He joined the king at Oxford in 1645, and after the surrender of the city in 1646 he raised a regiment for the service of the French king. He was wounded at the siege of Dunkirk, and with his brother Dudley, who had acted as captain in his brother's command, returned to England in 1648. It is not known whether the brothers took any part in the disturbances in Kent of that year, but both were imprisoned at Petre House in Aldersgate. During this second imprisonment he collected and revised for the press a volume of occasional poems, many if not most of which had previously appeared in various publications. The volume was published in 1649 under the title of _Lucasta_, his poetical name--contracted from _Lux Casta_--for a lady rashly identified by Wood as Lucy Sacheverell, who, it is said, married another during his absence in France, on a report that he had died of his wounds at Dunkirk. The last ten years of Lovelace's life were passed in obscurity. His fortune had been exhausted in the king's interest, and he is said to have been supported by the generosity of friends. He died in 1658 "in a cellar in Longacre," according to Aubrey, who, however, possibly exaggerates his poverty. A volume of Lovelace's _Posthume Poems_ was published in 1659 by his brother Dudley. They are of inferior merit to his own collection. The world has done no injustice to Lovelace in neglecting all but a few of his modest offerings to literature. But critics often do him injustice in dismissing him as a gay cavalier, who dashed off his verses hastily and cared little what became of them. It is a mistake to class him with Suckling; he has neither Suckling's easy grace nor his reckless spontaneity. We have only to compare the version of any of his poems in _Lucasta_ with the form in which it originally appeared to see how fastidious was his revision. In many places it takes time to decipher his meaning. The expression is often elliptical, the syntax inverted and tortuous, the train of thought intricate and discontinuous. These faults--they are not of course to be found in his two or three popular lyrics, "Going to the Wars," "To Althea from Prison," "The Scrutiny"--are, however, as in the case of his poetical master, Donne, the faults not of haste but of over-elaboration. His thoughts are not the first thoughts of an improvisatore, but thoughts ten or twenty stages removed from the first, and they are generally as closely packed as they are far-fetched. His poems were edited by W. C. Hazlitt in 1864.