Among Rowlands' numerous productions are a number of Bell-man's Sounds and Cries, to put us in mind of our Mortality. Here are two of them :—

Remember, man, thou art but dust ;
There is none alive but die he must.
To-day a man, to-morrow none,
So soon our life is past and gone.
Man's life is like a wither'd flower,
Alive and dead all in an hour.
Leave off thy sins, therefore, in time,
And Christ will rid thee of thy crime.

Arise from sin, awake from sleep;
The earth doth mourn, the heavens weep;
The winds and seas distempered bin,
And all by reason of man's sin;
Wherefore arise, lay sleep aside,
And call on God to be your guide.
From raging sword and arrow's flight,
And from the terrors of the night;
From fire's flame, from sin and sorrow,

God bless you all; and so, Good-morrow!1

The following stanza, on the Soul of Man, is by Gervase Markham (1566-1637), a soldier of fortune, a good linguist, and a writer of works of agriculture and arboriculture. His Teares of the Beloved; or The Lamentation of St. John, was published in 1600.

Fly forth, my soul; for sure this Word divine
Hath power on thee to call thee back again;
Unseen thou art, my body doth thee shrine,
Bodiless and immortal, subject to joy or pain:

To none more like than to that hidden grace
The Godhead hath, which Satan would deface.2

Samuel Nicholson, of whom little is known, except that he was a Master of Arts, wrote Acolastus his AfterWitte, at the end of the sixteenth century. The following are a few stanzas from it :

:

1 S. Rowlands' Heaven's Glory, etc., 1628; Hunterian Society, No. xxxvii.

2 The Teares of the Beloved, by Gervase Markham; ed. by Grosart, 1871, p. 38.

Misguided heart, made alien from the form

Of thy pure Maker's glorious creation;
Coward, why didst thou yield to Fancy's storm,
And stoop to Lust, that foul abomination?

Had'st thou, with Reason's bit, checked raging Will,
A small foresight might have forestalled this ill.

O where was Prayer, the Soul's Ambassador,
To muster heavenly troops of powerful aid,
When Sin and Hell first laboured to deflower
Thy body's Temple, God's unspotted maid?

Christ bids thee knock for help, and thou shalt have it ;
Then let him helpless die that will not crave it.
Thou should'st have summoned Hope and Charity,
Mount-moving Faith, hot Zeal, and perfect Love,
Free-given Grace, true Courage, Constancy,
With such like gifts descending from above.
The smallest handful of this holy band

Had kept the dev'l from seizing on thy Soul.
Look, as the chaff dispersed before the wind,
Or, as the dew exhaled by the sun,
Or, as a dream which, waking, none can find,
Or, as a thought, ended ere well begun ;
So fancies die, so soon we stifle evil,
If we resist the motives of the devil.

O heartless heart, false slave to false delight,
Why didst thou tremble ere the trumpet sounded,
Yielding thyself to sin before the fight,

And dastardly depart the field unwounded?

When guides misguide themselves, the simple sort,
By their ill-sample, render up the fort.1

The following lines I take from Professor Palgrave's Treasury of Sacred Song. They occur as prefatory to a Bible of 1594:—

Here is the Spring where waters flow

To quench our heat of sin;

Here is the tree where truth doth grow

To lead our lives therein;

Here is the Judge that stints [stays] the strife

When men's devices fail :

Here is the Bread that feeds the life

Which death can not assail.

1 Sam. Nicholson, M.A.; Acolastus his After-Witte, 1600, ed. by Grosart, 1876: Misguided heart, made alyen from the forme.'

The tidings of salvation dear

Comes to our ears from hence;
The fortress of our faith is here,
The shield of our defence.

Then be not like the hog that hath
A pearl at his desire,

And takes more pleasure in the trough
And wallowing in the mire.

Read not this book in any case

But with a single eye;

Read not, but first desire God's grace,

To understand thereby.

Pray still in faith with this respect
To fructify therein;

That knowledge may bring this effect,
To mortify thy sin.

Then happy thou in all thy life,
Whatso to thee befalls;

Yea, doubly happy shalt thou be

When God by death thee calls.

Among the many men of mark who adorned Queen Elizabeth's Court, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (15541628), was one of the most remarkable. Kinsman to Sir Philip Sydney, his school friend at Shrewsbury, his compeer in all chivalrous exercises, sharing with him his eager love for adventure, imbued like him with a deep vein of poetical thought, he was his bosom friend through life, and mourned his premature death with passionate and lasting grief. He was held in much honour by Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I., and, after holding several important posts of trust, and serving for Warwickshire in the House of Commons, he was made in 1614 Chancellor of the Exchequer and Privy Councillor. He received the title of Lord Brooke in 1620.

His was a pure and noble life. His poems, written in the intervals of active employment, were not published till after his death, and their chronology is uncertain. It is certain that some of them were not written till after the death of Elizabeth. If it did not seem natural that mention of him should be not far removed from that of Sir Philip Sydney, his poems might be considered as belonging almost more properly to the first part of the

seventeenth than to the closing years of the sixteenth century.

His poetical writings are by no means of an ordinary kind. They are far from being easy reading. But they contain so much profound thought, that the careful reader of them, however baffled and puzzled he may often be, will not rashly pronounce that the difficulties he meets with do not often rise from intricacy of thought, rather than of language. Still, obscurity is no merit either in poets of our own day or in those of a preceding age. Language may have its limitations; but a tolerable master of it should not often find it impossible to express in lucid words the subtler workings of his mind. In Lord Brooke's poems the thought is generally better than the composition. Some of his verses, especially those in the series entitled Calica, show that he was by no means without the power of writing melodiously, but his style is often cumbrous and perplexed; so much so, that a hasty reader will most certainly pass upon them a judgment far less favourable than they deserve.

In quoting a few of the verses, which are infused most definitely with the religious tone which more or less pervades them generally, I shall avoid the obscurer passages. I first give the concluding sonnet of the Calica, a fervent, but almost despairing, aspiration for the purging of the world's wickedness and the coming of a purer Kingdom of God:

Sion lies waste, and Thy Jerusalem,

O Lord, is fallen to utter desolation;
Against Thy prophets and Thy holy men
The sin hath wrought a fatal combination,
Profaned Thy name, Thy worship overthrown
And made Thee, Living Lord, a God unknown,
Thy powerful laws, Thy wonders of creation,
Thy word incarnate, glorious heaven, dark hell,
Lie shadowed under man's degeneration;

Thy Christ still crucified for doing well;
Impiety, O Lord, sits on Thy throne,

Which makes Thee, living Lord, a God unknown.

Yet unto Thee, Lord-mirror of trangression-
We, who for earthly idols have forsaken
Thy heavenly image, sinless, pure impression,
And so in nets of vanity lie taken,

All desolate, implore that to Thine own,
Lord, Thou no longer live a God unknown.
Yet, Lord, let Israel's plagues not be eternal,
Nor sin for ever cloud Thy sacred mountains,
Nor with false flames spiritual but eternal

Dry up Thy mercy's ever springing fountains;
Rather, sweet Jesu, fill up time, and come
To yield the sin her everlasting doom.1

Of the limitations of knowledge, and of the illimitable yearnings of the human mind which can only find satisfaction in the infinity of God:

And as the mind, in her vast comprehension,

Contains more worlds than all the world can find ;
So knowledge doth itself far more extend

Than all the minds of men can comprehend.

A climbing height it is without a head,

Depth without bottom, way without an end,

A circle with no line environéd,

Not comprehended, all it comprehends;

Worth infinite, yet satisfies no mind

Till it that infinite of the Godhead find.2

Of the Spirit of God in man :—

What is the chain which draws us back again,
And lifts mankind unto his first creation?
-Nothing in him his own heart can restrain ;
His reason lives a captive to temptation;
Example is corrupt, precepts are mixed;
All fleshly knowledge frail and never fixed.—
It is a light, a gift, a grace inspired,

A spark of power, a goodness of the Good;
Desire in him, that never is desired ;3

An unity where desolation stood;

In us, not of us, a spirit not of earth,
Fashioning the mortal to immortal birth.4

1 Lord Brooke's Works: Caelica, Sonnet cx., ed. by Grosart, iii. p. 142 : 'Syon lyes waste, and Thy Ierusalem.'

2 Id.: Of Humane Learning, 1-2, vol. ii. 5.

3 Which, I suppose, means 'a longing desire in man which is never asked in vain,' "desired' being used in the ancient sense of 'missed.' 4 Id.: Of Religion, 2-3, vol. i. 239.