[In the following excerpt, Squier discusses Suckling's late “essentially urbane, urban, and social” poetry.]

I THE CLUB

The last four years of Suckling's life include the writing of Aglaura, An Account of Religion by Reason, The Goblins, Brennoralt, and nine poems, including “The Wits,” “A Ballade Upon a Wedding,” and “Upon my Lord Brohalls Wedding.” These years also include the raising of his hundred horse for the First Bishops' War, appointment as a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, election to Parliament, participation in the Second Bishops' War, involvement in the Army Plot, and his final exile. In short they were years of activity not only in literary matters but in the world of political and military affairs as well. Aglaura, An Account of Religion by Reason, and “The Wits” were all apparently written in 1637. They represent a wide range of interests. The latter two in particular show Suckling reaching out beyond the court to less circumscribed concerns and audience; both indicate, moreover, a wider group of acquaintances. In 1638 Wye Saltonstall dedicated his Ovid de Ponto to Suckling and Thomas Nabbes did the same with his play Covent Garden. These dedications, as well as Lord Dudley North's letter to Suckling, accompanying a copy of “Concerning Petty Poetry,” indicate Suckling's growing reputation as a man of letters.

The poems belonging to these years are primarily social and literary in nature. Two poems are occasioned by weddings, but both of them focus more sharply on the social than the amatory aspects. With the exception of “Upon my Lord Brohalls Wedding” the poems of these years abandon the rakehell themes and tone and adopt a different voice, a voice that is essentially urbane, urban, and social.

“A Summons to Town” is Suckling's only verse epistle, but even the single appearance of the genre marks the wider and more social turn in his poetry. “A Summons to Town” is apparently addressed to John Hales, a distinguished scholar and theologian, fellow of Eton College and one of the group associated with Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland, and his intellectual circle at Great-Tew. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Suckling's contemporary who was to become Lord Chancellor of England, says of Hales:

Being a Person of the greatest Eminency for Learning, and other Abilities, from which He might have promised any Preferment in the Church, He withdrew himself from all Pursuits of that Kind, into a private Fellowship in the College of Eton … where He lived amongst his Books, and the most separated from the World of any Man then living; though He was not in the least Degree inclined to Melancholy, but on the contrary, of a very open and pleasant Conversation; and therefore was very well pleased with the Resort of his Friends to him, who were such as He had chosen, and in whose Company He delighted, and for whose Sake He would sometimes, once a Year, resort to London, only to enjoy their chearful Conversation.¹

Sir John Suckling was one of those London friends. “A Summons to Town” urges Hales to leave his theological studies and “straight bestride the Colledge Steed” (70, 8) to come to London and its pleasures:

The sweat of learned Johnsons
brain,
And gentle Shakespear's eas'er
strain,
A hackney-couch conveys you to,
In spite of all that rain can do:
And for your eighteen pence you sit
The Lord and Judge of all fresh wit.

(21-26)

“A Summons” reverses the more familiar pattern of the Horatian appeal to retreat from the city to the country found in such a poem as Carew's “To my friend G. N. from Wrest.” The theater, good food, wine, dry transportation, and the pleasures of witty conversation are the urban lures Suckling offers Hales.

As is appropriate for a verse epistle “A Summons” is simple and informal in style. Suckling jokes lightly about Hales's theological studies:

Leave Socinus and the Schoolmen,
(Which Jack Bond swears do but fool
men)

(9-10)

but the joke is part of an overall compliment to Hales. Further, it reminds the reader of Suckling's own claim of admission to the intellectual community, An Account of Religion By Reason. The compliment to Hales is casual and easy, without the slightest hint of flattery. The poem moves on to develop a cheerful, jocular irony in a hyperbolic vision of the social world of London where one can meet

                     … men so refin'd,
Their very common talk at boord,
Makes wise, or mad a young Court-Lord,
Where no disputes nor fore't defence
Of a mans person for his sence
Take up the time, all strive to be
Masters of truth, as victory:
And where you come, I'de boldly swear
A Synod might as eas'ly erre.

(71, 32-42)

The ironical twitting is capped by the reference to the Synod in the last line, for Hales attended the Synod of Dort (1618-1619) as chaplain to Sir Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador to the Netherlands: “and hath left the best Memorial behind him, of the Ignorance, and Passion, and Animosity, and Injustice of that Convention; of which He often made very pleasant Relations; though at that Time it received too much Countenance from England.”²

The line manages to compliment Hales by reference to his experience, to a subject of his conversation. Clarendon's description of Hales's references to Dort as “very pleasant Relations,” moreover, suggests that Hales spoke of the Synod of Dort in a humorous and ironic fashion, spoke, in short, with a tone much like that Suckling adopts in “A Summons to Town.” The compliment to Hales is obvious enough, but the easy, ironic wit so qualifies it, makes it so clearly friendly that its modest and retiring recipient could receive the poem in a perfectly comfortable manner.

“He loved Canarie [wine]; but moderately, to refresh his spirits,” John Aubrey tells us of Hales, whom he personally visited, finding him “a prettie little man, sanguine, of a cheerful countenance, very gentile, and courteous … ”³ Hales was anything but a rakehell courtier. His natural milieu was the cloistered shelter of Eton. His delights were books and conversation. Given a description of this sort, one might not expect to find Suckling writing him this sociable appeal. The fact that he does marks a major shift in Suckling's poetry. That the appeal is to come to the city underlines the nature of the shift. City versus country is one of the major themes of the Restoration, and Suckling's poem is a precursor of that theme as it is of the movement toward public, social poetry in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

II “THE WITS”;

The shift to social poetry is seen strikingly in his major poem of this period, “The Wits” or “A Sessions of the Poets.” The poem is called “A Sessions of the Poets” in Fragmenta Aurea, but “The Wits” is a more appropriate title not only because of manuscript authority and contemporary references, but also because that title more accurately describes the participants in the “sessions.”

A Sessions was held the other day,
And Apollo himself was at it (they
say;)
The Laurel that had been so long reserv'd,
Was now to be given to him best deserv'd.

(71, 1-4)

The sessions is held so that Apollo may award the laureate bays,⁴ but not all those present could be serious contenders. Many of the participants are gentlemanly poetasters at best. The gathering is clearly more correctly seen as a society of wits than of poets. If we find poets of note—Ben Jonson, William Davenant, Thomas Carew, Thomas May, George Sandys, and Edmund Waller, we also find scholars—John Hales of Eton, John Selden, William Chillingworth; and courtiers who at the most wrote poems incidentally as a gentleman ought—William Murray, for example, a Gentleman of the Bedchamber who later became the first Earl of Dysart and who had, the Dictionary of National Biography records, “one particular quality, that when he was drunk, which was very often, he was upon a most exact reserve, though he was pretty open at other times.”

“The Wits” is of considerable social interest, for it shows something of the complexity and range of the society in which Suckling moved. A thorough analysis of that aspect belongs to the social historian, but one can note that the wits of the poem are drawn from at least three overlapping, interlocking but still distinct groups. The largest is of courtiers; at least fifteen of the twenty-two wits have clear court associations. Most of these held court appointments, and most of them had strong associations with Queen Henrietta Maria and her court faction.

Another group is identified with Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland, and his circle of intellectual and scholarly friends; this group often overlaps still another society, that connected with the law and the Inns of Court. Twelve of the twenty-two are mentioned by Charles II's future Lord Chancellor and Earl of Clarendon, Edward Hyde, in his Life, as friends during his days as a law student or later: Thomas Carew, Lucius Cary, William Chillingworth, Sir Kenelm Digby, Sidney Godolphin, John Hales, Ben Jonson, Thomas May, John Selden, Sir John Vaughan, Edmund Waller, and Sir Francis Wenman. Hyde doesn't mention his former roommate at the Middle Temple, the scapegrace William Davenant,⁵ but in the Life the earl looks back on his wild youth with considerable distaste: “ … there never was an Age, in which in so short a Time, so many young Gentlemen, who had not Experience in the World, or some tutelar Angel to protect them, were insensibly and suddenly overwhelmed in that Sea of Wine, and Women, and Quarrels, and Gaming, which almost overspread the whole Kingdom, and the Nobility and Gentry thereof.”⁶ It is not surprising that Hyde fails to mention his own exact contemporary, Davenant's good friend, Sir John Suckling, who was only too willing to sail on that sea of wine, women, quarrels and gaming; nor is it, contrariwise, surprising that Suckling omits Hyde, for all their mutual friends, from the convivial gathering of “The Wits.”

If the poem was the “Ballad made of the Wits sung to the King when he was in New Forest”⁷ in the late summer of 1637, the social nature of the poem is even more manifest. The poem uses an ostensible literary occasion, the sessions itself, Apollo's awarding of the laureate bays, to celebrate a society. The kind of social links seen in “The Wits” and something of the atmosphere of literary debate are found in the traditional story of the argument between Suckling and Ben Jonson which Nicholas Rowe recounted in his edition of Shakespeare: “In a Conversation between Sir John Suckling, Sir William D'Avenant, Endymion Porter, Mr. Hales of Eaton, and Ben Johnson, Sir John Suckling, who was a profess'd admirer of Shakespear, had undertaken his Defence against Ben Johnson with some warmth; Mr. Hales, who had sat still for some time, hearing Ben frequently reproaching him with the want of Learning, and Ignorance of the Antients, told him at last, ‘That if Mr. Shakespeare had not read the Antients, he had likewise not stollen any thing from 'em’; (a fault the other made no Conscience of).”⁸ Jonson receives rough treatment from Suckling in “The Wits.” He is twitted for publishing his folio Workes of Benjamin Jonson:

… he told them plainly he deserv'd the Bayes,
For his were call'd Works, where others were but Plaies;

(72, 19-20)

but the joke was a familiar one, for Jonson's audacity in the matter was a major subject for gossip and witticisms at the time, and Jonson does at least receive two stanzas to himself, and compliments along with taunts.

“The Wits” is admittedly important as a fictional-narrative work of literary criticism.⁹ Carew is criticized for his “hard bound” Muse, for poems

… brought forth but with trouble and pain.

And

All that were present there did agree,
A Laureats Muse should be easie and free.

(73, 35-38)

Walter Montague is teased for the unintelligibility and, by implication, the Platonic preciousness of his wordy pastoral play, The Shepheard's Paradise, in which Queen Henrietta Maria and her maids of honor acted before the king in 1632. Sir William Berkeley is assured that all mean well toward him but will reserve their critical judgment until “they … see how his snow would sell” (73, 50), which may be a reference to the manner and content of his play, The Lost Lady.¹⁰ The diminutive courtier and Member of Parliament Sidney Godolphin is advised “not to write so strong” (75, 92), to avoid, in other words, those “strong lines” in the manner of Donne which critics such as Dudley, Lord North, deplored. The general critical stance of the poem is for poetry that is natural and open, “easie and free.”

Literary criticism, however, is always in passing and subordinate to the poem's social intent. It, like “A Summons to Town,” is a clubby poem; its pleasures are greatest for the members of the club. The pleasures are those of inclusion and of sharing mutual likes and dislikes. Familiar companionable jokes are repeated; the club members are teased in the poem as they are over their wine. Jonson's presumed pretentiousness in publishing his Works; Davenant's unfortunate lack of a nose; Suckling's own insouciant attitude toward poetry and his preference for “black eyes” or a “lucky hit / At bowls” (74, 77-78) all receive comment. The gossipy and bustling Toby Mathew, always whispering in someone's ear, is admitted only because of his “Character” (a brief essay) of Lady Carlisle:

                                                                                                    For
Had not her Character furnisht you out
With something of handsome, without all doubt
You and your sorry Lady Muse had been
In the number of those that were not to come in.

(74, 61-64)

The final awarding of the laurel to an alderman underlines the courtly quality of the poem, with its aristocratic gibe at the city and city money. Finally, the fullest compliment in the poem is given to Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland:

He was of late so gone with Divinity,
That he had almost forgot his Poetry,
Though to say the truth (the Apollo
did know it)
He might have been both his Priest and his Poet.

(75, 99-102)

And Falkland, the Sidney of his age, undoubtedly was the man most admired by all the groups bound into the social world of “The Wits.”

“The Wits” belongs to the ballad tradition,¹¹ its ballad story a social narrative. The stanzaic form is suitable for the narrative and for the jocular tone of the poem, being a variation of the old bob and wheel, each stanza consisting of two quatrains joined by a one-word “bob.”¹² Michael Drayton's “The Sacrifice to Apollo” surely had no direct influence on “The Wits,” but its links with the “Tribe of Ben” and their meetings in the “Apollo Room” of the Devil Tavern suggest again the social and clubby background of the poem. Certainly somewhere in the inspirational vicinity of “The Wits” are Jonson's own verses “Over the Door at the Entrance into the Apollo”:

Welcome all that lead or follow,
To the Oracle of Apollo—
Here he speaks out of his Pottle,
Or the Tripos, his Tower Bottle:
All his answers are Divine,
Truth it self doth flow in wine.(13)

Another poem possibly connected with “The Wits” is “On the Time-Poets”; as Clayton points out, it is an extract from William Heminge's Elegy on Randolph's Finger, c. 1630-32. It opens with a reference to Apollo:

One night the great Apollo pleas'd with Ben,
Made the odde number of the Muses ten;(14)

and is a kind of catalogue of poets with a comment for each. Suckling, it has been seen, was not so pleased with Ben and might have written “The Wits” partly in reaction to it.¹⁵

But finally “The Wits” is also an original poem which sets rather than follows a fashion. Professor Clayton cites Samuel Johnson's recognition of “The Wits” in the Lives of the English Poets as “‘a mode of satire … first introduced by Suckling’” and notes the “many … imitations, including, for example, poems by (or attributed to) John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester; John Sheffield, first Duke of Buckingham and Normandy; Leigh Hunt; and James Russell Lowell; as well as … anonymous poems.”¹⁶ Satire that it is at times, “The Wits” is basically a complimentary social poem. Its brief moments of literary criticism are themselves social, that is, expressions of the values and standards of the group saluted in the poem. It is, more specifically, a court poem; most of its participants are courtiers, and if it was sung before the king in New Forest, its courtliness is even more evident. To the world of the court and to the court poem, however, Suckling adds the intellectual, literary worlds of London taverns and the Inns of Court and of learned country gentlemen,—Falkland, Wenman, and their university friends. In short, Suckling modifies the court poem into the club poem and develops a social voice of the sort which will dominate the poetry of the coming age. Apart from its social and critical interest “The Wits” is a lively and sprightly work showing Suckling at his “natural and easy” best.

III TWO WEDDING POEMS

If imitations and parodies are a measure of popularity, “A Ballade. Upon a Wedding” was one of Suckling's most popular poems, and it retains its popularity. Like “The Wits” it too establishes a poetic vogue, the parodistic, countrified epithalamium. The poem most probably celebrates the marriage of John, Lord Lovelace and Lady Anne, the fifteen year old daughter of Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Cleveland.¹⁷ The couple was married on July 11, 1638; their marriage was also poetically celebrated by Thomas Carew with “An Hymeneall Song on the Nuptials of the Lady Ann Wentworth, and the Lord Lovelace.” Carew's poem is written in a verse pattern similar to Suckling's, but Carew's is a serious and traditional epithalamium:

Their kisses measure as they flow,
Minutes, and their embraces show
                                                                                The howers as they passe.(18)

Carew's poem is graceful and effective, but thoroughly familiar in style and approach. It contrasts sharply with the brilliance and originality of Suckling's “A Ballade.”

The achievement of “A Ballade” is in accomplishing the aims of a tradition by mocking it. The speaker of “A Ballade” is presumably a rustic who is almost, but not quite, overwhelmed by the brilliance of the aristocratic wedding party observed at Charing Cross, close to where the farmers come to sell their hay:

I tell thee Dick, where I
have been,
Where I the rarest things have seen,
          Oh things beyond compare!

(79, 1-3)

His enthusiasm is unbounded; the country does not hold people like this. The bridegroom is handsomer than even

… lusty Roger …,
Or little George upon the Green,
                    Or Vincent of
the Crown.

(80, 22-24)

But naturally the greatest praise is reserved for the bride. Her smallness and delicacy are stressed:

Her feet beneath her Petticoat,
Like little mice stole in and out,
                    As if they fear'd the light:
But oh! she dances such a way!
No Sun upon an Easter day
Is half so fine a sight.

(81, 43-48)

The suggestion of Robert Herrick's lines

                    Her pretty feet
                    Like snailes did creep
A little out, and then,
As if they started at Bo-peep,
Did soon draw in agen.(19)

is totally appropriate, and Suckling does out-Herrick Herrick here. There is a country freshness and innocence to “A Ballade,” but both are qualified by a cheerful and wholesome bawdry and by the speaker's naive literalness.

The speaker is delighted with the bride's pretty little mouth and describes it with a charming image:

Her mouth so small when she doth speak
Thou'dst swear her teeth her words did break,
                    That they might passage get.

(61-63)

The figure might be Herrick's, but the stanza concludes with a deliberate literalism which asserts the naiveté of the speaker and reinforces the sophisticated comedy of “A Ballade”:

But she so handles still the matter,
They come as good as ours, or better,
                    And are not spoil'd one whit.

(82, 64-66)

The speaker is not a poet, but a literal countryman. His poetry is only that of enthusiasm and of delight in the beauty of the bride. The dramatic device gives Suckling a way of complimenting the wedding party that is both novel and amusing.

Stanza 13, which concludes the first movement of the poem, in terms of Carew's poem, the progress “to the Temple, and the Priest,” intensifies the comedy and the witty play of “A Ballade,” against the traditional epithalamium with cheerful bawdiness:

If wishing should be any sin,
The Parson self had guilty bin,
                    (she lookt that day so purely;)
And did the youth so oft the feat
At night, as some did in conceit,
                    It would have spoil'd him, surely.

(73-78)

The effect is to insure that the preceding compliments remain anything but mawkish. The impropriety is the salt of the joke. The relationship of the audience to the speaker and to the poet is complex. The audience is both praised and mocked; it is above the speaker's rusticity, but the speaker deflates any superiority by asserting their similarities.

The second section of the poem moves inevitably to the marriage feast and to the nuptial bed. The feast is described as that of a country wedding. The guests are seated before grace is said, “hatts fly off, and youths carrouse … ” (83, 97). The aristocrats are transformed into peasants; and in the last stanza Lord Lovelace and his bride, after all the hyperbolic compliment, are restored to the ordinary world, to the common level of humanity:

At length the candles out, and now
All that they had not done, they do:
                    What that is, who can tell?
But I beleeve it was no more
Than thou and I have done before
                    With Bridget,
and with Nell.

(84, 127-32)

Herbert Berry is undoubtedly correct when he says, “The ‘Ballade’ contains more lyrical rapture than anything else Suckling ever wrote.”²⁰ However, the rapture is colored by the good-natured bawdry and comedy of the speaker; it is the rapture of high spirits, of sheer exuberance. Thomas Randolph, a contemporary of Suckling, also has a rustic speaker in “The milk-maids Epithalamium,” but Randolph's poem is far more conventional; it does not attempt realistic country speech and is less comic. A comparison of Randolph's and Suckling's poems makes clear the importance of audience and speaker in “A Ballade.” The primary audience of “A Ballade” is the wedding party. They are, as said before, both complimented and teased by the speaker. They are consciously superior to the fictional speaker and yet are reminded of their final equality with him. The poem works against the whole epithalamium tradition by removing the possibility of elegant idealization; coitus, Suckling reminds us, is a great leveler. Still another aspect affecting the poem's audience is the awareness of the author, of Sir John, manipulating his fictional speaker in order to tease and to shock. The secondary audience, the audience not in the wedding party and not directly teased, watches the whole scene as one might a court masque. “A Ballade” is, then, eminently a social poem. Any epithalamium is, of course, social; but the difference between Carew's “A Hymeneall Song” and Suckling's “A Ballade. Upon a Wedding” is not just that between conventional and unconventional, serious and witty, but a larger one of focus and intent. Carew's poem celebrates a wedding; Suckling's celebrates a society.

The last poem to be considered, “Upon my Lord Brohalls Wedding,” was occasioned by the marriage of Roger Boyle, Baron Broghill, to Lady Margaret Howard on January 27, 1641. The poem is an epithalamium more by courtesy than fact. It is a dialogue between S. and B., Suckling and, to name the most likely candidates, either Jack Barry or Jack Bond.²¹ Whatever the identity of B., his attitude toward marriage is jesting and cynical while S. takes a more conventional, positive position toward love and marriage:

S. In bed dull man?
When Love and Hymens Revels are begun,
And the Church Ceremonies past and done?
B. Why who's gone mad to day?

(86, 1-4)

But the point of the poem is not really to debate the question of marriage versus libertine freedom or actually to celebrate the wedding of Lord Broghill and Lady Margaret. Rather the poem exists to play wittily on the past circumstances of Broghill's romantic life. It is a piece of gossip turned to social verse.

Less than a year before his marriage Broghill had been engaged to Francis Harrison, one of the queen's maids of honor, and he had fought a duel over her.²² The engagement obviously did not last, and Broghill's marriage to Lady Margaret Howard clearly was a bit of juicy and amusing gossip. A tactful epithalamium would hardly picture the bridegroom marrying “on the rebound,” but “Upon my Lord Brohalls Wedding” goes out of its way to do so. Broghill is married with “A sprigg of Willow in his hat … / The loosers badge and liv'ry heretofore” (87, 17-18). S. and B. develop the theme until S. finally concludes wittily:

But was the fair Nymphs praise or power lesse
That led him captive now to happinesse,
Cause she did not a forreign aid despise,
But enterr'd breaches made by others eyes?
                    The Gods forbid!
There must be some to shoot and batter down,
Others to force and to take in the Town.
          To Hawkes (good Jack)
and hearts
                                        There may
          Be sev'ral waies and Arts:
One watches them perchance, and makes them tame;
Another, when they're ready, shews them game.

(29-40)

The audience for this poem is certainly less the wedding party (obviously Lady Margaret could hardly have greeted such verse with much enthusiasm) than the larger social world of the court. The metaphors of siege and hawking belong to libertine poetry, and the attitudes of “Upon my Lord Brohalls Wedding” are libertine. The poem is of the sort that would be appropriate for the modern institution of the bachelor's dinner. The wedding is the occasion for the poem; the purpose of the poem is the social joke.

Amusing as it is, “Upon my Lord Brohalls Wedding” is darker and more cynical than either “The Wits” or “A Ballade. Upon a Wedding,” but the times were darker. The latter two poems were written in a period of literary and social success for Suckling. They represent the high-water mark of his career. “Upon my Lord Brohalls Wedding” was written only a few months before Suckling's flight to France.

In these social poems, and in “The Wits” and “The Ballade” in particular, one can see the promise of a poetic future cut short by exile and early death. Such poetic maturity as Suckling finally found was outside the conventions and anticonventions of the love lyric. His bent is ultimately social; his public is still limited, but broadened far beyond the coterie world of the court to include the intellectual, literary world of the city, the Devil Tavern, the Inns of Court, and of the great houses of the learned gentry and nobility. These last poems of Suckling's look from the court to the coffeehouse; the society poet becomes the social poet. In this turning from the narrow and exhausted traditions of the courtly love lyric to the social poem Suckling is as forward-looking and “modern” as his friend Davenant with his introduction of the opera and stage innovations a decade later.

Notes

1. The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon (Oxford, 1760), I, 41.

2. Ibid. The synod was held to discuss the question of the so-called Remonstrants, Dutch Protestants of the liberal wing of Calvinism.

3. Aubrey, p. 118.

4. A. R. Benham in “Sir John Suckling. A Sessions of the Poets' Some Notes and Queries,” Modern Language Quarterly, VI (1945), discusses the relation of the poem to the poet laureateship and concludes “that in 1636 and 1637 there was at least some interest in the election of a poet laureate in England” (p. 25).

5. Alfred Harbage, Sir William Davenant (Philadelphia, 1935), p. 35.

6. Clarendon, I, 53.

7. George Garrard in a letter to the Earl of Stratford quoted in Clayton, p. xliv.

8. J. F. Bradley and J. Q. Adams, The Jonson Allusion-Book (New Haven, 1927), p. 187.

9. Clayton, p. 266.

10. Ibid., p. 276.

11. Philip H. Gray, “Suckling's A Sessions of the Poets as a Ballad: Boccalini's ‘Influence’ Examined,” Studies in Philology, XXXVI (1939), 60-69, concludes that Suckling was not influenced by Boccalini's Ragguagli di Parnaso and places “The Wits” in the ballad tradition.

12. The form is discussed in detail by Flosdorf, pp. 54-55.

13. The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson, ed. William B. Hunter, Jr. (New York, 1963), p. 376.

14. “On the Time-Poets” in Choyce Drollery, ed. J. W. Ebsworth (Boston, Lincolnshire, 1876), p. 3.

15. Clayton, p. 267.

16. Ibid., p. 268.

17. Berry, Letters, pp. 11-18, argues convincingly for the connection with Lord Lovelace and Lady Anne Wentworth rather than the earlier association with the wedding of Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill. The “Dick” to whom the poem is addressed may be, as has often been suggested, Richard Lovelace, the poet and distant relative of the bridegroom, but there is no solid evidence.

18. The Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford, 1949), p. 115.

19. The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. J. Max Patrick (New York, 1968), p. 258.

20. Berry, Letters, p. 15.

21. Herbert Berry (Letters, p. 15) argues for Jack Barry, “a fellow officer in the King's army. Barry had stood as Broghill's second in a duel less than a year before over another woman.” Clayton (289) finds “the cynical Jack Bond … equally likely.”

22. Berry, Letters, p. 15.