Note 1. “The amatory poetry of Habington is that of a man who regards woman as a highly intellectual being; not as the mere slave and instrument of sensual pleasure; and the correctness of his mind, in this particular, is equally apparent in his prose and verse.” (Habington’s Castara, edit. by Charles A. Elton, The Prefatory Essay, p. 7.) I think, in this poem, Mr. Elton’s particular critical virtue of the Castara poems is perhaps shown at its best from a moral, and highest from a poetical point of view. But Prof. Saintsbury (History of Elizabethan Literature, 1887, p. 382) has this to say: “Castara is a real instance of what some foreign critics very unjustly charge on English literature as a whole—a foolish and almost canting prudery. The poet dins the chastity of his mistress into his readers’ heads until the readers in self-defence are driven to say, ‘Sir, did any one doubt it?’ He protests the freedom of his own passion from any admixture of fleshly influence, till half a suspicion of hypocrisy and more than half a feeling of contempt force themselves on the hearer…. To tell the truth, it is, though, as has been said, an estimable, yet a rather irritating work. That Habington was a true lover every line of it shows; that he had a strong infusion of the abundant poetical inspiration then abroad is shown by line after line, though hardly by poem after poem, among its pieces.” [back]
