When Edward Benlowes put before the world in 1652 his big
poem, Theophila, he commended to the reader "these Intervall Issues
of spiritual Recreation" in these words: "If thou thinkest that I have
wanted Salt to preserve them to Posterity, know that the very Subject
It self is Balsam enough to make them perpetual." In that was
the modesty proper to an author's preface, yet at the same time the
boast that his work would enjoy a lasting fame. A lively circle of
admirers and flatterers, some at least of whom had known the bounty
for which Benlowes was renowned, helped to sustain him in the
confidence with which he looked towards posterity. Yet when he
died in 1676, Anthony à Wood spoke of him as "a great poet of
his time," bearing witness in a single phrase both to Benlowes'
fame and to the fact that it was already past. Fifteen years later,
in his Fasti Oxonienses, Wood repeated his verdict, but, with a sig-
nificant shift of emphasis, pushed Benlowes a little farther into
oblivion with the words: "Much noted in his time, but since not,
for the art and faculty of poetry." Benlowes had already, before
his death, been excessively ridiculed by Samuel Butler in his Char-
acter of "A Small Poet". This was printed among Butler Remains
in 1759, and its effect, aided by a gibe of Pope in The Dunciad,
was to make Benlowes, in so far as he was heard of at all, an almost
legendary example of a bad poet. Yet throughout the nineteenth
century his Theophila, by reason of its handsome decorations, con-
tinued to be a book-collector's prize, and in 1905 Saintsbury, chal-
lenging the traditional verdict, ventured to claim attention for the
text. Theophila and two of Benlowes' shorter poems were included
in the first volume of Saintsbury Minor Poets of the Caroline Period.
Since then the vogue for "metaphysical" poetry has helped to draw
him a little way out of his obscurity and caused him to be spoken
of with a certain approbation and even with enthusiasm. ¹

As for the man himself, Anthony à Wood was responsible for

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