Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 47.djvu/100

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assured, his ‘Emblems’ (London, by G. M., and sold at John Marriot's shop), sm. 8vo. The volume is lavishly and quaintly illustrated mainly by William Marshall, whose work, as reproduced in the early issues, is admirable. Other plates by W. Simpson, Robert Vaughan, and I. Payne are of comparatively inferior quality. Quarles divided his volume into five books, but only the drawings and their poetic interpretations in the first two seem original; the forty-five prints in the last three books are borrowed, with the plates reversed, from the Jesuit Hermann Hugo's ‘Pia Desideria Emblematis, Elegiis et Affectibus SS. Patrum illustrata’ (Antwerp, 1624). Quarles's verses in the last three books are also translated or closely paraphrased from Hugo. Quarles dedicated his work to his old friend Edward Benlowes, whose long Latin poem, ‘Quarleis,’ in praise of the author, was appended, with a separate title-page finely engraved by Marshall; this poem, which is translated into English in Dr. Grosart's edition of Quarles's works, had been already published in 1634 both in Benlowes's ‘Lusus Poeticus Poetis,’ and with a new edition of Quarles's ‘Divine Poems.’ Quarles's ‘Emblems’ achieved an immediate and phenomenal popularity, and he followed up his success by a similar venture, ‘Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man’ (1638), illustrated by Marshall, and dedicated to his patroness, the Countess of Dorset. The licence is dated 9 Jan. 1637–8. This book was bound up with later editions of the ‘Emblems.’

In 1638 Quarles gave to another Essex friend, John Josselyn [q. v.], metrical versions of six psalms (Nos. 16, 25, 51, 88, 113, and 137) to take out to John Winthrop and John Cotton in America. They were printed at Boston in the ‘Whole Booke of Psalms’ (1640). Other verse published in Quarles's later life consisted of separately issued elegies. These respectively commemorated Sir Julius Cæsar (1636, dedicated to the widow; in Huth Libr.; reprinted in Huth's Fugitive Poetical Tracts, 2nd ser. No. xii. 1875); ‘Mr. John Wheeler, sonne of Sir Edmund Wheeler of Riding Court, neare Windsor’ (1637); Dr. Wilson, master of the rolls (1638); Mildred, wife of Sir William Luckyn (whose elegy Quarles entitled ‘Mildreiados,’ 1638); his brother, Sir Robert Quarles (1639–40); and ‘those incomparable sisters, the Countesse of Cleaveland, and Mistresse Cicily Killigrue, daughters of Sir John Crofts, Knt.’ (1640).

On 1 Feb. 1639 Quarles, on the recommendation of the Earl of Dorset, the husband of the lady to whom he had dedicated his ‘Divine Fancies’ and his ‘Hieroglyphikes,’ was appointed chronologer to the city of London. This post he filled till his death, but undertook no literary work in his official capacity. Thenceforth he appears to have resided in the parish either of St. Olave or St. Leonard, Foster Lane, and to have mainly devoted himself to the composition of prose manuals of piety. Of these the earliest was ‘Enchiridion, containing Institutions Divine and Moral,’ a collection of aphorisms on religious and ethical topics. The first edition, dated 1640, includes three centuries of essays and is dedicated to Ussher's daughter Elizabeth. Next year a new edition added a fourth century, and the volume was dedicated to Prince Charles (afterwards Charles II), the old address to Elizabeth Ussher serving to introduce the second century. The popularity of this volume almost equalled that of the ‘Emblems.’ Of like character were Quarles's ‘Observations concerning Princes and States upon Peace and Warre’ (1642), and ‘Barnabas and Boanerges … or Wine and Oyl for … afflicted Soules,’ London, 12mo, 1644, the first part of a curious collection of meditations, soliloquies, and prayers, adapted to the besetting sins of various worshippers.

A sturdy royalist, Quarles openly avowed his sympathy with the royal cause, and he is said to have visited Charles I at Oxford early in 1644. On 9 April in the same year, according to Thomason, he published, anonymously at Oxford, a defence of the king's political and ecclesiastical position in a prose tract entitled ‘The Loyall Convert.’ He denounced the parliamentarians as a ‘viperous generation,’ called Cromwell a ‘profest defacer of churches and rifeler of the monuments of the dead,’ and defended the employment of Roman catholics in the royalist army. He pursued the same line of argument in two later pamphlets, ‘The Whipper Whipt’ (1644), a defence of Cornelius Burges [q. v.], dedicated to the king, and ‘The New Distemper.’ The three tracts were reissued in one volume in 1645, with a new dedication to Charles I, and with the general title ‘The Profest Royalist in his Quarrel with the Times’ (copy in Trin. Coll. Dublin). Quarles's pronounced views brought on him the active animosity of the parliamentarians. His library was searched by parliamentary soldiers and his manuscripts destroyed. Moreover, ‘a petition was preferred against him by eight men.’ This ‘struck him so to the heart that he never recovered it.’

He died, according to his wife's account, on 8 Sept. 1644, and was buried, according to the parish register, in the church of St. Olave, Silver Street, three days later. His