FLETCHER, GILES (c. 1584-1623), poet, younger son of the preceding, was educated at Westminster school and Trinity college, Cambridge. In 1603 he contributed a poem on the death of Queen Elizabeth to Sorrow's Joy. His great poem of Christ's Victory appeared in 161o, and in 1612 he edited the Remains of his cousin Nathaniel Pownall. His sermons at St. Mary's were famous. Fuller tells us that the prayer before the sermon was a continuous allegory. He left Cambridge about 1618, and soon after received, it is supposed from Francis Bacon, the rectory of Alderton, on the Suffolk coast. His last work, Tile Reward of the Faithful, appeared in the year of his death (1623).
The principal work by which Giles Fletcher is known is Christ's Victorie and Triumph, in Heaven, in Earth, over and after Death (16io). The theme owes something to the Semaines of Du Portas, but the devotion, the passionate lyrism and the exquisite vision of paradise is Fletcher's own. The metre is an eight-line stanza owing something to Spenser, of whom, like his brother Phineas, he was a disciple. The first five lines rhyme a, b, a, b, b, and the stanza concludes with a rhyming triplet, resuming the conceit which nearly every verse embodies. Like most amateurs of the conceit, he is sometimes grotesque, but when he forgets his ingenuity he attained a depth of melody that delighted Milton, who followed him to some extent in Paradise Regained.
Giles Fletcher's poem was edited (1868) for the Fuller Worthies Library (1876) for the Early English Poets by Dr. A. B. Grosart, and, with this brother's works, by Prof. Boas (2 vols., 1 go8-0g) . It was also reprinted for The Ancient and Modern Library of Theo logical Literature (1888), and in R. Cattermole's and H. Stebbing's Sacred Classics (1834, etc.) vol. 20. In the library of King's college, Cambridge, is a ms. Aegidii Fletcherii versio poetica Lamentationum Jeremiae, and see H. E. Cory, Spenser, the School of the Fletchers, and Milton (Univ. of California Publications, No. 5, 1912).