A MASCULINE MIND.*.

THE publication of Poems of Charles Cotton—a complete collection of the shorter poems—confers a real benefit on judicious readers, and thus repeats Mr. Cobden-Sanderson's gift of good things, which began with the admirable collection of Clare's poems a few years ago. The present volume has but a single fault—it bulges ; it is printed on thick paper and asks for too much space on the bookshelf. It will find

space, however, for those wise readers cannot do without the book now that it is available, and our complaint is but a slight one to make concerning so bulky a volume.

Cotton himself would not be displeased at being approached thus with a facetious phrase, for he refused to subdue his wit to solemnity, and saw even himself and his own life and misfortunes humorously. Not the least of his misfortunes is posthumous, for he has waited more than two centuries for the recognition which his present editor compels on his behalf ; but even this misfortune would have found him smiling, at the same time as he may have looked questioningly at the zeal -which has prompted the various editions of his contemporaries, Vaughan, Herrick and Marvell for example, not to speak of the slightly-earlier and grandly-unique Donne, and Cowley who usurped so much of the fame which might have lit the shadow of Charles Cotton. He liked to write of himself, but no writer was ever less capable of mere intro- spective idleness, and so he writes of his excellent subject as though it were someone else and he the amused spectator. He never loses his head or his temper ; never aspires, never feigns, never falsifies ; when his own experience forms the theme he accepts it without exaggerating his emotion or swelling his style. He writes of poverty, of which he knew something at times, as though he enjoyed the devices to which it drove him, and enjoyed not less the furious, forlorn faces

of his " obstrep'rous creditors . . . bloody Persecutors." He writes another Pindaric Ode on death, managing his form coolly and pleasantly, sometimes achieving beautiful lines, and always satisfying himself with neat metrical moralities. He writes love poems and they are charming, but they have less of love in them than the odes and elegies on his friends ; his heart goes out more promptly and largely to his most worthy friend, Mr. Izaak Walton, or Colonel Richard Love- lace, or Lord Orrery, than to his Caelia and Corinna : he plays at love but he does not play with sorrow. He is a man's poet, and his masculine mind is shown in a single stanza in the poem on Walton's Lives

Now happy was my father, then, to see

Those men he lov'd, by him he lov'd, to be Rescued from frailties and mortality."

His love poems were written from his head and in the fashion of his time ; but these others were written from lus heart and in his own man's fashion.

His masculinity appears everywhere, and especially in his fondness for good-humoured satire and mock-love poems ; even his titles have something of his sharp humour, as when he heads a mere eight lines of abuse and amusement with the single word, Madrigal. Perhaps his masculinity will be called to account for his occasional coarseness, but it will have an easy answer. Chiefly, it will be found a convenient explanation of the general air of hearty common sense which

hangs about everything he writes. Excellent is his conversational verse :-

" And now I'm here set down again in peace,

After my troubles, business, voyages, The same dull Northern clod I was before, Gravely enquiring how ewes are a score, How the hay harvest, and the corn was got, And if or no there's like to be a rot ; Just the same sot I was e'er I remov'd ; Nor by my travel, nor the Court improv'd ; The same old-fashioned Squire, no whit refin'd, And shall be wiser when the Devil's blind . . . . "

It is a mere brief specimen of a common thing in Charles Cotton's verse ; there are hundreds of equal lines in his " Voyage to Ireland " and in other burlesques ; and in all alike there are the pleasantest reminiscent hints of a boyish • Poems of Charks Cotton. 1630-1687. Edited. with an Introduction and Notes, by John Berestord. London Cobden-Sanderson. (168.1 gasconading, surviving in the man and giving him a fellowship with all young-old men. He enjoys, and enjoys himself first and most of all.

But this lowlier praise must not be taken as excluding higher dues. He pours his heart out, not simply in elegies on his friends, but also whenever he thinks of the admired river, its tributary streams and meads.

" Oh my beloved Nymph, fair Dove, Princess of rivers—"

he cries, in his poem to Walton. And even in his burlesque verse an element of sudden beauty is freed—" my white Dove

Now numb'd with bitterness of weather, Had not the power to stir a feather . . . The ruffian bound, though knowing's betters, Her silver feet in crystal fetters,

In which estate we saw poor Dove lie, Even in captivity more lovely."

He writes descriptive poetry that has the clearness and swift- ness of flowing water, or the firmness of frozen water with

his own satisfaction singing pebblelike along the surface. Indeed, it is winter, winter in the high lands, that he most fondly describes, his invitation to Phyllis extending not only to the dappling Spring but also to that glistening time when " . . The trees their naked bones Together knock, like skeletons,

Then, with the softest', Whitest locks, Spun with the tribute of thy flocks, We will o'ercast thy whiter skin, Winter without, a Spring within."

Nevertheless, even in the enthusiasm of a revival, in which it is proper and easy to lose one's head, it cannot be sug-

• gested that Cotton was a great poet, or an exquisite small poet, another Donne or another Herrick. But he was one of the truest and most definitely individual poets ever over- laid by careless, snoring Mrs. Time. His firm and precise stanzas, apprehending natural phenomena with such rare vividness, as though arrested in extraordinary motion, cannot be too highly praised ; witness the quatrains of Morning, Noon and the rest, Winter, the New Year—in fact, most of the first section of Mr. Beresford's volume. Reading these, and responding to their rapid and vivacious rhythms, one is aware not simply of an alert intelligence, a in ight good sense, but of that rarer thing, imagination, darting like a dragon-fly soddenly hither and thither, then gone again : imagination playing upon the very subject of those later poets of the Romantic Movement who were so unlike Cotton, but who wonderfully recognized and praised him ; Coleridge and Wordsworth, and Lamb like the good genius of them all, inspiring them with the intuitions of his nimble and sensitive mind.

JOHN FREEMAN.