Britannicum.  In his poem entitled The Rapture great splendor of language and imagery is devoted to the service of an unbridled sensuality.  Waller, who followed the court to Paris, was the author of two songs, which are still favorites, Go, Lovely Rose, and On a Girdle, and he first introduced the smooth, correct manner of writing in couplets, which Dryden and Pope carried to perfection.  Gallantly rather than love was the inspiration of these courtly singers.  In such verses as Carew’s Encouragements to a Lover, and George Wither’s The Manly Heart,

  If she be not so to me,
  What care I how fair she be?—­

we see the revolt against the high, passionate, Sidneian love of the Elizabethan sonneteers, and the note of persiflage that was to mark the lyrical verse of the Restoration.  But the poetry of the cavaliers reached its high-water mark in one fiery-hearted song by the noble and unfortunate James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, who invaded Scotland in the interest of Charles II., and was taken prisoner and put to death at Edinburgh in 1650.

  My dear and only love, I pray
    That little world of thee
  Be governed by no other sway
    Than purest monarchy.

In language borrowed from the politics of the time, he cautions his mistress against synods or committees in her heart; swears to make her glorious by his pen and famous by his sword; and, with that fine recklessness which distinguished the dashing troopers of Prince Rupert, he adds, in words that have been often quoted,

  He either fears his fate too much,
    Or his deserts are small,
  That dares not put it to the touch
    To gain or lose it all.

John Milton, the greatest English poet except Shakspere, was born in London in 1608.  His father was a scrivener, an educated man, and a musical composer of some merit.  At his home Milton was surrounded with all the inflences of a refined and well-ordered Puritan household of the better class.  He inherited his father’s musical tastes, and during the latter part of his life he spent a part of every afternoon in playing the organ.  No poet has written more beautifully of music than Milton.  One of his sonnets was addressed to Henry Lawes, the composer, who wrote the airs to the songs in Comus.  Milton’s education was most careful and thorough.  He spent seven years at Cambridge, where, from his personal beauty and fastidious habits, he was called “The lady of Christ’s.”  At Horton, in Buckinghamshire, where his father had a country seat, he passed five years more, perfecting himself in his studies, and then traveled for fifteen months, mainly in Italy, visiting Naples and Rome, but residing at Florence.  Here he saw Galileo, a prisoner of the Inquisition “for thinking otherwise in astronomy than his Dominican and Franciscan licensers thought.”  Milton was the most scholarly and the most truly classical of English