"While pike doth range the silly tench doth fly, These fleet afloat, while those do fill the dish: Nor greedy greyhound still pursue the chase; And fearful hare to run a quiet race- "In Haman's pomp poor Mardocheus wept, CONTENT AND RICH. "Sith sails of largest size The storm doth soonest tear, I bear so low and small a sail As freeth me from fear. "I wrestle not with rage While fury's flame doth burn; And ebbing wrath doth end, Into a quiet friend. "Spare diet is my fare, My clothes more fit than fine: I know, I feed and clothe a foe That pampered would repine. "No change of fortune's calms Can cast my comforts down: "And when in froward mood She proved an angry foe, Less loss to let her go." The collection of poems entitled England's Helicon, was first printed in 1600, and was followed by Davidson's Poetical Rhapsody, in 1602. These two miscellanies, the latest, we may say, which combine the attraction of antiquity with that of intrinsic interest, supply very few contributions for our present object. England's Helicon consists almost entirely of Pastoral Poems, and, in these, with scarcely an exception, the pleasures, and much more frequently the pangs of love, are the only feelings in the shepherd's heart that are deemed worthy to prompt the song. We select one verse of a moral composition, which, although of no great merit, may be thought curious, as an early example of those common-places of comparison by which the shortness and vanity of life and its enjoyments have been so often shadowed forth. "As withereth the primrose by the river, The rose, the shine, the bubble, and the snow Of praise, pomp, glory, joy (which short life gathers), The withered primrose by the morning river, The Rhapsody is somewhat more multifarious in its contents; but here, too, though arrayed in a more courtly costume, Cupid is still the leading character of the Drama. We confess. we have but little sympathy or admiration for the effusions of our amatory poets in general, who appear to have felt the passion more in their head than in their heart, or to have chosen this theme as a schoolboy might do, that they might exercise their ingenuity or display their learning. "He jests at scars that never felt a wound ;" is the remark of the enamoured Romeo on the merry and mocking Mercutio. But the persons to whom we have referred scem to have reversed the proverb, and to have affected the most acute agonies, and the most desperate extremities of suffering, without having ever received a scratch. We find the following moral verses in the Rhapsody without the name of any author: RHAPSODY 67. "The virtuous man is free, tho' bound in chains; "Nor good haps, proud-nor bad, dejected make him; To God's, not to man's will, he frames each action : He seeks no fame, but inward satisfaction; And firmer stands, the more bad fortunes shake him." We believe that the two collections we have just mentioned, are the earliest publications which contain any number of the poetical compositions of Raleigh. That this remarkable person wrote several poems of merit, is unquestionable; but it seems difficult to determine either what are his genuine productions, or at what period of his life they were written. A late elegant, but somewhat fanciful critic and antiquary, has been pleased to invest him with somewhat like manorial privileges over the outskirts of Parnassus, and to have appropriated to him all the waifs and strays that were worth seizing. The collection of Raleigh's Poems first printed at the Lee Priory Press, has enlarged a very small nucleus to a very respectable bulk, by ascribing to him a variety of pieces, as to which there is no evidence whatever that he was the writer. The Lie, or the Soul's Errand, is there given as his, not upon any satisfactory authority, but on the very questionable footing," that, though the date ascribed to this poem is demonstrably wrong," the editor knows "no author so capable of writing it as Raleigh." Another poem is assigned to him with an equal absence of proof, and simply, because it is "not unbecoming the vigorous mind, the worldly experience, and the severe disappointments of Raleigh." A considerable class of these poems is attributed to him, on no other authority than this supposition, that the signature of IGNOTO affixed to them belongs exclusively to Raleigh, which indisputably it does not, having been attached to pieces supposed to be written by Shakespeare and other contributors to the Helicon, and having probably no meaning, except simply that of Unknown.' The inference as to identity of authorship arising from this subscription, seems, indeed, to be not much more correct than that of the old lady who was struck with the number of works that were written by FINIS. Without, however, examining very critically into this question, we shall here notice such real or reputed poems of Raleigh as fall within our present province. These, it is singular to observe, are to be found not in the contemporaneous compilations of the Helicon or Rhapsody, but in a work which had no existence for thirty years after Raleigh's death-we mean the Reliquia Wottoniane, published by Isaac Walton, in 1651. The pieces we refer to, bear the signature of Ignoto, and are printed along with Sir Henry Wotton's own compositions, among other poems said by Walton to have been found among Sir Henry's papers. We are certainly not authorized to conclude that they are Wotton's, but there is still less ground for ascribing them to any one else; and it seems to be probable, that if Ignoto was known as the exclusive signature of Raleigh, Walton would have mentioned him as the author, as he has done in other instances, both in his Angler and in the Reliquiæ. The first that we shall select, appears to us to be extremely beautiful. "Blest silent groves, oh may you be For ever mirth's best nursery! May pure contents For ever pitch their tents Upon these downs, these meads, these rocks, these mountains, And peace still slumber by these purling fountains: Which we may every year Meet when we come a-fishing here." It may be thought that some of the points here brought out are of the nature of conceits, in which fanciful, and sometimes merely verbal contrasts, are exhibited between the delights of the country and the troubles or vanities of the world. Yet surely the images and ideas introduced are beautiful and pleasing, and are neither forced nor far fetched. There are, we conceive, moods of feeling in which trains of thought of this precise character are naturally suggested to the mind; and no occasion is more favourable for such contemplations than when the comparison here drawn is instituted by those who, dissatisfied with their experience of artificial life, are enjoying, in all its freshness, the pleasures of a change to nature and simplicity. No strong passions are at work, in such a situation, to fix the feelings and imagination on some great and engrossing object. The heart is light and at ease, and the fancy is at liberty to sport with the successive images that attract its attention, and to exert even some ingenuity in moulding them to suit its favourite inclination. Such, though more fantastic and querulous, was the spirit in which the melancholy Jacques moralised, by the river's side, the spectacle of the sobbing deer into a thousand similies, and found in it mat. ter for invective against all the modes of human life. Let us add, from Wotton, another of Raleigh's or Ignoto's moralities, which is more in Jacques's vein, though, if it was written posterior to As You Like it, we may think that it might as well have been let alone. DE MORTE. "Man's life's a tragedy: his mother's womb Another speaker follows on the same side, whose voice, if it were genuine, would be worth listening to. The verses now to be quoted bear, in the Reliquiæ, the signature of Francis Lord Bacon, though we do not remember that any poetry has ever found admission into his collected works, except some translations of psalms. What we are here to give is not very poetical, and would scarcely turn the balance against the prose wisdom of one of the immortal Essays, Civil and Moral. Perhaps, however, these lines have some touches characteristic of their nominal author, and would, at least, hold a respectable place in any anthology gathered from the effusions of lawyers or lord chancellors. They are obviously copied from some of the Greek epigrams on the same subject. THE WORLD. "The world's a bubble: and the life of man Less than a span. In his conception wretched; from the womb, So to the tomb. Nurst from his cradle, and brought up to years Who then to frail mortality shall trust, "Yet, whilst with sorrow here we live opprest, What life is best? Courts are but only superficial schools, To dandle fools: These extracts from the Reliquiæ naturally lead us to the undoubted compositions of the eminent man who has given a name to the whole collection. Who can speak of Sir Henry Wotton without love and admiration? -of him whose life has, in the hands of his amiable and attached biographer, been rendered as interesting as a romance and as instructive as a sermon ; --an accomplished and liberal traveller, yet a firm favourer of his own country—a man of the world, yet a lover of letters and retirement-a practised diplomatist, yet retaining among protocols and politics a gallantry and enthusiasm that would have become an old chevalier, and a purity and piety that would have done honour to a divine. Were there nothing else to commend him, it ought to be enough to perpetuate the memory of Wotton that he was among the earliest, and was probably the most authoritative, of those friends who encouraged the rising genius of Milton-to whom, in 1638, when sending him abroad with the memorable advice, "I pensieri stretti e il viso sciolto," he wrote, expressing the singular delight he had received from that "dainty piece of entertainment," the Mask of Comus, "wherein," he says, "I should much commend the tragical part, if the lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Dorique delicacy in your songs and odes; whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our language; ipsa mollities." May we be allowed to conjecture whether Milton, Francis Lord Bacon. on the other hand, had not, in the final passage of his Penseroso, meant somewhat to shadow out that venerable retirement of Wotton as provost of Eton College, by which he exchanged the task of rolling the restless stone of state employment for the sweet contemplation and holy thoughts of a calm and cloister-like seclusion? "And may at last my weary age Be this as it may, the interchange of courtesies and kindnesses which at this time passed between these great, though not equally great, men, was worthy both of the young poet and the old ambassador. All of us know the exquisite song beginning, "Ye meaner beauties of the night," written by Wotton, upon his admired and unfortunate mistress, the Princess Elizabeth, and which some senseless clippers and coiners of poetry, in our own country, have recast into a eulogium upon the Scottish Queen Mary. The other little poem with which Wotton's name is most frequently connected, has certainly not so much poetical beauty; but it has also considerable merit, and is altogether, bating a little want of method and connexion, a very favourable specimen of the species of com |