Francis Quarles

Francis Quarles (1592–1644) was an English poet and prose writer, born in Essex and educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, and Lincoln's Inn. He served as cupbearer to Elizabeth of Bohemia, the daughter of James I, and later as secretary to James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, in Ireland. In 1639 he was appointed chronologer of the City of London, and he remained a committed royalist during the Civil War.

Quarles was among the most widely read devotional writers of the seventeenth century. His Divine Fancies (1633) gathers epigrams, meditations and observations in verse; his best-known work, Emblemes (1635), pairs engraved emblems with sacred poems, and was followed by Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (1638). His popularity endured for generations among readers of plain, pointed religious verse.