ABSTRACT
Carew (?1595-?1639) and Aurelian Townsend (fl. 1601-43) were fellow-members of the circle of wits and poets at the Court of Charles I, and both of them wrote masques and poems which were highly regarded at Court. Carew's intelligent admiration of Donne's poetry is plain in the elegy he wrote for Donne's death, which was given in the 1633 edition of the poems (see No. 18 (g)). In the following extract Carew protests that he is incapable of writing a worthy poem on the death of the King of Sweden. King Gustavus Adolfus, the hope of Protestant Europe, had been killed in battle in 1632.
