Page:EB1911 - Volume 05.djvu/341

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
328
CAREW, G.—CAREY, H.
  

factories, and works for meat extract and tinning. The dugong fishery is carried on, and the oil is extracted. There are large timber forests in the district, and much cedar is exported.


CAREW, GEORGE (d. about 1613), English diplomatist and historian, second son of Sir Wymond Carew of Antony, was educated at Oxford, entered the Inns of Court, and passed some years in continental travel. At the recommendation of Queen Elizabeth, who conferred on him the honour of knighthood, he was appointed secretary to Sir Christopher Hatton, and afterwards, having been promoted to a mastership in chancery, was sent as ambassador to the king of Poland. In the reign of James he was employed in negotiating the treaty of union with Scotland, and for several years was ambassador to the court of France. On his return he wrote a Relation of the State of France, with sketches of the leading persons at the court of Henry IV. It is written in the classical style of the Elizabethan age, and was appended by Dr Birch to his Historical View of the Negotiations between the Courts of England, France and Brussels, from 1592 to 1617. Much of the information regarding Poland contained in De Thou’s History of His Own Times was furnished by Carew.


CAREW, RICHARD (1555–1620), English poet and antiquary, was born on the 17th of July 1555, at Antony House, East Antony, Cornwall. At the age of eleven, he entered Christ Church, Oxford, and when only fourteen was chosen to carry on an extempore debate with Sir Philip Sidney, in presence of the earls of Leicester and Warwick and other noblemen. From Oxford he removed to the Middle Temple, where he spent three years, and then went abroad. By his marriage with Juliana Arundel in 1577 he added Coswarth to the estates he had already inherited from his father. In 1586 he was appointed high-sheriff of Cornwall; he entered parliament in 1584; and he served under Sir Walter Raleigh, then lord lieutenant of Cornwall, as treasurer. He became a member of the Society of Antiquaries in 1589, and was a friend of William Camden and Sir Henry Spelman. His great work is the Survey of Cornwall, published in 1602, and reprinted in 1769 and 1811. It still possesses interest, apart from its antiquarian value, for the picture it gives of the life and interests of a country gentleman of the days of Elizabeth. Carew’s other works are:—a translation of the first five Cantos of Tasso’s Gerusalemme (1594), printed in the first instance without the author’s knowledge, and entitled Godfrey of Balloigne, or the Recouerie of Hierusalam; The Examination of Men’s Wits (1594), a translation of an Italian version of John Huarte’s Examen de Ingenios; and An Epistle concerning the Excellences of the English Tongue (1605). Carew died on the 6th of November 1620.

His son, Sir Richard Carew (d. 1643?), was the author of a True and Readie Way to learn the Latine Tongue, by writers of three nations, published by Samuel Hartlib in 1654.


CAREW, THOMAS (1595–1645?), English poet, was the son of Sir Matthew Carew, master in chancery, and his wife, Alice Ingpenny, widow of Sir John Rivers, lord mayor of London. The poet was probably the third of the eleven children of his parents, and was born at West Wickham in Kent, in the early part of 1595, for he was thirteen years of age in June 1608, when he matriculated at Merton College, Oxford. He took his degree of B.A. early in 1611, and proceeded to study at the Middle Temple. Two years later his father complained to Sir Dudley Carleton that he was doing little at the law. He was in consequence sent to Italy, as a member of Sir Dudley’s household, and when the ambassador returned from Venice, he seems to have kept Thomas Carew with him, for he is found in the capacity of secretary to Sir Dudley Carleton, at the Hague, early in 1616. From this office he was dismissed in the autumn of that year for levity and slander; he had great difficulty in finding another situation. In August 1618 his father died, and Carew entered the service of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, in whose train he started for France in March 1619, and it is believed that he travelled in Herbert’s company until that nobleman returned to England, at the close of his diplomatic missions, in April 1624. Carew “followed the court before he was of it,” not receiving the definite appointment of gentleman of the privy chamber until 1628. While Carew held this office, he displayed his tact and presence of mind by stumbling and extinguishing the candle he was holding to light Charles I. into the queen’s chamber, because he saw that Lord St Albans had his arm round her majesty’s neck. The king suspected nothing, and the queen heaped favours on the poet. Probably in 1630, Carew was made “server” or taster-in-ordinary to the king. To this period may be attributed his close friendship with Sir John Suckling, Ben Jonson and Clarendon; the latter says that Carew was “a person of pleasant and facetious wit.” Donne, whose celebrity as a court-preacher lasted until his death in 1631, exercised a powerful if not entirely healthful influence over the genius of Carew. In February 1633 a masque by the latter, entitled Coelum Britanicum, was acted in the banqueting-house at Whitehall, and was printed in 1634. The close of Carew’s life is absolutely obscure. It was long supposed that he died in 1639, and this has been thought to be confirmed by the fact that the first edition of his Poems, published in 1640, seems to have a posthumous character. But Clarendon tells us that “after fifty years of life spent with less severity and exactness than it ought to have been, he died with the greatest remorse for that licence.” If Carew was more than fifty years of age, he must have died in or after 1645, and in fact there were final additions made to his Poems in the third edition of 1651. Walton tells us that Carew in his last illness, being afflicted with the horrors, sent in great haste to “the ever-memorable” John Hales (1584–1656); Hales “told him he should have his prayers, but would by no means give him then either the sacrament or absolution.”

Carew’s poems, at their best, are brilliant lyrics of the purely sensuous order. They open to us, in his own phrase, “a mine of rich and pregnant fancy.” His metrical style was influenced by Jonson and his imagery still more clearly by Donne, for whom he had an almost servile admiration. His intellectual power was not comparable with Donne’s, but Carew had a lucidity and directness of lyrical utterance unknown to Donne. It is perhaps his greatest distinction that he is the earliest of the Cavalier song-writers by profession, of whom Rochester is the latest, poets who turned the disreputable incidents of an idle court-life into poetry which was often of the rarest delicacy and the purest melody and colour. The longest and best of Carew’s poems, “A Rapture,” would be more widely appreciated if the rich flow of its imagination were restrained by greater reticence of taste.

The best edition of Carew’s Poems is that prepared by Arthur Vincent in 1899.  (E. G.) 


CAREY, HENRY (d. 1743), English poet and musician, reputed to be an illegitimate son of George Savile, marquess of Halifax, was born towards the end of the 17th century. His mother is supposed to have been a schoolmistress, and Carey himself taught music at various schools. He owed his knowledge of music to Olaus Linnert, and later he studied with Roseingrave and Geminiani. He wrote the words and the music of The Contrivances; or More Ways than One, a farce produced at Drury Lane in 1715. His Hanging and Marriage; or The Dead Man’s Wedding was acted at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1722. Chrononhotonthologos (1734), described as “The most Tragical Tragedy that ever was tragedized by any Company of Tragedians,” was a successful burlesque of the bombast of the contemporary stage. The best of his other pieces were A Wonder; or the Honest Yorkshireman (1735), a ballad opera, and the Dragon of Wantley (1737), a burlesque opera, the music of which was by J. F. Lampe. He was the author of Namby-Pamby, a once famous parody of Ambrose Philips’s verses to the infant daughter of the earl of Carteret. Carey is best remembered by his songs. “Sally in our Alley” (printed in his Musical Century) was a sketch drawn after following a shoemaker’s ’prentice and his sweetheart on a holiday. The present tune set to these words, however, is not the one written by Carey, but is borrowed from an earlier song, “The Country Lasse,” which is printed in The Merry Musician (vol. iii., c. 1716). It has been claimed for him that he was the author of “God save the King” (see National Anthems). He died in London on the 4th of