"Our art" is the art of love in the Ovidian sense. Another Magician answers:

Indamora, the delight of destiny!

She, and the beauties of her train; who sure
Though they discover Summer in their looks,
Still carry frozen Winter in their blood.

They raise strange doctrines, and new sects of Love
Which must not woo or court the person, but

The mind; and practice generation not

Of bodies but of souls.

To the question,

But where shall this new sect be planted first?

Answer is made,

In a dull northern isle they call Britaine.

Whereto the comment, as if Italy had not started the doctrine:

Indeed, 'tis a cold northerly opinion.

It will be long enough ere it

Shall spread and prosper in the South! Or if

The Spaniard or Italian ever be

Persuaded.

The initiative evidently came from the court ladies,

for

Certain young Lords at first disliked the philosophy
As most uncomfortable, sad and new ;

But soon inclin'd to a superior vote,

And are grown as good Platonical lovers

As are to be found in an hermitage, where he
That was born last reckons above fourscore.

I. ., Queen Henrietta Maria.

Sir Will D'Avenant was not among the converts himself. In the Prologue to his later play, The Platonick Lovers, acted by His Majesty's servants at the Blackfriars, 1636, he remarks with some humor:

'Tis worth my smiles to think what enforc'd ways
And shifts, each poet hath to help his Plays.
Ours now believes the Title needs must cause,
From the indulgent Court, a kind applause,
Since there he learnt it first, and had command
T'interpret what he scarce doth understand.

Howell and D'Avenant both speak as if the fashion were a novelty in 1634. Possibly, we may understand them to mean that it had by that time become widespread at court. Certainly, in Jonson's The New Inn, which proved a flat failure in 1629, the doctrine is in full evidence ;' and there is interesting indication of the originators of the "new Love" at least in Jonson's own opinion. Lady Frances Frampul is a typical Platonique, a "most Socratic lady," whose "humour" is, in Jonson's words, to think "nothing a felicity, but to have a multitude of servants, and be called mistress by them." In the regulation "Court of Love," presided over by the maid Prudence,3 Lovell (i. e. Love-well), after being sworn, oddly, on Ovid's De Arte Amandi, ex

2

' Probably the trouble was the intolerably tedious fooling of the comic characters, rather than the main theme. Jonson was failing. • The context of the play shows that "servants " is used in its common secondary sense of servants-in-love-cavalieri serventi.

2

Act III., sc. ii.

pounds in a set speech the "new Love," namely,

that

The end of love, is to have two made one
In will, and in affection, that the minds

Be first inoculated, not the bodies, &c.

Lady Frances, who has hitherto been scornful of Lovell, is overcome by his eloquent exposition of her preferred doctrine, and exclaims:

O speak, and speak for ever! let mine ear
Be feasted still, and filled with this banquet!
No sense can ever surfeit on such truth,
It is the marrow of all lover's tenets !
Who hath read Plato, Heliodore, or Tatius,
Sydney, D'Urfe, or all Love's fathers, like him?
He's there the Master of the Sentences,
Their school, their commentary, text, and gloss,
And breathes the true divinity of love!

Evidently, Lady Frances is a Femme Savante as well as a Précieuse, that she thus familiarly refers to the Greek philosopher, two Greek romancers, and the scholastic Peter Lombard, besides the up-to-date D'Urfé. The significant omission of Castiglione and other Italian exponents of the doctrine, suggests, however, that the English rehabilitation of it at this time came direct from France and D'Urfé.'

Courtly Platonic love manifested itself in certainly three types, possibly more, for I am not concerned to

'D'Urfé's influence seems to have reached England and Germany about simultaneously. In 1624, twenty-nine lords and ladies of Germany formed an Académie des Vrais Amants, and indited a flattering letter to D'Urfé as the only veritable Celadon.

Madam

be systematic. There was the salon type, in which a great lady dispensed her beneficent influence (and her hospitality) to a coterie of "servants," who in turn "immortalized" her in verse, or in dedications or in letters (which usually sooner or later found their way into print), or at least amused her busy idleness with précieux entretiens d'amour. Scarcely a poet of the time but has his packet of such mock-amorous laudations; the letters even of the sensible cosmopolite James Howell are full of the doctrinal amourism and precious phraseology in vogue. Here is a part of one to Lady Elizabeth Digby. "Madam : It is no improper Comparison, that a thankful Heart is like a Box of precious Ointment, which keeps the Smell long after the Thing is spent. (without Vanity be it spoken) such is my Heart to you, and such are your Favours to me; the strong aromatic Odour they carried with them diffused itself thro' all the Veins of my Heart, especially thro' the left Ventricle, where the most illustrious Blood lies; so that the Perfume of them remains still fresh within me, and is like to do, while that Triangle of Flesh dilates and shutes itself within my Breast: Nor doth this Perfume stay there, but as all Smells naturally tend upwards, it hath ascended to my Brain," &c. &c. We may agree that something has indeed ascended to the poor man's brain. The bit is characteristic of the general infelicitous "felicity" of English préciosité.

This salon type of Platonic love was, of course, the most open, being frankly impersonal, a system where an indefinite number of satellites revolve

around a central life-giving (often living-giving) "she-sun." Lady Frances Frampul in Jonson's The New Inn is, before she succumbs to her “ principal servant," Lovell, perfectly representative of this type. Indeed, Lovell's "character" of her in the first act very closely resembles the "Character of a real and principal salon-leader of the time, Lucy Percy, Countess Carlisle, who was celebrated by all the cavalier poets and the French Voiture, who dominated the Queen, and in succession Strafford, and Pym. Lady Frances Frampul, says Lovell,

she

is

A noble lady, great in blood and fortune,
Fair and a wit! but of so bent a phant'sy,
As she thinks nought a happiness, but to have
A multitude of servants: and to get them,
Though she be very honest, yet she ventures
Upon these precipices, that would make ber
Not seem so, to some prying narrow natures.

professeth still, To love no soul or body, but for ends,

Which are ber sports, etc.

So Lady Carlisle, according to Sir Toby,' will freely discourse of love, and hear both the fancies and powers of it: but if you will needs bring it within knowledge, and boldly direct it to herself, she is likely to divert the discourse; or, at least, seem not A Collection of Letters made by Sir Tobie Mathews, Kt. with a Character of the most excellent Lady Lucy, Countesse of Carleile, &c. London, 1660.