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on Jonson's verse :—' -'In the morning before the battle, as always upon action, he was very cheerful, and put himself in the first rank of the Lord Byron's regiment, then advancing upon the enemy, who had lined the hedges on both sides with musketeers, from whence he was shot with a musket in the lower part of the belly, and in the instant falling from his horse, his body was not found till the next morning; till when, there was some hope he might have been a prisoner; though his nearest friends, who knew his temper, received small comfort from that imagination. Thus fell that incomparable young man, in the four-and-thirtieth year of his age, having so much dispatched the true business of life, that the eldest rarely attain to that immense knowledge, and the youngest enter not into the world with more innocency: whosoever leads such a life needs be the less anxious upon how short warning it is taken from him.'-History of the Rebellion, book vii. Cf. also Matthew Arnold's essay on him.

CCCVII

Page 277-Wise men pity never want.' From one of the 'Divine and Moral Songs' in Campion's Two Books of Airs, circ. 1613.

CCCVIII

Page 278-The man of life upright.' From Campion and Rosseter's A Book of Airs, 1601. The same poem with variations occurs with the preceding numbers in the Two Books of Airs. Hannah gives the lines to Bacon.

CCCIX

Page 279-'The chief use then in Man of that he knows.' A stanza from A Treatie of Humane Learning. Lord Brooke was murdered in September 1628 by a serving-man in his London house in Holborn: the Treatie was not printed until five years later.

CCCX

Page 279-'All I care.' From a song in Robert Jones's Ultimum Vale, or Third Book of Airs, 1608. Mr. Bullen points out that the last line is from Seneca's Thyestes:

'qui, notus nimis omnibus, Ignotus moritur sibi.'

CCCI

Page 279-'Come thou, who art the wine and wit.' The allusion in 'no Court for our Request,' is to the Court of Requests, established in the reign of Richard II. as a subsidiary Court of Equity for the hearing of poor men's suits, and abolished (with the Star Chamber) in 1641.

CCCXII, CCCXIII

Pages 281, 282-'Full fathom five thy father lies.' 'Call for the robin-redbreast and the wren.' Lamb's famous comparison of these two pieces must be quoted again. Speaking of the second be says, I never saw anything like the funeral dirge in this play (The White Devil) for the death of Marcello, except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father in The Tempest. As that is of the water, watery, so this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intenseness of feeling, which seems to resolve itself into the element which it contemplates.' In a footnote he adds, 'Webster was parish clerk at St. Andrew's, Holborn. The anxious recurrence to church matters, sacrilege, tomb-stones, with the frequent introduction of dirges, in this and his other tragedies, may be traced to his professional sympathies.'

CCCXV

Page 283-'Urns and odours bring away!' From The Two Noble Kinsmen. Cf. note on CCXL.

CCCXVII

Page 284-'Mortality, behold and fear!' Mr. Henley (Lyra Heroica) aptly compares Shirley's succeeding numbers and Raleigh's great apostrophe in the History of the World: 'O Eloquent, Just, and Mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the World hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the World and despised: thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched Greatness, all the Pride, Cruelty, and Ambition of Man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic Jacet.'

CCCXX

Page 287-'How near me came the hand of Death.' From Hallelujah, or Britain's Second Remembrancer, Hymn xxvii. 'For a Widower, or a Widow deprived of a loving Yoke-fellow.' There are six stanzas in the original.

I find on correcting the pages for press that Crashaw's noble epitaph, which should have followed this hymn of Wither's, has unaccountably slipped out of the text, and I here add it:

AN EPITAPH UPON HUSBAND AND WIFE,

Who died and were buried together.

'To those whom death again did wed
This grave's the second marriage-bed.
For though the hand of Fate could force
'Twixt soul and body a divorce,

1

NOTES

It could not sever man and wife,
Because they both lived but one life.
Peace, good reader, do not weep;
Peace, the lovers are asleep.
They, sweet turtles, folded lie
In the last knot that love could tie.
Let them sleep, let them sleep on,
Till the stormy night be gone,

And the eternal morrow dawn;

Then the curtains will be drawn,

And they wake into a light

Whose day shall never die in night.'

CCCXXV

Page 293-May! be thou never graced.

361

In the title

'M. S.' probably stands for 'Marita Suæ.' Browne was twice married. His first wife is the subject of this epitaph.

CCCXXVI

Page 293-'Underneath this sable herse.' These lines are generally given to Jonson; but the evidence that Browne wrote them, as it is marshalled by Mr. Gordon Goodwin in the latest edition of Browne's poems (The Muses' Library. London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1894), is certainly very strong. Briefly, it comes to this: (1) They were first printed in Osborn's Traditional Memoirs on the Reign of King James, 1658, and next in the Poems of the Countess's son, William, Earl of Pembroke, and Sir Benjamin Rudyerd in 1660; but in neither volume are they signed. (2) Writing about the same time, Aubrey, in his Natural History of Wiltshire, gives the lines to Browne. (3) They are signed 'William Browne' in a middle seventeenth century MS. in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. (4) They do not appear in the 1640 edition of Jonson, nor indeed in any edition, until in 1756 Peter Whalley included them on the ground that they were 'universally assigned to Jonson.' (5) Browne seems to refer to this very epitaph in his Elegy on Charles, Lord Herbert of Cardiff and Shurland (written, too, in the same metre):

'And since my weak and saddest verse

Was worthy thought thy granddam's herse;
Accept of this!'

CCCXXVIII

Page 294-'The Lady Mary Villiers lies.' Carew penned two other epitaphs upon her little ladyship, of which one deserves to be quoted :

'This little vault, this narrow room,

Of Love and Beauty is the tomb;

The dawning beam, that 'gan to clear
Our clouded sky, lies darken'd here,

For ever set us us; by Death

Sent to inflame the world beneath.

'Twas but a bud, yet did contain
More sweetness than shall spring again;
A budding Star, that might have grown
Into a sun when it had blown.

This hopeful Beauty did create
New life in Love's declining state;

But now his empire ends, and we

From fire and wounding darts are free;
His brand, his bow, let no man fear;
The flames, the arrows, all lie here.

With this and the following epitaphs compare Beaumont's
''Tis not a life;

'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away.'

CCCXXX

Page 295-'Here a pretty baby lies.' I cannot forbear from adding here in the notes another of Herrick's epitaphs upon children:

UPON A CHILD

'But born, and like a short delight,

I glided by my parents' sight.

That done, the harder fates denied
My longer stay, and so I died.

If, pitying my sad parents' tears,

You'll spill a tear or two with theirs,

And with some flowers my grave bestrew,

Love and they'll thank you for 't, Adieu.'

CCCXXXI

Page 296-'As I in hoary winter's night.' Ben Jonson (it is worth remarking) told Drummond of Hawthornden that he had been content to destroy many of his own writings to have written 'The Burning Babe.'

CCCXXXII

Page 299-'I sing the birth was born to-night.' With stanza 2, lines 4-6, compare Giles Fletcher's lines

'A Child He was, and had not learn'd to speak
That with His word the world before did make;
His mother's arms Him bore, He was so weak
That with one hand the vaults of heav'n could shake
See, how small room my infant Lord doth take,
Whom all the world is not enough to hold!
Who of His years, or of His age hath told?
Never such age so young, never a child so old.'

CCCXXXVIII

Page 304-Yet if His Majesty, our sovereign lord.' From Mr. Bullen's More Lyrics from the Elizabethan Song-books.

Mr.

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Bullen discovered this fine poem-a fragment, apparently, but flawless in itself-among a collection of early MS. music in the library of Christ Church, Oxford (where he also found that 'odd little snatch, printed as No. XXI.). He writes, "The detailed description of the preparations made by a loyal subject for the coming of his "earthly king" is singularly impressive. Few could have dealt with common household objects-tables and chairs and candles and the rest-in so dignified a spirit.'

CCCXLI

Page 306-'Now winter nights enlarge. From Campion's Third Book of Airs, circ. 1617.

CCCXLIII

Page 308-'Let not the sluggish sleep. From William Byrd's Psalms, Songs, and Sonnets, 1611.

CCCXLV

Page 310-'Never weather-beaten sail more willing bent to shore.' From Divine and Moral Songs, circ. 1613.

CCCLV

Page 320-'In the hour of my distress.' Barron Field, who reviewed Dr. Nott's edition of Herrick in the Quarterly, August 1810, gives an account of a visit he paid to Dean Prior in the summer of 1809, for the purpose of making some inquiries concerning the poet. He says, 'The person, however, who knows more of Herrick than all the rest of the neighbourhood, we found to be an old woman in the ninety-ninth year of her age, named Dorothy King. She repeated to us, with great exactness, five of his Noble Numbers, among which was the beautiful Litany. These she had learnt from her mother, who was apprenticed to Herrick's successor in the vicarage. She called them her prayers, which, she said, she was in the habit of putting up in bed, whenever she could not sleep: and she therefore began the Litany at the second stanza

'When I lie within my bed,' etc.

Another of her midnight orisons was the poem beginning

'Every night thou dost me fright

And keep mine eyes from sleeping,' etc.

She had no idea that these poems had ever been printed, and could not have read them if she had seen them,'

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