No More Learning

9
1 The Month, vol. LXXXVI, Jan. -April 1896, pp. 32 et seq.


## p. 131 (#153) ############################################

John Davies of Hereford 131
A good way of learning to appreciate Southwell's poetry is to
compare it with that of another religious poet, John Davies of
Hereford Davies was born in Hereford, about 1565, and settled
at Oxford as a writing-master, living, as it appears, an easy
and prosperous life. The principal model of his uninspired verse
was Joshua Sylvester, the translator of Du Bartas's Semaines, on
which he founded his long poem, Microcosmos (1603); but he owed
something, also, to his namesake, Sir John Davies, whose Nosce
Teipsum formed the basis of Mirum in Modum (1602) and Summa
Totalis (1607). Davies of Hereford is no lyric poet. He writes
long philosophical and theological treatises in rime, modelling his
stanzas on Spenser; and neither his imagination nor his reasoning
power is sufficient to make him more than mildly interesting.
The antithesis and paradox prominent in Southwell may be found
also in Davies, but wearing the air rather of scholastic pedantry
than of living and effectual truth. Davies borrows from Sylvester
the practice of playing upon words, and carries it to tedious
lengths. In spite of the work of Sir John Davies, it may be fairly
said that the art of reasoning in verse was not mastered till
Dryden's day; and John Davies of Hereford is chiefly valuable
as illustrating by contrast the genius of Southwell, who dealt with
the same theological truth, and from much the same intellectual
standpoint, in an entirely different manner.
The same might fairly be said of Abraham Fraunce's The
Countesse of Pembrokes Emanuell, which appeared three years
before Saint Peters Complaint. Fraunce, who was a fellow of
Saint John's college, Cambridge, and a distinguished lawyer, is
of interest in the story of English prosody, since he belonged to
the Cambridge group, including Gabriel Harvey and others, which
attempted to force upon English poetry the classical metres. All
his poems are in hexameters. In The Countesse of Pembrokes
Emanuell, the poem on The Nativity is in what he calls riming
hexameters; but as this means that the last syllable only of the
lines is rimed in couplets, the effect is scarcely different from that
of the unrimed hexameters, especially as in both cases he avails
himself to excess of the convenience of participles ending in -ing.
Like many poets of his and the succeeding age, he paraphrased
some of the Psalms. A learned and laborious person rather than
a poet, he freely translated Thomas Watson's Latin poem Amyntas,
and part of Tasso's Amintà, and published the two in The
Countesse of Penibrokes Yvychurch in 1591.
9-2


## p. 132 (#154) ############################################

132 Robert Southwell. Samuel Daniel
6
In Samuel Daniel, we reach the leading example of the graver,
reflective poetry of the later years of Elizabeth's reign. Daniel is
not a religious nor a theological poet in the sense in which the
words may be used of Southwell and John Davies; and, if he is
called a philosophical poet, it is not in the sense in which the term
is applied to such writers as Fulke Greville. There is no dialectic
in his poems, and no system is advanced ; they are philosophical
in the sense that their author was a man with a wide and grave
outlook upon life, in whom (though he sang exquisitely of love)
judgment was stronger than passion, who moralised sincerely
and sanely over his own and other people's feelings and who, in
his culture, his synthetic mind and his belief in the importance of
humanism, stands much nearer to later poets, 'critics of life'as
they have been called, than to the singers of the dawn. In his 'vast
philosophic gravity and stateliness of sentiment,' to use Hazlitt's
phrase about him, he resembles Wordsworth, to whom he has
also other points of likeness to be mentioned later: in other
respects, when allowance has been made for all differences of time
and opportunity, it may not be fanciful to see in him the Matthew
Arnold of his age.
Samuel Daniel, the son of a music master, was born, probably
near Taunton in Somerset, in 1562, and went to Magdalen hall
(now Hertford college), Oxford, where, however, he did not take a
degree. In 1585, we find him in London, appearing as the translator
of Paolo Giovio's book on impresas, to which he wrote a preface.
He may, perhaps, have been in the service of lord Stafford.
In 1586, he visited Italy, and, on his return, became tutor, at
Wilton, to Shakespeare's friend and patron William Herbert, to
whom he dedicated his Defence of Ryme ; and here he made the
acquaintance of Herbert's mother, Mary countess of Pembroke.
Another of his friends was lord Mountjoy, afterwards earl of Devon-
shire, whom Daniel visited at Wanstead; and, in 1595, he was ap-
pointed tutor to Anne Clifford, daughter of Margaret countess of
Cumberland, with whose family he remained on terms of intimate
friendship, though he seems to have found the work of tutor a
bar to his poetical progress. In 1603, after greeting James I with
a Panegyrike Congratulatorie, he was appointed inspector of
Kirkham's children of the queen’s revels. Here he remained,
living a prosperous and easy life, which was only once threatened
by a slight incident. So far back as 1595, in the second book of his
epic, T'he Civil Wars, he had eulogised Robert Devereux, second
earl of Essex; and, on the publication of his play Philotas, in


## p. 133 (#155) ############################################

Samuel Daniel
133
1605, the character of Philotas was supposed to stand for that of
Essex, and the author of the play to be in sympathy with that
noble's rebellion. On being summoned before the lords in council,
he was able to prove that the first three acts of the play had been
read by the master of the revels before 1600. This, however,
could not save him from a reprimand from Essex's old friend,
Devonshire. Of his life, there is nothing more to chronicle except
that he spent his later years on his farm at Beckington, in Somerset,
where he died in 1619. His office passed to his brother John
Daniel, author of Songs for the Lute, Viol and Voice (1606).
Samuel Daniel began his literary career with a set of sonnets
entitled Delia. Twenty-seven sonnets by him had been appended
to the 1591 edition of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, without, as he
declared, his authorisation, and, probably, through the action of
Nashe. In the following year, appeared the first edition of Delia,
containing fifty sonnets, and including revised versions of eighteen
of those that had appeared in Astrophel and Stella. In 1592,
came the second edition of Delia, with four new sonnets, and
The Complaynt of Rosamond. The third edition, published in
1594, includes twenty-three new stanzas to Rosamond, and Cleo-
patra, a tragedy. In this third edition, the prose epistolary
dedication to the countess of Pembroke, which had appeared in the
previous editions, has given place to a sonnet addressed to her; while
Cleopatra is also dedicated to the same lady, the poet stating that
he wrote it at her command as a companion to her own tragedy of
Antonie (1592). In 1595, came the first four books of The Civil
Wars between the two Houses of Lancaster and York, the fifth
book being published the same year; and it was mainly the desire
to go on with his epic that made his duty as tutor to lady Anne
Clifford seem tedious to him. During the next four years, he
published nothing. In 1599, Musophilus, or a General Defence of
Learning was issued, dedicated to Fulke Greville, and, in the same
volume, was included the first of the poetical epistles, that from
Octavia to Marcus Antonius, which was dedicated to the countess
of Cumberland. In the same year, appeared the first collected
edition of his works, the Poeticall Essayes; and, two years later,
an augmented collection was published, including the sixth book of
the Civil Wars, and showing much revision of the text of other
poems. In 1602, he replied to Campion's Observations in the Art
of English Poesie with his prose Defence of Ryme', a curious and
admirable work which was the last serious blow dealt to the
1 See vol. in of the present work, chap. XIV.


## p. 134 (#156) ############################################

134 Robert Southwell.
Samuel Daniel
a
Latinisers, whom old Gabriel Harvey, then still living, had ad-
vanced into estimation, until the movement was checked by the
ridicule of Nashe and his fellows. In the same year, came the
Panegyrike Congratulatorie, on the accession of James I, and
then followed a few years in which Daniel's attention was very
largely occupied by the composition of the masques in which the
queen, Anne of Denmark, delighted. The Vision of 12 God-
desses (published 1604); The Queenes Arcadia (published 1606),
adapted from Guarini's Pastor Fido; Tethys Festival: or the
Queenes Wake (published 1610) and Hymens' Triumph (published
1615) all belong to this period, during which, also, Daniel became one
of the grooms of the queen's privy chamber. In 1605, he published
Certaine Small Poems, which included Philotas and one of his
best known lyrics, Ulisses and the Syren, and, in 1609, a new
edition of the Civil Wars, now comprising eight books. In 1623,
his brother John issued his whole works. ' It will be seen that
Daniel's activity was wide; and it should be mentioned that his prose
works included, also, a history of England (1612). He began, in
the usual way, as a translator and a sonneteer; his scope increased
until he embraced tragedy, masque and epic. And, his natural bent
being set strongly towards history, it was to epic that he attached
the greatest importance. He believed that men were more
influenced by it than by any other form of literature.
Daniel's sonnets have been discussed elsewhere', and no further
mention need be made of them here, while his Senecan tragedies
and his masques also belong to another section of this work With
The Complaynt of Rosamond, we come into touch with Daniel
in his most characteristic mood. The honour had been accorded
to him of mention by name in Spenser's Colin Clout. The 'new
shepherd late up sprong' is bidden to 'rouse thy feathers quickly,
Daniell'; and Spenser goes on to say that most, me seemes, thy
accent will excell In tragick plaints and passionate mischance. '
In Rosamond, we have the tragic plaint, combined with the
interest in English history, the ‘philosophic gravity, the pre-
occupation with morals, which are all characteristic of Daniel.
Rosamond describes and laments her sin with the king much in
the manner of the stories in A Mirror for Magistrates, but
with more flexibility, more sweetness and more smoothness.
Churchyard's tale of Shore's Wife, doubtless, was his model; but
the difference between the two poems is instructive as to the
advance that the intervening years had brought about in the
1 Sce vol. III, chap. XII.
2 See volumes v and vi.


## p. 135 (#157) ############################################

6
Samuel Daniel
135
use of language, the form of English poetry and urbanity of
judgment. Musophilus shows another side of Daniel's mind—the
importance he attached to literature and culture' as refining and
enlarging elements of life.
The poem is a dialogue between
Philocosmus, a courtier, and Musophilus, a man of letters, in
whom speaks Daniel himself. From the days of Daniel to those
of Matthew Arnold there has been in English literature no such
important pleading for the influence of letters. In Castiglione's
view of a courtier, letters had played a part : Daniel soars far above
the chivalric view of the subject; and one of the most eloquent and
lofty passages of his poetry—an apostrophe to the English lan-
guage as a force that is to spread civilisation over the world-
includes a remarkable piece of prophecy. The worlds in the
yet unformëd Occident’are to come refined with accents that are
ours. ' 'O who,' he cries, 'can tell for what great work in hand
The greatness of our style is now ordained ? '
His immense faith in his native tongue unites in him the man
of letters with the patriot and the statesman : a combination that
may be seen also in his prose Defence of Ryme. Secure of some
niche in the temple of fame (“Something I shall be,' he writes to
the countess of Pembroke, “though not the best '), he values his
immortality not so much for himself as for the English language;
and the English language is to attain a beauty and an influence
worthy of the English constitution. Frequently in the poems of
Daniel there sounds a note of sadness, the regret, of a man who
feels himself born too late, for great days that are gone. It is
heard in the epistle to prince Henry which introduces Philotas,
and very clearly again in the Panegyrike Congratulatorie. There
must have been many thoughtful men and good patriots whose
minds were similarly affected by the troubles of the later years of
the reign of Elizabeth; and, whatever may have been Daniel's
actual relation to the plot of Essex, there can be little question
that though, like Essex, he was a protestant, he had, like Essex,
sympathies with the Catholics, and must have been for some
reasons inclined to wish that Essex could have become king. At
any rate, he addresses to James what is at once a glowing patriotic
poem and a shrewd warning that the state of the times needs firm
handling from the monarch. He looks back to the despotism of
the Tudors with longing, and sees in a strong monarchy the promise
of a return of the old order, decency and security—the 'ancient
native modesty' which had never existed in his lifetime, but was
the dream of a patriotic poet.
-


## p. 136 (#158) ############################################

136 Robert Southwell. Samuel Daniel
This regret it was, doubtless, which spurred him to the com-
position of his great epic, The Civil Wars. An interest in English
history, manifested even more clearly in the dramatic Chronicles
than in the printed poetry, was characteristic of the time. Even
before the loss of the Spanish Armada, William Warner, sometime
a student at Oxford and then an attorney, had published in 1586
a part of his long historical poem, Albion's England, which began
with the Flood, passed through Grecian mythology to the Trojan
war, and so, by means of Brute, to England, the history of which
he carried down to his own period, including even the execution
of Mary queen of Scots. Warner's poem, which is written in the
old 'fourteeners,' rimed in couplets, was very successful; and, as
new editions were called for, the author continued to revise it,
and to add recent events, including the loss of the Spanish Armada,
to his story. Before his death in 1609, he had added three more
books, in which he embarked on the history of Scotland and Wales.
Often clumsy and sometimes dull, the poem contains a number
of good stories, like that of the wooing of Argentile, daughter of
Adelbright, king of Diria, and Curan, son of a Danish prince,
or that of the murder of Turgesius, the Norwegian conqueror of
Ireland, by youths disguised as girls, all told with a brave sim-
plicity. It delights in legend as much as does Poly-Olbion; but
it lacks both the haunting regret which often inspires that protest
against the inroads of time, and lacks, also, in its superficial, sturdy
patriotism, the philosophic and humane intention of Daniel's Civil
Wars.
In a less marked degree, Daniel took the Miltonic view of
the poet's office. The poet was not only to delight, but to
instruct and fortify; and, perhaps unwisely, Daniel regarded
epic as the best form of poetry for the purpose.
Guided
always by principle rather than by passion, he adopted the
poetic theory followed two centuries later by Wordsworth, and
worked something on Wordsworth’s lines, believing in the will and
the message rather than in the inspiration. It is a tribute to the
force of his mind and the fineness of his taste that The Civil Wars
is as interesting as an unprejudiced reader must find it. At
the worst, it can only be regarded as a mistake, in that it
occupied time which the poet might have devoted to other kinds
of poetry. There are, no doubt, long stretches of dulness in the
eight books; there is too much chronicle and too little drama;
but the subject, though of little importance to the world outside
England, was, in Daniel's view, of immense importance to the
a


## p. 137 (#159) ############################################

The Civil Wars
137
Englishmen through whom the world was to be civilised. The
whole poem is grave, dignified and wise; it never falls below a
very creditable level of matter and execution. It stands to Daniel's
best poetry in much the same relation as The Excursion stands
to Wordsworth's best. Daniel's example, indeed, may have sup-
ported Wordsworth through the labour of writing The Excursion,
into which he wove', with perfect propriety, a stanza from Daniel's
poem, To the Lady Margaret, countesse of Cumberland, ending
with the well known lines :
And that unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is Man!
The eight books of The Civil Wars contain nearly 900 stanzas of
eight lines each. The first book tells the story of England from
the Conquest to the return of Hereford against Richard II; the
other seven describe the wars of the Roses down to the accession
of Edward IV and his marriage to Elizabeth Grey. The poet does
not hesitate to draw the moral from these events, as from the story
of Rosamond or of Octavia, and the poem becomes particularly
interesting in book vi, where Daniel ascribes Cade's rebellion to
the spread of knowledge and the invention of artillery. In his
desire to prove himself 'the remnant of another time' and to
celebrate the good days that are gone, Daniel seems here almost to
contradict his own views on the importance of culture and letters;
but in his day the ideals of Thomas Love Peacock’s ‘learned friend'
were unknown. Democracy was not even a name, and discontent
was not yet called 'divine. ' 'Swelling sciences' were “the gifts of
griefe,' and the political absolutist who told James I that the
weight of all seems to rely Wholly upon thine own discretion' put
the spread of knowledge and the increase of discontent together
as unqualified evils. Indeed, like all the writers of his day in whom
the spirit of the age of chivalry still lingered-like Shakespeare
himself—Daniel had no sympathy with 'the mob. Yet the
patriotism which his epic was written to inspire was none the less
lofty and sincere because he regarded it as, with knowledge and
culture, the province of the knight and the noble only.
Ben Jonson, who (for a reason that will probably never be
discovered now, but may have been not unconnected with Daniel's
opposition to the Latinists) never appreciated his work, not only
parodied Daniel's verses in Everyman in his Humour (act v) and
The Staple of News (act v, sc. 1), but said bitter things about him
9
1 The Excursion, iv, 324–331.


## p. 138 (#160) ############################################

138 Robert Southwell.
Samuel Daniel
to Drummond of Hawthornden. “An honest man, but no poet,'
was his phrase. “He wrote Civil Wars and yet had not one battle
in all his book. ' "Too much historian in verse,' said Drayton in
bis epistle to Henry Reynolds Of Poets and Poesy, and added
that his manner better fitted prose. ' Both Jonson and Drayton
‘
hit upon weak spots in Daniel's Civil Wars, regarded as an epic :
neither, perhaps, took sufficiently into account the ethical purpose
with which Daniel wrote. Daniel's model, undoubtedly, was the
Pharsalia of Lucan; and Guilpin, in his Skialetheia, states that he
was called by some 'a Lucanist. ' It may be allowable, perhaps, to
find him nearer to Vergil than Lucan. Admitting that the work
has little of Vergil's dramatic power, its sweetness and the sim-
plicity and purity of its style resemble rather the Augustan poet
than the Neronian. Daniel's object was not so much to interest and
excite his readers as to rouse in them, by presenting their national
history in a moral and philosophic light, a spirit of wise patriotism;
and the wisdom, gravity and sincerity of his epic atone for its lack
of vivid incident and dramatic force. If, like his masques, it is too
serious,' the fault was deliberately committed.
In some ways, the epic is Daniel's most characteristic work: as
poetry, it falls short of such poems as his Epistles (to Sir Thomas
Egerton, lord Henry Howard, lady Anne Clifford and others),
his letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius, the charming little
lyrics in Hymens' Triumph, or the two which later taste has
selected as the best of his shorter poems, the Epistle to the Lady
Margaret, countesse of Cumberland, and the 'ballad'-or, rather,
the discussion upon honour-called Ulisses and the Syren. If the
sonnets, beautiful as they are, savour a little of an exercise in
poetry, if the masques are 'too serious' and the epic shows him
“too much historian in verse,' in these two poems he completely
proves his title to the 'something . . . though not the best' he
modestly claimed, and almost to the eulogies accorded to him by
others of his contemporaries besides Spenser.
The most glowing tribute of all came from Francis Davison,
who said in the Poetical Rapsody that Daniel's ‘Muse hath
surpassed Spenser,' and headed his poem : "To Samuel Daniel
Prince of English poets, upon his three several sorts of poesie.
Lyrical, in his Sonnets. Tragical, in Rosamond and Cleopatra.
Heroicall, in his Civill Warres. ' The last verse of the poem states
that, as Alexander conquered Greece, Asia and Egypt, so Daniel
conquered all poets in these fields. "Thou alone,' says Davison,
'art matchlesse in them all. ' From praise so extravagant as this, it
6
>
6
6


## p. 139 (#161) ############################################

Daniel's Diction
139
is pleasant to turn to the comments of the author of The Returne
from Parnassus, part II (acted 1601—2) who speaks (act 1, sc. 2)
of 'sweet honey-dropping D[aniel]. ' The remainder of Judicio's
remarks on this poet seem to imply that he knew little or nothing
of Daniel's work besides the sonnets to Delia; for, after stating
that he
doth wage
War with the proudest big Italian,
That melts his heart in sugared sonneting,
he goes on to warn him that he should
more sparingly make use
Of other's wit, and use his own the more;
That well may scorn base imitation.
We know from the dedication to Cleopatra that one of Daniel's
wishes was to break free from Italian influence. He aspires to
make
the melody of our sweet isle
heard to Tyber, Arne and Po,
That they might know how far Thames doth outgo
The music of declinëd Italy.
Still, the criticism is not uninstructive. It shows that the
sweetness and purity of Daniel's language, which won the praise of
Meres, Lodge, Drummond, Carew and others, was fully recognised
in his own day; and it hints at a timidity in the poet which may
account for the comparative lack in his work of pure lyrical
outburst. His was a mind of fine taste rather than of powerful
creative genius. He was eminent as a poet, as Matthew Arnold
was eminent, because he was first of all a critic of life and letters.
Coleridge bears a remarkable tribute to the purity of language
which is not the least important of Daniel's characteristics. "The
style and language,' he wrote in Table Talk of the epic, ‘are just
such as any very pure and manly writer of the present day-
Wordsworth, for example-would use; it seems quite modern in
comparison with the style of Shakespeare. ' Like Southwell's, the
English of Daniel is notably free from words of Latin origin ; and
the constant labour he devoted to the revision of his text, as it
passed through new editions, all tended towards greater simplicity
and purity. Yet he was no archaist, as Coleridge saw. He had no
taste for what in one of his sonnets he calls the 'aged accents and
untimely words’ of Spenser. He regarded the English of his own
era as a sufficient and living tongue, and, by his use of it, did more
to establish it also as a classical and polite tongue than has,
perhaps, been commonly recognised. As a metrist, he was no


## p. 140 (#162) ############################################

140 Robert Southwell. Samuel Daniel
innovator. By his nature and the nature of his material, he
was inclined, like Southwell, again, to the decasyllabic line. His
Civil Wars are written in eight-lined stanzas riming abababcc ;
Musophilus is in lines of the same length riming ababab, or,
occasionally, ababcc; Rosamond is in rime royal; the letter from
Octavia and the Panegyrike Congratulatorie are in the same
metre as the epic. Only rarely, as in the lyrics in Hymens'
Triumph, does he use anything like a complicated structure; and
he invests the eights and sixes of Ulisses and the Syren with
something of the grave dignity of the decasyllable. His technical
triumph is the investment of the decasyllabic line with the utmost
sweetness and smoothness, while yet contriving to evade monotony;
and the skilful use of an occasional rugged line, such as ‘Melan-
cholies opinion, Customs relation,' or 'Impietie of times, Chastities
abator' (both from Rosamond), helps to prove him a finished
artist in poetic structure.
For a reason which is not very easy to discover, Samuel Daniel
has not been appreciated by ages subsequent to his own as he
should have been. As a thinker, in his regret for the great days
that had just passed, his hopes of a strong monarchy, his gravity,
his culture and his philosophical outlook, he is fully representative
of the best minds of a society already tottering to a fall.
writer, he achieved a great advance towards clarity and fixity of
style. It is difficult to avoid thinking that, if Dryden and his age
had known and appreciated him better, Daniel could have been
of considerable service to the men of letters of the Restoration,
in their work of reducing the English language to accuracy and
order.
As a


## p. 141 (#163) ############################################

CHAPTER VIII
THOMAS CAMPION
6
>
THOMAS CAMPION, who was born on Ash Wednesday, 12
February 1566/7, was the son of well-to-do middle-class parents.
His father, John Campion, was a member of the Middle Temple,
and, by profession, one of the cursitors of the chancery court, the
clerks of course' (who made out the writs de cursu according to
the procedure requisite in the various districts).
John Campion was buried at St Andrew's, Holborn, on
8 October 1576, and, about a year later, his relict Lucy, who was
the daughter of Laurence Searle, one of the queen's serjeants-at-
arms, married Augustine Steward, of a family which was of some
importance in the north-easterly home counties, and from which,
through his mother, Oliver Cromwell was descended. There were
no children of this marriage, which Lucy did not long survive, for
she died in 1580, leaving her children, Thomas and his sister Rose,
in the care of Steward. In 1581, Steward married Anne, daughter
of Thomas Argall, and relict of Clement Sisley of Barking, who
brought him a second stepson, Thomas Sisley, a lad of about the
same age as Campion.
During their minority, both lads were under Steward's tute-
lage ; and, in 1581, they were entered as gentlemen pensioners
at Peterhouse, Cambridge, then under the mastership of Andrew
Perne, with whom, in his capacity as dean of Ely, Steward had
business relations. Neither of the boys matriculated or proceeded
to a degree. After four years of study, they left the university,
and, on 27 April 1586, Campion was entered at Gray's inn,
possibly with a view to his pursuing a legal profession. It is
clear, however, from his works, that he had little sympathy with,
or respect for, legal studies; and he does not appear to have been
called to the bar.
His later movements cannot be ascertained with certainty,
though he appears to have kept up his connection with Gray's inn


## p. 142 (#164) ############################################

142
Thomas Campion
for some years. In 1591, a set of five of his poems appeared anony-
mously among the Songs of Divers Noblemen and Gentlemen,
appended to Newman's surreptitious edition of Sidney's Astrophel
and Stella. These, possibly, were pirated by the enterprising pub-
lisher from MS copies in circulation after the fashion of those
times, or lent by Nashe, who was a friend of Campion and who
contributed the introduction : for not only are they full of obvious
misprints, but there is an accumulated weight of internal evidence
to show that the poet took part in the earl of Essex's expedition,
for the succour of Henry IV, against the League, which reached
Dieppe in August 1591, and laid siege to Rouen.
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.


## p. 143 (#165) ############################################

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


## p. 145 (#167) ############################################

?
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.


## p. 146 (#168) ############################################

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


## p. 147 (#169) ############################################

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


## p. 148 (#170) ############################################

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


## p. 151 (#173) ############################################

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.


## p. 152 (#174) ############################################

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


## p. 153 (#175) ############################################

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.