In the year 1648, when he was fifty-seven years of age, being prominent as a Royalist, he was ejected from his living by the dominant Puritans; and in that same year he published his poems, of which the latter part and later written is his _Noble Numbers_, or religious poems.

We may wonder at his publishing the _Hesperides_ along with them, but we must not forget that, while the manners of a time are never to be taken as a justification of what is wrong, the judgment of men concerning what is wrong will be greatly influenced by those manners--not necessarily on the side of laxity.

It is but fair to receive his own testimony concerning himself, offered in these two lines printed at the close of his _Hesperides_: To his book's end this last line he'd have placed: _Jocund his muse was, but his life was chaste_.
We find the same artist in the _Noble Numbers_ as in the _Hesperides_, but hardly the same man.

However far he may have been from the model of a clergyman in the earlier period of his history, partly no doubt from the society to which his power of song made him acceptable, I cannot believe that these later poems are the results of mood, still less the results of mere professional bias, or even sense of professional duty.
In a good many of his poems he touches the heart of truth; in others, even those of epigrammatic form, he must be allowed to fail in point as well as in meaning.

As to his art-forms, he is guilty of great offences, the result of the same passion for lawless figures and similitudes which Dr.Donne so freely indulged.