NOTES ON POEMS
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| 7. | On New-Year's Day, 1640. | |
| The year is 1641, N.S. Strafford had been impeached in the preceding November, Laud in December. In a few months the discovery of the Army Plot brought Suckling's career in England to a close. | ||
| 9. | A Session of the Poets. | |
| 'Sessions' is the form printed in the earliest three editions. The date is probably about 1637, the year of Ben Jonson's death. Rochester imitated this poem about 1683 in his Trial of the Poets for the Bays. Another imitation is Sheffield's Election of a Poet Laureat, 1719. | ||
| l. 10. | There was] There 1646, 1658. | |
| Selden] Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Clark, 1898, ii. 223, refers to this passage and to two examples of Selden's poetical skill, one of which, prefixed to Ben Jonson's works (Gifford's one vol. edition, pp. 81, 82), is a copy of Latin hendecasyllabics. The 'sessions' is open to critics as well as to poets. | ||
| l. 11. | Wenman] Weniman 1646, 1658; Wainman 1648. For the form 'Wainman,' cf. Clarendon, Hist. Reb., ed. 1707, ii. 575, and an erasure in Aubrey, loc. cit., i. 151. Sir Francis Wenman 'of Caswell, in Witney parish,' is enumerated by Aubrey among the 'learned gentlemen of the country' who gathered round Falkland at Great Tew. Lady Wenman, on the same authority, was a niece of George Sandys, the next poet on the list. Hazlitt mentions a Thomas Wenman, author of the Legend of Mary, Queen of Scots, published from MS., 1810. | |
| l. 12. | Sands] Aubrey, loc. cit., ii. 212, quotes the register of Sandys' burial at Boxley in 1644, 'poetarum Anglorum sui sæculi facile princeps.' Sandys' poetry was confined mainly to translations. | |
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