This delectable versifier was born in 1589, in Gloucestershire, from an
old family in which he sprung. He was educated at Corpus Christi College,
Oxford, but neither matriculated nor took a degree. After finishing his
travels, he returned to England, and became soon highly distinguished, in
the Court of Charles I., for his manners, accomplishments, and wit. He
was appointed Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and Sewer in Ordinary to the
King. He spent the rest of his life as a gay and gallant courtier; and in
the intervals of pleasure produced some light but exquisite poetry. He is
said, ere his death, which took place in 1639, to have become very
devout, and bitterly to have deplored the licentiousness of some of his
verses.
Indelicate choice of subject is often, in Carew, combined with great
delicacy of execution. No one touches dangerous themes with so light and
glove-guarded a hand. His pieces are all fugitive, but they suggest great
possibilities, which his mode of life and his premature removal did not
permit to be realised. Had he, at an earlier period, renounced, like
George Herbert, 'the painted pleasures of a court,' and, like Prospero,
dedicated himself to 'closeness,' with his marvellous facility of verse,
his laboured levity of style, and his nice exuberance of fancy, he might
have produced some work of Horatian merit and classic permanence.