EMBLEM I. BOOK III. My soul hath desired thee in the night.-ISAIAH, xxvi. 6. GOOD God what horrid darkness doth surround The bold-faced lamp of heaven can set and rise, Can chase the shadows and restore the day : All states have changes, hurried with the swings Jets oft from perch to perch; from stock to ground, Thy flames, yet lend the twilight of thine eye! SONG. To the tune of-Cuckolds all a-row. KNOW then, my brethren, heaven is clear, The righteous now shall flourish, and Come then, my brethren, and be glad, And eke rejoice with me ; Lawn sleeves and rochets shall go down, And hey! then up go we! We'll break the windows which the Whore And when the popish saints are down, Shall stand for men to see; Rome's trash and trumperies shall go down, And hey! then up go we! We'll down with all the 'Varsities, The language of the beast. And arts, whate'er they be ; If once that Antichristian crew Be crush'd and overthrown, Good manners have an ill report, We'll therefore cry good manners down, The name of lord shall be abhorr'd, For every man's a brother; Our cobblers shall translate their souls We'll ask no bands, but e'en clap hands, WILLIAM BROWNE. [Born, 1590. Died, 1645.] WILLIAM BROWNE was the son of a gentleman of Tavistock, in Devonshire. He was educated at Oxford, and went from thence to the Inner Temple, but devoted himself chiefly to poetry. In his twenty-third year he published the first part of his Britannia's Pastorals, prefaced by poetical eulogies, which evince his having been, at that early period of life, the friend and favourite of Selden and Drayton. To these testimonies he afterwards added that of Ben Jonson. In the following year he published the Shepherd's Pipe, of which the fourth eclogue is often said to have been the precursor of Milton's Lycidas. A single simile about a rose constitutes all the resemblance! In 1616 he published the second part of his Britannia's Pastorals. His Masque of the Inner Temple was never printed, till Dr. Farmer transcribed it from a MS. of the Bodleian library, for Thomas Davies's edition of Browne's works, more than 120 years after the author's death. He seems to have taken his leave of the Muses about the prime of his life, and returned to Oxford, in the capacity of tutor to Robert Dormer, Earl of Caernarvon, who fell in the battle of Newbury, 1643. After leaving the university with that nobleman, he found a liberal patron in William, Earl of Pembroke, whose character, like that of Caernarvon, still lives among the warmly coloured and minutely touched portraits of Lord Clarendon. The poet lived in Lord Pembroke's family; and, according to Wood, grew rich in his employment. But the particulars of his history are very imperfectly known, and his verses deal too little with the business of life to throw much light upon his circumstances. His poetry is not without beauty; but it is the beauty of mere landscape and allegory, without the manners and passions that constitute human interest. ADDRESS TO HIS NATIVE SOIL. HAIL thou, my native soil! thou blessed plot Such rocks in whom the diamond fairly shines: EVENING. As in an evening when the gentle air Yet lest mine own delight might injure you FROM BRITANNIA'S PASTORALS. BOOK II. SONG V. BETWEEN two rocks (immortal, without mother)* This description coincides very strikingly with the scenery of the Tamar, in Devonshire. Browne, who was a native of that county, must have studied it from na ture. At further end the creek, a stately wood Yet that their happy voyage might not be Without time's short'ner, heav'n-taught melody (Music that lent feet to the stable woods, And in their currents turn'd the mighty floods, Sorrow's sweet nurse, yet keeping joy alive, Sad discontent's most welcome corrosive, The soul of art, best loved when love is by, The kind inspirer of sweet poesy, Least thou shouldst wanting be, when swans would fain Have sung one song, and never sung again) Nevermore let holy Dee O'er other rivers brave, Or boast how (in his jollity) Kings row'd upon his wave. But silent be, and ever know That Neptune for my fare would row. Swell then, gently swell, ye floods, As proud of what ye bear, And nymphs that in low coral woods String pearls upon your hair, Ascend; and tell if ere this day A fairer prize was seen at sea. See the salmons leap and bound Blow, but gently blow, fair wind, Till we have ferried o'er : So may'st thou still have leave to blow, And fan the way where she shall go. THOMAS NABBES. [Died, 1645.] THIS was an inferior dramatist in the time of Charles I. who, besides his plays, wrote a continuation of Knolles's History of the Turks. He seems to have been secretary or domestic to some nobleman or prelate, at or near Worcester. He had a share in the poetical collection called Fancy's Theatre, with Tatham, Richard Brome, and others. FROM "MICROCOSMUS, A MASQUE." 1637. SONG BY LOVE AND THE VIRTUES TO PHYSANDER AND BELLANIMA. WELCOME, Welcome, happy pair, No winter's ice, no summer's scorching beam; Chorus. All mortal sufferings laid aside, Here in endless bliss abide. Love. Welcome to Love, my new-loved heir, I thought to disinherit thee; Mine only daughter, fate allows That Love with stars should crown your brows. THOMAS HEYWOOD. [Died, 1649.] THOMAS HEYWOOD was the most prolific writer in the most fertile age of our drama*. In the midst of his theatrical labours as an actor and poet, he composed a formidable list of prose works, and defended the stage against the puritans, in a work that is full of learning. One of his projects was to write the lives of all poets that were ever distinguished, from the time of Homer downwards. Yet it has happened to the framer of this gigantic design to have no historian so kind to his own memory as to record either the period of his death, or the spot that covers his remains. His merits entitled him to better remembrance. He composed indeed with a careless rapidity, and seems to have thought as little of Horace's precept of " sæpe stylum vertas” as of most of the injunctions in the Art of Poetry. But he possesses considerable power of interesting the affections, by placing his plain and familiar characters in affecting situations. The worst of him is, that his common-place sentiments [* He had, as he himself tells us, "either an entire hand, or at the least a main finger, in two hundred and twenty plays." He was a native of Lincolnshire.] and plain incidents fall not only beneath the ideal beauty of art, but are often more fatiguing than what we meet with in the ordinary and unselected circumstances of life. When he has hit upon those occasions where the passions should obviously rise with accumulated expression, he lingers on through the scene with a dull and level indifference. The term artlessness may be applied to Heywood in two very opposite senses. His pathos is often artless in the better meaning of the word, because its objects are true to life, and their feelings naturally expressed. But he betrays still more frequently an artlessness, or we should rather call it, a want of art, in deficiency of contrivance. His best performance is, "A Woman killed with Kindness." In that play the repentance of Mrs. Frankford, who dies of a broken heart, for her infidelity to a generous husband, would present a situation consummately moving, if we were left to conceive her death to be produced simply by grief. But the poet most unskilfully prepares us for her death, by her declaring her intentions to starve herself; and mars, by the weakness, sin, and horror of suicide, an example of penitence that would otherwise be sublimely and tenderly edifying. The scene of the death of Mrs. Frankford has been deservedly noticed for its pathos by an eminent foreign critic, Mr. Schlegel*, who also commends the superior force of its inexorable morality to the reconciling conclusion of Kotzebue's drama on a similar subject. The learned German perhaps draws his inference too rigidly. Mrs. Frank ford's crime was recent, and her repentance and death immediately follow it; but the guilt of the other tragic penitent, to whom Mr. S. alludes, is more remote, and less heinous; and to prescribe interminable limits, either in real or imaginary life, to the generosity of individual forgiveness, is to invest morality with terrors, which the frailty of man and the mercy of Heaven do not justify. SCENE IN THE TRAGEDY "A WOMAN KILLED WITH KINDNESS." Grief of Frankford, after discovering his wife's infidelity, and dismissing her. Enter CRANWEL, FRANKFORD, and NICHOLAS. Cran. WHY do you search each room about your house, Now that you have dispatch'd your wife away? [corner. Nic. Master, here's her lute flung in a Fran. Her lute? Oh God! upon this instrument Her fingers have ran quick division, Swifter than that which now divides our hearts. These frets have made me pleasant, that have now Frets of my heart-strings made. Omaster Cranwel, Oft hath she made this melancholy wood (Now mute and dumb for her disastrous chance) Speak sweetly many a note; sound many a strain To her own ravishing voice, which being well strung, What pleasant strange airs have they jointly rung? Post with it after her; now nothing's left; Of her and her's I am at once bereft. * NICHOLAS Overtakes MRS. FRANKFORD with her lute. Nic. There. Anne. I know the lute; oft have I sung to thee: We both are out of tune, both out of time. Nic. My master commends him unto ye; there's all he can find that was ever yours: he hath nothing left that ever you could lay claim to but his own heart, and he could not afford you that. All that I have to deliver you is this; he prays you to forget him, and so he bids you farewell. Anne. I thank him; he is kind, and ever was. All you that have true feeling of my grief, That know my loss, and have relenting hearts, Gird me about; and help me, with your tears, To wash my spotted sins: my lute shall groan; It cannot weep, but shall lament my moan. * Mr. Schlegel, however, is mistaken in speaking of him as anterior to Shakspeare, evidently confounding him with an older poet of the name. FROM THE SAME. Death of Mrs. Frankford. Persons. MR. MALBY, MRS. ANNE FRANKFORD, FRANK- Tell me, oh tell me, where's Mr. Frankford? Mal. Yes, Mrs. Frankford: divers gentlemen Anne. You have half revived me with the pleasing news: Raise me a little higher in my bed. Blush I not, brother Acton? Blush I not, sir Can you not read my fault writ in my cheek! Char. Alas! good mistress, sickness hath not left you Blood in your face enough to make you blush. Anne. Then sickness, like a friend, my fault would hide. Is my husband come? My soul but tarries Acton. I came to chide you, but my words of hate Are turn'd to pity and compassionate grief. Enter FRANKFORD. Fran. Good-morrow, brother; morrow, gentle men! God, that hath laid this cross upon our heads, Might (had he pleased) have made our cause of meeting On a more fair and more contented ground: |