sh critics have sometimes hoped that certain qualities in Campion's
music might be traced to the fact that his grandfather was "John Campion
of Dublin, Ireland." The art--and in Campion it was art, not
artlessness--with which he made use of such rhymes as "hill" and "vigil,"
"sing" and "darling," besides his occasional use of internal rhyme and
assonance (he rhymed "licens'd" and "silence," "strangeness" and
"plainness," for example), has seemed to be more akin to the practices of
Irish than of English poets. No evidence exists, however, as to whether
Campion's grandfather was Irish in anything except his adventures. Of
Campion himself we know that his training was English. He went to
Peterhouse, and, though he left it without taking a degree, he was
apparently regarded as one of the promising figures in the Cambridge of
his day. "I know, Cambridge," apostrophized a writer of the time,
"howsoever now old, thou hast some young. Bid them be chaste, yet suffer
them to be witty. Let them be soundly learned, yet suffer them to be
gentlemanlike qualified"; and the admonitory reference, though he had left
Cambridge some time before, is said to have been to "sweet master
Campion."

The rest of his career may be summarized in a few sentences. He was
admitted to Gray's Inn, but was never called to the Bar. That he served as
a soldier in France under Essex is inferred by his biographers. He
afterwards practised as a doctor, but whether he studied medicine during
his travels abroad or in England is not known. The most startling fact
recorded of his maturity is that he acted as a go-between in bribing the
Lieutenant of the Tower to resign his post and make way for a more pliable
successor on the eve of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. This he did on
behalf of Sir Thomas Monson, one of whose dependants, as Mr. Percival
Vivian says, "actually carried the poisoned tarts and jellies." Campion
afterwards wrote a masque in celebration of the nuptials of the murderers.
Both Monson and he, however, are universally believed to have been
innocent agents in the crime. Campion boldly dedicated his _Third Book of
Airs_ to Monson after the first shadow of suspicion had passed.

As a poet, though he was no Puritan, he gives the impression of having
been a man of general virtue. It is not only that he added piety to
amorousness. This might be regarded as flirting with religion. Did not he
himself write, in explaining why he mixed pious and light