CAVALIER POETS, a term properly ap plied to the group of lyrists among the follow ers of Charles I and of his exiled son, from the first actual warfare with the Commonwealth until the Restoration. The term is also applied more broadly to other poets of the time such as Herrick (q.v.) or Donne (q.v.) who wrote in the same style; but the distinction of the manner is due to those loyalists who were pre eminently court gentlemen and fighters for the King.
In literary tradition the Cavalier poets took their descent from Wyatt and Surrey, Sidney and Raleigh, and those other cultured and well traveled *makers') of the Tudor and Eliza bethan courts, who naturalized the Provencal lyric and its love-system on English soil. This influence, of course, had been strong in Chau cer's time, but only with this later group did lyric poetry as an accomplishment become well established among the gentlemen around the English sovereign, and take on a native manner, truly expressive of the historical moment.
The early Elizabethan court poets, even in their narrowest imitations of the French son neteers, had some of the largeness of the age in their manner; they spoke consciously to an audience. At the end of the reign the Renais sance wealth of scholarship and culture had spread through the nation, in a wide circle from the court. What remained the peculiar inher itance of the courtly poet was undergoing a re finement such as the novel shows in the second part of (Euphues,) in which the story is talEen into the drawing-room, where the feminine in fluence is dominant, imposing in a modern way the exquisiteness which is the end of all courts of love. By a similar transition the courtly poets, letting go the larger subjects and the public manner, made the quality of their verse the very qualities of graceful society — the per sonal compliment; the brief sallies that general conversation demands; the quick turns in which grace and wit count; that method of society verse which restrains beneath an even manner all feeling that is too personal or too deep. The presence of the ladies is felt — not of one woman alone; as in the garden scene in the second part of (Euphues,) the lover must find ways to woo his lady under the very eyes of her teasing comrades.
This development of the court poetry was occasioned, no doubt, by the natural growth of culture and the perfecting of manners in Eng lish society, as well as at the court. Some im pression, however, was made upon the court by the change from Elizabeth's manlike rule to the gentle influence of Charles' refined Queen. The influence of Henrietta Maria, however, was not altogether admirable. Refining though it was, it took the direction of effeminacy, and in the precieuse fashion which is fostered, of insincere pedantry. William Harbington (1605-54) in his (Castara) (1634) illustrates the over-refine ment of theme .to which the graceful court verse at this moment might have seemed doomed.
The personality of Charles, however, which enlisted the loyalty of the courtiers, his tragic end, and the exile of his family and his follow ers, gave back to the courtly verse the vitality it was losing, and in addition some new char acteristics, which distinguished it as Cavalier poetry. Loyalty to Charles and to his son, un like loyalty to Elizabeth, was personal more than patriotic; it served to revive therefore some of the most ideal conditions of chivalry. Charles became not so much the sovereign of a country as the head of an order of knights; his exiled son became their leader under all skies. The sufferings that were the cost of their loyalty, their sense of a lost cause and the long tradition of proud breeding that would bear all with outward lightness, made the pathos and the grace of the best Cavalier poets. The Eliza bethan largeness of manner never quite re turned, though the Marquis of Montrose (1612• 50) echoed it nobly in his lines on the death of Charles I, and in those on his own execution ,• but in general the lighter gracefulness continued to be a mark of the Cavaliers, as in Montrose's most famous lyric, 'My dear and only love.) In singleness and loftiness of devotion, in the actual sacrifice of his life for the cause, and in the natural, incidental place of literature in his career, Montrose is perhaps the ideal Cavalier poet.