ourt_,' is the poet's own description--it is to note
that Drayton had no model for it; that it remains wellnigh
unique in English letters for over two hundred years; and that,
despite such lapses into doggerel as the third stanza, and some
curious infelicities of diction which need not here be specified,
it remains, with a certain Sonnet, its author's chief title
to fame. Compare the ballads of _The Brave Lord Willoughby_
and _The Honour of Bristol_ in the seventeenth century, the
song of _The Arethusa_ in the eighteenth, and in the nineteenth
a choice of such Tyrtaean music as _The Battle of the Baltic_,
Lord Tennyson's _Ballad of the Fleet_, and _The Red Thread of
Honour_ of the late Sir Francis Doyle.

II

Originally _The True Character of a Happy Life_: written and
printed about 1614, and reprinted by Percy (1765) from the
_Reliquiae Wottonianae_ of 1651. Says Drummond of Ben Jonson, 'Sir
Edward (_sic_) Wotton's verses of a Happy Life he hath by heart.'
Of Wotton himself it was reserved for Cowley to remark that

He did the utmost bounds of knowledge find,
And found them not so large as was his mind;

* * * * * *

And when he saw that he through all had passed
He died--lest he should idle grow at last.

See Izaak Walton, _Lives_.

III, IV

From _Underwoods_ (1640). The first, _An Ode_, is addressed to an
innominate not yet, I believe, identified. The second is part of
that _Ode to the Immortal Memory of that Heroic Pair, Sir Lucius
Cary and Sir Henry Morrison_, which is the first true Pindaric in
the language. Gifford ascribes it to 1629, when Sir Henry died,
but it seems not to have been printed before 1640. Sir Lucius
Cary is the Lord Falkland of Clarendon and Horace Walpole.

V

From _The Mad Lover_ (produced about 1618: published in 1640).
Compare the wooden imitations of Dryden in _Amboyna_ and
elsewhere.

VI

First printed, Mr. Bullen tells me, in 1640. Compare X. (Shirley,
_post_, p. 20), and the cry from Raleigh's _History of the World_:
'O Eloquent, Just, and Mighty Death! Whom none could advise,
thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done;
and whom all the World hath flattered, thou only hast cast out
of the World and despised: thou hast drawn together all the
far-stretched Greatness, all the Pride, Cruelty, and Ambition
of Man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words,
"_Hic Jacet_."'

VII, VIII

This pair of '