of theology being overlaid with poetic grace, sets off its grandeur by loveliness. Finally, whatever13 this may be, you will nevertheless, I know, be able and willing to be lovingly disposed towards it; not as anything great or uncommon; not, in short, as anything worthy of you, but as your own—your own by highest right as having been called forth from your soil, by your light, and, in fine, into your hand. As for what fortune awaits this little book, deign to be persuaded, most worshipful Sir, not to scorn when addressing you now in a more public style him whom you have welcomed in private with so ready an affection. May you stand on its threshold, not only as its good omen but also as its subject! In very truth that countenance of yours is a Sacred Epigram, or teaches what it should be, where forsooth severity is tempered with love, and sanctity is mellowed by sweetness. You see me inclined towards a sphere denied to me—that of sounding your praises, I mean; which since your modesty has taken from me, it remains of necessity that I should be brief: yes indeed, I am too diffuse, seeing that the very subject is cut off from me in which alone I was, and even without irksomeness, able to be prolix. Farewell, most cultured of men, and do not disdain me, so insignificant a suppliant, for daring to honour your tranquil genius, and, since divinity even does not forbid this respecting itself, also to love it. But in the mean while give pardon to the Muse, to such a degree unrestrained as to have dared for this part at least of your praise, which is most due to you on account of14 sacred things that have been honoured amongst us, to fly towards you with a strain of such kind as this, whatever it may be:

LECTORI.

Si nimium hic promitti tibi videtur, Lector bone, pro eo cui satisfaciendo libellus iste futurus fuerit; scias me in istis non ad haec modo spectare quae hic habes, sed ea etiam quae olim, haec interim fovendo, habere poteris. Nolui enim, si hactenus deesse amicis meis non potui, flagitantibus a me, etiam cum dispendii sui periculo, paterer eos experiri te in tantum favorem tuum, nolui, inquam, fastidio tuo indulgere. Satis hic habes quod vel releges ad ferulam suam, neque enim maturiores sibi annos ex his aliqua vendicant, vel ut pignus plurium adultiorumque in sinu tuo reponas. Elige tibi ex his utrumvis. Me interim quod attinet, finis meus non fefellit. Maximum meae ambitionis scopum jamdudum attigi: tunc nimirum cum quale-cunque hoc meum pene infantis Musae murmur ad aures istas non ingratum sonuit, quibus neque doctiores mihi de publico timere habeo, nec sperare clementiores; adeo ut de tuo jam plausu, dicam ingenue et breviter, neque securus sim ultra neque solicitus. Prius tui, quisquis es, Lector, apud me reverentia prohibet; de cujus judicio omnia possum magna sperare: posterius illorum reverentia non sinit, de quorum perspicacitate maxima omnia non possum mihi non persuadere. Quanquam ô quam velim tanti me esse in quo patria mea morem istum suum deponere velit, genio suo tam non dignum; istum scilicet quo, suis omnibus fastiditis, ea exosculatur unice, quibus trajecisse Alpes et de transmarino esse, in pretium cessit! Sed relictis hisce, nimis improbae22 spei votis, convertam me ad magistros acygnianos; quos scio de novissimis meis verbis, quanquam neminem nominarim, iratos me reliquisse: bilem vero componant; et mihi se hoc debere, ambitioso juveni verbum tam magnum ignoscant—debere, inquam, fateantur: quod nimirum in tam nobili argumento, in quo neque ad foetida de suis sanctis figmenta, neque ad putidas de nostris calumnias opus habeant confugere, de tenui hoc meo dederim illorum magnitudini unde emineat. Emineat vero; serius dico, sciantque me semper se habituros esse sub ea, quam mihi eorum lux major affuderit, umbra, placidissime acquiescentem.

[TRANSLATION. Verse and Prose, G.]

To the Reader.

If it seem to you, good Reader, that I have promised overmuch on behalf of him to whom this tractate shall be pleasing, know that I do not look merely on those things which you possess here, but also on those which, by cherishing such as you now have, you may hereafter obtain; for I have been unwilling, if hitherto I have not been a-wanting to my friends earnestly entreating me that I should allow them, even at the risk of their own peril, to encroach on your good-will, however great—I have been unwilling, I say, to give myself up to your fastidious criticism. You have enough here either to hand over to the rod which it deserves (for none of these things ask or claim for themselves maturer years), or to lay it up in your bosom as a pledge32 of more and of advanced attempts. Choose for yourself an alternative. As for myself, my aim has not deceived me. I have already attained the utmost pinnacle of my ambition, at the time when this somewhat indifferent murmur of my almost-infantine Muse sounded not unmusically in those ears, than which from the world at large I have none more learned to fear, none more indulgent to hope for; so that, as regards your applause, I will speak candidly and at once: I am neither over-confident nor over-solicitous of it. Firstly, my respect for you, Reader, whoever you are, and of whose decision I can hope everything, restrains; and next, my respect for those of whose penetration I am unable not to persuade myself to hope the greatest things. Yet still, how I do wish that I were of service whenever my Country desires to cast aside its own particular custom, so unworthy its own worth—that custom particularly by which, all her own things being despised, she only prizes those things to which having crossed the Alps and lived over the sea has given a value! But these wishes of too rash hope being put aside, let me turn to the acygnian gentlemen, whom I know—although I shall name none personally—to have angrily abandoned me on account of some of my recent sayings. Still, let them compose their temper, and let them confess—may they pardon such a great saying from a forward young man!—I say, let them confess that they owe me this: that, in truth, in so grand an argument,33 in which they have not recourse to the stale untruths concerning their own services, nor to the nauseous calumnies concerning ours. With regard to this slight statement of mine, I have yielded to the importance of those from whence it springs. And let it spring, forsooth! I speak seriously—and let them know that they will always find me most tranquilly reposing under that shadow which their greater light has cast around me!

34

35

EPIGRAMMATA SACRA.

I.

Pharisaeus et Publicanus. Luc. xviii. 14-19.

Two went up into the Temple to pray.

ANOTHER VERSION.

II.

In asinum Christi vectorem. Matt. xxi. 7.

Upon the asse that bore our Saviour.

MORE CLOSELY.

37

III.

Dominus apud suos vilis. Luc. iv. 28-29.

The Lord 'despised and rejected' by His own people.

IV.

Ad Bethesdae piscinam positus. Joan. v. 1-16.

The cripple at the Pool of Bethesda.

38

ANOTHER VERSION.

V.

Christus ad Thomam. Joan. xx. 26-29.

Christ to Thomas.

ANOTHER RENDERING.

VI.

Quisquis perdiderit animam suam mea causa inveniet eam. Matt. xvi. 25.

Whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it.

VII.

Primo mane venit ad sepulchrum Magdalena. Joan. xx. 1.

40

[Mary] Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, cometh unto the sepulchre.

VIII.

Quinque panes ad quinque hominum millia. Joan. vi. 9.

On the miracle of multiplyed loaves.

ANOTHER VERSION.

IX.

Æthiops lotus. Act. viii. 38.

On the baptized Ethiopian.

ANOTHER VERSION.

X.

Publicanus procul stans percutiebat pectus suum. Luc. xviii. 13.

The publican standing afar off smote on his breast.

XI.

[In] obolum viduae. Marc. xii. 44.

The widow's mites.

XII.

Maria vero assidens ad pedes ejus audiebat eum. Luc. x. 39.

Mary, which also sat at Jesus' feet, and heard His word.

44

XIII.

In Spiritus Sancti descensum. Act. ii.

The descent of the Holy Spirit.

XIV.

Congestis omnibus peregre profectus est. Luc. xv. 13.

ON THE PRODIGALL.

The younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country.

XV.

Non solum vinciri, sed et mori paratus sum. Act. xxi. 13.

I am ready not to be bound only, but to dye.

ANOTHER VERSION.

46

XVI.

In Herodem σκωληκόβρωτον. Act. xii. 23.

On Herod worshipped as a god, eaten of worms.

XVII.

Videns ventum magnum timuit, et cum coepisset demergi, clamavit, &c. Matt. xiv.

When he saw the wind boisterous he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, &c.

47

XVIII.

Obtulit eis pecunias. Act. viii. 18.

He offered them money.

XIX.

Umbra S. Petri medetur aegrotis. Act. v. 15.

The shadow of St. Peter heals the sick.

XX.

Tetigit linguam ejus, &c. ... et loquebatur ... et praecepit illis ne cui dicerent: illi vero eo magis praedicabant. Marc. vii. 33, 36.

The dumbe healed, and the people enjoyned silence.

ANOTHER VERSION.

XXI.

Sacerdos quidam descendens eadem via vidit, et praeteriit. Luc. x. 32.

And a certaine priest comming that way looked on him, and passed by.

ANOTHER RENDERING.

ANOTHER VERSION.

XXII.

Leprosi ingrati. Luc. xvii.

The ungrateful lepers.

XXIII.

Ne soliciti estote tu crastinum. Matt. vi. 34.

Be ye not fretted about to-morrow.

ANOTHER VERSION.

XXIV.

A telonio Matthaeus. Matt. ix. 9.

Matthew called from the receipt of custom.

XXV.

Viduae filius e feretro matri redditur. Luc. vii. 15.

The dead son re-delivered to his mother.

XXVI.

Bonum intrare in coelos cum uno oculo, &c. Matt. xviii. 9.

It is better to go into heaven with one eye, &c.

ANOTHER VERSION.

XXVII.

Hydropicus sanatur. Luc. xiv. 2-4.

XXVIII.

Non erat iis in diversorio locus. Luc. ii. 7.

There was no room for them in the inn.

XXIX.

In lacrymas Lazari spretas a Divite. Luc. xvi.

Upon Lazarus his teares.

ANOTHER RENDERING.

XXX.

Indignatur Caiphas Christo se confitenti. Matt. xxvi. 65.

Caiphas angry that Christ confesses He is the Christ.

XXXI.

Cum tot signa edidisset, non credebant in eum. Joan. xii. 37.

But though He had done so many miracles before them, yet they believed not on Him.

57

XXXII.

Ad S. Andream piscatorem. Marc. i. 16.

To S. Andrew, fisherman.

XXXIII.

Ego sum vox, &c. Joan. i. 23.

I am the voice.

XXXIV.

Vincula sponte decidunt. Act. xii. 7.

The chains spontaneously fall off.

XXXV.

IN DIEM OMNIUM SANCTORUM.

Ne laedite terrain, neque mare, neque arbores, quousque obsignaverimus servos Dei nostri in frontibus suis. Rev. vii. 3.

On All-Saints' Day.

XXXVI.

In die Conjurationis sulphureae.

Upon the Powder-day.

XXXVII.

Deus sub utero Virginis. Luc. i. 31.

God in the Virgin's womb.

XXXVIII.

Ad Judaeos mactatores Stephani. Act. vii. 59.

To the Jews, murderers of St. Stephen.

XXXIX.

D. Joannes in exilio. Rev. i. 9.

St. John in exile.

XL.

Ad infantes martyres. Matt. ii. 16.

To the infant martyrs.

ANOTHER VERSION.

XLI.

Quaerit Jesum suum beata Virgo. Luc. ii. 45.

The blessed Virgin seeks Jesus.

XLII.

Non sum dignus ut sub tecta mea venias. Matt. viii. 8.

64

I am not worthy that Thou shouldst come under my roofe.

XLIII.

Christus accusatus nihil respondet. Matt. xxvii. 12.

And He answered them nothing.

ANOTHER VERSION.

XLIV.

Nunc dimittis. Luc. ii. 29.

Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace.

XLV.

Verbum inter spinas. Luc. viii. 7.

66

The Word among thorns.

XLVI.

Sabbatum Judaicum et Christianum. Luc. xiv. 5.

The Judaic and Christian Sabbath.

XLVII.

Ad verbum Dei sanatur caecus. Marc. x. 52.

67

The blind cured by the word of our Saviour.

XLVIII.

Onus meum leve est. Matt. xi. 30.

My burden is light.

XLIX.

Miraculum quinque panum. Joan. vi. 1-13.

On the miracle of loaves.

ANOTHER VERSION.

L.

Nunc scimus te habere daemonium. Joan. viii. 52.

Now we know Thee to have a devil.

LI.

In beatae Virginis verecundiam.

On the blessed Virgin's bashfulness.

LII.

In vulnera Dei pendentis.

On the wounds of our crucified Lord.

71

LIII.

Quare cum Publicanis manducat Magister vester? Matt. ix. 11.

Wherefore eateth your Master with Publicans?

LIV.

Ecce locus ubi jacuit Dominus.

Come, see the place where the Lord lay.

Vpon the sepulchre of our Lord.

LV.

Leprosi ingrati. Luc. xvii. 11-19.

The unthankful lepers. (Where are the nine?)

LVI.

In cicatrices quas Christus habet in se adhuc superstites. Joan. xx.

On the still-surviving markes of our Saviour's wounds.

ANOTHER RENDERING.

LVII.

Aeger implorat umbram D. Petri. Act. v. 15.

The sick implore St. Peter's shadow.

ANOTHER RENDERING.

LVIII.