Southwell learned how to suffer for conscience sake, and gave proof of his willingness to make a complete surrender of himself to his cause by his entrance into the Society of Jesus in 1577. In 1588 he was sent with Garnet into England to minister to the spiritual needs of those who adhered to the ancient faith. Here for several years he continued to pass from house to house, concealed by the care and fidelity of his friends, till he was at last betrayed, by the treachery of one Ann Bellamy, to the informer Topcliffe, by whose means he was arrested and sent to the Tower in 1592. After being put to the rack thirteen times, he was hanged, bowelled, and quartered at Tyburn, in February 1594-95. On the scaffold he pleaded that he "never entertained any designs or plots against the Queen or kingdom," neither "had I," said he, "any other design in returning home to my native country than to administer the sacraments to those that desired them." Southwell's poems were published posthumously in 1595. Most of them were doubtless written in prison. They breathe, through the historic persons of Holy Writ, and especially St. Peter and Mary Magdalene, the contempt of the writer for life, repentance for sin, and the desire of St. Paul," to be with Christ which is far better." Here, for example, is a stanza from Mary Magdalene's Complaint at Christ's Death: Sith my life from life is parted, Death, come take thy portion; All that live, and not in God, Couch their life in death's abode. And again, in a poem called Life is Loss, he says, in the same antithetical vein as Chidiock Tichborne : For that I love I long, but that I lack; That others love I loathe, and that I have; Speaking in the person of Mary Queen of Scots, he triumphs in the idea of death: A prince by birth, a prisoner by mishap, From crown to cross, from throne to thrall I fell; My weal my woe, my worldly heaven my hell. By death from prisoner to a prince enhanced, From woe to weal, from hell to heavenly reign. Compared with the poems of later Roman Catholic writers, like Crashaw, Southwell's style is pure and simple. The foregoing extracts show how skilfully he adapted the poetical Euphuism of his day to the paradoxical character of his thought. Though Hall says of his poetry satirically, Now good Saint Peter weeps pure Helicon, the unprejudiced reader will find in Southwell a mirror of genuine emotion, without any attempt at wit for wit's sake. The ardour of his imagination, as well as the glow of his religious faith, is felt in the following beautiful little poem, which Ben Jonson knew by heart :— THE BURNING BABE As I in hoary winter's night stood shivering in the snow, Surprised I was with sudden heat, which made my heart to glow; And lifting up a fearful eye, to view what fire was near, A pretty babe all burning bright did in the air appear, Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed, As though His floods should quench His flames which with His tears were fed; "Alas!" quoth He, "but newly born in fiery heats I fry, Yet none approach to warm their hearts, or feel my fire, but I ! My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns; Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns; The allegorical representation of spiritual emotion by means of material images, which appears in mediæval poetry as early as the Divine Comedy, and which crystallises itself in the isolated metaphors of Petrarch, is here exhibited in an admirably balanced form. In other of Southwell's poems the tendency to isolate single concetti, and to illustrate them by means of far-fetched imagery, is carried to excess. St. Peter's Complaint, for example, is a composition of 132 stanzas, each consisting of six lines, in which the Apostle is made to bewail his denial of his Master by extracting a moral reflection from every incident mentioned in the Gospel narrative of the Crucifixion. Thus the recorded fact that Peter warmed himself at the fire gives rise to this apostrophe : O hateful fire! (ah! that I ever saw it), Too hard my heart was frozen for thy force; Thy hell-resembling heat did freeze it worse. O that I rather had congealed to ice, Than bought thy warmth at such a damning price! When it is written that Jesus turned to look on Peter, the poet writes of Christ's eyes : Sweet volumes, stored with learning fit for saints, Wherein eternal study never faints, Still finding all, yet seeking all it finds : How endless is your labyrinth of bliss,. Where to be lost the sweetest finding is! Sometimes the discordia concors is produced by the conjunction round a single idea of a number of contrary Christ's bloody sweat, for example, is com images. pared to Fat soil, full spring, sweet olive, grape of bliss, That yields, that streams, that pours, that dost distill, Very different in character and style is the "wit" of John Davies of Hereford, who appears from contemporary evidence to have been also a Roman Catholic.1 Born at Hereford about 1565,2 he was educated, probably, at the grammar school in that town. He seems not to have been a member of an English university, though he resided at Oxford, where it is likely that he exercised his profession of writing-master, and wrote two sonnets in praise of Magdalen College. Fuller bears testimony to his pre-eminence in his own art, calling him "the greatest master of the pen that England in her age beheld, whether for 'fast writing,' 'fair writing,' 'close writing,' or 'various writing."" 3 Davies himself speaks of his "pen" as being his " plough," meaning that it procured him his livelihood; and he leads us to suppose that it gave him the means of frequent and familiar intercourse with the nobility. We may therefore suppose that he passed his life quietly and in easy circumstances, enjoying the company (as we may gather from his Wit's Pilgrimage (1610)) of the leading men of letters in his time, such as Ben Jonson, Chapman, Browne, and Sylvester. His other works are of a uniformly religious character: Mirum in Modum (1602); Microcosmos (1603); Humour's Heaven in Earth, with The Triumph of Death (1605); Summa Totalis (1607); Holy Roode (1609); Scourge of Folly (1610); Muses' Sacrifice, or Divine Meditations (1612). He died in 1618, and was buried at St. Dunstan's in the West. Davies's work shows none of the genius and originality of Southwell's. He has two main originals-his namesake, Sir John Davies, author of Nosce Teipsum, and Sylvester, the translator of Du Bartas. From the former he obtained the suggestion for Mirum in Modum, a long theological discourse on the nature of the soul, written in rhyming stanzas, arranged on the model of the Spenser stanza, 1 Statement of Arthur Wilson. See Peck's Desiderata Curiosa, p. 461. 2 Davies's age is determined by his marriage license in the Bishop of London's office, dated June 1613, in which he is said to be "about 48." 3 Worthies (1672), Herefordshire, p. 40. 4 Microcosmos. Funeral Elegy on Mrs. Anne Dutton: "Oft have I been embosomed with Lords." with a decasyllabic, instead of an Alexandrine, verse for the close. Summa Totalis, a philosophic poem on the nature of God, is also inspired from the same source. On the other hand, Microcosmos, a long rambling meditation on the world in general, evidently owes its being to Sylvester's Holy Weeks; and the same may be said of The Holy Roode and The Muses' Sacrifice; while in Wit's Pilgrimage and The Scourge of Folly he uses the satiric and epigrammatic vein which, after being worked by Harington and Davies, had been further developed by Ben Jonson. Davies of Hereford possesses neither the strong reasoning power of the author of Nosce Teipsum, nor the ingenious fancy of Sylvester; but like the latter he cultivates the habit of flitting in bee-like fashion from one conceit to another, and of perpetually playing upon words. Here, for example, is the opening of Mirum in Modum :Wit yield me words; Wit's words Wisdom bewray; My soul, infuse thyself int' saws divine. The froth of Wit, O Wisdom, scum away; Powder these lines with thy preserving brine; Refresh their saltness, salt their freshness fine, That Wit's sweet words of Wisdom's salt may taste; Which can from crude conceit corruption stay, And make the same eternally to last, Though in oblivion be buried ay The scum of Wit, the witty scum's repast, Which, like light scum, with those lewd scums doth waste. The following passage from Summa Totalis, describing the omnipresence of God, when compared with the close reasoning in verse of Nosce Teipsum, will suggest to the reader the difference in the mental calibre of the two poets : If so, then so he must be everywhere, He is, and is not so: but sith this strain |