ON A PRAYER-BOOK


"Fair and flagrant things"--Crashaw's own phrase--might serve for a
brilliant and fantastic praise and protest in description of his
own verses. In the last century, despite the opinion of a few, and
despite the fact that Pope took possession of Crashaw's line -

"Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep,"

and for some time of the present century, the critics had a wintry
word to blame him with. They said of George Herbert, of Lovelace,
of Crashaw, and of other light hearts of the seventeenth century--
not so much that their inspiration was in bad taste, as that no
reader of taste could suffer them. A better opinion on that
company of poets is that they had a taste extraordinarily liberal,
generous, and elastic, but not essentially lax: taste that gave
now and then too much room to play, but anon closed with the purest
and exactest laws of temperance and measure. The extravagance of
Crashaw is a far more lawful thing than the extravagance of
Addison, whom some believe to have committed none; moreover, Pope
and all the politer poets nursed something they were pleased to
call a "rage," and this expatiated (to use another word of their
own) beyond all bounds. Of sheer voluntary extremes it is not in
the seventeenth century conceit that we should seek examples, but
in an eighteenth century "rage." A "noble rage," properly
provoked, could be backed to write more trash than fancy ever
tempted the half-incredulous sweet poet of the older time to run