Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/169

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ENGLISH POETRY.
149

from Scripture—A Feast of Worms set forth in a Poeme of the History of Jonah, Sions Elegies wept by Jeremie the Prophet, Sions Sonnets sung by Solomon the King, &c.—and later wrote prose pious manuals, and defended King Charles. His best known work was the pious and "conceited" Emblems (1635), verses composed to woodcuts, all of which except those in the first book are taken from the Pia Desideria (Antwerp, 1624) of the Jesuit, Herman Hugo.

Both Dr Henry More (1614-1687)—the Cambridge Platonist—and Joseph Beaumont, the mystical friend More and
Beaumont.
of Crashaw, employed Spenserian allegory as late as 1648 to set forth their theosophy. Beaumont's Psyche, or Love's Mystery is an allegory of the soul's temptations and deliverances, with an interpolated sketch of Bible history. More even essayed the Spenserian stanza, but it is poetically a very far cry from the Faerie Queene to the Antipsychopannychia.

Although the Scottish poet, William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649), cannot be classed with the Jacobean Spenserians, nevertheless his Drummond. indebtedness to both Spenser and Sidney, as well as to the Italian masters of these poets, connects him more closely with them than with Donne and Jonson. Drummond's poetry is Italianate, florid, and fluent, not condensed, abrupt, or metaphysical.

After completing his studies at Edinburgh University, Drummond spent three years (1606-9) in France studying law and poetry, and it was doubtless in these years, and those which he spent subse-