ROBERT SOUTHWELL. BORN 1560; EXECUTED 1595. SOUTHWELL was a Roman Catholic, and at an early age entered the Society of Jesuits at Rome. Returning to England he employed himself with zeal as a missionary, in the hopeless cause of the abolished religion. He was arrested, and committed to the Tower, where he lingered nearly three years; during which time he was repeatedly put to the torture, in order to draw from him disclosures respecting the conspiracies in which the Papists were at that time engaged against Queen Elizabeth; and finally was tried, and suffered, on a charge of high treason. It is impossible to become acquainted with the literary remains of this author, breathing, as they do, the most ardent and humble piety, in language of great purity and pathos, without wishing that the stain of his blood could be removed from our judicial annals-without lamenting the dire necessity, which, in times of imminent peril to the general weal, calls for the execution of statutes of such a sweeping severity as to involve in equal destruction, as abettors of the same cause, the best and vilest of mankind; the assassin or the incendiary, and the high-souled martyr, though of an erroneous faith. The works of Southwell, although now rarely met with, were frequently reprinted at the close of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries. The longest of his poems is "St. Peter's Complaint;" of his prose treatises the chief are "Mary Magdalene's Funeral Tears," and "The Triumphs over Death; a consolatory Epistle for troubled Minds, in the Effects of dying Friends." ROBERT SOUTHWELL. TIMES GO BY TURNS. THE lopped tree in time may grow again; The sea of fortune doth not ever flow, Her loom doth weave the fine and coarsest web: No hap so hard, but may in fine amend. Not always fall of leaf, nor ever spring, A chance may win that by mischance was lost, Who least, hath some, who most, hath never all. LOOK HOME. RETIRED thoughts enjoy their own delights, The mind a creature is, yet can create, Man's soul of endless beauties image is, All that he had, his image should present, |