QUARLES, Francis (1592-1644), a sacred poet of the 17th century, enjoyed considerable celebrity in his own day, and some of his works have shared in the recent revival of interest in our older literature. The work by which he is best known, his Emblèmes, was originally published in 1635, with grotesque illustrations, engraved by Marshall, and borrowed from the Pia Desideria of Hermann Hugo. The poems, which are diffuse meditations upon Scriptural texts, seem, in modern phrase, to have been “written up” to the illustrations, and are quite in keeping with their quaint mixture of sublime and familiar thoughts. An edition of the Emblems, with new illustrations by C. H. Bennett, was published in Edinburgh in 1857, and these illustrations are reproduced in Mr Grosart’s complete edition in the Chertsey Worthies Library. The incongruous oddities of Quarles’s verse are more obvious than the higher qualities that recent admirers claim for him. The following stanza, in a paraphrase of Job xiv. 13, has often been referred to as the supreme example of his occasional sublimity of thought :—...
“’ Tis vain to flee; till gentle Mercy show Her better eye, the farther off we go The swing of Justice deals the mightier blow.” Quarles would seem to have been a man of good family, and he boasts of his “long-lived genealogy.” He was born at Romford in Essex in 1592, and, after a regular education at school, Christ’s College, Cambridge, and Lincoln’s Inn, had influence enough at court to get the office of cupbearer to the queen of Bohemia. He was afterwards (about 1621) appointed secretary to Ussher, the primate of Ireland, and later on, returning at an uncertain date to England, obtained (in 1639) the post of city chronologer, which had been held before him by Middleton and Ben Jonson. Upon the outbreak of the Civil War he wrote on the Royalist side, and died in 1644, in consequence, his widow suggests, of his harsh treatment by the king’s enemies. Quarles’s first publication, with the suggestive title of The Feast of Wbrmes, appeared in 1620, and from that date till his death he was a busy and prolific writer of verse and prose. His Divine Poems, collected in 1630, were published separately at intervals in the course of the preceding ten years. Divine Fancies followed in 1632; then the Emblems, which might well come under that general designation. The earlier poem of Argahis and Parthenia (1622) was in a different vein: the substance was imitated from Sidney’s Arcadia, and the verse from Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. The speeches are spun out to a most tedious length, but the poem contains more fine lines and fewer incongruous fancies than any other of the author's productions. Quarles also published many Elegies, in the fashion of memorial verses of which Milton’s Lycidas was the contemporary masterpiece. His Hieroglyphics, in the same vein as his Emblems, appeared first in 1638. His principal prose work was the Enchyridion (1640), a collection of four “centuries” of miscellaneous aphorisms. This was followed two years later by more “observations” of the same kind “concerning princes and states.” Lovers of commonplace wisdom dressed in a garb always studiously quaint and sometimes happily epigrammatic, may turn to Quarles with every prospect of enjoyment.
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