LORD VAUX, AS A POET.

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marriage of Prince Arthur and Katharine of Arragon. After many disputes and disquisitions, it is established that the poems of Vaux are preserved in the Paradise of Dainty Devices.' In spite of this attractive name, the compositions of this minor poet bear titles bespeaking a mournful renunciation of the pleasures of life. I lothe that I did love,' is a ditty, written in the time of Queen Mary (certainly not a cheerful period). It represents the 'image of Death.' From this ditty are taken, Warton tells us, three of the stanzas of the grave-digger's song in Hamlet. Vaux appears to have been the great writer upon the death of all notable persons of his time. One of his poems, The Assault of Cupide upon the Fort in which the Lover's Heart lay wounded,' is of a more cheerful description. Yet Warton indignantly observes: There is more poetry in some of the old pageants described by Holinshed than in this allegory of Cupid.' Surely an Edinburgh reviewer-when Jeffrey flourished-or a Saturday reviewer of our own day, could say nothing more severe. If there ever lived a writer whose pages seem intended to produce a head-ache, it is Holinshed.

As a specimen of the playful compliments which Vaux indulged in to the other sex let us give his ode to a lady named Bayes:

'In Bayes I boaste, whose braunch I beare,

Such joye therein I finde,

That to the death I shall it weare,

To ease my carefull minde.

In heat, in cold, both night and day,

Her virtue may be sene;

When other frutes and flowers decay,

The Bay yet growes full grene.

Her berries feede the birdes ful oft,

Her leaves swete water make;

Her bowes be set in every loft,

For their swete savour's sake.

The birdes do shrowd them from the cold,

In her we dayly see;

And men make arbers as they wold,

Under the pleasant tree.'

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LINES BY MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS.

This, and the other poems referred to, are taken from those of Uncertain Authors,' printed in Tottell's edition of the poetry of Surrey and Wyatt, the first printed poetical miscellany in our language. That this publication was extensively circulated is evident, from the fact that two lines taken from it, were written by Mary Queen of Scots on a window, with a diamond, in Fotheringay Castle. Royalty has been, in all ages, the last to whom popular works are known. The lines are these:

CHAPTER VI.

MARY TUDOR; HER SADNESS AND OBSTINACY. HENRY'S BRUTALITY.

INTENDS. AT ONE TIME PUTTING HER TO DEATH.

JOHN HEYWOOD, THE

ONLY PERSON WHO COULD MAKE HER SMILE. HIS LIFE AND POEMS.

SACKVILLE; HIS MIRROUR OF MAGISTRATES.'

-

SPENSER; HIS EARLY

LIFE, AND STRUGGLES. ANECDOTE OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY OF BURLEIGH. —

SPENSER RETIRES TO THE NORTH OF ENGLAND.

FALLS IN LOVE.

HIS HIS MISFORTUNES IN

FRIENDSHIP FOR GABRIEL HARVEY, AND RALEGH.

IRELAND. LAST DAYS AND DEATH. SPENSER'S WORKS.

JOHN HEYWOOD, THE EPIGRAMMATIST.

105

CHAPTER VI.

In the midst of the court festivities in the various palaces of Henry the Eighth, amid the gay and great, one mournful, unchanging face was seen-that of the Princess Mary. The gloom on that young brow was rarely dispelled. Compelled to be present, she appeared in spectral silence at every revelry; she witnessed every pageant; sat, with aching heart, through all the displays in which her mother-in-law the first Anne Boleyn, played a part; and beheld, apparently unmoved, the scarcely vacant place by her royal father's side filled by the fair Jane Seymour. Still her resolution not to conform to new modes of faith, not to let down the temperature of her slow and sullen wrath, continued until Henry's last hour.

There was one person alone who could move this unhappy princess to a smile by his irresistible flow of mirth; this was John Heywood, commonly called the Epigrammatist. He seems to have been the only being who, amid the crowd of obsequious courtiers, cared for Mary; and she owed to him the few gleams of cheerfulness in her dreary existence. In her presence Heywood gave utterance to his jests and epigrams; and she often summoned him to her privy chamber, to amuse her specially in her hours of retirement. Heywood was among our first writers of comedy; he composed six hundred epigrams-his puns and jokes versified. He had a sort of patent for bon-mots; even one of the titles of his plays