Richard Lovelace was born in Woolwich, Kent, England, in 1618. He was graduated at Oxford in 1636, and went to court. Anthony Wood praises him extravagantly for beauty and amiability. He entered the royal service, and rose to the rank of colonel. For delivering to the Long Parliament a petition for the restoration of the king he was thrown into prison until he could procure heavy bail. He entered the French service in 1646, and was wounded at the siege of Dunkirk. He died in 1658, in extreme poverty, having spent a fortune in the royalist cause. He published “The Scholar,” a comedy; “The Soldier,” a tragedy (both of which are lost); and two volumes of lyrics addressed to Lucasta.

Personal

  He was an extraordinary handsome man, but prowd.

  Being then accounted the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld, a person also of innate modesty, virtue and courtly deportment, which made him then, but especially after, when he retired to the great city, much admired and adored by the female sex. In 1636, when the King and Queen were for some days entertained at Oxon, he was, at the request of a great Lady belonging to the Queen, made to the Archb. of Cant. then Chancellor of the University, actually created, among other persons of quality, Master of Arts, tho’ but of two years standing; at which time his conversation being made public, and consequently his ingenuity and generous soul discovered, he became as much admired by the male, as before by the female, sex…. He died in a very mean lodging in Gun-powder Alley near Shoe-lane, and was buried at the West-end of the Church of S. Bride alias Bridget in London, near to the body of his kinsman Will. Lovelace of Greys-Inn Esq; in sixteen hundred fifty and eight, having before been accounted by all those that well knew him, to have been a person well vers’d in the Greek and Lat. poets, in music whether practical or theoretical, instrumental or vocal, and in other things befitting a gentleman.

  The most notable instance of inconstancy related in the “loves of the poets” is that of Lucy Sacheverell, to whom Col. Lovelace, the Philip Sidney of Charles I’s court, was warmly attached. He celebrated her accomplishments in some exquisite poetry; but, on his being taken prisoner in one of the wars of the time, and reported to be dead, she hastily married another. He soon returned to his native land, imprecated divers anathemas on the sex, and declined into a vagabond,—dying perhaps of a malady, common enough in dark ages, but now happily banished from genteel society, a broken heart.

  Aubrey says that Lovelace’s death took place in a cellar in Long Acre, and adds: “Mr. Edm. Wylde, etc., had made a collection for him and given him money.” But Aubrey’s authority is not valued against Wood’s. He is to be read like a proper gossip, whose accounts we may pretty safely reject or believe as it suits other testimony.

  Faults and virtues, Richard Lovelace, as a man and as a writer, may be taken as an impersonation of the cavalier of they civil wars, with much to charm the reader, and still more to captivate the fair.

  Lucy Sacheverell married another, on a false report that Richard Lovelace had fallen in foreign war, and he was twice for years in prison, and died miserably at forty; but somehow we cannot think that the bright essence of the most ideal of English knights, after Sir Philip Sidney, was permanently subdued by adverse fate. Who shall say that the mystical reunion foreshadowed in that last stanza may not actually have taken place far outside of these mundane conditions, which the poet invariably treated with a kind of angelic scorn?

  There is no reason to suppose that Richard Lovelace, the poet of Bethersden, was ever married. He played an active part in the stormy drama of the great English Rebellion, his natural extravagance and unswerving loyalty, at a period when loyalty was more expensive than any extravagance, must have brought him at an early period into serious pecuniary difficulties, and for a part of his brief career he was probably, like his father, a soldier of fortune. When not actually in military service he was either plotting or in prison, and his romantic life closed in obscurity and wretchedness. In the short period of his Court life he was apparently a great favourite with women; we have the assurance of Wood that he was the handsomest man of his time; and to the exterior graces of his person were united a cultivated and brilliant mind, a refined courtesy of manner, and a disposition at once gentle and heroic. Lucasta and Althea are the subjects of his amorous verses; a third, Amarantha, seems to have been another name for Lucasta, to whom we may conclude, from the evidence of the poems themselves, that he was actually betrothed. The seeds of future domestic happiness were therefore sown, and in a happier time might have borne rich fruit to the unhappy poet. As it is, there is no evidence forthcoming to contradict the story preserved by Wood, and which has been already referred to, except the fact that the posthumous poems of Richard Lovelace contain no reference to Lucasta’s broken troth.

  Lovelace was buried in St. Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, “at the west end of the church;” but the building was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. The present St. Bride’s was built by Wren, and contains no memorial to the poet.

General

  “Lucasta:” Epodes, Odes, Sonnets, Songs, &c. Lond. 1649, Oct. The reason why he gave that title was, because, some time before, he had made his amours to a gentlewoman of great beauty and fortune named Lucy Sacheverel, whom he usually called Lux casta; but she upon a strong report that Lovelace was dead of his wound received at Dunkirk, soon after married.

  His pieces, which are light and easy, had been models in their way were their simplicity but equal to their spirit: they were the offerings of gallantry and amusement, and, as such, are not to be reduced to the test of serious criticism.

  Lovelace is chiefly known by a single song: his other poetry is much inferior; and indeed it may be generally remarked, that the flowers of our early verse, both in the Elizabethan and the subsequent age, have been well culled by good taste and a friendly spirit of selection. We must not judge of them very favorably, by the extracts of Headley or Ellis.

  It was worth while, perhaps, to reprint Lovelace, if only to show what dull verses may be written by a man who has made one lucky hit…. He is to be classed with the lucky authors who, without great powers, have written one or two pieces so facile in thought and fortunate in phrase as to be carried lightly in the memory, poems in which analysis finds little, but which are charming in their frail completeness.

  We see the gallant cavalier in the happy moods when he was true to his natural feelings, and wrote as men with any power at all always write when unfettered by a system, unprejudiced by a theory. In prison his poetry was freer than when he himself was at liberty. The fetters on his body seemed not only not to chain his mind, but to leave it more elastic and buoyant to roam in the fairy-land of love and poetry. What would have overcome less self-reliant and heroic men, and bound them down until they became equal to the degrading circumstances which oppressed them, only raised the poet and made him what men, strong and heroic men always are, superior to those circumstances—their lord and master…. When in the stone walls of his cell he lifts up his voice and sings in honour of love, of constancy, of loyalty and truth, he strikes a chord so true, so national and so universal, that we cheerfully lend him our ear; willingly give ourselves up to the delight of his verse; and yield him our warmest praise. A more generous, chivalrous, and noble-hearted man than Richard Lovelace never made a prison famous, or glorified a dungeon by the power of song.

  Party feeling did not blind Wither or Marvell to the genius of Lovelace. A living poet had the living fellowship of his competitors, a dead poet their praise.

  It may safely be said that of all the Royalist lyrists Lovelace has been overestimated the most, as Carew has been the most neglected. The reason of this is not hard to find. Carew was a poet of great art and study, whose pieces reach a high but comparatively uniform standard, while Lovelace was an improvisatore who wrote two of the best songs in the language by accident, and whose other work is of much inferior quality. A more slovenly poet than Lovelace it would be difficult to find; his verses have reached us in the condition of unrevised proofs sent out by a careless compositor; but it is plain that not to the printer only is due the lax and irregular form of the poems. It did not always occur to Lovelace to find a rhyme, or to persist in a measure, and his ear seems to have been singularly defective. To these technical faults he added a radical tastelessness of fancy, and an excess of the tendency of all his contemporaries to dwell on the surroundings of a subject rather than on the subject itself…. There are high qualities in the verses of Lovelace, though he rarely allows us to see them unalloyed. His language has an heroic ring about it; he employs fine epithets and gallant phrases, two at least of which have secured the popular ear, and become part of our common speech. “Going to the Wars,” his best poem, contains no line or part of a line that could by any possibility be improved; “To Althea” is less perfect, but belongs to a higher order of poetry. The first and fourth stanzas of this exquisite lyric would do honour to the most illustrious name, and form one of the treasures of our literature.

  It is not quite true that Lovelace left nothing worth reading but the two immortal songs, “To Lucasta on going to the Wars” and “To Althea from Prison;” and it is only fair to say that the corrupt condition of his text is evidently due, at least in part, to incompetent printing and the absence of revision. “The Grasshopper” is almost worthy of the two better-known pieces, and there are others not far below it. But on the whole any one who knows those two (and who does not?) may neglect Lovelace with safety.

  Whether we think of Lovelace as the spoiled darling of a voluptuous court, or as dying of want in a cellar; whether we picture him as sighing at the feet of beauty, or as fighting stoutly for his country and his king; whether he is winning all hearts by the resistless charms of voice and presence, or returning broken from battle to suffer the bitterness of poverty and desertion, we know that in his two famous lyrics we possess the real and perfect fruit, the golden harvest, of that troubled and many-sided existence.

  As a poet Lovelace is known almost exclusively by his best lyrics. Popularly his name is more familiar than those of his contemporaries, Carew, Suckling, Randolph, and Waller, who are at most points his superiors. This is due partially, no doubt, to the fact that his poems not being very accessible except in anthologies, few have courted disappointment by perusing his minor pieces…. Whether Lovelace is a mere reckless improvisatore, or the most fastidious of the concettists, may be open to argument, but it is tolerably certain that to the majority of readers his minor lyrics will remain as poetry unintelligible. If none of his song-writing contemporaries, with the possible exception of Wither, could have surpassed the exquisite “Tell me not (sweet) I am unkind,” few could have written short pieces so inelegant or so vapid as some of the “Posthume Poems.” On a surer foundation than the permanence of his poetry rests the chivalrous repute in which his life has been held. The Adonis of the court, “the handsomest man of his time,” he rejected a courtier’s career for the profession of arms, and his heroism, rather than his rhyme, challenged the oft-quoted comparison with Sir Philip Sidney.

  Much of Lovelace’s verse is almost hopelessly obscure, but it is hard to say whether this obscurity is due to over-elaboration, or to want of care. The earlier editions abound in printer’s errors, which it is now impossible to correct.