[In the following review, Moorman sees Suckling as John Donne's “direct successor,” and comments on Suckling's poetic influence.]

In this volume [The Works of Sir John Suckling] Mr Hamilton Thompson has given us a careful reprint, based on the early editions of the Fragmenta Aurea, of all Suckling's writings in verse and prose. In a short Introduction—which might with advantage have been longer—he relates the chief facts in the author's life, and forms a sane and liberal estimate of the man's character. He also makes some attempt to indicate his relation to the poets of the preceding generation and to those contemporary with himself. He rightly insists on his detachment from Ben Jonson, adding that ‘his inclinations led him rather in the direction which had been pointed so forcibly by Donne.’ Mr Thompson has drawn attention to certain verbal reminiscences of Donne's Songs and Sonets in the lyrics of Suckling, but it might well be contended that the influence of the Elizabethan poet penetrated much deeper than this. For Donne was the poet who waged relentless war in his early lyrics upon the Petrarchian tradition in English lyric poetry as represented by Spenser and the sonneteers as a whole; and in this warfare Suckling may be looked upon as Donne's direct successor. Something too might have been said of Suckling's influence upon post-Restoration lyric poetry. Of the Cavalier poets of Charles I's reign, Suckling alone seems to have been widely read in the next generation. Dryden's well-known reference, in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, to Suckling's courtly style and to his reproduction in his poetry of ‘the conversation of a gentleman,’ and Congreve's Millamant's praise of ‘natural, easy Suckling,’ are eloquent tributes to his vogue in the second half of the seventeenth century; and it would have been well within the scope of Mr Thompson's survey to have indicated the influence which Suckling exerted upon the lyrics of poets like Sedley and Rochester.

The most interesting part of the Introduction is that in which resemblances of idea and characterisation are traced between Suckling's lamely-constructed plays and those of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists; while in his Notes, which are excellent, Mr Thompson renders valuable service by pointing out, among other things, a number of passages in these plays which bear a more or less close resemblance to passages in Shakespearean drama.