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By Root 21598 0

the hour that, as a handsome and accomplished lad, he joined the Court and made London his chief home, authors acknowledged his appreciation of literary effort of almost every quality and form. He had in his Italian tutor Florio, whose circle of acquaintance included all men of literary reputation, a mentor who allowed no work of promise to escape his observation. Every note in the scale of adulation was sounded in Southampton’s honour in contemporary prose and verse. Soon after the publication, in April 1593, of Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis,’ with its salutation of Southampton, a more youthful apprentice to the poet’s craft, Barnabe Barnes, confided to a published sonnet of unrestrained fervour his conviction that Southampton’s eyes—‘those heavenly lamps’—were the only sources of true poetic inspiration. The sonnet, which is superscribed ‘to the Right Noble and Virtuous Lord, Henry, Earl of Southampton,’ runs:

Receive, sweet Lord, with thy thrice sacred hand

(Which sacred Muses make their instrument)

These worthless leaves, which I to thee present,

(Sprung from a rude and unmanurèd land)

That with your countenance graced, they may withstand

Hundred-eyed Envy’s rough encounterment,

Whose patronage can give encouragement

To scorn back-wounding Zoilus his band.

Vouchsafe, right virtuous Lord, with gracious eyes—

Those heavenly lamps which give the Muses light,

Which give and take in course that holy fire—

To view my Muse with your judicial sight:

Whom, when time shall have taught, by flight, to rise

Shall to thy virtues, of much worth, aspire.

Tom Nash’s addresses.

Next year a writer of greater power, Tom Nash, betrayed little less enthusiasm when dedicating to the earl his masterly essay in romance, ‘The Life of Jack Wilton.’ He describes Southampton, who was then scarcely of age, as ‘a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.’ ‘A new brain,’ he exclaims, ‘a new wit, a new style, a new soul, will I get me, to canonise your name to posterity, if in this my first attempt I am not taxed of presumption.’ Although ‘Jack Wilton’ was the first book Nash formally dedicated to Southampton, it is probable that Nash had made an earlier bid for the earl’s patronage. In a digression at the close of his ‘Pierce Pennilesse’ he grows eloquent in praise of one whom he entitles ‘the matchless image of honour and magnificent rewarder of vertue, Jove’s eagle-borne Ganimede, thrice noble Amintas.’ In a sonnet addressed to ‘this renowned lord,’ who ‘draws all hearts to his love,’ Nash expresses regret that the great poet, Edmund Spenser, had omitted to celebrate ‘so special a pillar of nobility’ in the series of adulatory sonnets prefixed to the ‘Faerie Queene;’ and in the last lines of his sonnet Nash suggests that Spenser suppressed the nobleman’s name

Because few words might not comprise thy fame.

Southampton was beyond doubt the nobleman in question. It is certain, too, that the Earl of Southampton was among the young men for whom Nash, in hope of gain, as he admitted, penned ‘amorous villanellos and qui passas.’ One of the least reputable of these efforts of Nash survives in an obscene love-poem entitled ‘The Choosing of Valentines,’ which may be dated in 1595. Not only was this dedicated to Southampton in a prefatory sonnet, but in an epilogue, again in the form of a sonnet, Nash addressed his young patron as his ‘friend.’

Markham’s sonnet, 1595. Florio’s address, 1598.

Meanwhile, in 1595, the versatile Gervase Markham inscribed to Southampton, in a sonnet, his patriotic poem on Sir Richard Grenville’s glorious fight off the Azores. Markham was not content to acknowledge with Barnes the inspiriting force of his patron’s eyes, but with blasphemous temerity asserted that the sweetness of his lips, which stilled the music of the spheres, delighted the ear of Almighty God. Markham’s sonnet runs somewhat haltingly thus:

Thou glorious laurel of the Muses’ hill,

Whose eyes doth crown the most victorious pen,

Bright lamp of virtue, in whose sacred skill

Lives all the bliss of