Fletcher.

Fletcher. GILES and PHINEAS, poets, were cousins of Fletcher the dramatist, and sons of Giles Fletcher, LL.D. (1549-1611), himself a poet and writer on Russia, and Queen Elizabeth's minister in negotiations in Germany and at the court of Russia.—GILES, the younger of the two brothers, was born about 1588, was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and died at his living at Alderton, in Suffolk, in 1623. Fuller tells us that his 'clownish low-parted parishioners, having nothing but their shoes high about them, valued not their pastor according to his worth, which disposed him to melancholy and hastened his dissolution.' His chief poetical work is a sacred poem, entitled Christ's Victory and Triumph in Heaven and Earth over and after Death, published at Cambridge in 1610. It is full of splendid versification and imagery, and is saved from the fatal dullness of most professedly religious poems by a quickening glow of genuine enthusiasm. It is of course based upon Spenser, and most of his distinctive characteristics are imitated and overdone. The metre is original and not entirely successful. Each stanza has eight lines, the last an Alexandrine, rhyming thus: ababbecc; and a lyrical interlude occurs here and there. The poem, although once admired, is now unknown to general readers, and is chiefly remarkable for having to some extent influenced the majestic muse of Milton. His poems were edited by Dr Grosart in the 'Fuller Worthies Library' (1868), and in 'Early English Poets' (1876).—PHINEAS was born in 1582, educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and in 1621 became rector of Hilgay, in Norfolk, where he died in 1650. His most important poem, the Purple Island, or the Isle of Man, was published in 1633, in twelve cantos of seven-lined stanzas, a regular elegiac quatrain taking the place of the irregular quintett of Giles's poem. It contains an elaborate description of the human body, given with great anatomical minuteness. The body is an island, the bones its foundations, and the veins the streams by which it is watered. The vices and virtues that affect it are similarly allegorised with laborious ingenuity. Although to a large extent formal and pedantic, the Purple Island abounds in fine passages, in which the splendour of Spenser and the gravity of Milton are curiously mingled. His poetical works were edited by Dr Grosart in the 'Fuller Worthies Library' (4 vols. 1868).