And as the Wit doth reap the fruits of Sense,
So doth the quickening power the senses feed:
Thus while they do their sundry gifts dispense,
The best the service of the least doth need.

Even so the King his Magistrates do serve,

Yet Commons feed both Magistrate and King:
The Commons' peace the Magistrates preserve

By borrowed power, which from the Prince doth spring.
The quickening power would be, and so would rest;
The sense would not be only, but be well;

But Wit's ambition longeth to the best,

For it desires in endless bliss to dwell.

And these three powers three sorts of men do make:
For some, like plants, their veins do only fill ;
And some, like beasts, their senses' pleasure take;
And some, like angels, do contemplate still.
Therefore the fables turned some men to flowers,
And others did with brutish forms invest;
And did of others make celestial powers,
Like angels, which still travail, yet still rest.

Yet these three powers are not three souls but one;
As one and two are both contained in three,

Three being one number in itself alone :

A shadow of the Blessed Trinity.

The question then naturally arises whether this complex organism is destroyed by death, and the remainder of Nosce Teipsum is occupied with an examination of reasons advanced for and against the immortality of the soul. Each is stated and handled with the same facility of expression that shines in the extracts from the poem already made. Though not absolutely the first to write in the decasyllabic quatrain with alternate rhymes, Davies certainly employs the metre with finer skill and versatility than any English poet who has used it on a large scale. Neither the Gondibert of Davenant nor the Annus Mirabilis is equal in flow and harmony of movement to Nosce Teipsum; and though Davies does not attain-as indeed he does not attempt the depth of pathos found in Gray's Elegy, it seems certain that the style of that noble poem could not have been preserved through a great number of stanzas without becoming monotonous.

Davies obtained his mastery over his metre by having at an early age used alternate rhymes, rather than the couplet, for the purpose of epigram. Though there is no record of the date of the publication of his epigrams, the allusions they contain to matters of ephemeral interest suggest that they must have been written some years before the appearance of Orchestra. They number forty-eight, and the first of them defines their scope and character

Fly, merry Muse, unto that merry town,

Where thou mayst plays, revels, and triumphs see ;
The house of Fame and theatre of renown,
Where all good wits and spirits love to be.

Fall in between their hands that praise and love thee,
And be to them a laughter and a jest:

But as for them which scorning shall reprove thee,
Disdain their wits, and think thine own the best.

But if thou find any so gross and dull
That think I do to private taxing lean,

Bid him go hang, for he is but a gull,

And knows not what an epigram doth mean,
Which taxeth, under a peculiar name,

A general vice, which merits public blame.

The field for the operations of the epigram was the Court; and the appearance of this species of poem shows that, in the Court of Elizabeth, the civil standard of morals, manners, and taste had so far prevailed, that persons who exceeded or fell short of it had become marks for social ridicule. Each of the epigrams reflects pointedly on some folly or affectation of behaviour, as exhibited in different hangers on of the Court and fashionable society" gulls," gamblers, common debauchees, loose women, bad poets, or clownish pretenders. The standard of measurement is practically what is recommended by Castiglione in the Courtier. Martial is the model for style: the matter, as might be expected, is generally gross, sometimes obscene, showing the author to have been young, and the code of manners semibarbarous; yet the point made is, as a rule, just and reasonable. The following lines, satirising one of Drayton's sonnets in praise of Idea, will illustrate the relation of

these classic epigrams to the romantic extravagances of

the age :

Audacious painters have Nine Worthies made,
But poet Decius, more audacious far,
Making his mistress march with men of war,
With title of "Tenth Worthy" doth her lade.

Me thinks that gull did use his terms as fit,
Which termed his love "a giant for her wit." 1

Court follies first suggested to Davies to write in the manner of Martial. The epigrammatic subject-matter of Davies, joined to an imitation of the satiric manner of Juvenal and Persius, became the starting-point for English satire. The first public attempt at the Roman style of satire in England was undoubtedly made in a collection of poems with the title of Virgidemiarum, which appeared in 1597. The author himself laid claim to the merit of originality :—

I first adventure with foolhardy might
To tread the steps of perilous despite.
I first adventure, follow me who list,
And be the second English satirist.

Joseph Hall, the writer of these verses, was born, as he himself tell us, " 1st July 1574, at five of the clock in the morning, in Bristow Park, within the parish of Ashby-de-la-Zouch." He was educated in the grammar school of the town, and, as he was one of twelve children, his father, who was of the household of the Earl of Huntingdon, had intended not to send him to a university. The intervention of others, however, procured Joseph admission, at the age of fifteen, to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, of which he was elected first scholar and then fellow. "I spent," he says, "in that society six or

1 The point of the epigram is explained by Ben Jonson, who told Drummond of Hawthornden: "Sir J. Davies played in an epigram on Drayton's, who in a sonnet concluded his Mistress might have been the Ninth Worthy; and said he used a phrase like Dametas in Arcadia, who said, For Wit his Mistress might be a giant." The sonnet was Amour 8 in Idea's Mirror (see p. 29). It was suppressed in consequence of Drayton's quarrel with the Countess of Bedford, and perhaps too from a perception that Davies's ridicule was just.

seven years more with such contentment as the rest of my life hath in vain shown to yield." He enjoyed a great reputation as a lecturer on rhetoric, and it was during this period that he published the first three books of the satires above referred to. The remaining three books were issued with the same title in 1598, but, as Hall was then mixed up in a quarrel with Marston, his satires were seized, at the same time with those of his rival, by order of the Bishop of London, and were ordered to be burned on the ground of their supposed indecency. Such a charge was ridiculous with respect to Hall's work, which was soon released by the authorities, and was reprinted in 1599 and 1602. It was the last poetical production of the writer, the rest of whose life was devoted to the service of the Church.

In this his advancement was steady, and his career, with the exception of the closing years of his life, prosperous. He was appointed in rapid succession to the livings of Halstead, Waltham, and the prebend of Willenhall; James I. sent him to the Synod of Dort to reconcile, if possible, the differences between the Calvinists and the Arminians; he also made him Dean of Gloucester. Under Charles I. he was raised first to the Bishopric of Exeter, and afterwards to that of Norwich. In the latter capacity he suffered much from the Long Parliament, whose sequestrators deprived him of the rents due both from his spiritual and temporal lands, allowing him instead a maintenance of £400 a year. After supporting himself

in his trials, for some years, with great dignity and patience, Bishop Hall died on the 8th of September 1656, being then in the eighty-second year of his age. He was, as a divine, too reasonable for the times in which he lived. When he wrote against what he himself calls "the damnable corruption of the Roman Church," he found himself" suddenly exposed to the rash censures of many well-affected and zealous Protestants," because he dwelt on the necessity of a visible Church. When he tried to be tolerant of the Puritans he fell under the suspicion of Laud; on the other hand, his very moderate apology for

Episcopal Government brought down upon him the savage invective of Milton.

Milton, in the worst style of controversy, fell, for lack of argument, upon the title of his adversary's satires, which Hall had rather pointlessly called Toothless. "That such a poem," says the Puritan pamphleteer, "should be toothless I still affirm it to be a bull, taking away the essence of what it calls itself. For if it bite neither the persons nor the vices, how is it a satire ? And if it bites either, how is it toothless? So that toothless satires are as if he had said toothless teeth." 1 In this there was some justice. The nature of satire, in the Roman sense of the word, was as yet little understood. Hall, was indeed, technically speaking, scarcely entitled to call himself the "first English satirist." Spenser's Mother Hubberd's Tale is a satirical apologue, and in 1593 Thomas Lodge had published five satires in his Fig for Momus, saying of them: "My satires, to speak truth, are by pleasure rather placed here to prepare and try the ear than to feed it; because, if they pay well, the whole centon of them already in my hands shall suddenly be published." Lodge's satires were, however, of a kind that could interest nobody, being mere abstract sermons upon things in general, smoothly written, but without pith or pungency, so that Hall in his assertion,

I first adventure; follow me who list,
And be the second English satirist,

might very well be ignorant of the claims of any predecessor (especially as Donne's satires were not published), and was, indeed, really the first to attempt an imitation in English of Juvenal's manner.

His poems were nevertheless rather of the nature of epigrams than satires. They were contained in six books, of which the first three, published before the rest, were classified as (1) Poetical; (2) Academical; (3) Moral. By far the best are those in the first book. These are directed against the poetical taste of the day, and are 1 Apology against a Pamphlet, etc.

VOL. III

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