Of the sonnets of Shakespeare, I shall say nothing here, for though they form a sequence, the sequence is not of the kind which the sonnets of Sidney and Daniel and Drayton and Spenser illustrate, and of which the purpose is to celebrate the love of a man for a woman, but of a kind which the genius of Shakespeare originated, and which deals with the friendship of a man and for a man, and of which the most noteworthy example is Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” I pass, therefore, from Spenser to Drummond of Hawthornden, who, in the year of Shakespeare’s death, published in his second collection of verse a series of sonnets, songs, sextains, and madrigals, the majority of which are of an amatory nature. Modelled after the manner of his Italian and English predecessors, and consequently academical rather than individual, they are characterized by tenderness of sentiment and a vein of melancholy reflection, by studied graces of scholarly phrasing which are not free from Scotticisms, and by a chastened remembrance of his sorrow for the loss of Mary Cunningham, the daughter of a laird, who was carried off by a fever before the arrival of their nuptial day. The line of amatory sonneteers ended with Drummond; but not the line of amatory poets, the best of whom (apart from mere lyrists like Lovelace and Suckling) was William Habington, who in 1634-1635 celebrated his affection for Lucia, daughter of William, Lord Powis, and the worst of whom was Abraham Cowley, who, at a later period, celebrated nobody in “The Mistress, or Several Copies of Love-Verses.” There are exquisite things in “Castara,” the title of which is fully justified by the spiritual purity of the love of which it is a memorial, and there are execrable things in “The Mistress,” where the fancy of Cowley exhausted itself in a profusion of ingenious conceits, the brilliant absurdity of which is absolutely bewildering. Love there is none, nor any serious pretence of it, Cowley’s motive in writing being that poets are scarce thought free-men of their Company, without paying some duties, and obliging themselves to be true to Love.