QUARLES  .

FRANCIS (1592-1644), English poet, was born at Romford, Essex, and baptized there on the 8th of May 1592 . His father, James Quarles, held several places under Elizabeth, and traced his ancestry to a family settled in England before the Conquest . He was entered at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 16o8, and subsequently at Lincoln's Inn . He was made cup-bearer to the Princess Elizabeth, Electress Palatine, in 1613, remaining abroad for some years; and before 1629 he was appointed secretary to Ussher, the primate of Ireland . About 1633 he returned to England, and spent the next two years in the preparation of his Emblems . In 1639 he was made city chronologer, a post in which Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton had preceded him . At the outbreak of the Civil War he took the Royalist side, drawing up three pamphlets in 1644 in support of the king's cause . It is said that his house was searched and his papers destroyed by the Parliamentarians in consequence of these publications . He died on the 8th of September in that year . Quarles married in 1618 Ursula Woodgate, by whom he had eighteen children . His son, John Quarles (1624-1665), was exiled to Flanders for his Royalist sympathies and was the author of Fans Lachrymarum (1648) and other poems .

The

work by which Quarles is best known, the Emblems, was originally published in 1635, with grotesque illustrations engraved by William Marshall and others . The forty-five prints in the last three books are borrowed from the Pia Desideria (Antwerp, 1624) of Herman Hugo . Each " emblem " consists of a paraphrase from a passage of Scripture, expressed in ornate and metaphorical language, followed by passages from the Christian Fathers, and concluding with an epigram of four lines . The Emblems was immensely popular with the vulgar, but the critics of the 17th and 18th centuries had no mercy on Quarles . Sir John Suckling in his Sessions of the Poets disrespectfully alluded to him as he " that makes God speak so big in's poetry." Pope in the Dunciad spoke of the Emblems, " Where the pictures for the page atone And Quarles is saved by beauties not his own." The works of Quarles include: A Feast for Wormes . Set forth in a Poeme of the History of Jonah (162o), which contains other scriptural paraphrases, besides the one that furnishes the title; Hadassa; or the History of Queene Ester (1621); Job Militant, with Meditations Divine and Morall (1624); Sions Elegies, wept by Jeremie the Prophet (1624); Sions Sonets sung by Solomon the King (1624), a paraphrase of the Canticles; The Historie of Samson (1631); Alphabet of Elegies upon . . . Dr Aylmer (1625); Argalus and Parthenia (1629), the subject of which is borrowed from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia; four books of Divine Fancies digested into Epigrams, Meditations and Observations (1632); a reissue of his scriptural paraphrases and the Alphabet of Elegies as Divine Poems (1633); Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (1638) ; Enchyridion, containing Institutions Divine and Moral (1640-41), a collection of four " centuries " of miscellaneous aphorisms; Observations concerning Princes and States upon Peace and Warre (1642), and Boanerges and Barnabas—Wine and Oyle for . . . afflicted Souks (1644-46), both of which are collections of miscellaneous reflections; three violent Royalist tracts (1644), The Loyall Convert, The Whipper Whipt, and The New Distemper, reissued in one volume in 1645 with the title of The Profest Royalist; his quarrell with the Times, and some elegies . Solomon's Recantation ... (1645) contains a memoir by his widow . Other posthumous works are The Shepheards' Oracles (1646), a second part of Boanerges and Barnabas (1646), a broadside entitled A Direfull Anathema against Peace-haters (1647), and an interlude, The Virgin Widow (1649) .

An edition of the Emblems (

Edinburgh, 1857) was embellished with new illustrations by C . H . Bennett and W . A . Rogers These are reproduced in the complete edition (1874) of Quarles included in the " Chertsey Worthies Library " by Dr A . B Grosart, who provides an introductory memoir and an appreciation which greatly overestimates Quarles's value as a poet .