No More Learning

The first published work bearing Campion's name is his
volume of Latin Poemata, which appeared in 1595. This little
book, which is extremely rare at the present day, contains
panegyrics of Elizabeth and of the earl of Essex, a poem of
rejoicing on the defeat of the Armada, and so forth, followed by a
collection of elegies and a series of epigrams chiefly addressed to
his own friends and contemporaries by name. It was not until
1601 that Campion's first collection of English poems, A Booke
of Ayres, was given to the world in the form of one of the song-
books to which reference has been made in a previous chapter.
It was divided into two parts, the first set to airs composed by
Campion himself, who thus made his first appearance as a
musician, and the second to the airs of Philip Rosseter, musician
and theatrical manager and Campion's lifelong friend.
In the following year, 1602, Campion published his Observa-
tions in the Art of English Poesiel "against the vulgar and
unartificial custom of riming'; and, some time between 1602 and
1606, when he first signed himself 'Doctor in Physic,' he must
have taken up the study of medicine and proceeded to the degree
of M. D. We have already seen that this degree was not conferred
on him at Cambridge, neither, so far as can be ascertained, was it
conferred at Oxford or at Dublin. It only remains to assume that
the poet studied at some continental university, and, while
nothing certain has at present been ascertained as to this, it is
interesting to note that the study of medicine and the practice of
foreign travel were both sedulously fostered at Peterhouse, which
not only possessed one of the finest early collections of books
upon medicine, but frequently granted dispensations to its fellows
to pursue some approved course of study in partibus trans-
marinis. In 1607, he wrote and published a masque for the
1 See vol. III of the present work, chap. XIV.


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His Life
143
occasion of the marriage of lord Hayes, and, in 1613, appeared a
volume of Songs of Mourning, in which, in common with many
other famous poets, he expressed the grief evoked in Britain
by the untimely death of prince Henry. In the same year,
he wrote and arranged three masques, the Lords' Maske, for
the occasion of princess Elizabeth's marriage to the elector
palatine, a masque entertainment for the amusement of queen
Anne, during her visit at Caversham house, and a third for the
occasion of the earl of Somerset's marriage to the notorious
Frances Howard. To this last masque, some personal interest
attaches, by reason of its connection with the Overbury poisoning
case, in which Campion was slightly involved. He had per-
formed some trifling duties for his patron, Sir Thomas Monson,
which afterwards became of importance in the history of the trial.
Monson himself was thrown into the Tower, upon suspicion of
complicity, where the poet attended him in his professional
capacity as physician; after some delay, during which the poet's
evidence was heard, Monson received the royal pardon in
circumstances and conditions which made it tantamount to a
complete acquittal. If this verdict be accepted—and there is no
reason for rejecting it—a fortiori Campion could not have been
privy to the conspiracy.
In 1612, appeared Two Bookes of Ayres, followed, in 1617, by
the Third and Fourth Booke of Ayres. To 1617, also, probably
belongs his New Way of Making Fowre Parts in Counter-point,
a technical treatise which, for many years, was the standard text-
book on the subject. In 1618 was published Ayres that were sung
and played at Brougham Castle, which were almost certainly
written by Campion for the occasion of the king's entertainment
on his return from Scotland; and, in 1619, he published a second
edition of his Latin poems in two books, the latter of which was a
reprint, with considerable alterations, omissions and additions,
of the 1595 collection of epigrams, followed by a similar ré-
chauffé of the elegies contained in that volume. He died on
1 March 1619/20, and was buried at St Dunstan's in the West,
having, by his will, a nuncupatory one made in extremis, left the
whole of his estate to his old collaborator, Philip Rosseter. From
this circumstance, it may fairly be inferred that he left behind
him neither wife nor issue.
As to the poet's religious views, divers opinions have been
expressed. It has been thought by some that, in view of the
fact that a large number of Campion's best friends were adherents


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144
Thomas Campion
to the older faith, and that he did not dissemble a distaste
for puritans and puritanism, he was himself a Catholic. But it
is not likely that any devout Catholic, howsoever loyal, could
have alluded to Elizabeth as “Faith's Pure Shield, the Christian
Diana,' and the conclusion at which we must arrive is that
Campion, though probably nominally a protestant, was not
seriously concerned with dogma of any sort. However, his
devotional poetry contains some of the finest things he has
written. 'Never weather-beaten Saile more willing bent to shore,'
‘Awake, awake, thou heavy spright' and some others exhibit the
union, all too rare in the annals of hymnology, of genuine spiritual
exaltation with the true lyrical note.
He was thoroughly steeped in classical studies, as his Observa-
tions in the Art of English Poesie indicates. Hence, his Latin
verses, of which he wrote a great number, show considerable
familiarity with the Latin poets. They are, of course, mainly
imitative: the epigrams are sometimes lacking in decisive point,
and frequently express mere vituperation in place of wit—a valid
substitute in the opinion of those times—while many of them,
especially those in the earlier edition, are obscene. All, however,
are graceful and easy, and exhibit dexterity in the handling
of the various metres. They won him a great reputation among
his contemporaries.
Of the musical work, a New Way of Making Fowre Parts in
Counter-point, it will not be necessary to say much; its interest is
entirely technical. The 'new way' itself, the sole contribution of
the book to the sum of contemporary musical knowledge, is a rule
of thumb for the harmonisation of a continuous piece of vocal or
instrumental music, given the bass and the first chord. But, apart
from the value, such as it is, of this discovery, no doubt the book
served as a useful compendium for the musical student, and it was
very popular, being several times reprinted in Playford's Intro-
duction to the Skill of Musicke.
As a masque writer, he was not pre-eminently successful. He
had served no apprenticeship in the art of dramatic composition,
and in dramatic invention and contrivance his powers were not
remarkable. The construction of a masque should strike the
happy mean between too great complexity and too great looseness,
and Campion usually errs upon the side of unsuitable complication
of incident. In this respect, his first masque, that written for the
marriage of lord Hayes, is the best, and the dramatic part, as
distinguished from the purely lyrical, though showing signs of the
3


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?
His Works
145
undeveloped character of the author's style (witness the larger
proportion of end-stopped lines and couplets over those in the
other masques), is exceedingly fresh, graceful and full of charming
fancy. His other two masques proper, those written for the
respective marriages of princess Elizabeth (the Lords Maske)
and the countess of Essex, are less direct, and have little
dramatic merit. But no one can deny the superlative quality of
the lyrical element in all these masques, admirably adapted as it
is to the necessities of music and action, and comprising in ‘Now
hath Flora rob'd her bowers,' “So be it ever, joy and peace,' and
other short pieces, some of the most beautiful songs in the
language.
The truth is that Campion's muse is chiefly lyrical, and to the
song-books must we go for the more abundant field of his genius.
As regards his place in English poetry, he constitutes a link be-
tween the Elizabethans and the Jacobeans, for he was contemporary
with both Sidney and Jonson, Sackville and Donne. It is worthy
of notice, too, that he shows no sign in his later period of the
influence of the last-named, which, at that time, was becoming the
predominant tendency of English poetry. This is probably due to
the circumstance that Campion's style was based upon the earlier
traditions of the time when he first began to write. Moreover,
the style which he struck out for himself in his first essays was
complete, and he adhered to it with little variation throughout his
life. In the Songs of Divers Noblemen and Gentlemen above
cited, appears in its perfect form one of his most perfect lyrics,
'Harke, al you ladies that do sleep,' in which fairylike imagination
is combined with the most unshackled and musical expression.
The appearance of this poem at such a time, written when the
author was but twenty-four years of age is most remarkable, and
indicates the possession of an ear keenly sensitive to music, and
a predisposition to musical effect.
Campion has been called a Euphuist by a contemporary as
well as by a recent critic; but his Euphuism is a refined and
sublimated variety, the highest form of which it was capable. The
characteristics of Euphuism were narrowed in him to the frequent
use of balanced phrase and antithesis, and of moral reflections,
with an occasional parallel from natural objects. It is not unusual
to meet with poems such as 'Harke, al you ladies,' "There is a
Garden in her face' (which, possibly, suggested Herrick's Cherry
Ripe), ‘Young and simple though I am,' and others, in which little
taint of Euphuism can be observed. But the large majority of his
10
6
6
E. L. IV.
CH, VIII.


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146
Thomas Campion
poems are infused with it, tempered, however, by his admiration
of the classics. Courthope describes Campion's development as
a progress from romantic to classical Euphuism, instancing the
lyrics from the Lords' Maske; but it should be remembered
that masques, in consequence of an accepted tradition, were
almost invariably classical, at least in subject matter; while the
songs of the third and fourth books, published some five years
after the masques, are not less romantic than those of A Booke.
Another, and a most important aspect of Campion's lyrics is
the metrical. He has been truly called 'a curious metrist’; and
few can fail to be struck with the infinite variety of his cadences
and rhythms. He not only rings every possible change upon the
usual stanza measures of the period, but frequently introduces
subtle changes, shifting from line to line in a single poem. The
clue to this, as well as to any complete appreciation of his poetry,
is the fact of the mutual interdependence of words and musical
setting, and that, too, the setting of the poet, who emphasises his
own conscious aims in this respect in the preface to the reader
(Two Bookes) :- In these English ayres I have chiefely aymed to
couple my Words and Notes lovingly together, which will be much
for him to doe that hath not power over both. ' It seldom happens
that poet and composer are one ; but when, as in this case, the
combination does occur, it is easy to see that there is likely to be a
close connection between the twin offspring of the single brain. As
one can readily understand, in many cases the words framed them-
selves to an air in composition, or an air suggested its suitable
lyric. These verses were not intended to be read, or even printed
alone; their sole function was to be sung, and adaptability,
therefore, was an important requirement. Campion's success in
this respect is testified to by his contemporaries, one of whom,
John Davies, writes :
Never did lyrics’ more than happy strains,
Strained out of Art by Nature, so with ease
So purely hit the moods and various veins
Of Music and her hearers as do these.
And, though this success is immaterial for the point of view of
permanent literary criticism, it has left its trace in the absence of
metrical uniformity, in the novelty of some of the forms and rhythms
and especially in variable and shifting cadences, full of musical
suggestion. Of this lack of uniformity, this liquid character in his
rhythms, there are many instances, but a few will suffice from part II
of A Booke of Ayres. When Laura smiles. her sight revives both
6


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His Prosody
147
night and day,' the first line of no. ix, is itself slightly peculiar in
its freedom from any marked caesura, a feature reproduced in the
first lines of stanzas 3 and 4. But hardly any two corresponding
lines in the rest of the poem are metrically similar. No. xv, again,
contains some curious rhythms: 'If I hope, I pine; if I feare, I faint
and die. ' No. XII, 'Shall I come, if I swim ? wide are the waves,
you see,' exhibits a lack of uniformity similar to that of no. ix.
In this piece, too, we become aware of a feature which will
frequently assert itself, a certain ambiguity as to the correct
prosodic rendering. The two lines 'Shall I come, if I flie, my
deare love, to thee? ' and 'She a priest, yet the heate of love truly
felt' correspond in their respective stanzas. But to get actual
metrical correspondence, it would be necessary to read 'my deare
love'; whereas the accent falls more naturally on 'my. Which
rhythm expresses the poet's intention? To this and similar queries
there is no authoritative reply, because the poems were written for
singing, not for reading; and such ambiguities only arise when
they are read. It is, of course, of trifling importance which phrasing
is upheld; but the point is that, unless the purpose of the poem
had been chiefly musical, if, in fact, Campion had paid even a
hasty regard to its reading quality, his accurate ear would not
have tolerated the existence of such ambiguities. The poems
which contain such doubtful passages are not the best, and we
may conclude that he regarded these as mere lay-figures to be
garbed in musical raiment. But in his finer pieces, those on
which the hand of the lyrist lavished its craft, this instability
and ambiguity are absent; and, though there is abundance of
prosodic interest, it is chiefly due to other reasons. For
there was a further cause which contributed in no less measure
to this metrical variety. The period covered by Campion's
lifetime, the period of transition from the infancy of prosodic
control to complete mastery, was, inprimis, an age of experi-
ment, on the triumphs and failures of which the fabric of English
versification was securely established. While Campion was tran-
sitional in chronology only, in an age of experiment he was an
arch-experimentalist. He was not only led into the false ways of
more grievous experiment in quantitative verse and adapted
classical measures, but he affords clear evidence of having given
careful consideration to the analysis of metrical effect. It is
impossible not to infer both from his work and his own
admissions, that his metrical variety was, in great part, the fruit of
conscious experiment, the deliberate assay of novel combinations,
10_2


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148
Thomas Campion
6
controlled and guided by an exquisite ear. Take, for example,
' 'Harke, al you ladies that do sleep,' already cited. Apart from the
daring experiment of a refrain in the second line, there can be
little doubt that the poem is an attempt to naturalise classical
feet; for the lines of the last quatrain in each stanza scan,
respectively: anapaestic, anapaestic, dactylic and adonic. The
result is most charming. Take, again, the rhythms of 'Follow your
Saint; follow with accents sweet,' with its echo in ‘Love me or not,
love her I must or dye. ' These are novel cadences, and their
success is as great as their novelty. And, even in the pieces of
less metrical originality, there is much subtle handling of caesura
to prove what an adept Campion was in fingering all the varied
stops of his verse instrument.
We may take it, therefore, that there were two main influences
working upon Campion's prosody. When the lyric was a mere
puppet to dance to music, when the composer took precedence of
the poet, the musical interest affected the prosody; but, when the
composer was lost in the lyrist, his prosodic mastery had a clear
field. In relation to the metrical progress that distinguished his
age, he was an original force; an active, and not merely a passive,
element; he must have contributed far more to that progress than
he benefited by the example of others.
Tribute has been paid to the freshness and spontaneous charm
of Campion's lyrics, concealing, as they do, beneath their seemingly
artless ease, a subtle mastery of syllabic tones and values. In a few
instances he goes beyond even this, and attains to that complete-
ness and finality, that consummate roundness of expression which
betokens close kinship with great poetry.


## p. 149 (#171) ############################################

CHAPTER IX
THE SUCCESSORS OF SPENSER
It will be remembered that John Pietro Pugliano commended
the art of horsemanship to Sir Philip Sidney with such warmth
that, “If I had not beene a piece of a Logician before I came to
him, I think he would have persuaded me to have wished my selfe
a horse. ' In like manner, Sidney's famous apology for poetry and
the English language worked upon his successors so greatly that
they one and all wished themselves poets; and a surprising number
were poets. Influence cannot be confined to one man or two men,
still less to a pamphlet. But there can be no doubt that the pam-
phlet of Sidney, and the poetry of Sidney and Spenser, gave impetus
and direction to the work of succeeding poets. For through all
the work of these men, varied as it is in subject and in value,
runs the golden thread of sincerity. Each wrote about that which
interested him most deeply, and, considering the manifold affecta-
tions of speech that were the fashion, wrote with remarkable
directness. There was little affectation of language and manner;
and no affectation in the actual choice of subject. The personality
of each poet makes itself clearly felt in his work. Spenser and
Sidney did much to remove the misconceptions which were
beginning to throw out their life-killing feelers—that poetry must
be kept apart from life, that poetry must borrow dignity for its
subject from what was called learning, instead of lending dignity
to any subject by its own graciousness, that things could exist
which were too sacred or too commonplace to be treated in poetry.
'Foole, said my Muse to me, looke in thy heart and write,' might
have been the word' of each of these poets. It is the keynote
of all their work. Even in adulatory addresses to king James, there
is sincerity, because, in those addresses, the personal character
of the king (where it was known) was easily lost in the love of
the place which he held at the head of the country the writers
loved. So they wrote, and no subject was considered unfit for


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150
The Successors of Spenser
poetry. Fulke Greville, lord Brooke, was inspired by statecraft;
George Wither by the puritan spirit; Browne and Basse celebrated
the joys of country life; Sir John Davies and Drummond of
Hawthornden explored the realm of the spirit; Phineas Fletcher
took for his subject the whole construction of man; his brother
Giles, the Christian faith.
Certain literary forms or conventions were prevalent at the
time, especially the sonnet sequence, the pastoral and the allegory,
which Sidney and Spenser had taken from French and from Italian
models, and by their superb use had established in English. But
these forms were not dominant. The poets who used them inspired
them with life, and, in their hands, the forms are as fresh as the
love of the country side or of their mistress, or the beliefs in the
possibilities of life, which were expressed in them. At no other
time, perhaps, was poetry so little an exercise of imitative wit,
and so much and so generally an honest expression of personality.
William Drummond of Hawthornden was born on 13 December
1585. His father, Sir John Drummond, was of a good Scots family.
He was educated at the high school and the university of Edin-
burgh. In comparison with the lives of other poets of his day, his
life was unremarkable. The spirit of adventure and exploration
was not alien to him, but the world into which he was constrained
to adventure was not the material, but, as was beginning to be more
generally the case, the spiritual, world, into which he journeyed
further than his contemporaries, and from which he brought back
richer results of thought. He realised at an early age the scope
of his possible kingdom and, unlike his many-sided contemporaries,
was steadfast and undistracted in the pursuit of his object. Cir-
cumstances doubtless furthered, so far as circumstances may, the
metaphysical bent of his disposition. In the year 1610, when
William Drummond was twenty-five years of age, his father died,
and the only reason for the continuance of his studies in law was,
by this event, removed. He returned to Scotland immediately, ,
and lived the remainder of his life in quiet seclusion at the place
which lent its gracious peace to his retirement, and which is in-
dissolubly connected with his name.
His life, though not eventful, was not without event, and its
records are pleasantly detailed and full. The death of Elizabeth
in the year 1603 interrupted his studies at Edinburgh, for Sir John
Drummond accompanied James VI of Scotland on his royal progress
to ascend the throne of England, and, three years later, William


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Drummond of Hawthornden 151
Drummond journeyed south to join his father in London on his
way to France to study jurisprudence. He had taken his degree
at Edinburgh, and his intelligence was alive to absorb in its own
way the sights which awaited him in London. The early years of
king James's reign were days of pageant, and they stirred the
boy's imagination. The descriptions which he wrote to his friend
of the festivities in honour of the queen's brother, king Christian
of Denmark, read like passages from a medieval romance. These
a
letters, six in number, the first of which is dated 1 June and the
last 12 August, are printed in bishop Sage's folio of Drummond's
works, published in 1711,
Drummond appears to have remained two or three years in
France, and, according to bishop Sage, worked diligently. But
the list of books which he read during those years, a list which is
extant in his own handwriting, is that of a literary epicure, and
contains but one work of jurisprudence, namely the Institutes of
Justinian. A valuable letter which he wrote to Sir George Keith
of Cowburn gives an account of his life abroad, and of the vivid
impression which the beauty of certain pictures made upon his
mind. 'A stately diction, recalling the language of his favourite
romances; a love of beauty. . . a fanciful vein of moralising: these
are the marked features of the young student's letters, and not
less of the maturer writings of the poet? '
He returned in 1609 to Scotland, and, in the following year, ho
again came to London. His father died in London the same year.
William Drummond returned at the age of twenty-five to Haw-
thornden, and, as has been said, did not henceforth swerve from his
resolution to adventure into the unknown kingdom of thought.
The circumstances of his life brought him into singular touch
with the shape of death, and the great mystery of death seems
have inspired his early life with a strange attractiveness. His first
published poems were written to commemorate the death of prince
Henry, who had died on 6 November 1612. In 1613, appeared
Drummond's pastoral elegy Tears on the Death of Moeliades,
with a sonnet and two epitaphs. The poem was published by
Andro Hart, and a second edition was printed in the following
year.
Of all the elegances which were the fashion of his day, he
makes use, and, though they cannot but seem artificial to a
modern ear, they came so naturally to Drummond that they do
not for a moment obscure the deep sincerity of the poem.
1 Ward, introduction to bis edition of Drummond's works.


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152
The Successors of Spenser
6
Especially was he pleased at such play on words, as 'O hyacinths,
for aye your ai keeps still' or 'Raise whom they list to thrones,
enthron'd dethrone,' and subtle illustrations drawn from the
classics. Sir William Alexander, a Scots poet of some distinction,
wrote a complimentary sonnet to the poem. He was some
seventeen years senior to Drummond, and a friendship, which had
lately begun by a chance visit, lasted between the two until Sir
William's death.
In 1616, the Tears on the Death of Moeliades was reprinted,
but the chief place in the volume was given to a sequence of
sonnets, songs and madrigals in which the poet sings the praises of
his lady and mourns her untimely death. For again and most darkly
had the shadow of death fallen across his path. Just before his
intended marriage with Mary Cunningham in 1615, the lady died.
He had sought seclusion when worldly honours lay within his grasp,
and the disaster did not send him to the world for distraction: it
helped him to become more deeply contemplative. A continued
consciousness of the end of things, noticeable in all his works, did
not afflict him, but, rather, lifted him gently a little above the
quiet world in which he chose to live, and filled his songs and
poems with that sad sweetness to which they owe their peculiar
charm. The lines which end with 'Death since grown sweet,
begins to be desir'd,' seem to have a faint foreshadowing of the
idea which turned Shelley's Adonais into a triumph song. There
is no bitterness in the moods to which these poems give expression.
His large nature was too enamoured of death's scope and mystery
to feel small bitterness. But, for him, the quiet beauty of the
country possessed a deeper meaning, of memory and, in some sort,
of anticipation.
. . and she is gone, 0 woe!
Woods cut again do grow,
Bud doth the rose and daisy, winter done,
But we, once dead, no more do see the sun.
The elegances of his manner, which were so part of him that
they never left him, put into abrupt relief the simplicity of such
lines as these; and it is this sudden simplicity which shows that,
in mind, Drummond was more akin to Sidney, whose very phrases
he weaves into his verse, than to any other English poet.
His next published work was a poem of very different calibre
and of small value. Its elegance is unalloyed, and, as an exercise
in verse, it is almost perfect. In May 1617, king James visited
Scotland, and Forth Feasting is the felicitous title of the verses


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Drummond of Hawthornden
153
which Drummond's courtly instinct bade him compose to celebrate
the king's visit. The verses are not memorable. But in the
following year an incident both memorable and characteristic
occurred. Joseph Davis arrived at Hawthornden bearing an
introduction from Michael Drayton, for whose work Drummond
cared greatly. He wrote to Drayton and, though the two poets
never met, they began a correspondence which continued to the
year of Michael Drayton's death in 1631. This was a kind of
friendship which would appeal strongly to Drummond and to
which his nature responded. Ben Jonson, who, on his northern
tour, visited Hawthornden the same year, would have had greater
sympathy with Drummond, if Drummond had not been disturbed
by the man's vigorous actual presence. The world of letters,
however, is the richer for their meeting, although many of their
arguments must have been distasteful to Drummond's sensitive
nature. 'He dissuaded me from poetry, for that she beggared
him when he might have been a rich lawyer, physician or
merchant, writes Drummond, whose own opinion of riches is
beautifully put in The Cypress Grove—They are like to thorns
which, laid on an open hand, are easily blown away and wound
the closing and hard-gripping. The two men were at funda-
mental odds. Ben Jonson was a great poet almost in spite of
himself: Drummond used all the forces at the command of his
exquisite nature to become a better poet than he ever could be.
Flowers of Sion appeared in 1623, and to the poems was
appended a prose essay on death, The Cypress Grove, in which
Drummond reaches his highest sustained level. The poems are
religious in the widest and best meaning of that word. Like
Shelley, Drummond, beyond all the narrow limits of dogma, gave
voice to the spirit of Christ's teaching, the ultimate spirit of all
religion, namely, that God is love. He saw and sang the truth
less clearly, and, therefore, less beautifully, than Shelley, but
there is much in them of surprising similarity. In Drummond's
poems, witness especially the Hymn of the Fairest Fair, the idea
remained a beautiful theory, whereas Shelley applied the idea to
human life and worked it out in amazing detail, helped by his
profound knowledge of human nature. Drummond is a link, as
it were, between Spenser's great conception of Beauty, as the
informing spirit of life, and Shelley's greater application of that
idea to human affairs. To have reached such a point of view amid
the fierce religious quarrels of that day shows the strong indepen-
dence of Drummond's mind. But he was inspired by his personal


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154
The Successors of Spenser
griefs, by his personal difficulties in finding an answer to great
problems; he was not at all a reformer; he had no passionate wish
to alleviate the sorrow of humanity. Therein lies at once his
strength and his limitation.
He found at length a personal answer; and, having created
his faith and won through to a certain tranquillity, he no longer
wrote poetry, except as an occasional exercise, or to lament a
friend's death. He lived twenty-six years after the appearance of
Flowers of Sion and, from one point of view, his life in that year
began. He took interest in the stirring events that followed the
death of James I; he wrote a history of Scotland; he married and
had many children; he wrote topical prose pamphlets; he travelled
he rebuilt his house.
Just as the solemn mystery of death fashioned Drummond into
a poet, so the joy of life inspired George Wither his contemporary.
There is no hesitation and little deep thought in his poetry. But
for him all the common things of life were decked with the grace
of poetry. 'Before Wither, writes Charles Lamb, 'no one ever
celebrated its power at home, the wealth and the strength which this
divine gift confers upon its possessor . . . it seems to have been left
to Wither to discover that poetry was a present possession as well
as a rich reversion. ' Nor was his life passed, as was Drummond's,
in seclusion: it was caught up in the fury of his times. He was
born in 1588 at Bentworth, near Alton, Hampshire. John Greaves,
the neighbouring vicar, taught him his rudiments, and, from the
vicar's care, he went in 1604 to Magdalen college, Oxford, where
he spent two years only before he was recalled by his father to
the farm. A country life, however, did not satisfy his nature.
He went to London in 1610, to try his fortune as a writer. Little
is known of his early doings-except that he made the acquaintance
of William Browne-until, in 1612, his elegy on the death of prince
Henry, dedicated to Sir Robert Sidney, was published. The book
contained elegies on the prince and a dialogue between the prince's
ghost and Great Britain. Among the mass of verse which prince
Henry's death occasioned, Wither's effort attracted small notice.
The subject was not so congenial to him as it was to William
Drummond, though the dialogue gave some scope to his vein of
unpedantic moralising. But, in the following year, the marriage of
princess Elizabeth with the elector palatine offered him a more
suitable subject, and the princess was so pleased by his book of
Neptial Poems that she became his best patron. Though flattery


## p. 155 (#177) ############################################

George Wither
155
1
meant favour, he, in that age of flatterers, was too honest to be
servile, and his next book Abuses stript and whipt or Satiricall
Poems had an original and a characteristic dedication which ran
'to Himselfe G. W. wisheth all happiness. The satire was popular,
but displeasing to the authorities, and all the immediate happiness
the book obtained for Wither was imprisonment in the Marshalsea.
The reason why the book should have brought such summary
injustice upon its author is difficult to understand, for, unlike later
satirists, he made no personal attacks, but tilted in a genial and
not a very original manner against the general vices of human
nature. However, in the Marshalsca he was confined for some
months and, during his confinement, wrote pastorals, which were
published in 1615 under the title The Shepherds Hunting. In
the fourth eclogue, in praising the poetry of 'my Willie,' by whom
he meant his friend William Browne, he extolled the power of
poetry in general and wrote his most beautiful, if not his best
known, lines. They are written in the measure to which
the wits of Queen Anne's days contemptuously gave the name of Namby-
Pamby, in ridicule of Ambrose Philips . . . but Wither, whose darling measure
it seems to have been, may shew, that in skilful hands it is capable of ex-
pressing the subtilest movements of passion 1.
Of the same pastoral description were the poems that he next
published: Fidelia, privately printed in 1617, and Faire Virtue,
the Mistresse of Phil Arete, the revision, probably, of earlier
work, in 1622. The pastoral in Wither's hands was not a town
convention: however conventional the shepherds may be, the
freshness of the fields breathes in his poems, and an intimate
knowledge of country lore is manifested on every page. The
hounds of Philarete the Hunter are named after human virtues
and human vices, but they have the character and bearing of real
dogs; and they show, pleasantly enough, that George Wither,
whatever may be the value of his judgment of men and their ways,
knew and loved the ways of his pack with discriminating insight.
But, between 1617 and 1622, he also wrote two works of a
singularly diverse nature: Hymnes and Songs of the Church—of
which king James approved, but of which his clergy disapproved-
and Wither's Motto. The motto was Nec habeo, nec careo, nec
curo; it is partly a satire, and chiefly an extolling of the possibilities
of his own personality:
My intent was to draw the picture of mine own heart. . . . But my principal
intention was, by recording those thoughts, to confirm my own resolution
and to prevent such alterations, as time and infirmities may work upon me.
i Charles Lamb.


## p. 156 (#178) ############################################

156
The Successors of Spenser
>
6
>
Though the verses are as genial and harmless as is the intention,
they gave offence to those in authority, and, again, Wither was shut
up in the Marshalsea.
And here his first poetic period ends. He wrote countless
topical pamphlets in prose and verse, which have been collected
and printed by the Spenser Society, but nothing of literary note
except The Scholars Purgatory (c. 1625), in which, with his
customary frankness, he defends himself against those stationers
who "unchristianly vilify and scandalize alsoe' his hymns and
songs, and passes from personal defence and his usual attractive
self-revelation to an interesting dissertation on the subject of
"divine' poems in general.
When the Civil war broke out, Wither joined the parliamen-
tarians. In 1639, he was a captain of horse in the expedition
against the Scots, was soon raised to the rank of major and, in
1642, commanded the garrison of Farnham castle in Surrey. The
royalists took him prisoner soon afterwards, and he only escaped
hanging by a jest of the gallant Denham, who declared that, as
long as Wither lived, he, Denham, could not be accounted the
worst poet in England. Wither survived the jest to become major-
general of all Cromwell's horse and foot in the county of Surrey.
At the restoration, he lost the considerable fortune which he had
made from royalist sequestrations and, in 1660, was imprisoned in
Newgate for three years. Four years after his release, he died
(2 May 1667), and was buried in the Savoy church in the
Strand.
Such were the events of his second period. The poetry of that
period was not pastoral, and is not so well known as his pastoral
It is, however, intensely characteristic, and deserves to
survive not only for its continual quaintness but for its occasional
beauty: Haleluiah or Britain's Second Remembrancer is the
unpromising title, and stern puritan faith is the unpromising
subject. But the poems, composed in a three-fold volume, are
instinct with his personality and vigorous charm. Hymns Oc-
casional, Hymns Temporary, Hymns Personall are the names
of the three parts; they are written 'that all Persons, according
to their Degrees and qualities, may at all times. . . be remembred
to praise GOD; and to be mindful of their duties. There is no
occasion too homely to be improved; and each hymn is prefaced
by a short note of explanation as to the exact circumstances under
which it should be sung. Such poems as A Rocking Hymn
(exquisite in the simplicity of its beauty) show Wither at his best.
verse.


## p. 157 (#179) ############################################

William Browne
157
They have a clear sincerity; and they express a joy in the possi-
bilities of life which is remarkable and very different from what
is usually understood by the puritan spirit. They are written in
various metres, with the spontaneous ease which was part of Wither's
very being, and in which he resembles his friend William Browne.
William Browne also shared Wither's joy in life, though the
circumstances of his career formed a strong antithesis to those of his
friend's stormy life. For Browne seems to have lived as peacefully
and gracefully as he wrote. He was born at Tavistock not later
than 1591 of a good Devon family. About 1603, he went from
the grammar school of Tavistock to Exeter college, Oxford, and,
leaving the university without taking a degree, he came to
Clifford's inn and then settled at the Inner Temple (November
1611). Little is known of his life, which was without great inci-
dent. Browne was twice married. Of his first wife, no record
remains. In 1628, he married Tymothy Eversfield, daughter of Sir
Thomas Eversfield, after a courtship of some thirteen years. He
owed his position chiefly to the patronage of the Herberts and to
the fact that he coached Robert Dormer, the future earl of
Carnarvon. He died about the year 1645.
Browne's first printed poem, like that of Wither and of Drum-
mond, was concerned with the death of prince Henry. It appeared
in 1613, with an elegy by Christopher Brooke. In the same year was
published the first book of Britannia's Pastorals, his longest and
most famous work. It tells the story of the loves of Marina and
Redmond and Celand. The story is elusive and unimportant,
and serves chiefly as a means of singing the praises of England
and of his own Devon. The charm of the poem lies in its sim-
plicity of thought and diction. No rural incident is too trivial to
be recorded, and, though this triviality, especially in metaphor,
is sometimes a little far-fetched, the metaphors are often most
effective, and give an atmosphere of delicacy which is real and
refreshing. For simple beauty, there are few passages to equal
that which describes how Marina, trapped in a cave, was fed on
strawberries and cherries by a robin redbreast; and it is im-
possible to forget the two little brothers who were scared by the
angry bull, or the little lad who,
gotten new
to play his part amongst a skilful crew
of choice musicians,
was obliged to emphasise his presence by a loud and sudden noise.


## p. 158 (#180) ############################################

158
The Successors of Spenser
His poems show a capacity for warm affection; and he had many
friends among the many poets of his day. With Drayton, Wither,
Christopher Brooke, Davies, Ben Jonson, he was on terms of
intimacy; and the fact that they were his friends did not prevent
him from celebrating in verse their achievements, for which he had
great and discerning admiration. But Spenser was his master, as
he is proud to avow, and, in a less degree, Sidney. That is to say,
in the great view of life which is expressed in Spenser's poetry, the
homeliest affairs of everyday existence have their place as surely
as the heights of life's imagined possibilities ; and Browne was
strengthened in his love of these everyday affairs by Spenser's
treatment of them. If the nature of influence be pressed too
closely, a false conception is quickly produced. For the influence
lies in the time in which the men lived: the time inspired each
man according to his capacity, though the smaller men were
strengthened by the utterance of the bigger man.
Browne ends the first song of the second book of Britannia's
Pastorals with a eulogy of Spenser. He never missed an occasion
for giving voice to his love and admiration of Spenser, but this is
the most notable passage, and it seems to imply that a plan for
erecting a monument in honour of Spenser was thwarted by
'suborn'd, curs’d Avarice. This slight wrought upon Browne to
compo: e lines almost unrecognisably fierce in denunciation of 'that
gulf-devouring offspring of a devil'— my busied pen Shall jerk
to death this infamy of men. ' But he returns at the beginning
of the second song to his gentle vein, and passes in review the
English poets. In his praises of them, he shows his discernment.
He writes of 'all-loved’ Drayton, “a genuine note of all the
nymphish trains began to tune'; of Ben Jonson, ‘One so
judicious, so well knowing and A man whose least worth is to
understand'; of 'well-languag'd' Daniel; and of Brooke, 'whose
polish'd lines Are fittest to accomplish high designs. ”
For Browne was a scholar and could discriminate. He was
interested in old MSS and printed a poem of Occleve with his
Shepherd's Pipe (1614); ‘as this shall please,' he wrote, “I may be
drawn to publish the rest of his works. ' However, it did not please,
and others of Occleve's works remained in Browne's possession.
This trait probably accounts for the small care he took about the
publishing of his own works. The first book of Britannia's
Pastorals was published, as has been said, in 1613, the second in
1616, and the two were reissued together in 1625; but the third
book remained during his lifetime in manuscript, and was not
6


## p. 159 (#181) ############################################

Fulke Greville
159
published till 1852. The same is true of the Inner Temple Masque
which was performed on 13 January 1614/15, and which was not
printed till 1772, from a manuscript in the library of Emmanuel
college, Cambridge.
Fulke Greville, lord Brooke, belonged to an elder generation
than that of the other poets in this chapter, and was an exact
contemporary of Sir Philip Sidney, whose life he wrote. Unlike
Browne or Drummond, he was not primarily a poet; he belonged
rather to the older school of men, who, like Castiglione's courtier,
cultivated the germ of poetry as a faculty which should belong to
every properly constituted man. Wither was a poet masquerading
as a man of arms. His soldierly achievements cannot be taken
with perfect seriousness. Fulke Greville, primarily, was a states-
man and man of affairs. In 1598, he became treasurer of the
navy and, in 1614, chancellor of the exchequer. Born at Beau-
champ court, Warwickshire, in 1554, Fulke Greville entered
Shrewsbury school on the very same day as Philip Sidney, 17
October 1564, and, from Shrewsbury, he went to Jesus college,
Cambridge, four years later. With Sidney, he came to the court
in 1577, and travelled to Heidelberg with him in the same year.
Like Sidney, he was rapidly taken into the queen's favour, and
him, too, the queen forbade to go far from her presence. The
secretaryship to the principality of Wales was given him before the
age of thirty.
Fulké Greville was a great patron of letters. Camden was
appointed Clarencieux through his influence. He freed John
Speed's 'hand from the daily employment of a manual trade. '
He endowed a history chair at Cambridge into which he put the
renowned Dorislaus of Holland; Samuel Daniel, Henry Lok, John
Davies, William D'Avenant were glad to acknowledge their in-
debtedness to him.
Except for an elegy on Sidney, which appeared in the miscellany
The Phoenix Nest (1593), two poems in the first edition of
Englands Helicon (1600) and the tragedy of Mustapha (1609),
the work of lord Brooke remained unpublished during his life-
time. In 1633, five years after his death, appeared a volume
containing, as the title-page recounts, Certaine learned and
elegant workes written in his Youth and familiar exercise with
Sir Philip Sidney. They include A Treatise of Humane Learn-
ing, An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour, A Treatie of
Warres, his tragedies Mustapha and Alaham and a set of poems


## p. 160 (#182) ############################################

160
The Successors of Spenser
which, according to the fashion of the time, are named sonnets,
called Caelica'. In 1652, appeared his life of Sir Philip Sidney,
and, in 1670, the Remains of Sir Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke,
being poems of Monarchy and Religion, never before printed.
The reason which prevented the publication of his poems is,
probably, the same as that which restrained him from publishing
his life of Sidney and from writing his history of queen Elizabeth.
With the exception of some of the poems in Caelica, they deal
with subjects of statecraft which might have been easily mis-
interpreted by enemies. As Elizabeth grew old, the question of
her successor and of the best form of government in general
for the country troubled all the finest minds in England. Her
death was not only a personal grief to such men as Greville and
Ralegh; it foreshadowed to them the eventual death of monarchy.
“Their author,' writes Charles Lamb of his two tragedies, ‘has
strangely contrived to make passion, character and interest, of
the highest order subservient to the expression of state dogmas. '
Fulke Greville was forty-nine years old when the queen died. To
his feeling for her he gives beautiful expression in his digression
in the life of Sidney in which he recounts the features of her reign
and policy, and this feeling merged into his conception of the place
which, to his thinking, she filled admirably, that is to say, into his
conception of monarchy. This is why, through the cold, intellec-
tual force of his treatment and reasoning, there shines the living
glow of personal passion. Nor is it necessary to search for the
original of Caelica; internal evidence strongly points to the fact
that these poems afford one more proof of the power of Elizabeth. .
Most of the sonnets' in Caclica, and the whole of the poems
Of Humane Learning, Of Fame and Honour, Of Warres and
on Monarchy and Religion are written in a six-lined stanza,
riming ababcc. The versification of the tragedies is of peculiar
interest, for, although the choruses, for the most part, are written
in riming couplets, in the speeches great care has been taken to
obtain the effect of the couplet without its monotony. Consecu-
tive couplets rarely occur : most speeches of any length conclude
with a couplet: there are many instances of unriming lines, and
many rimes run in quatrains abab.
Brooke's death was sudden and tragic. He was murdered in
1628 by his servant Haywood, who thought he had been omitted
from his master's will. He wrote the epitaph which was cut on
his tombstone. It amply epitomises his life: “Fulke Grevil-
i See vol. ui of the present work, p. 267.


## p. 161 (#183) ############################################

Sir John Davies
161
Servant to Queene Elizabeth—Councellor to King James-and
Frend to Sir Philip Sydney. Trophaeum Peccati. '
Sir John Davies (not to be confused with John Davies of
Hereford) was a man of the same pattern, though without lord
Brooke's memory of the spacious days' and without his deep
austerity. He, too, was a man of affairs, and rose to a high
position in the state. His life, however, had not the same great
beginning, and his was no smooth passage to fame. Born in 1569,
at Tisbury in Wiltshire, he went to Winchester and Oxford (partly,
it appears, resident at New college, partly at Queen's college),
and, like the majority of young men of the time, came, in 1587, to
study law in London. But he quarrelled with the friend to whom
he had dedicated his Orchestra, Richard Martin, and, entering the
hall, armed with a dagger, he broke his cudgel over Martin's head,
who was eating his dinner at the barristers' table. In consequence
of this outrage on the benchers, he was disbarred. For an orphan,
with his way to make, the calamity was heavy. He returned to
Oxford in 1598, three years after he had been called, and wrote
his great poem Nosce Teipsum. Lord Mountjoy, afterwards earl
of Devonshire, approved of it so highly that he advised Davies to
publish it, with a dedicatory poem to the queen. This, Davies
was not slow to do. The poem appeared the year after his ex-
pulsion from the bar, and added largely to his growing reputation
as a poet. The Hymns to Astroea appeared in the same
year, and Davies's services were in request to write words for
‘entertainments' offered to her majesty. A Dialogue between a
Gentleman Usher and a Poet, A contention betwixt a Wife, a
Widdow and a Maide and A Lottery, are the names of those that
are extant. A Lottery gained the queen's acknowledgment,
and, through the influence of lord Ellesmere, Davies, after a formal
apology to the benchers and to Richard Martin, was reinstated at
the bar in 1601. His career now began. He was among those
who went with lord Hunsdon to escort king James to the English
throne, and James was sufficiently impressed with him to appoint
him solicitor-general for Ireland, under lord Mountjoy, then lord
deputy. In December 1603, on his arrival in Dublin, he was
knighted, and, some years later, he married the daughter of lord
Audley. One of his children was the famous countess of Hunting-
don. His work in Ireland, where he remained until 1619, was
distinguished, and how deeply he was interested in Irish affairs may
be gathered from his Discourse of the true reasons why Ireland
>
E. L, IV.
CH. IX
11


## p. 162 (#184) ############################################

162
The Successors of Spenser
has never been intirely subdued till the beginning of His Majesty's
reign. In 1619, he resumed his seat in the House of Commons
as member for Newcastle under Lyme, to which he had been
elected in 1614, and, just before he could assume the office of chief
justice, to which he had been appointed in 1626, he died suddenly
of an apoplexy.
Orchestra or a Poeme on Dauncing was written before June
1594, although it was not published until 1596. The poem is in
the form of a dialogue between Penelope and one of her suitors,
and consists of 131 stanzas of seven lines, each riming ababbcc.
In the dedicatory sonnet to ‘his very friend MA. Richard Martin,'
which, in spite of the reconciliation, was omitted from the edition
of 1622, Davies describes the poem as 'this suddaine, rash half-
capreol of my wit,' and reminds Martin how it was written in
fifteen days. The fact is worthy of attention because it shows the
writer's ability and mastery over his material. The poem bears
no sign of haste in the making. Gallant and gay, it flows with
transparent clearness to its conclusion, and the verse has the happy
ease which marks all the work of Davies, and makes it comparable
with the music of Mozart.
His next work Nosce Teipsum possesses the same fluidity of
thought and diction, which is the more remarkable as the poem is
deeply philosophical. The sub-title explains the subject : 'This
oracle expounded in two elegies. 1. Of Humane knowledge.
2. Of the Soule of Man and the immortalitie thereof. ' The first
edition was published in 1599, the second, 'newly corrected and
amended,' in 1602, the third in 1608, and, of course, the poem was
included in the collected edition which Davies himself made of his
poems in 1622.
Wouldst thou be crowned the Monarch of a little world?
command thyself,' wrote Francis Quarles, who was certainly well-
acquainted with Nosce Teipsum, in the second century of his
Enchiridion, and that sentence gives the gist of the first part of
the poem on Humane Knowledge. Davies then passes on to
examine the nature of the soul, its attributes and its connection
with the body; and, having defined with exactness what he means
by the soul, proceeds to prove its immortality by means of argu-
ments for and against his proposition. Proof in such a matter is not
possible; but a personal answer to the great question, so sincerely
thought and so lucidly expressed as is this answer of Davies, will
always have its value. Nor is Nosce Teipsum a treatise which
ingenuity has fashioned into verse and which more properly would


## p. 163 (#185) ############################################

Sir Henry Wotton
163
be expressed in plain prose. Davies does not, as it were, embroider
his theme with verse, but uses verse, and its beauties of line and
metaphor, to make his meaning more clear, and, thereby, gallantly
justifies the employment of his medium. This mastery of his is
enviously complete ; but, perhaps, it is most conspicuous in the
Hymns to Astroea which were first published in 1599. As the
title-page announces, they are written ‘in Acrosticke verse. ' They
are twenty-six in number: each poem is of three stanzas (two of
five lines, one of six lines), and each line begins with a different
letter of the name Elizabetha Regina. Yet, in spite of this
fantastic formality, not a line is forced, and one or two of the
poems, notably hymn v, To the Lark
Earley, cheerfull, mounting Larke,
Light's gentle usher, Morning's clark,
are exquisite songs.
.
Sir Henry Wotton owes his literary fame to one poem of
memorable beauty, to his friendship with Sir Edward Dyer and
John Donne, and to the twofold fact that an elegy on his death was
composed by Abraham Cowley and that his life was written by his
illustrious fellow-angler, Izaak Walton. The author of 'You meaner
beauties of the night' deserves immortality, though many authors
of songs as beautiful remain unknown. He was born at Boughton
hall, in the parish of Boughton Malherbe, Kent, in 1568, and was
educated at Winchester and New college, which he entered on
5 June 1584. His father's death left him in a position to travel,
of which he availed himself to the full.