ng is known of
him. He was an Oxfordshire man by birth, and an Oxford man by education; he
had something to do with Cary, Lord Hunsdon, became an Attorney of the
Common Pleas, and died at Amwell suddenly in his bed in 1609, being, as it
is guessed rather than known, fifty years old or thereabouts. _Albion's
England_ was seized as contraband, by orders of the Archbishop of
Canterbury--a proceeding for which no one has been able to account (the
suggestion that parts of it are indelicate is, considering the manners of
the time, quite ludicrous), and which may perhaps have been due to some
technical informality. It is thought that he is the author of a translation
of Plautus's _Menaechmi_; he certainly produced in 1585? a prose story, or
rather collection of stories, entitled _Syrinx_, which, however, is
scarcely worth reading. _Albion's England_ is in no danger of incurring
that sentence. In the most easily accessible edition, that of Chalmers's
"Poets," it is spoilt by having the fourteeners divided into eights and
sixes, and it should if possible be read in the original arrangement.
Considering how few persons have written about it, an odd collection of
critical slips might be made. Philips, Milton's nephew, in this case it may
be hoped, not relying on his uncle, calls Warner a "good plain writer of
moral rules and precepts": the fact being that though he sometimes
moralises he is in the main a story-teller, and much more bent on narrative
than on teaching. Meres calls him "a refiner of the English tongue," and
attributes to him "rare ornaments and resplendent habiliments of the pen":
the truth being that he is (as Philips so far correctly says) a singularly
plain, straightforward, and homely writer. Others say that he wrote in
"Alexandrines"--a blunder, and a serious one, which has often been repeated
up to the present day in reference to other writers of the seven-foot
verse. He brings in, according to the taste and knowledge of his time, all
the fabulous accounts of the origins of Britain, and diversifies them with
many romantic and pastoral histories, classical tales, and sometimes mere
_Fabliaux_, down to his own time. The chief of the episodes, the story of
Argentile and Curan, has often, and not undeservedly, met with high praise,
and sometimes in his declamatory parts Warner achieves a really great
success. Probably, however, what commended his poem most to the taste of
the day was its promiscuous admixture of thing