GILES

See also:

• FLETCHER, ALICE CUNNINGHAM (1845– )
• FLETCHER, ANDREW
• FLETCHER, GILES (c. 1548-1611)
• GILES FLETCHER (c. 1584-1623)
• FLETCHER, JOHN WILLIAM (1729-1785)
• FLETCHER, PHINEAS (1582-1650)

FLETCHER (c. 1584-1623)  , English poet, younger son of the preceding, was born about 1584 . Fuller in his Worthies of England says that he was a native of London, and was educated at Westminster school . From there he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree in 1606, and became a minor fellow of his college in 1608 . He was reader in Greek grammar (1615) and in Greek language (1618) . 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 1610, and in 1612 he edited the Remains of his cousin Nathaniel Pownall . It is not known in what year he was ordained, but 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, where " his clownish and low-parted parishioners . . . valued not their pastor according to his worth; which disposed him to melancholy and hastened his dissolution." (Fuller, Worthies of England, ed . 1811, vol. ii. p . 82) .

His last

work, The 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 (1610) . An edition in 164o contains seven full-page illustrative engravings by George Tate . It is in four cantos and is epic in design . The first canto, " Christ's Victory in Heaven," represents a dispute in heaven between Justice and Mercy, assuming the facts of Christ's life on earth; the second, " Christ's Victory on Earth," deals with an allegorical account of the Temptation; the third, " Christ's Triumph over Death," treats of the Passion; and the fourth, " Christ's Triumph after Death," treating of the Resurrection and Ascension, concludes with an affectionate eulogy of his brother Phineas Fletcher (q.v.) as " Thyrsilis." The metre is an eight-line stanza owing something to Spenser . The first five lines rhyme ababb, and the stanza concludes with a rhyming triplet, resuming the conceit which nearly every verse embodies . Giles Fletcher, like his brother Phineas, to whom he was deeply attached, was a close follower of Spenser . In his very best passages Giles Fletcher attains to a rich melody which charmed the ear of Milton, who did not hesitate to borrow very considerably from the Christ's Victory and Triumph in his Paradise Regained . Fletcher lived in an age which regarded as models the poems of Marini and Gongora, and his conceits are sometimes grotesque in connexion with the sacredness of his subject . But when he is carried away by his theme and forgets to be ingenious, he attains great solemnity and harmony of style . His descriptions of the Lady of Vain Delight, in the second canto, and of Justice and of Mercy in the first, are worked; out with much beauty of detail into separate pictures, in the manner of the Faerie Queene . Giles Fletcher's poem was edited (1868) for the Fuller Worthies Library, and (1876) for the Early English Poets by Dr A .

B .

Grosart . It is 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, &c.) vol . 20 . In the library of King's College, Cambridge, is a MS . Aegidii Fletcherii versio poetica Lamentationum Jeremiae .