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From graver subjects of thy grave assays,

Bend thy courageous thoughts unto these lines—

The grave from whence my humble Muse doth raise

True honour’s spirit in her rough designs—

And when the stubborn stroke of my harsh song

Shall seasonless glide through Almighty ears

Vouchsafe to sweet it with thy blessèd tongue

Whose well-tuned sound stills music in the spheres;

So shall my tragic lays be blest by thee

And from thy lips suck their eternity.

Subsequently Florio, in associating the earl’s name with his great Italian-English dictionary—the ‘Worlde of Wordes’—more soberly defined the earl’s place in the republic of letters when he wrote: ‘As to me and many more the glorious and gracious sunshine of your honour hath infused light and life.’

The congratulations of the poets in 1603.

The most notable contribution to this chorus of praise is to be found, as I have already shown, in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets.’ The same note of eulogy was sounded by men of letters until Southampton’s death. When he was released from prison on James I’s accession in April 1603, his praises in poets’ mouths were especially abundant. Not only was that grateful incident celebrated by Shakespeare in what is probably the latest of his sonnets (No. cvii.), but Samuel Daniel and John Davies of Hereford offered the Earl congratulation in more prolonged strains. Daniel addressed to Southampton many lines like these:

The world had never taken so full note

Of what thou art, hadst thou not been undone:

And only thy affliction hath begot

More fame than thy best fortunes could have won;

For ever by adversity are wrought

The greatest works of admiration;

And all the fair examples of renown

Out of distress and misery are grown . . .

Only the best-compos’d and worthiest hearts

God sets to act the hard’st and constanst’st parts.

Davies was more jubilant:

Now wisest men with mirth do seem stark mad,

And cannot choose—their hearts are all so glad.

Then let’s be merry in our God and King,

That made us merry, being ill bestead.

Southampton, up thy cap to Heaven fling,

And on the viol there sweet praises sing,

For he is come that grace to all doth bring.

Many like praises, some of later date, by Henry Locke (or Lok), George Chapman, Joshua Sylvester, Richard Brathwaite, George Wither, Sir John Beaumont, and others could be quoted. Beaumont, on Southampton’s death, wrote an elegy which panegyrises him in the varied capacities of warrior, councillor, courtier, father, and husband. But it is as a literary patron that Beaumont insists that he chiefly deserves remembrance:

I keep that glory last which is the best,

The love of learning which he oft expressed

In conversation, and respect to those

Who had a name in arts, in verse or prose.

Elegies on Southampton.

To the same effect are some twenty poems which were published in 1624, just after Southampton’s death, in a volume entitled ‘Teares of the Isle of Wight, shed on the Tombe of their most noble valorous and loving Captaine and Governour, the right honorable Henrie, Earl of Southampton.’ The keynote is struck in the opening stanza of the first poem by one Francis Beale:

Ye famous poets of the southern isle,

Strain forth the raptures of your tragic muse,

And with your Laureate pens come and compile

The praises due to this great Lord: peruse

His globe of worth, and eke his virtues brave,

Like learned Maroes at Mecænas’ grave.

V.—THE TRUE HISTORY OF THOMAS THORPE AND ‘MR. W. H.’

The publication of the sonnets in 1609.

In 1598 Francis Meres enumerated among Shakespeare’s best known works his ‘sugar’d sonnets among his private friends.’ None of Shakespeare’s sonnets are known to have been in print when Meres wrote, but they were doubtless in circulation in manuscript. In 1599 two of them were printed for the first time by the piratical publisher, William Jaggard, in the opening pages of the first edition of ‘The Passionate Pilgrim.’ On January 3, 1599-1600, Eleazar Edgar, a publisher of small account, obtained a license for the publication of a work bearing the