LOVELACE, Richard (1618-1658), English poet, was born in 1618. On the father’s side he was a scion of a Kentish family, and inherited a tradition of military distinction, maintained by successive generations from the time of Edward III. His mother’s family was legal; her grandfather had been chief baron of the exchequer. Lovelace’s fame has been kept alive by a few songs and the romance of his career, and his poems are commonly spoken of as careless improvisations, and merely the amusements of an active soldier. But the unhappy course of his life gave him more leisure for verse-making than opportunity of soldiering. Before the outbreak of the civil war in 1642 his only active service was in the bloodless expedition which ended in the Pacification of Berwick in 1640. By that time he was one of the most distinguished of the company of courtly pofets gathered round Queen Henrietta, and influenced as a school by contemporary French writers of vers de société. Lovelace had probably a more serious and sustained poetical ambition than any of them. He wrote a comedy, The Scholar, when he was sixteen, and a tragedy, The Soldier, when he was one and twenty. From what he says of Fletcher, it would seem that this dramatist was his model, but only the spirited prologue and epilogue to his comedy have been preserved. When the rupture between king and parliament took place, Lovelace was committed to the Gatehouse at Westminster for presenting to the Commons a petition from Kentish royalists in the king’s favour. It was then that he wrote his most famous song, “To Althaea from Prison.” He was liberated on bail of <£40,000,—a sign of his importance in the eyes of the parliament,—and throughout the civil war was a prisoner on parole, with this security in the hands of ...