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Till they have caught the birds for whom they brided, And on their backs they bear both land and fee, Castles and towers, revenues and receipts,

Lordships and manors, fines, yea farms and all.
What should these be? (speak you my lovely lord)
They be not men: for why they have no beards.
They be no boys which wear such sidelong gowns.
They be no Gods, for all their gallant gloss.

They be no devils (I trow) which seem so saintish.
What be they? women? masking in men's weeds?
With dutchkin doublets, and with jerkins jagged?
With Spanish spangs and ruffs set out of France,
With high copt hats and feathers flaunt a flaunt?
They be so sure even woe to Men in deed.
Nay then, my lord, let shut the glass apace,
High time it were for my poor Muse to wink,
Since all the hands, all paper, pen and ink,
Which ever yet this wretched world possest,
Cannot describe this sex in colours due.
No, No, my lord, we gazed have enough,
(And I too much; God pardon me therefore),
Better look off than look an ace too fa:
And better mum than meddle overmuch,
But if my glass do like my lovely lord,
We will espy some sunny summers day,
To look again and see some seemly sights.
Meanwhile my muse right humbly doth beseeck
That my good lord accept this vent'rous verse
Until my brains may better stuff devise.

THOMAS SACKVILLE.

[THOMAS SACKVILLE was born in 1536 at Buckhurst in Sussex, where his family had been settled since the Conquest. After some time spent at

Oxford and Cambridge, he entered parliament (1557-58), and in the beg ning of Elizabeth's reign he became known as a poetical writer. Between 1557 and 1563 he took part in The Tragedy of Gorboduc. and also planned a work called The Mirror of Magistrates, a series of poetical examples, showing with how grievous plagues vices are punished in Great Princes and Magistrates, and how frail and unstable worldly prosperity is found, where fortune seemeth most highly to favour.' He wrote the Induction, a preface, and the Story of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. But he soon threw himself into the risks of public life. On the whole he was successful. In 1567 he was created Lord Buckhurst. He experienced the fitful temper of the Queen in various public employments. He sat on several of the great state trials of the time-those of the Duke of Norfolk, Mary Queen of Scots, the Earl of Essex. In 1:99 he was made Lord High Treasurer. James I created him Earl of Dorset in 16:4. In 1608 he died, while sitting at the council table at Whitehall.']

The scanty remains of Sackville's poetry are chiefly interesting because they show a strong sense of the defects of the existing poetical standard, and a craving after something better. They show an effort after a larger and bolder creation of imagery; as where the poet, copying Dante, imagines himself guided by the Genius of Sorrow through the regions of the great Dead, there to hear from their own mouths the sad vicissitudes of their various stories. There is a greater restraint and severity than had yet been seen in the choice of language and ornament, though stiffness and awkwardness of phrase, and the still imperfect sense of poetical fitness and grace, show that the writer could not yet reach in execution what he aimed at in idea. And there is visible both in the structure of the seven-line stanzas, and in the flow of the verses themselves, a feeling for rhythmic stateliness and majesty corresponding to his solemn theme. In their cadences, as well as in the allegorical figures and pathetic moralising of Sackville's verses, we see a faint anticipation of Spenser, who inscribed one of the prefatory Sonnets of the Faery Queene to one who may have been one of his masters in his art.

R. W. CHURCH.

FROM THE INDUCTION.'

[Sorrow guides the poet to the realms of the dead.]

Then looking upward to the heaven's leams,
With nighted stars thick powder'd every where,
Which erst so glisten'd with the golden streams,
That cheerful Phoebus spread from down his spherę
Beholding dark oppressing day so near,

The sudden sight reduced to my mind,
The sundry changes that in earth we find.

That musing on this worldly wealth in thought,
Which comes, and goes, more faster than we see
The flickering flame that with the fire is wrought,
My busy mind presented unto me

Such fall of peers as in the realms had be,
That oft I wish'd some would their woes descrive
To warn the rest whom fortune left alive.

And straight forth stalking with redoubled pace,
For that I saw the night draw on so fast,
In black all clad, there fell before my face
A piteous wight, whom woe had all forewaste:
Forth from her eyen the crystal tears out brast:
And sighing sore her hands she wrung and fold
Tare all her hair, that ruth was to behold.

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I stood aghast, beholding all her plight,
"Tween dread and dolour, so distrain'd in heart,
That, while my hairs upstarted with the sight,
The tears outstream'd for sorrow of her smart:
But, when I saw no end that could apart
The deadly dewle which she so sore did make,
With doleful voice then thus to her I spake :

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'O Sorrow, alas, sith Sorrow is thy name,

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And that to thee this drear doth well pertain,

In vain it were to seck to cease the same:

But, as a man himself with sorrow slain,

So I, alas, do comfort thee in pain,

That here in sorrow art foresunk so deep,
That at thy sight I can but sigh and weep.'

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'Come, come,' quoth she, 'and see what I shall show, Come, hear the plaining and the bitter bale

Of worthy men by Fortune overthrow :
Come thou and see them rueing all in row,

They were but shades that erst in mind thou roll'd:
Come, come with me, thine eyes shall them behold'

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Flat down I fell, and with all reverence
Adored her, perceiving now that she,
A goddess, sent by godly providence,

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In earthly shape thus show'd herself to me,
To wail and rue this world's uncertainty:

And, while I honour'd thus her godhead's might,

With plaining voice these words to me she shright.

'I shall thee guide first to the grisly lake,
And thence unto the blissful place of rest,

Where thou shalt see, and hear, the plaint they make
That whilom here bare swing among the best :
This shalt thou see: but great is the unrest
That thou must bide, before thou canst attain
Unto the dreadful place where these remain.'

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Thence come we to the horrour and the hell,
The large great kingdoms, and the dreadful reign
Of Pluto in his throne where he did dwell,
The wide waste places, and the hugy plain,
The wailings, shrieks, and sundry sorts of pain,
The sighs, the sobs, the deep and deadly groan :
Earth, air, and all, resounding plaint and moan.
Here pul'd the babes, and here the maids unwed
With folded hands their sorry chance bewail'd,
Here wept the guiltless slain, and lovers dead,
That slew themselves when nothing else avail'd;
A thousand sorts of sorrows here, that wail'd

With sighs, and tears, sobs, shrieks, and all yfear,
That, oh, alas, it was a hell to hear.

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Lo here, quoth Sorrow, princes of renown,
That whilom sat on top of fortune's wheel,
Now laid full low, like wretches whirled down,
Ev'n with one frown, that stay'd but with a smile:
And now behold the thing that thou, ere while,
Saw only in thought: and what thou now shalt hear
Recount the same to kesar, king and peer.'

COMPLAINT OF THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM.

So long as fortune would permit the same,
I liv'd in rule and riches with the best :
And pass'd my time in honour and in fame,
That of mishap no fear was in my breast:
But false fortune, when I suspected least,
Did turn the wheel, and with a doleful fall
Hath me bereft of honour, life, and all.

Lo, what avails in riches floods that flows?
Though she so smil'd, as all the world were his :
Even kings and kesars biden fortune's throws,

And simple sort must bear it as it is.

Take heed by me that blith'd in baleful bliss:
My rule, my riches, royal blood and all,
When fortune frown'd, the feller made my fall.

For hard mishaps, that happens unto such
Whose wretched state erst never fell no change,
Agrieve them not in any part so much
As their distress, to whom it is so strange
That all their lives, nay, passed pleasures range,
Their sudden woe, that aye wield wealth at will,
Algates their hearts more piercingly must thrill

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