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Edmund Spenser.

stanza 28 of the 2nd of the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie; and Drummond, CXXIII, 1-2, on which see note. II make mate. See note under CXLI.

12-XXII. The reader will compare this with similar vaticinations by Shakspeare and others (LXVII, &c.).

=

XXIII. ensue = follow (intrans.)-more frequently transitive in Spenser pursue, as in his dedicatory sonnet under CXLV. 13-XXIV. culver dove. In the first and all the early editions this sonnet, the last of the Amoretti, is numbered 'LXXXIX' instead of LXXXVIII, the 35th ('My hungry eyes through greedy covetize') having been repeated by mistake as the 83rd. It may be noted that Todd (1805), who claims and has heretofore been allowed the credit of having first rectified this blunder, was anticipated by Hughes in 1715. 5-13-VIII-XXIV. From Amoretti and Epithalamion. Written not long since by Edmunde Spenser. 1595. Prefixed to these 'sweete conceited Sonets,' as Ponsonby the publisher calls them in the Epistle Dedicatory to Sir Robert Needham, who had come over from Ireland in the same ship that brought the MS. from Spenser, are two commendatory sonnets by G. W. senior' and 'G. W. I.' (conjecturally George Whetstone senior and junior) which Prof. Child therefore errs in stating to have been 'first printed' in the 1611 folio.

Sir Walter Raleigh.

13-XXV. Appended to Spenser's Faerie Queene, 1590 (Books I-III), and entitled in full A Vision upon this conceipt of the Faery Queene. 'This noble sonnet,' says Dr. Hannah (The Courtly Poets, from Raleigh to Montrose, 1870, p. 215), 'is alone sufficient to place Raleigh in the rank of those few original writers who can introduce and perpetuate a new type in a literature; a type distinct from the "Visions" which Spenser translated. The highest tribute which it has received is the imitation of Milton:

"Methought I saw my late espoused saint."

1

But Mr. Todd quotes a sonnet, printed as early as 1594, beginning:—
Methought I saw upon Matilda's tomb."

Waldron gives another, signed "E. S.," which was printed in 1612

1 See CLIII, p. 77.

The Vision of Matilda, prefixed to Drayton's Matilda, 1594, and signed 'H. G. Esquire.'

And the echo is still repeated by poets nearer our own times.—

"Methought I saw the footsteps of a throne."

Wordsworth: Miscellaneous Sonnets.

"Methought I saw a face divinely fair,

With nought of earthly passion."

Lyra Apost. No. xcii.

'Methought there was around me a strange light." Williams: Thoughts in Past Years. No, lv, &c.'

Raleigh is here employing a style-truly the very hyperbole of praisewhich the reader will avoid the error of accepting in too prosaic a spirit. It were in Horatio's language to 'consider too curiously' to interpret the poem as a piece of deliberate critical appraisement, and thus have to qualify our admiration of it with Dr. Trench's protest that the great poets of the past lose no whit of their glory because later poets are found worthy to share it ;' that 'Petrarch in his lesser, and Homer in his greater sphere, are just as illustrious since Spenser appeared as before.' (A Household Book of English Poetry, ed. 1870, p. 392). Surrey, earlier, had only exercised a poet's privilege, presumably without slighting the 'Morning Star,' when he sang of his deceased friend Wyat that his hand had

'reft Chaucer the glory of his wit ;'

and Drummond of Hawthornden furnishes a later example of the same figure in CXXXII. Raleigh has another noble sonnet which must find a place here. It is prefixed to Sir Arthur Gorges' translation of Lucan's Pharsalia: containing the Civill Warres betweene Cæsar and Pompey, 1614. TO THE TRANSLATOR

Had Lucan hid the truth to please the time,
He had beene too unworthy of thy Penne,
Who never sought, nor ever car'd to clime

By flattery, or seeking worthlesse men.

For this thou hast been bruis'd; but yet those scarres
Do beautifie no lesse than those wounds do

Receiv'd in just and in religious warres;

Though thou hast bled by both, and bearst them too,

Change not to change thy fortune tis too late :

Who with a manly faith resolves to dye,

May promise to himselfe a lasting state,
Though not so great, yet free from infamy.
Such was thy Lucan, whom so to translate
Nature thy Muse (like Lucans) did create.
W. R.

A Vision upon this his Minerva, prefixed to Henry Peacham's Minerva Britanna [1612]. The sonnet has a distinctly Spenserian ring.

2 'Sir Arthur Gorges was Raleigh's kinsman; had been captain of Raleigh's own ship in the Island voyage, when he was wounded by his side in the landing of Fayal;

Sir Walter Raleigh.

From a large number of examples read in the wide and, as was fancied, promising field of Elizabethan and Jacobean encomiastic verse, where Raleigh shines with a natural and characteristic brilliance, the four following may be subjoined here as at least approximately satisfying the necessary conditions of interest and poetic merit for a popular collection. Curiously enough, three of them lie clustered in one booklet: namely, prefixed to John Bodenham's Belvedere: or, The Garden of the Muses, 1600. The first of the triad has been attributed with much probability to Anthony Munday (1553?-1633), 'poet-laureate to the city of London,' and the third, with its companion To the Universitie of Cambridge (withheld), to Bodenham himself; while the graceful panegyrist of the second, who is doubtless identical with the 'A. B.' of the prefatory sonnet to England's Helicon, 1600, from which Bodenham is ascertained to have been the editor of that more famous miscellany also, remains unknown.

TO HIS LOVING AND APPROOVED GOOD FRIEND,
M. JOHN BODENHAM.

To thee that art Arts lover, Learnings friend,
First causer and collectour of these floures:
Thy paines just merit I in right commend,

Costing whole years, months, weeks, and daily hours.
Like to the Bee, thou every where didst rome,
Spending thy spirits in laborious care:

And nightly brought'st thy gather'd hony home,
As a true worke-man in so great affaire.
First, of thine owne deserving, take the fame;
Next, of thy friends, his due he gives to thee:
That love of learning may renowme thy name,
And leave it richly to posterity,

Where others (who might better) yet forslow it,
May see their shame, and times hereafter know it.'
A. M.

OF THIS GARDEN OF THE MUSES.

Thou which delight'st to view this goodly plot,
Here take such flowres as best shal serve thy use,

and has left a history of that expedition which is of material importance in Raleigh's biography. He is the "Alcyon" of "Colin Clout's come home again: " Collier's "Spenser," vol. v., p. 45; cf. "Daphnaida," ib., 229.'-Note, p. 222 Courtly Poets, as before. For some of his original verses see Sir E. Brydges' Restituta, vol. iv., 1816. Excepting Mr. Fry (Biblio, Memoranda, Bristol, 1816, p. 273), the bibliographers seem to ignore a little work by the chevalier-The Wisedome of the Ancients, written in Latine by the Right Honourable Sir Francis Bacon Knight, Baron of Verulam, and Lord Chancellor of England. Done into English by Sir Arthur Gorges Knight. Lond. sm. 8vo, 1619: a copy of which, the reader may remember, was one of Hugh Miller's early possessions (My Schools and Schoolmasters, 1854, chap. xi.). 1 paines = pains-taking; for slow: = to delay, waste in sloth:

Forslow no time, sweet Lancaster; let's march.'

Marlowe's Edward II., p. 199, ed. Dyce, 1862.

Where thou maist find in every curious knot,
Of speciall vertue, and most precious juyce,
Set by Apollo in their severall places,
And nourished with his celestiall Beames,
And watered by the Muses and the Graces,
With the fresh dew of those Castalian streames.
What sente or colour canst thou but devise
That is not here, that may delight the sense?
Or what can Art or Industry comprize,
That in aboundance is not gather'd hence?
No Garden yet was ever halfe so sweet,
As where Apollo and the Muses meet.

A. B.

TO THE UNIVERSITIE OF OXENFORD.

Thou eye of Honour, Nurserie of Fame,
Still-teeming Mother of immortall seed:
Receive these blessed Orphanes of thy breed,
As from thy happie issue first they came.
Those flowing wits that bathed in thy foord,
And suck't the honie dew from thy pure pap:
Returne their tribute backe into thy lap,
In rich-wrought lines, that yeelde no idle woord.
O let thy Sonnes from time to time supplie
This Garden of the Muses, where dooth want
Such Flowers as are not, or come short, or scant
Of that perfection may be had thereby :

So shall thy name live still, their fame ne're dye,
Though under ground whole worlds of time they lie.
Stat sine morte decus.

The fourth example referred to, doubtless the work of Sir John Beaumont (being subscribed 'I. B.,' and prefixed to the Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, 1602, an anonymous work now confidently ascribed to his famous younger brother, Francis), must be regarded as the highwater-mark of a style which was then deemed the most elegant vehicle of adulation. The reader will most readily find it among the poems in laudem auctoris, Dyce's edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, xi, 1846, 443; or in Dr. Grosart's Fuller Worthies' Library, The Poems of Sir John Beaumont, Bart., 1869, p. 205, from which latter it is here given:

TO THE AUTHOUR.

Eyther the goddesse drawes her troupe of loves
From Paphos, where she erst was held divine,
And doth unyoke her tender-necked doves,
Placing her seat in this small papry shrine;
Or the sweet Graces through the Idalian grove
Led the blest Author in their dauncèd rings;
Or wanton Nymphs in watry bowres have wove,
With fine Mylesian threds, the verse he sings;
Or curious Pallas once againe doth strive
With proud Arachne for illustrious glory,

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Sir Walter Raleigh.

And once againe doth loves of gods revive,
Spinning in silken twists a lasting story:
If none of these, then Venus chose his sight
To leade the steps of her blind sonne aright.
Sir John Beaumont.

John Florio.

14-XXVI. This sonnet, with nothing to indicate its authorship, was first printed prefixed to Essayes written in French by Michael Lord of Montaigne, &c., Done into English by John Florio. Second Edition. Lond. fol. 1613: whence it is here given. It reappears in the third edition of the same work, 1632, but, so far as I am aware, has not since been reprinted, except by Henry Brown in his Sonnets of Shakespeare Solved, 1870, who was content to give it corruptly as he found it, and, on what authority I know not, describes it as 'attributed to Shakespeare.' Its present ascription to the 'Resolute' himself is, it must be confessed, purely conjectural; and since in both editions of the Montaigne the sonnet immediately follows (separated, however, by a line extending right across the page) a longish commendatory poem of a kindred character addressed by Samuel Daniel To my deare brother1 and friend M. John Florio, it is just possible that the real author was Daniel, of whom it is abundantly worthy, and indeed most characteristic in sentiment and diction, if not in structure. A claim must also in justice be recognized for each of those other tuneful friends of Florio's who were wont to bring him their votive wreaths, in sonnetform for the most part, as often as he challenged public attention; especially the anonymous writer of that well-turned sonnet prefixed to Queen Anna's New World of Words, fol. 1611, and subscribed with the three stars [***], beginning

'Kinde friend, the strictnesse of these few-few lines,'

a writer, by the way, whom probably we ought to identify with the friendly 'gentleman' referred to by Florio in that famous address of his To the Reader in the first edition of the work just named (A Worlde of Wordes, 4to, 1598), where he is understood by some commentators to be wincing under Shakspeare's supposed caricature of

1 That is, brother in office, as one of the Gentlemen of the Royal Privy Chamber. The oft-asserted relationship of Florio and Daniel as brothers-in-law was disproved by the late Bolton Corney in Notes and Queries, 3rd S. viii, July 1, 1865.

2 Only three per cent. of the sonnets composing Delia are built on the principle of the one in question.

See Variorum Shakspeare, ed. Malone, 1821, iv, 479-483.