In his charming collection of "Rare Poems" Mr. Linton quotes freely from the song-books of Byrd and Dowland, but gives only one lyric of Dr. Thomas Campion. As Mr. Linton is an excellent judge of poetry, I can only suppose that he had no wide acquaintance with Campion's writings, when he put together his dainty Anthology. There is clear evidence[1] that Campion wrote not only the music but the words for his songs--that he was at once an eminent composer and a lyric poet of the first rank. He published a volume of Latin verse, which displays ease and fluency (though the prosody is occasionally erratic); as a masque-writer he was inferior only to Ben Jonson; he was the author of treatises on the arts of music and poetry; and he practised as a physician. It would be interesting to ascertain some facts about the life of this highly-gifted man; but hitherto little information has been collected. The Oxford historian, good old Anthony-à-Wood, went altogether wrong and confused our Thomas Campion with another person of the same name who took his degree in 1624--five years after the poet's death. It is probable that our Thomas Campion was the second son of Thomas Campion of Witham, Essex, and that he was distantly related to Edmund Campion the famous Jesuit. His first work was his "Epigrammatum Libri duo," published in 1595, and republished in 1619. The first edition is exceedingly rare; there is no copy in the British Museum. Francis Meres, in his very valuable (and very tedious) "Wit's Treasury," 1598, mentions Campion among the "English men, being Latin poets," who had "attained good report and honorable advancement in the Latin empire." In 1601 Campion and Philip Rosseter published jointly "A Book of Airs." The music was partly written by Campion and partly by Rosseter; but the whole of the poetry may be safely assigned to Campion. From a dedicatory epistle, by Rosseter, to Sir Thomas Monson, we learn that Campion's songs, "made at his vacant hours and privately imparted to his friends," had been passed from hand to hand and had suffered from the carelessness of successive transcribers. Some impudent persons, we are told, had "unrespectively challenged" (_i.e._ claimed) the credit both of the music and the poetry. The address _To the Reader_, which follows the dedicatory epistle, is unsigned, but appears to have been written by Campion. "What epigrams are in poetry," it begins, "the same are airs in music: then in their chief perfection when they are short and well seasoned. But to clog a light song with a long preludium is to corrupt the nature of it. Many rests in music were invented either for necessity of the fugue, or granted as an harmonical licence in songs of many parts; but in airs I find no use they have, unless it be to make a vulgar and trivial modulation seem to the ignorant strange, and to the judicial tedious." It is among the curiosities of literature that this true poet, who had so exquisite a sense of form, and whose lyrics are frequently triumphs of metrical skill, should have published a work (entitled "Observations in the Art of English Poesy") to prove that the use of rhyme ought to be discontinued, and that English metres should be fashioned after classical models. "Poesy," he writes, "in all kind of speaking is the chief beginner and maintainer of eloquence, not only helping the ear with the acquaintance of sweet numbers, but also raising the mind to a more high and lofty conceit. For this end have I studied to induce a true form of versifying into our language; for the vulgar and artificial custom of rhyming hath, I know, deterr'd many excellent wits from the exercise of English poesy." The work was published in 1602, the year after he had issued the first collection of his charming lyrics. It was in answer to Campion that Samuel Daniel wrote his "Defence of Rhyme" (1603), one of the ablest critical treatises in the English language. Daniel was puzzled, as well he might be, that an attack on rhyme should have been made by one "whose commendable rhymes, albeit now himself an enemy to rhyme, have given heretofore to the world the best notice of his worth." It is pleasant to find Daniel testifying to the fact that Campion was "a man of fair parts and good reputation." Ben Jonson, as we are informed by Drummond of Hawthornden, wrote "a Discourse of Poesy both against Campion and Daniel;" but the discourse was never published. In his "Observations" Campion gives us a few specimen-poems written in the unrhymed metres that he proposed to introduce. The following verses are the least objectionable that I can find:--