College, Oxford. His Works of a Young Wit appeared in 1577; and a swift succession of small volumes proceeded from his pen-over a score in prose and about as many in verse; eight pieces with his name, comprising his first lyrics, are in England's Helicon, a notable poetical miscellany published in 1600, including contributions from Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh, Lodge, Marlowe, Watson, Greene, &c. He wrote far too much. His satire is less coarse but less effective than that of some contemporaries; his religious poems are disfigured by too fantastic conceits. Wit's Trenchmour, a prose idyl of angling, though named from an old merry dance, is one of his most notable pieces. A Pastoral of Phillis and Coridon. Faire befall the daintie sweet! In that bower there is a chaire, Fringed all about with golde, Where doth sit the fairest faire That did ever eye beholde. It is Phillis, fair and bright, She that is the shepheards joy, She that Venus did dispight, And did blind her little boy. There is she, the wise, the rich, That the world desires to see; This is ipsa qua, the which There is none but onely shee. Who would not this face admire? Who would not this saint adore? Who would not this sight desire, Though he thought to see no more? O faire eyes, yet let me see One good looke, and I am gone: Thou that art the shepheards queene, Phillida and Coridon. In the merry moneth of May Much adoo there was, God wot! She sayd, Never man was true; Till they did for good and all; A Sweet Lullabie. Come, little babe, come, silly soule, And to thyself unhappie chiefe: Sing lullabie and lap it warme, Poore soule that thinkes no creature harme. Thou little thinkst, and lesse doost knowe The cause of this thy mother's moane; Why doost thou weepe? why doost thou waile? Come, little wretch ! Ah! silly heart, 'Twas I, I say, against my will— And doest thou smile? O thy sweete face! But come to mother, babe, and play, Sweet boy, if it by fortune chance A lamb in towne thou shalt him finde : A noble youth of blood and boane, His glancing lookes, if he once smile, I, that can doe naught else but weepe, God blesse my babe, and lullabie, Popular and esteemed in the seventeenth century, Breton's work was forgotten in the eighteenth, till Bishop Percy printed in the Reliques two of his pieces from England's Helicon. There was no edition of his works in prose and verse till Dr Grosart produced them for the 'Chertsey Library' in 1877; another volume of new discoveries was added in 1893. Single works have been published separately as The Bower of Delights in the Elizabethan Library' in 1893, and No Whippinge nor Trippinge in 1896. Professor Saintsbury reprinted in his Elizabethan and Jacobean Tracts (1892) Breton's 'Pretie and Wittie Discourse between Wit and Will,' which contains the 'Song between Wit and Will' and other amœbean strains between them, between Care and Misery, &c. Edward de Vere, EARL OF OXFORD (15501604), studied at Cambridge, succeeded his father as seventeenth earl in 1562, and, already a favoured courtier, married Burghley's daughter in 1571. He was handsome, accomplished, foppish, luxurious, ruinously extravagant, and unbearably insolent and wrong-headed. He called Sidney a puppy, but was not allowed by the queen to accept Sidney's challenge. He was appointed to high offices, was special commissioner for the trial of Mary Queen of Scots, and acted as Lord Chamberlain at James I.'s coronation. But his estates had to be sold his wealth was utterly squandered by his wastefulness-and Burghley had to provide for his family. Yet some twenty-three of his poems remain to support the contemporary judgment that he was one of the best of the courtier poets of Elizabeth's early reign; they were printed in the Paradise of Dainty Devices and other anthologies. Puttenham illustrated his English Poesie with the one best known, given below; Grosart printed all that could be attributed to Oxford in his Miscel lanies of the Fuller Worthy Library (1872). Fancy and Desire. Come hither, shepherd's swaine ! I pray thee shew to me thy name! When werte thou borne, Desyre? By whom, sweet boy, wert thou begott? Tell me who was thy nourse? Freshe youthe, in sugred ioye, What haddest thou than to drincke? What lulled thee to thy sleepe? then What thing doth please thee most? Whom dost thou think to be thy foe? Dothe companye displease? Where would Desyre than chuse to be? Bring thee unto decaye? Noe, noe! Desyre both lives and dyes I should be lothe methinks to dwell Another short poem runs thus : then Doth sorrow fret thy soule? O direfull spirit. Doth pleasure feed thy heart? O blessed man. Hast thou bene happie once? O heavy plight. Are thy mishaps forepast? O happie than. Or hast thou blisse in eld? O blisse too late. But hast thou blisse in youth? O sweet estate. Thomas Watson (1557?-1592) was author of Hecatompathia, or Passionate Centurie of Love (1582), a series of sonnets; Amynta Gaudia (in Latin, 1585); Italian Madrigals Englished (1590), one of which is quoted above at page 274; The Tears of Fancie (1593). He translated the Antigone of Sophocles into Latin. In the Hecatompathia, 'a hundred passions,' a hundred eighteen-line poems called 'sonnets,' describe each a several passion; two of these are given below. But the lovemaking was as artificial as the record of it; though Watson ranks high among the 'amoretists.' Professor Arber reprinted the Hecatompathia, the Tears of Fancie, and some of Watson's other things (1870) in his English Reprints.' When Maye is in his prime, and youthfull Spring And lovely nature smiles and nothing lowres ; So she, for whom I wayle both day and night, Time wasteth yeeres, and months, and howrs; . Time maketh every tree to die and rott; Henry Constable (1562–1613), poet, the son of Sir Robert Constable of Newark, at sixteen entered St John's College, Cambridge, early turned Catholic, and betook himself to Paris. He was an active Catholic negotiator, conducted a mission to James VI. at Edinburgh (without result) on behalf of the papal powers, and was by-and-by pensioned by the French king. But he maintained his political loyalty, though on his return to England in 1604 he was for a few months confined in the Tower. He died at Liége. In 1592 was published his Diana, a collection of twenty-three sonnets; two years later, the second edition, containing seventysix, but some of these were by his friend Sir Philip Sidney and other poets. "The Shepheards Song of Venus and Adonis,' one of four pastoral poems contributed by him to England's Helicon, was thought by Malone and others to have suggested Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. See W. C. Hazlitt's edition of his works (1859), and J. Gray's (1897). The following is one of Constable's sonnets: My ladies presence makes the Roses red, because to see her lips they blush for shame; because the sunnes and her power are the same; dyed in the blood shee made my hart to shed. In briefe all flowers from her their vertue take; from her sweet breath their sweet smels do proceede; the living heate which her eye beames doth make warmeth the ground and quickeneth the seede: The raine wherewith shee watereth the flowers Falls from mine eyes which she dissolves in showers. Venus and Adonis begins thus : Venus fair did ride, Silver doves they drew her, By the pleasant lawnds Ere the sun did rise; Vestas beauty rich Open'd wide to view her; Philomel records Pleasing harmonies. Barnabe Barnes (1569?-1609), son of the Bishop of Durham, approved himself a true poet, but had been well-nigh forgotten when in 1875 Dr Grosart reprinted his poems-Parthenophil, containing 'sonnets, madrigals, elegies and odes,' by far his best work, and a collection of Spirituall❘ Sonnetts. He also wrote an unpleasant tragedy, The Devil's Charter, and a treatise on political offices and duties; as a friend and collaborator of Gabriel Harvey, he suffered at the hands of Nash and his allies; and see below at Shakespeare, page 364. Professor Arber included Parthenophil in his English Garner (vol. v. 1882). This 'echo sonnet' from Parthenophil shows Barnes perhaps at his worst, but is a fair specimen of the uncouth and inartistic artificialities to which writers of really fine verse sometimes condescended (rew being a form of 'row,' and here presumably meaning ‘rank') : What be those hairs dyed like the marigold? Lord Vaux and Nicholas Grimoald were amongst the contributors to Tottel's 'Miscellany.' Other sonneteers and minor poets of the period were: William Percy (1575-1648), third son of the eighth Earl of Northumberland, a fellow-student at Oxford and close friend of Barnes's, who produced in 1594 a volume of sonnets called Cœlia.-Henry Lok, or Locke (1553?-1608?), son of a London mercer, published upwards of three hundred sonnets on Christian Passions, Conscience, and the like, which show more piety than poetry, and his sixty secular ones are hardly more valuable. He also versified Ecclesiastes and some of the Psalms.-B. Griffin—probably Bartholomew Griffin --who published in 1596 a collection of sixty-two sonnets called Fidessa, some of them admirable. He may have been an attorney, but the facts of his life are little known.-Richard Linche, Or Lynche, who wrote two unimportant prose works, is believed to have been the R. L. who in 1596 published a collection of thirty-eight sonnets somewhat unequal in quality. William Smith, another Spenserian sonneteer, is remembered chiefly for his collection of over fifty sonnets called Chloris, published in 1596. Richard Hooker. Richard Hooker, one of the great glories of the English Church, was born in Exeter in March 1554, of a family originally called Vowell, his uncle being city chamberlain (see the article on Holinshed). At school he displayed so much aptitude for learning and gentleness of disposition that, having been recommended to Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, he was sent by him to Oxford. At the university he studied with ardour and success. Sandys, Bishop of London, put his son under Hooker's care. Another of his pupils was George Cranmer, a grand-nephew of the archbishop; and with both these young men he formed a close and enduring friendship. In 1579 his skill in Oriental languages led to his temporary appointment as deputy-professor of Hebrew; and two years later he entered into holy orders. Not long after this he had the misfortune to be led into a marriage which proved a constant source of annoyance to him during life. The tale is told by his biographer, Izaak Walton, whose picture of the saintly and simple-minded theologian is one of the most perfect things in English biography. But it must be remembered that Walton did not sketch from life: Keble pointed out that the excessive meekness and simplicity of the sketch hardly harmonise with the insight, incisiveness, and humour shown in Hooker's works. Dean Paget thinks there are but a few grains of truth in the gossip Walton got from Hooker's pupils Sandys and Cranmer; but there seems no doubt Mrs Hooker was a shrew from whom her husband got little sympathy. Appointed to preach at Paul's Cross in London, Hooker put up at a house set apart for the reception of the preachers. his arrival there from Oxford he was wet and weary, but received so much kindness and attention from the hostess that, according to Walton, 'he thought himself bound in conscience to believe all that she said. So the good man came to be persuaded by her that he was a man of a tender constitution; and that it was best for him to have a wife, that might prove a nurse to him-such a one as might both prolong his life, and make it more comfortable; and such a one she could and would provide for him, if he thought fit to marry.' Hooker authorising her to select a wife for him, she not unnaturally selected her own daughter, 'a silly, clownish woman, and withal a Xantippe.' With this helpmate he led but an uncomfortable life, though apparently in a spirit of resignation. When visited by Sandys and Cranmer at the Buckinghamshire rectory to which he had been presented in 1584, he was found by them reading Horace and tending sheep in the absence of his servant. In his house they received little entertainment except from his conversation; and even this Mrs Hooker did not fail to disturb, by calling him away to rock the cradle, and by exhibiting such other shrewish dispositions as made them glad to depart on the following morn On mere ing. In taking leave, Cranmer expressed his regret at the smallness of Hooker's income and the uncomfortable state of his domestic affairs; to which the worthy man replied, 'My dear George, if saints have usually a double share in the miseries of this life, I, that am none, ought not to repine at what my wise Creator hath appointed for me, but labour-as indeed I do dailyto submit mine to His will, and possess my soul in patience and peace.' On his return to London, Sandys made a strong appeal to his father in behalf of Hooker, the result of which was the appointment of the meek divine, in 1585, to the office of Master of the Temple. He accordingly removed to London, and commenced his labours as forenoon preacher. Now, the afternoon lecturer was Walter Travers, a man of great learning and eloquence, but a Puritan and high Calvinist, whereas Hooker's views, both on church-government and theology, were 'judicious' and moderate. The consequence was that 'the forenoon sermons spoke Canterbury, and the afternoon Geneva ;' Travers sometimes even expressly denounced the latitudinarianism of his colleague; and in consequence of these controversies Whitgift suspended Travers from preaching. Travers appealed to the Council with charges against Hooker's doctrine; and Hooker answered conclusively. But to Hooker the personal controversy was so vexatious that he strongly expressed to the archbishop his wish to retire into the country, where he might live in peace and have leisure to finish his treatise of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. A letter he wrote to the archbishop shows his temper and aim : MY LORD-When I lost the freedom of my cell, which was my college; yet I found some degree of it in my quiet country parsonage; but I am weary of the noise and oppositions of this place, and indeed God and nature did not intend me for contentions, but for study and quietness. And, my lord, my particular contests here with Mr Travers have proved the more unpleasant to me, because I believe him to be a good man; and that belief hath occasioned me to examine mine own conscience concerning his opinions; and to satisfy that, I have consulted the holy Scripture and other laws, both human and divine, whether the conscience of him and others of his judgment ought to be so far complied with by us as to alter our frame of Church-government, our manner of God's worship, our praising and praying to him, and our established ceremonies, as often as their tender consciences shall require us and in this examination I have not only satisfied myself, but have begun a Treatise in which I intend the satisfaction of others, by a demonstration of the reasonableness of the Laws of our Ecclesiastical Polity; in which design God and his holy Angels shall at the last great day bear me that witness which my conscience now does ; that my meaning is not to provoke any, but rather to satisfy all tender consciences, and I shall never be able to do this but where I may study, and pray for God's blessing upon my endeavours, and keep myself in peace and privacy, and behold God's blessing spring out of my mother earth, and eat my own bread without oppositions; and therefore, if your Grace can judge me worthy of such a favour, let me beg it, that I may perfect what I have begun. In consequence of this appeal, Hooker was presented in 1591 to the rectory of Boscombe, in Wiltshire; there he finished four books of his treatise (printed in 1594). He became sub-dean and prebendary of Sarum, and in 1595 was presented to the rectory of Bishopsbourne, in Kent. Here he wrote the fifth book, published in 1597, and on 2nd November 1600 he died. The sixth and eighth books appeared in 1648; the seventh in 1662. Doubts were raised as to the genuineness of the sixth book; it is certainly out of keeping with the general plan of the work, but Keble had no doubt it was substantially Hooker's work, though not designed as part of the Polity. The seventh and eighth books were probably written from Hooker's notes by Gauden, the editor or author of the Eikon Basilike. Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity is an unsurpassed masterpiece of reasoning and eloquence; its diction majestic, sonorous, and rhythmical. But the style is eminently Latinised, and so at times somewhat rhetorical and artificial; and the sentences are not seldom intolerably long, with inconvenient breaks and parentheses. 'So stately and graceful is the march of his periods,' said Hallam, 'so various the fall of his musical cadences upon the ear, so rich in images, so condensed in sentences, so grave and noble his diction, so little is there of vulgarity in his racy idiom, of pedantry in his learned phrase, that I know not whether any later writer has more admirably displayed the capacities of our language, or produced passages more worthy of comparison with the splendid monuments of antiquity.' The argument against Roman Catholics and Puritans alike is conducted by Hooker with rare moderation and candour, and on broad general principles, not on detached texts or interpretations of Scripture. The fundamental idea is the unity and all-embracing character of law as the manifestation of the divine order of the universe, the outward expression of the mind of God, identical with reason. 'It was a kind of maxim among the Puritans that Scripture was so much the exclusive. rule of human actions, that whatever, in matters at least concerning religion, could not be found to have its authority, was unlawful. Hooker devoted the whole second book of his work to the refuta tion of this principle. He proceeded afterwards to attack its application, more particularly to the episcopal scheme of church-government, and to the various ceremonies or usages which those sectaries treated as either absolutely superstitious, or at least as impositions without authority. It was maintained by this great writer, not only that ritual observances are variable according to the discretion of ecclesiastical rulers, but that no certain form of polity is set down in Scripture as generally indispensable for a Christian church.' The guide of human conduct is not Scripture alone, but the concurrent instruction of all the sources of knowledge Providence has put at man's command. The work is not a vast controversial pamphlet, but a monument of massive logic and masterly philosophical thought--one of the earliest and greatest in the English tongue. It is fair to say that to the Ecclesiastical Polity of the ‘judicious Hooker' Anglican theology owes the tone and direction which largely still characterise it. 'It is claimed for this great book,' Dean Paget says, 'that it first revealed to the nation what English prose might be. It is significant that even those who censured him felt that somehow he stood apart, and that later ages have looked back to him as eminent even in the period of Spenser, of Shakespeare, and of Bacon.' There is a preface-not too conciliatory-to them that 'seek (as they term it) the reformation of the laws and orders ecclesiastical in the Church of England,' which begins thus: Though for no other cause, yet for this; that posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream, there shall be for men's information extant thus much concerning the present state of the Church of God established amongst us, and their careful endeavour which would have upheld the same. At your hands, beloved in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (for in him the love which we bear unto all that would but seem to be born of him, it is not the sea of your gall and bitterness that shall ever drown), I have no great cause to look for other than the selfsame portion and lot, which your manner hath been hitherto to lay on them that concur not in opinion and sentence with you. But our hope is, that the God of peace shall (notwithstanding man's nature too impatient of contumelious malediction) enable us quietly and even gladly to suffer all things, for that work sake which we covet to perform. [He tells the malcontents by whom 'their dis |