Francis Quarles is reputed to have been the most popular writer of his day, and his attraction continued well beyond the eighteenth century. Today his work is valued less for its own merits than for its influence, especially that of the Emblemes (1635), on more-gifted poets of the earlier seventeenth century such as John Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Crashaw, as well as later writers such as John Bunyan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Browning. For Emblemes Quarles appropriated Continental engravings (sometimes modifying them to suit his purposes) and accompanied them with a motto, scriptural and patristic quotations, a poem, and an epigram, the whole to be used as didactic and meditative aids. Quarles was a loyal supporter of the Church of England and of the king; yet, ironically, during his lifetime he was accused of being a Roman Catholic sympathizer, and after his death his work became very...