lvi
Here may you see, your fond simplicitie,
Sith Kings have favored it, of royal Blood.
The King of Scots (now living) is a Poet
As his Lepanto and his Furies show it."
Meres, in Palladis Tamia (1598), quotes the last two lines of Barnfield,[1] while Vaughan in The Golden Grove (1600) writes that "James . . . is a notable Poet, and daily setteth out most learned poems, to the admiration of all his subjects."[2]
In Allott's England's Parnassus (1600),[3] there are ten quotations from James, nine from the Uranie and one from the Phœnix, amounting in all to about seventy lines. Bodenham in his account of the contributors to Belvedére, or The Garden of the Muses,[4] published in the same year, gives to James a place of honor. He has drawn, he writes, first from the triumphs, tiltings, and similar laudatory verses dedicated to Elizabeth; and next from "what workes of Poetrie have been put to the world's eye by that learned and right royall king and Poet, James King of Scotland, no one sentence of worth hath escaped. . . ." The number of lines which passed this test are not easily discovered in the olla-podrida of Bodenham's collection.
It was thus with a well- justified hope "of a more regard to the present condition of our writings, in respect of our soveraignes happy inclination this way,"[5] that poets good, bad and indifferent lifted up their voices in mingled grief and rejoicing at the change of rulers. Innumerable were the "Sorrowes Joyes" and "Mournefull Ditties to a pleasant newe Note" which met the King on his leisurely progress into England. Daniel, Drayton, T. Greene the actor, the two Fletchers of Cambridge in the poems issued by the University, Chettle the playwright, were among the more
- ↑ Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Smith, Vol. II, p. 321.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 326.
- ↑ Collier's Poetical Miscellanies, Vol. VI ; and on the authorship of quotations, cf. Crawfurd, Notes and Queries, Ser. X, Vol. X, p. 262.
- ↑ Spenser Society reprint, London, 1875.
- ↑ From the prefatory note of Daniel's Defence of Ryme (1603).
