Francis Quarles. An English sacred poet; born in Rumford, Essex, in 1592: died September 1644. He was educated at Cambridge, and studied for a lawyer. He received several appointments from the Crown, and finally held the position of city chronologer. His leading works were: “Emblems Divine and Moral” (1635); “Argalus and Parthenia” (1621); and the “Enchiridion” (1640) in prose. Frequent fine expressions redeem much commonplace.

Emblems Divine and Moral, 1635

  Tinnit, inane est; with the picture of one ringing on the globe with his finger, is the best thing I have the luck to remember, in that great poet Quarles.

  His “Emblems,” which have been serviceable to allure children to read, have been often printed, and are not yet forgotten. We sometimes stumble upon a pretty thought among many trivial ones in this book; and now and then meet with poetry in mechanism in the prints.

  “Quarles’ Emblems,” my childhood’s pet book.

  His best known work is his “Emblems,” through which a bitter melancholy vein runs, and in which the most extravagant notions on the misery of human life, and the sin and corruption of nature are to be found.

  These “Emblems” were illustrated in the first editions by most ridiculous prints; and yet, as Southey has noted, it is the prints that have been most popular, while the poems have been neglected. It is owing to both, however, that Quarles became so early what Philips, Milton’s nephew, calls him, “the darling of our plebeian judgments.” After the Restoration Quarles was completely forgotten, and Pope even gives him a place in the “Dunciad.” The better taste, or, as Campbell says, the more charitable criticism, of modern times has admitted him into “the laurelled fraternity of the poets,” and he is now admired for his quaintness, vigour, and occasional beauty.

  It is difficult to conceive of any poet who could produce verse of a high order of merit in close on a hundred and fifty short poems written to order on as many pictures; and the author of the “Emblems” has certainly written nothing that can be classed with the best of Crashaw or Vaughan. But he has here kept a level of poetic excellence in his verse considerably above that to which it sometimes sank.

General

  Had he been contemporary with Plato (that great back-friend to Poets), he would not onely have allowed him to live, but advanced him to an office in his Commonwealth. Some Poets, if debarr’d profaness, wantoness, and satyricalness (that they may neither abuse God, themselves, nor their neighbours), have their tongues cut out in effect. Others onely trade in wit at the second hand, being all for translations, nothing for invention. Our Quarles was free from the faults of the first, as if he had drank of Jordan instead of Helicon, and slept on Mount Olivet for his Parnassus: and was happy in his own invention. His visible Poetry (I mean his “Emblems”) is excellent, catching therein the eye and fancy at one draught, so that he hath out-Alciated therein, in some men’s judgement. His Verses on Job are done to the life, so that the Reader may see his sores, and through them the anguish of his soul.

  Milton was forced to wait till the world had done admiring Quarles.

  Examples of bad writing might no doubt be produced, on almost any occasion, from Quarles and Blackmore; but as no body reads their works, no body is liable to be misled by them.

  The charitable criticism of the present age has done justice to Quarles, in contrasting his merits with his acknowledged deformities…. A considerable resemblance to Young may be traced in the blended strength and extravagance, and ill-assorted wit and devotion of Quarles. Like Young, he wrote vigorous prose—witness his “Enchiridion.” In the parallel, however, it is due to the purity of Young to acknowledge, that he never was guilty of such indecency as that which disgraces the “Argalus and Parthenia” of our pious author.

  I have been reading lately what of Quarles’s poetry I could get. He was a contemporary of Herbert, and a kindred spirit. I think you would like him. It is rare to find one who was so much of a poet and so little of an artist. He wrote long poems, almost epics for length, about Jonah, Esther, Job, Samson, and Solomon, interspersed with meditations after a quite original plan,—Shepherd’s Oracles, Comedies, Romancies, Fancies, and Meditations,—the quintessence of meditation,—and Enchiridions of Meditation all divine,—and what he calls his Morning Muse; besides prose works as curious as the rest. He was an unwearied Christian, and a reformer of some old school withal. Hopelessly quaint, as if he lived all alone and knew nobody but his wife, who appears to have reverenced him. He never doubts his genius; it is only he and his God in all the world. He uses language sometimes as greatly as Shakespeare; and though there is not much straight grain in him, there is plenty of tough, crooked timber. In an age when Herbert is revived, Quarles surely ought not to be forgotten.

  As a poet he has been somewhat hardly dealt with; having been judged more by the evidence of his conceits, absurdities, and false taste, than by his striking and original images, his noble and manly thoughts, and the exceeding fertility of his language. It is not surprising that posterity has failed to reverse the unjust judgment passed upon him by his contemporaries…. No writer is either more affected or more obscure. It is only by raking that we can gather the gold; yet it is such as will reward the seeker who has courage to undertake the search. His sagacity and good sense are unquestionable, and occasionally there is a rich outbreak of fancy; while at times he startles us by compressing, as it were, a volume into a single line.

  He has not so much of beauty and elegance as some of his contemporaries; his taste is coarser than even that of his time; but the ruggedly sublime knows and loves him well…. Besides the qualities we have chiefly ascribed to this poet, namely, grandeur and deep-hearted Christian earnestness, he has some minor but interesting qualities. He possesses a style, manly, nervous, generally clear, and more modern than that of almost any poet in his age. He has a keen discrimination of human nature, a copious supply of apt and bold imagery, and adds to this, extensive reading, particularly in the ancient fathers of the Church. Being a layman, too, his piety and zeal tell much better in favour of Christianity than had he been a minister; and Quarles ranks with Grotius, Addison, Pascal, Johnson, Coleridge, and Isaac Taylor, as one of the eminent “lay brothers” in the Christian Church, whose testimony is above all challenge, and whose talents lift their religion above all contempt.

  His verses are characterized by ingenuity rather than fancy, but, although often absurd, he is seldom dull or languid. There is a good deal of spirit and coarse vigor in some of his pieces.

  With honoured, thrice honoured George Herbert waiting at the door, I cannot ask Francis Quarles to remain longer: I can part with him without regret, worthy man and fair poet as he is.

  His poems, like those of so many others in this and the preceding age, bespeak a full mind and a meditative temper.

  Whose name is preserved from oblivion by a touch of originality in his most characteristic productions.

  Like Byrom in the next century, like not a few poets in the Middle Ages, Quarles was a kind of journalist to whom the vehicle of verse came more easily than the vehicle of prose, and the dangers of that state of things are well known…. All Quarles’s work is journey-work, but it is only fair to note the frequent wealth of fancy, the occasional felicity of expression, which illustrate this wilderness. I should not like to be challenged to produce twenty good lines of his in verse or prose written consecutively, yet it might be a still more dangerous challenge to produce any journalist in verse or prose of the present day who has written so much, and in whom the occasional flashes—the signs of poetical power in the individual and of what may be called poetical atmosphere in his “surroundings”—are more frequent.

  The wretchedness of man’s earthly existence was the main topic of Quarles’ muse, and it was exclusively in religious circles that the bulk of his work has been welcomed with any enthusiasm. In his own day he found very few admirers among persons of literary cultivation, and critics of a later age treated his literary pretentions with contempt. Anthony à Wood sneered at him as “an old puritanicall poet … the sometime darling of our plebeian judgment.” Phillips, in his “Theatrum Poetarum” (1675), wrote that his verses “have been ever, and still are, in wonderful veneration among the vulgar;” Pope who criticised his “Emblems” in detail in a letter to Atterbury, denounces the books in the “Dunciad” (bk. i. ll. 139–40) as one

	Where the pictures for the page atone,
	And Quarles is saved by beauties not his own.

Horace Walpole wrote that “Milton was forced to wait till the world had done admiring Quarles.” But Quarles is not quite so contemptible as his seventeenth-and-eighteenth-century critics assumed. Most of his verse is diffuse and dull; he abounds in fantasic, tortuous and irrational conceits, and he often sinks into ludicrous bathos; but there is no volume of his verse which is not illumined by occasional flashed of poetic fire. Charles Lamb was undecided whether to prefer him to Wither, and finally reached the conclusion that Quarles was the wittier writer, although Wither “lays more hold of the heart” (“Letters,” ed. Ainger, i., 95). Pope deemed Wither a better poet but a less honest man. Quarles’s most distinguished admirer of the present century was the American writer, H. D. Thoreau, who asserted, not unjustly, that “he uses language sometimes as greatly as Shakespear” (“Letters,” 1865). Quarles’s “Enchiridion,” his most popular prose work, contains many aphorisms forcibly expressed.