SOURCE: de Soet, Frans Dirk. “Chapter IV.” In Puritan and Royalist Literature in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 117-23. Delft, Netherlands: N.V. Technische Boekhandel en Drukkerij J. Waltman Jr., 1932.

In the following essay, de Soet provides a brief overview of Suckling's life and praises his talents as a poet.

A very important place among the cavalier poets who wrote between the accession of Charles I and the Restoration must be allowed to Sir John Suckling,¹ the son of the secretary of state and comptroller of the household of James I.

He was born in his paternal house at Twickenham, in 1609. What we know of his life commences with the year 1623, when he was sent to Trinity college, Cambridge, from which he four years later removed to Gray's Inn.

The death of his father, who was one of the richest noblemen of England, made him the possessor of the...