Note 12 — INTRODUCTION TO THOMAS FLATMAN.

I own, however, and I am duly prepared to take the consequences of the confession, that Flatman appeals to me, though in a different way, almost as much as any other of the constituents of this volume, though certainly not so much as some of those of the other two. He had the pure misfortune—as the sternest critic must acknowledge it to have been—of being born too late for one period and too early for another. He could not give to his most serious things the 'brave translunary' exaltations and excursions which came naturally to the men of a time just before his, and he could not correct this want by the order and the sense, the neatness and the finish, which were born with the next generation. 'Death' and 'A Thought of Death' and the other things mentioned unfairly but inevitably remind us that we have left Donne and Crashaw, Vaughan, and even Herbert, behind us. 'The Mistake' and 'The Whim' and many others remind us that we have not come to Prior. Yet others—which it were cruel to particularize and which he that reads will easily find for himself—display a lack of the purely lyrical power which, among his own contemporaries, Rochester and Sedley and Aphra Behn, not to mention others, possessed. Nor had he that gift of recognizing the eclipse of the Moon and utilizing the opportunities of the Earth, which has made Dryden, to competent and catholic tastes, all but one of the greatest of English poets. But still he was a 'child of the Moon' herself; and he has the benefits which she never withholds from her children, though they may be accompanied by a disastrous influence. He was no doubt a minor poet in a time when minor poetry was exposed to special disadvantages. But with far less wit he was more of a poet than Cleveland; with far less art he was perhaps as much of a poet as Stanley; and I am not even sure that, with 'weight for age' in the due sense, he was so very much less of a poet than King. And if those who think but little of these others as poets deem this scanty praise let us go further and say that he is a poet—imperfect, disappointing as well as disappointed, only half aneled with the sacred unction and houselled with the divine food—but a poet. Which if any denies he may be 'an excellent person'—as Praed or Praed's Medora so finally puts it—but he does not know much, if indeed he knows anything, about poetry.12