To SAMUEL DANIEL’S high merits we have only lately awakened: his “Complaint of Rosamond” has a sustained dignity and pathos that deserve all Barnfield’s praise; the “Sonnets to Delia” are graceful and impressive in their purity; his “Civil Wars” may seem heavy, but the fault lies in ourselves, if unsteady readers, not the poet: thus we suspect, when we remember the true poetic fervour of his Pastoral,
and his Description of Beauty, from Marino.
Of “Heroick DRAYTON” we write more hereafter: He grows dearer to us with every year. His “Dowsabell” is on p. 73. Was his being coupled as a “Poet-Beadle,” in allusion to his numerous verse-epistles, showing an acquaintance with all the worthies of his day, even as his _Polyolbion_ gives a roll-call of the men, and a gazetteer of the England they made illustrious? For, as shown in the _Apophthegmmes of Erasmus_, 1564, Booke 2nd, (p. 296 of the Boston Reprint,) it is “the proper office and dutie of soche biddelles (who were called in latin _Nomenclators_) to have perfecte knowlege and remembrance of the names, of the surnames, and of the titles of dignitees of all persones, to the ende that thei maie helpe the remembraunce of their maisters in the same when neede is.” To our day the office of an Esquire Beddell is esteemed in Cambridge University. But, we imagine, George Wither is styled a “Poets Beadle” with a very different significance. It was the Bridewell-Beadles’ whip which he wielded vigorously, in flagellation of offenders, that may have earned him the title. See his “_Abuses Stript and Whipt_,” 1613, and turn to the rough wood-cut of cart’s-tail punishment shown in the frontispiece to _A Caueat or Warening for Common Cursetors, vulgarly called Vagabones_, set forth by Thomas Harman, Esquier for the utilitie and profit of his naturall country, &c., 1566, and later (Reprinted by E. E. Text Soc., and in _O. B. Coll. Misc._, i. No. 4, 1871).
GEORGE WITHER was his own worst foe, when he descended to satiric invective and pious verbiage. True poet was he; as his description of the Muse in her visit to him while imprisoned in the Marshalsea, with almost the whole of his “Shepherd’s Hunting” and “Mistress of Phil’arete,” prove incontestibly. He is to be loved and pitied: although perversely he will argue as a schismatick, always wrong-headed and in trouble, whichever party reigns. To him, in his sectarian zeal or sermonizing platitudes—all for our good, alas!—we can but answer with the melancholy Jacques: “I do not desire you to please me. I do desire you to _sing_!”