The Nineteenth Century: Various Affectations

Abstract

GEORGE DARLEY (1795–1846) was a poet and mathematician; he even wrote on Italian art. Why he chose the style exemplified in the following extract from Nepenthe (1839), lines 234ff. and 465ff., is hard to say, and the idiom is not quite consistent; but revivals (even of Jacobean style) were in the air, and one of Darley’s lyrics fooled Palgrave, the compiler of The Golden Treasury, who stuck it in the seventeenth century between poems by Milton and Carew.