Perhaps we should not expect vers de societe from the Crusaders, who were not peaceable, and who were very earnest indeed, in love or war.  But as soon as you get a Court, and Court life, in France, even though the times were warlike, then ladies are lauded in artful strains, and the lyre is struck leviore plectro.  Charles d’Orleans, that captive and captivating prince, wrote thousands of rondeaux; even before his time a gallant company of gentlemen composed the Livre des Cent Ballades, one hundred ballades, practically unreadable by modern men.  Then came Clement Marot, with his gay and rather empty fluency, and Ronsard, with his mythological compliments, his sonnets, decked with roses, and led like lambs to the altar of Helen or Cassandra.  A few, here and there, of his pieces are lighter, more pleasant, and, in a quiet way, immortal, such as the verses to his “fair flower of Anjou,” a beauty of fifteen.  So they ran on, in France, till Voiture’s time, and Sarrazin’s with his merry ballade of an elopement, and Corneille’s proud and graceful stanzas to Marquise de Gorla.

But verses in the English tongue are more worthy of our attention.  Mr. Locker begins his collection of them, Lyra Elegantiarum (no longer a very rare book in England), as far back as Skelton’s age, and as Thomas Wyat’s, and Sidney’s; but those things, the lighter lyrics of that day, are rather songs than poems, and probably were all meant to be sung to the virginals by our musical ancestors.

“Drink to me only with thine eyes,” says the great Ben Jonson, or sings it rather.  The words, that he versified out of the Greek prose of Philostratus, cannot be thought of without the tune.  It is the same with Carew’s “He that loves a rosy cheek,” or with “Roses, their sharp spines being gone.”  The lighter poetry of Carew’s day is all powdered with gold dust, like the court ladies’ hair, and is crowned and diapered with roses, and heavy with fabulous scents from the Arabian phoenix’s nest.  Little Cupids flutter and twitter here and there among the boughs, as in that feast of Adonis which Ptolemy’s sister gave in Alexandria, or as in Eisen’s vignettes for Dorat’s Baisers: 

   “Ask me no more whither do stray
   The golden atoms of the day;
   For in pure love did Heaven prepare
   These powders to enrich your hair.”

It would be affectation, Gifted, if you rhymed in that fashion for the lady of your love, and presented her, as it were, with cosmical cosmetics, and compliments drawn from the starry spaces and deserts, from skies, phoenixes, and angels.  But it was a natural and pretty way of writing when Thomas Carew was young.  I prefer Herrick the inexhaustible in dainties; Herrick, that parson-pagan, with the soul of a Greek of the Anthology, and a cure of souls (Heaven help them!) in Devonshire.  His Julia is the least mortal of these “daughters of dreams and of stories,” whom poets celebrate; she has a certain opulence of flesh and blood, a cheek like a damask rose, and “rich eyes,” like Keats’s lady; no vaporous Beatrice, she; but a handsome English wench, with