xl
was honored, together with his royal master, by a surprisingly large number of selections, forty-seven in all and amounting to 392 lines, taken from his translation of Judith. He is also included, with the King and Locke, in the list of forty or more contributors to Bodenham's Belvedére, or The Garden of the Muses, published in the same year. The first of these collections contains some distinguished verse, but Hudson's, it must be admitted, is of a type to warrant the disparaging remarks about "crows and kestrels" in The Return from Parnassus of 1602. In this satire, both he and Locke are advised to sleep quiet "among the shavings of the press, and let your books lie in some old nooks among old boots and shoes, so you may avoid my censure."[1] The verse of his which has survived consists of an epitaph on Sir Richard Maitland[2] (d. 1586), prefatory sonnets for James's poems and for Fowler's Triumphs of Petrarch, and The History of Judith[3] translated from Du Bartas and published in Edinburgh, 1584. Robert Hudson wrote sonnets on the same themes as his brother, and is addressed by Montgomerie in a series of four sonnets (XXV-XXIX) which are really a single poem seeking his assistance at court.
Fowler's Triumphs of Petrarch, just mentioned, was written, like Hudson's Judith, at the request of the King, and is preserved in manuscript, with a sonnet sequence entitled The Tarantula of Love, in the Edinburgh University Library.[4] The title "P. of Hawicke," which is given Fowler in the MS., is explained by an entry in the Records of the Burgh of Edinburgh, May 29, 1589, to the effect that "William Fowler, persoun of Hawick" had been appointed
- ↑ Temple Dramatists edition, London, 1905, I, ii, ll. 56, 147-155. The editor follows W. C. Hazlitt in describing Locke and Hudson as "satirists of the time ... the Bavius and Mævius of that age." They were poetæ minimi, but not satirists.
- ↑ This, with Robert's epitaph and other sonnets probably of the same authorship, is in Pinkerton's Ancient Scottish Poems, Vol. II, p. 350 ff.
- ↑ "At your owne commandement enterprised, corrected by your Maiest. owne hande, and dedicated to your owne Highnesse."—Epistle dedicatorie.
- ↑ For a description of the MS., cf. XXLX, note.
