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Francis Quarles

Francis Quarles (about 8 May 1592 – 8 September 1644) was an English poet most notable for his emblem book aptly entitled Emblems.

Early life

Francis Quarles was born in Romford, Essex, and baptised there on 8 May 1592. His family had a long history of royal service. His great-grandfather, George Quarles, was Auditor to King Henry VIII, and his father, James Quarles, held places under Queen Elizabeth and James I, for which he was rewarded with an estate called Stewards in Romford. His mother, Joan Dalton, was the daughter and heiress of Eldred Dalton of Mores Place, Hadham. There were eight[citation needed] children in the family; the eldest, Sir Robert Quarles, was knighted by James I in 1608.

Francis Quarles was entered at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1608, and subsequently joined Lincoln's Inn to read for the bar. In 1613, when Princess Elizabeth married Frederick V of the Electoral Palatinate, Quarles was made her cupbearer and went with her to the continent, remaining in post for some years.

Career

Some time before 1629, Quarles was appointed as secretary to James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland.

About 1633, Quarles 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.

Quarles married Ursula Woodgate in 1618, 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 Fons Lachrymarum (1648) and other poems.

The work by which Quarles is best known, the Emblems, was originally published in 1634, with grotesque illustrations engraved by William Marshall and others. The forty-five prints in the last three books are borrowed from the designs by Boetius à Bolswert for 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 readers, 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."

Courtesy--wikipedia
- Francis Quarles

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