NOTES ELIZABETH. P. 34, No. xxxviii. "Jack and Joan, they think no ill." Many selections have been made from Campion, more perhaps than appear in any selection of lyric verse from the Elizabethan age. Thomas Campion was a famous musician, and, though it does not require that a man should be a good musician to make him a great lyrical poet-as witness Walter Scott, one of the greatest in that line who, yet, notoriously had no musical ear-it nevertheless cannot but be a help to a poet that he should be sensible of musical as well as of verbal rhythm. Campion's verse has been gathered together by the discriminating hand of Mr. A. H. Bullen, to whom I am largely indebted. P. 54, No. lxi. “My prime of youth is but a frost of cares. " Chidiock Tychborn was the lineal ancestor of Roger Tichborne, the personation of whom by an impostor was, as every one over five-and-twenty knows, the most important social lawsuit of this century. The late Lord Coleridge, counsel for the Tichborne family, dealing with the history of the real Roger Tichborne, who ended a life of much promise by death from shipwreck, quoted, in court, from his poet ancestor with extraordinary effect the touching lines beginning: "My prime of youth is but a frost of cares." P. 74, No. lxxxvii. JAMES I. "Ah, Ben! The reign of James I. bears most of the blossom and fruit that grew from seed sown and tended in Elizabeth's time. Though, by the arrangement of this book, Shakespeare's lyric verse comes under the previous reign-indeed most of it was actually written in Elizabeth's time-James gets the reflected glory of verse by poets only one degree less great as songwriters than Shakespeare himself: of Ben Jonson, of Fletcher, of John Ford, of Beaumont, of "the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease" in the manner of these masters of song, and who figure in this book mostly as "Anon.," and last, though not least, of Robert Herrick, the pupil of Ben Jonson. Herrick has left in this poem not only a splendid memorial of the poet he loved and followed, but evidence to all time of the estimation in which lyrical verse was held under the first James. P. 76, No. lxxxix. "Roses, their sharp spines being gone." The Two Noble Kinsmen was long ascribed to Shakespeare, and it is difficult to believe that the greater master's hand is not visible in the compass and strength of this lyric. Great poets, though, can raise their contemporaries to great efforts; and it may after all not be Shakespeare who wrote "Not an angel of the air, P. 77, No. xci. Bird melodious or bird fair, Be absent hence." Weep with me, all you that read." The reader need hardly be reminded that women's parts were, in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, played by boys so young in age that their ears could be summarily boxed as often as they were wayward and perverse, and to the very obvious prevalence of harmony behind the scenes. Perhaps, though, it is not wholly due to this circumstance that as soon as woman made her appearance on the stage the drama began to decline. P. 78, No. xciii. Before I sigh my last gasp, let me breathe.' The Will of John Donne is probably the wittiest and the bitterest lyric in our language. Donne's love passages and their record in verse were over before the author was of age. His wit then turned into metaphysical sermon - writing and theological polemics, and his bitterness into a despairing austerity. His last sermon, of an hour's length, was, it is said, preached by him in his last illness, when he was nearing his death, and he stood up to preach it in his own coffin, set upright for a pulpit. |