I. _His change from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism._ From our Memoir
of his Father it will be apparent to all that _he_ was a Protestant of
Protestants; and it is an inevitable assumption that his son from
infancy would be indoctrinated with all vigilance and fervour in the
paternal creed, which may be designated Puritan, as opposed to Laudian
High-Churchism within the Church of England.[15] I think we shall not
err either, in concluding that the younger Crashaw had a very
impressionable and plastic nature; so that the strong and self-assertive
character of his Father could not fail to mould his earliest thinking,
opinions, beliefs, and emotion. Still it will not do to pronounce our
Poet's change to have been a revolt and rebound from the narrowness of
the paternal teaching and writing, seeing that his Father died in 1626,
when he was only passing into his 13-14th year.[16] It is palpable that
the elder Crashaw was spared the distress of the apostacy (as he should
most trenchantly have named it) of his only son. Moreover, the very
notable poems from the Tanner MSS. on the _Gunpowder Treason_ (vol. i.
pp. 188-194) are pronounced and intense in their denunciations of (to
quote from them) that 'vnmated malice,' that 'vnpeer'd despight' and
'very quintessence of villanie,' for 'singing' of which he feels he must
have not 'inke' but 'the blood of Cerberus, or Alecto's viperous brood,'
and demonstrate that he carried with him to, and kept in, Cambridge all
his father's wrath, and more than even his father's vocabulary of
vituperation, with too his own after-epithets, instinct with poetic
feeling, as a thoughtful reading reveals. These poems belong to 1631-3.
Even in the Latin Epigrams of 1634 there is (to say the least) a
'slighting' allusion to the Pope in the 'Umbra S. Petri,' being 'Nunc
quoque, Papa, tuum sustinet illa decus' (see Epigram xix. p. 47). That
volume, also, is dedicated in the most glowing words of affection and
indebtedness to Dr. Benjamin Lany (vol. ii. pp. 7-15), afterwards, as we
shall find onward, a distinguished bishop in the Church of England. And
he was a man after the elder Crashaw's own heart, as we shall now have
revealed in a little overlooked poem addressed to Crashaw senior, which
is appended to the 'Manvall for True Catholicks' (as before). Here it
is; and let the Reader ponder its anti-papal sentiment: