on the orphan head
Of innocence descend,--
But chiefly spare, O king of clouds!
The sailor on his airy shrouds;
When wrecks and beacons strew the steep,
And spectres walk along the deep.
Milder yet thy snowy breezes
Pour on yonder tented shores,
Where the Rhine's broad billow freezes,
Or the dark-brown Danube roars.

CAMPION

(-1619)

BY ERNEST RHYS

Dr. Thomas Campion, lyric poet, musician, and doctor of
medicine,--who, of the three liberal arts that he practiced, is
remembered now mainly for his poetry,--was born about the middle of
the sixteenth century; the precise date and place being unknown. It
has been conjectured that he came of an Essex family; but the evidence
for this falls through. Nor was he, as has been ingeniously supposed,
of any relationship to his namesake Edmund Campion, the Jesuit. What
is certain, and thrice interesting in the case of such a poet, is that
he was so nearly a contemporary of Shakespeare's. He was living in
London all through the period of Shakespeare's mastery of the English
stage, and survived him only by some three or four years. From an
entry in the register of St. Dunstan's-in-the-West, Fleet Street, we
learn that Campion was buried there in February, 1619-20. But although
it is clear that the two poets, one the most famous, the other
well-nigh the least known, in the greater Elizabethan galaxy, must
have often encountered in the narrower London of that day, there is no
single reference in the lives or works of either connecting one with
the other.

We first hear of Campion at Gray's Inn, where he was admitted a member
in 1586, from which it is clear that his first idea was to go in for
law. He tired of it before he was called to the bar, however; and
turning to medicine instead, he seems to have studied for his M.D. at
Cambridge, and thereafter repaired again to London and begun to
practice as a physician,--very successfully, as the names of some of
his more distinguished patients show. A man of taste, in the very
finest sense,--cultured, musical, urbane,--his own Latin epigrams
alone would show that he had all that social instinct and tact which
count for so much in a doctor's career. He was fortunate, too, in
finding in London the society best adapted to stimulate his finely
intellectual and artistic faculty. The first public sign of his
literary art was his book of 'Poemata,' the Latin epigrams referred
to, which a