Among the many talented Caroline writers, William Habington no longer enjoys his seventeenth-century reputation. The eldest son of a Worcestershire family with significant Catholic loyalties, Habington married into a family with important London and court influences. His name may not have been among the wits of the 1630s singled out in Sir John Suckling's "A Sessions of the Poets"; but by the time this poem was written in 1637, two editions of Habington's Castara (1634, 1635) and his various commendatory poems had confirmed his position as an established and well-connected author. Before the civil crisis of 1642 dispelled the halcyon calm of Charles I's reign and curbed its growing toleration of Catholicism, Habington expanded another edition of Castara (1640), wrote a well-received play, and published two works of history. Together with his earlier poetry these pieces complete the development of a distinctive sensibility, one that reflects in varied form literary concerns central to...