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states, Ah, Sweet Content might for its "sweet, soft simpleness," have formed part of the Arcadia, -the quaint solemn beauty of The Talent might have added another leaf to the wreaths that encircle the brows of Donne and George Herbert. It may be mentioned that Barnes was born in the county of York about the year 1568, and was the younger son of Dr. Barnes, Bishop of Durham: he was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, and subsequently accompanied the Earl of Essex into France. Those subscribers who have the good fortune of possessing copies of Dr. Grosart's excellent reprint of Barnes' poems are much to be congratulated.

Page 31. Drummond of Hawthornden, has been designated, and rightly, "the Scottish Petrarch": with the exception of Shakespeare he is the most important sonneteer before Milton, and his compositions are both melodious and picturesque. One of the most remarkable of his sonnets is that on Mary Magdalen, which for striking and bold originality, for freshness of thought and expression, for delicious imagery and tender pathos, may compare favourably with our best English sonnets. It should be mentioned that his well-known sonnet beginning

Q

"Alexis, here she stayed," is addressed to William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, who was himself a poet, and has the honour (so far as is known) of having written the first Dialogue sonnet in English, which is here given for that reason:

A.

What art thou, in such sort that wail'st thy fall,
And comes surcharged with an excessive grief?

H.

A woeful wretch, that comes to crave relief,
And was his heart that now hath none at all.

A.

Why dost thou thus to me unfold thy state,
As if with thy mishaps I would embroil me?

H.

Because the love I bare to you did spoil me,
And was the instrument of my hard fate :--

A.

And dare so base a wretch so high aspire,

As for to plead for interest in my grace?
Go, get thee hence! Or if thou dost not cease
I vow to burn thee with a greater fire.

H.

Ah, ah,-this great unkindness stops my breath,
Since those that I love best procure my death.

Page 40. It may possibly be urged by those who are not conversant with the history of the Sonnet that these two examples by Robert Herrick are not sonnets at all. Such objectors may well be referred to a short paper by no less an authority than Samuel Taylor Coleridge, entitled "What is a Sonnet?" which they will find in Blackwood's "Edinburgh Magazine,” for June, 1832. The form used by Herrick is as legitimate as that in which Shakespeare's sonnets are written, and it is that adopted by Thomas Carew in his sonnet Love's Force, by Edmund Waller, by Cotton, and more especially by William Habington, the most productive sonneteer of Herrick's contemporaries, whose well-known collection of poems, Castara, is mainly composed of sonnets written in this form. The following may be quoted as a representative example of Habington's style :

Where sleeps the north-wind when the south inspires
Life in the spring, and gathers into quires

The scattered nightingales; whose subtle ears

Heard first the harmonious language of the spheres ;
Whence hath the stone magnetic force to allure
The enamoured iron; from a seed impure
Or natural did first the mandrake grow;

What power i' th' ocean makes it ebb and flow;

La brevita' del sonetto non comporta che una sola parola sia vana, ed il vero subietto e materia del sonetto debbe essere qualche acuta e gentile sentenza, narrata attamente, ed in pochi versi ristretta, e fuggendo la oscurità e durezza.

Comment, di Lor. de Med. sopra i suoi sonetti.

Motes.

HE two sonneteers that preceded Spenser, namely, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of

Surrey, are not included in the foregoing selection, as their sonnets are not such as would please, or interest, the large majority of modern readers. To Wyatt, however, must be attributed the honour of having written the first English Sonnet, for, as Mr. Deshler points out in his interesting Afternoons with the Poets, many of his sonnets are said to have been addressed to Anne Boleyn before her connection with Henry the Eighth, and must therefore have been written when the Earl of Surrey was not more than fifteen years of age. The following, in which the poet ‘Relinquisheth the Pursuit,' was probably composed about the time of that lady's marriage to

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