LOVELACE, RICHARD, a poet, the son of Sir William Lovelace, of Lovelace Place, in Kent, was born in 1618. After receiving his education first at Charter House, and afterwards at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, he was presented at court, and was there much admired for his amiable disposition and handsome person. A zealous royalist, he became a colonel in the army of Charles I., and soon after the close of the civil war was the bearer of a petition from the county of Kent to the Long Parliament for the restitution of the king and the settlement of the government. For this bold deed he was imprisoned, but was soon liberated on a heavy bail. Having entered the French service in 1646 as commander of a regiment which he had raised, he was wounded at the battle of Dunkirk. On his return to England in 1648, he was again thrown into prison, and continued there till the king's death in 1649. In the same year was published his volume of Odes, Sonnets, and Songs, under the title of Lucasta, the fictitious name of a lady who had reciprocated his attachment, but in consequence of a false report of his death at Dunkirk, had been married to another. Thrown into a state of melancholy by this latter circumstance, and penniless through his vast expenditure in the royalist cause, he passed his latter years in wretchedness. Wood relates that he died of consumption in 1658 in a miserable alley near Shoe Lane. Lovelace also wrote The Scholar, a comedy, and The Soldier, a tragedy. In 1659 appeared his Posthumous Poems; and these, along with his Lucasta, were reprinted in 1817 and 1818, 12mo. A few of his lyrics, including his well-known lines, To Althea from Prison, are free from the crude conceits and disjointed versification of the majority of his poems. Pervaded by the quaint and deformed imagery peculiar to that age, they are yet raised to the rank of true lyrical poetry by their sweetness of rhythm, simplicity of thought, and tender and elevated feeling.