A poet of the reign of Charles I., descended from an old family in Gloucestershire, was born 1589. Having been educated at Oxford, he traveled abroad for some time, and on his return was received at court, and patronized by Charles I. Carew deserves mention chiefly as the precursor and representative of what may be called the courtier and conventional school of poetry, whose chief characteristic was scholarly ease and elegance, with a spice of indelicacy, and even indecency. Carew’s poems, mostly lyrical, and treating of trifling subjects, are among the best of their kind, and exhibit much fancy and tenderness. He died 1639. Several editions of his poems, which first appeared in 1640, have been published.

Personal

  His glory was, that after fifty years of his life, spent with less severity or exactness than it ought to have been, he died with the greatest manifestations of Christianity, that his best friends could desire.

  Then was told this by Mr. Anthony Faringdon, and have heard it discourst by others, that Mr. Thomas Cary, a poet of note, and a great libertine in his life and talks, and one that had in his youth bein acquainted with Mr. Ha., sent for Mr. Hales to come to him in a dangerous fit of sickness, and desired his advice and absolution, which Mr. Hales, upon a promise of amendment, gave him, (this was I think in the country). But Mr. Cary came to London, fell to his old company, and into a more visible scandalous life, and especially in his discourse, and be (being?) taken very sick, that which proved his last, and being much trowbled in mind, procured Mr. Ha. to come to him in this his sickness and agony of minde, desyring earnestly, after a confession of many of his sins, to have his prayers and his absolution. Mr. Ha. told him he shoold have his prayers, but woold by noe meanes give him then either the sacrament or absolution.

  He became reckon’d among the chiefest of his time for delicacy of wit and poetic fancy. About which time being taken into the Royal Court for his most admirable ingenuity, was made Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and Sewer in Ordinary to K. Ch. I. who always esteemed him to the last one of the most celebrated wits in his Court, and therefore by him as highly valued, so afterwards grieved at his untimely death. He was much respected, if not ador’d by the poets of his time, especially by Ben Johnson.

  As an amatory poet, he is far superior to Waller: he had equal smoothness and fancy, and much more variety, tenderness, and earnestness; if his love was less ambitiously, and even less honourably placed, it was, at least, more deep seated, and far more fervent. The real name of the lady he has celebrated under the poetical appellation of Celia, is not known—it is only certain that she was no “fabled fair,”—and that his love was repaid with falsehood.

  The writings of Carew abound with conceits, but, unlike the conceits of some of his less noted contemporaries, they generally reconcile themselves to us by good taste in the treatment and delicacy of execution. We look back with changed feelings and different eyes upon these things; time has wrought a powerful alteration in the position before the world of old Sir Matthew Carew, the respectable and ill-fated Master in Chancery: his gallant son Sir Matthew, who was doubtless viewed as the hope and mainstay of the family: and the scapegrace youth to whom no one would have anything to say, and of whom his relatives despaired. For while the lives and fortunes of the high judicial functionary and the brave young knight-banneret are forgotten, while the persons of rank, fashion and influence with whom they mixed have passed, for the most part, completely away, and while even Sir Dudley Carleton is familiar only to a few antiquaries, the lustre which one man of genius has shed on the name of Carew remains unfaded, and can never decline.

  There is an uncertainty about the time of Carew’s death. It looks as if his life had been shortened by his irregular habits. When he was stricken down by mortal sickness, he sent for Hales of Eton to administer to him the consolations of religion. Hales seems to have thought very meanly of him, and made no secret of his low opinion. Carew has left some wretched attempts at versifying a few of the Psalms; these Mr. Hazlitt has printed. They have not a single merit. Carew probably died in 1639, but no entry of his burial has been found. The illness that led him to a maudlin kind of repentance seems to have come upon him when he was in the country. If he recovered enough from it to return to London, he probably died at his house in King Street, St. James’s.

General

  Poems. | By | Thomas Carew | Esquire. | One of the Gentlemen of the | Privie-Chamber, and Sewer in | Ordinary to His Majesty. | London, | Printed by I. D. for Thomas Walkley, | and are to be sold at the signe of the | flying Horse, betweene Brittains | Burse, and York-House. | 1640.

  He was a person of a pleasant and facetious wit, and made many poems, especially in the amorous way, which, for the sharpness of the fancy, and the elegancy of the language in which that fancy was spread, were at least equal, if not superior to any of that time.

  One of the famed poets of his time for the charming sweetness of his lyric odes and amorous sonnets…. By the strength of his curious fancy hath written many things which still maintain their fame amidst the curious of the present age.

  This elegant and almost forgotten writer, whose poems have been deservedly revived.

  The consummate elegance of this gentleman entitles him to very considerable attention. Sprightly, polished, and perspicuous, every part of his works displays the man of sense, gallantry and breeding. Indeed, many of his productions have a certain happy finish, and betray a dexterity both of thought and expression much superior to any thing of his contemporaries, and (on similar subjects) rarely surpassed by his successors. Carew has the ease without the pedantry of Waller, and perhaps less conceit. He reminds us of the best manner of Lord Lyttelton. Waller is too exclusively considered as the first man who brought versification to any thing like its present standard. Carew’s pretensions to the same merit are seldom sufficiently either considered or allowed. Though Love had long before softened us into civility, yet it was of a formal, ostentatious and romantic cast; and, with a very few exceptions, its effects on composition were similar to those on manners. Something more light, unaffected, and alluring was still wanting; in everything but sincerity of intention it (Poetry) was deficient…. Carew and Waller jointly began to remedy these defects. In them Gallantry, for the first time was accompanied by the Graces.

  The want of boldness and expansion in Carew’s thoughts and subjects, excludes him from rivalship with great poetical names; nor is it difficult, even within the narrow pale of his works, to discover some faults of affectation, and of still more objectionable indelicacy. But among the poets who have walked in the same limited path, he is pre-eminently beautiful, and deservedly ranks among the earliest of those who gave a cultivated grace to our lyrical strains. His slowness in composition was evidently that sort of care in the poet, which saves trouble to his reader. His poems have touches of elegance and refinement, which their trifling subjects could not have yielded without a delicate and deliberate exercise of the fancy; and he unites the point and polish of later times with many of the genial and warm tints of the elder muse. Like Waller, he is by no means free from conceit; and one regrets to find him addressing the surgeon bleeding Celia, in order to tell him that the blood which he draws proceeds not from the fair one’s arm, but from the lover’s heart. But of such frigid thoughts he is more sparing than Waller; and his conceptions, compared to that poet’s, are like fruits of a richer flavour, that have been cultured with the same assiduity.

  Carew was an elegant court trifler.

  More of a poet than Corbet, and accounted the prince of the amorous versifiers of his day, was Thomas Carew…. There is a light French spirit in his love poems, a grace and even a tenderness of sentiment, and a lucid softness of style, that make them peculiarly pleasing, and that, even when he becomes licentious, help to save him…. Spenser and Shakspeare seem to have been his favorites for private reading, and he seems to have formed his style partly from them and partly from the light artificial French poets with whom he had become acquainted in his travels.

  No one touches dangerous themes with so light and glove-guarded a hand.

  In polish and evenness of movement, combined with a diction elevated indeed in its tone, as it must needs be by the very necessities of verse, above that of mere good conversation, but yet in ease, lucidity, and directness rivalling the language of ordinary life, Carew’s poetry is not inferior to Waller’s; and, while his expression is as correct and natural, and his numbers as harmonious, the music of his verse is richer, and his imagination is warmer and more florid. But the texture of his composition is in general extremely slight, the substance of most of his pieces consisting merely of the elaboration of some single idea; and, if he has more tenderness than Waller, he is far from having so much dignity, variety, or power of sustained effort.

  Among the Royalist lyrists of the seventeenth century Carew takes a foremost place. In genius he is surpassed by Herrick only, and in age he is the first of that gallant band of cavalier song-writers of whom Rochester is the last. Born in the flush of the Elizabethan summer, when the whole garden of English poetry was ablaze with blossom, he lived to hand down to his followers a tradition of perfume and dainty form, that vivified the autumn of the century with a little Martin’s summer of his own…. Carew was far too indolent to trouble himself with the rhetoric of the schools or to speculate upon the conduct of the mind. He loved wine, and roses, and fair florid women, to whom he could indite joyous or pensive poems about their beauty, adoring it while it lasted, regretting it when it faded…. The claim of Carew to a place among the artificers of our language must not be overlooked. In his hands English verse took a smooth and flexible character that had neither the splendours nor the discords of the great Elizabethan school, but formed an admirable medium for gentle thought and florid reverie. The praise that Voltaire gave to Waller might be transferred to Carew if it were not that to give such praise to any one writer is uncritical. But Waller might never have written, and the development of English verse would be still unbroken, whereas Carew is a necessary link between the Elizabethans and Prior. He represents the main stream of one of the great rivers of poetic influence proceeding from Ben Jonson, and he contrived to do so much because he remained so close to that master and yet in his particular vein excelled him.

  He is one of the most perfect masters of lyrical form in English poetry. He possesses a command of the overlapped heroic couplet, which for sweep and rush of rhythm cannot be surpassed anywhere. He has, perhaps in a greater degree than any poet of that time of conceits, the knack of modulating the extravagances of fancy by the control of reason, so that he never falls into the unbelieveableness of Donne, or Crashaw, or Cleveland. He had a delicacy, when he chose to be delicate, which is quintessential, and a vigour which is thoroughly manly. Best of all, perhaps, he had the intelligence and the self-restraint to make all his poems wholes, and not mere congeries of verses. There is always, both in the scheme of his meaning and the scheme of his metre, a definite plan of rise and fall, a concerted effect. That these great merits were accompanied by not inconsiderable defects is true. Carew lacks the dewy freshness, the unstudied grace of Herrick. He is even more frankly and uncontrolledly sensual, and has paid the usual and inevitable penalty that his best poem, “The Rapture,” is, for the most part, unquotable, while another, if he carried out its principles in this present year of grace, would run him the risk of imprisonment with hard labour. His largest attempt—the masque called “Cœlum Britannicum”—is heavy. His smaller poems, beautiful as they are, suffer somewhat from want of variety of subject. There is just so much truth in Suckling’s impertinence that the reader of Carew sometimes catches himself repeating the lines of Carew’s master, “Still to be neat, still to be drest,” not indeed in full agreement with them, but not in exact disagreement. One misses the “wild civility” of Herrick. This acknowledgment, I trust, will save me from any charge of overvaluing Carew.

  It was Carew, indeed, who first sounded these “courtly amorous strains” throughout the English land; who first taught his fellow-poets that to sing of love was not the occasional pastime, but the serious occupation of their lives. Yet what an easy, indolent suitor he is! What lazy raptures over Celia’s eyes and lips! What finely poised compliments, delicate as rose leaves, and well fitted for the inconstant beauty who listened, with faint blushes and transient interest, to the song!

  Instead of Carew’s poetry being characteristically euphuistic, licentious, trivial, and sporadic, the exact opposite is the truth. It is true that he has his concetti, like the other poets of his day, but they are relatively to the whole of his verse but a small proportion…. With a very slight deduction, his volume is good throughout. There are few pages on which one is not struck by something fine. Carew was an artist as well as a poet. If he in some slight degree misses the gay, artless charm of Suckling, he has a more serious attractiveness. There is a richness and dignity, likewise an intellectual force, in his verse which lifts him to the rank of a serious poet, and makes one regret that, with such natural gifts and artistic acquirements, he did not devote himself to poetry more continuously and of set purpose. For, to a considerable degree, he shared with Waller the gift of the stately line, and his verse has that body and glamour in which for the most part Waller’s is deficient. There was indeed a drop of the ruddy Elizabethan blood in Carew.

  Carew has been unjustly condemned by Hazlitt as “an elegant Court trifler” in poetry. But it must be granted that he was a master of lyrical form, and that he had a rare sense of delicacy, which he combined too seldom with a manly glow and vigor of passion. He just misses being the equal of Herrick.

  Carew’s largest work was the masque, “Cœlum Britannicum,” with the production of which the court had tried, in 1634, to outrival the magnificance of the performance of Shirley’s “Triumph of Peace” at the Inns of Court. It is of but slight literary interest, the words being subordinated to elaborate scenic effects. But Carew also wrote a small number of poems, almost all short, in the style of amorous addresses then coming into vogue; and it is on these that his claim to a high place among lyrical poets rests. They are polished with the utmost care, and are marked by a cultivated grace exceeding that of most, if not all, the lyrical poets of his time. They are also “reasonable,” in a sense in which those of Donne or Crawshaw are not…. It is true that in Carew’s verses there is little of Herrick’s freshness and unstudied grace, but there is a self-restraint and balance that is almost, if not quite, an adequate compensation.