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Magellan." It was printed, as Lodge tells us, in his absence, and the dedication is dated 4th May, 1596. Among the prose are inserted a good many poems of various kinds and in different measures, which were extracted and reprinted in 1819. Two copies are in the British Museum.]

16. Prosopopeia, containing the Teares of the holy, blessed, and sanctified Marie, the Mother of God, &c. London, printed for E. White. 1596.

8vo.

[This is a production that has hitherto escaped the notice of bibliographers, and the only copy of it the writer has ever seen is in the Library at Lambeth Palace. Attention was first directed to it in The Shakespeare Society's Papers, vol. ii. p. 156. The dedication signed T. L. is to

the Dowager Countess of Derby (Lodge addressed his "Fig for Momus" to her son in the preceding year,) and to the Countess of Cumberland. The whole is prose, and is written in a repentant strain something like that of Thomas Nash in his "Christ's Tears over Jerusalem," 1593.]

This is the last we hear of Lodge as a miscellaneous author, excepting that he published a translation of Josephus in 1602, and, as already observed, a translation of Seneca in 1614. He seems to have, otherwise, devoted himself entirely to medicine, in which he had considerable success. By way of introducing himself to the profession he printed a "Treatise of the Plague" in 1603; and the writer is in possession of a MS. with an autograph dedication to the Countess of Arundell, under the title, not of "The Poor Man's Legacie," as it is called by Lowndes and others, but of "The Poor Man's Talent." The body of the work was written by some scribe, but it is throughout corrected in the handwriting of the author, and

it was sold with the books of the old Duke of Norfolk.

Having thus compiled, for the first time with any degree of accuracy, what I take to be a complete catalogue of the various works of Thomas Lodge, it is not my intention to go at all systematically through them, but to supply such specimens of his style, in prose and verse, as will enable readers to judge fairly of the merits of an author who has hitherto been much neglected, although the inventor of a story of which our great dramatist availed himself in a manner and to an extent which has no parallel in reference to any other of Shakspere's plays. Upon this point we shall not here enlarge, because it has already been sufficiently discussed, and because the novel of "Rosalynde" has been not long since reprinted in its entirety.

For a similar reason we shall pass over the two dramatic works of Lodge: they are now accessible to everybody who is interested in the history and progress of our early stage; but we may be allowed to remark that they merit peculiar attention, not merely because they are among our very oldest specimens of blank-verse, but because there is every ground for believing that, although not printed until 1594, they were written and acted before 1589, which may be supposed to be at least seven years anterior to the date when Shakspere joined a theatrical company in London. Lodge himself tells us that he had relinquished dramatic composition, in a remarkable stanza at the very close of one of his earliest productions (1589). He is speaking of the departure of Glaucus, after he and the author had been conferring together;

At last he left me where at first he found me,
Willing me let the world and ladies know
Of Scilla's pride; and then by oath he bound me
To write no more of that whence shame doth grow,
Or tie my pen to penny-knaves delight,
But live with fame, and so for fame to write.

Shame grew, as Shakspere and various others acknowledged, from the writing of stage-plays and from connexion with theatres; but, as if to render the matter perfectly intelligible and unmistakeable, Lodge adverts, with some scorn, to the sort of audiences whose taste he was compelled, as a dramatist, to please, terming them GENT. MAG. VOL. XXXIV.

"penny-knaves," in reference to the small sum at which the lower orders were then admitted into playhouses. This is a curious point as regards the biography of Lodge: so far as we know he kept his word, and never again put his

pen to paper for the purpose of giving "penny-knaves delight." We are not sure how far this determina4 I

tion may have been contributed to by want of success on the stage; for, assuredly, Lodge's talents were not of a dramatic kind: he was a lyrical, pastoral, and satirical poet of great variety and excellence, but at the same time without any very powerful imagination, or striking originality; and the two plays in which he was concerned, and especially that which he wrote without the aid of Robert Greene, want ease and vigour in the versification, while the plots move with tedious weight and solemnity.

We are, therefore, not much surprised by his renouncing the stage, as an author, in 1589; and we see that so early as 1584 he had entered himself of Lincoln's Inn. We may confidently conclude, therefore, that at that date he had entirely abandoned the boards, at least as a performer. That he had been an actor depends upon the assertion of Stephen Gosson, his adversary; and, although Lodge does not in terms deny it, he says enough in the pre

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fatory matter to his "Alarum against Usurers" to enable us to understand quite clearly, that he wanted as much as possible, and as soon as possible, to get rid of the imputation.*

With respect to the poem of "Scilla's Metamorphosis," from which we quoted the passage relating to Lodge and his anti-theatrical resolution, it will be seen that it is in precisely the same form of stanza as Shakspere's "Venus and Adonis," which, though probably written before its author quitted Stratford, was not published until he had been in London, perhaps, five or six years. A writer in vol. iii. of "the Shakespeare Society's Papers" wishes to establish that Lodge, having seen Shakspere's poem in MS. anterior to 1589, wrote "Scilla's Metamorphosis " in express imitation of it; but it seems at least as likely that Shakspere, having read Lodge's poem in print in 1589, took his subject from the following three stanzas, which occur near the beginning of it :

He that hath seen the sweet Arcadian boy
Wiping the purple from his forced wound,
His pretty tears betokening his annoy,

His sighs, his cries, his falling to the ground,
The echoes ringing from the rocks his fall,
The trees with tears reporting of his thrall;
And Venus, starting at her love-mate's cry,
Forcing her birds to haste her chariot on,
And, full of grief, at last with piteous eye

Seen where, all pale with death, he lay alone;
Whose beauty quail'd, as wont the lilies droop
When wasteful winter winds do make them stoop:

Her dainty hand address'd to daw her dear,
Her roseal lip allied to his pale cheek,
Her sighs, and then her looks of heavy cheer,
Her bitter threats, and then her passions meek;
How on the senseless corse she lay a-crying,
As if the boy were then but new a-dying.

We feel a strong belief that Shakspere had written his "Venus and Adonis three or four years before the appearance of Lodge's "Scilla's Metamorphosis;" but certainly such a passage as the above, in the very stanza our great dramatist employed, and on

(Sign. A 3 b.)

the very subject of his poem, may warrant an opinion that the work published in 1593 might owe its existence to the work published in 1589. Such is not our opinion, but, of course, we cannot blame those who come to a different conclusion.

* Lodge claimed to be of a good family, and was, in all probability, nearly related to Sir Thomas Lodge, upon the death of whose wife, called "Lady Anne Lodge," he wrote an epitaph, which was entered for publication on 23 December, 1579. See Extracts from the Registers of the Stationers' Company (published by the Shakespeare Society) vol. ii. p. 104.

Having dismissed matters of detail, we shall come in our next paper to a more general and comprehensive view of the character and poetry of Thomas

Lodge, supporting our conclusions by quotations from some of his rarest and best productions. J. PAYNE COLLIER.

BIRTH OF THE PRINCE OF WALES, SON OF JAMES II. A.D. 1688.

WE have received two communications upon this subject in connection with the article in our last Magazine, p. 468. The first of them is from our correspondent BERUCHINO, who sends us a copy of the original PROCLAMATION issued on the day of the Prince's birth, Sunday, 10th June, 1688, APPOINTING A TIME OF PUBLIC THANKSGIVING "for so great a blessing vouchsafed to his Majesty and these his kingdoms." This paper, which rectifies several misstatements of our historical writers, and sets the facts upon the firm footing of a documentary authority, was as follows:

"By the King

A PROCLAMATION.

"JAMES R. It having pleased Almighty God of his great and continued mercy to his Majesty and his kingdoms, to bless him and his royal consort the Queen with a son, and these his kingdoms

and dominions with a prince, his Majesty this day in council hath thought fit to appoint a time of public thanksgiving to Almighty God throughout this kingdom for so great a blessing; and his Majesty doth accordingly appoint and command that upon Sunday next, being the seventeenth day of this instant June, within the cities of London and Westminster and ten

miles distance, and upon the first day of July next, in all other places throughout this kingdom of England, dominion of Wales and town of Berwick upon Tweed, be had and solemnised a public thanksgiving to Almighty God for so great a blessing vouchsafed to his Majesty and these his kingdoms; and for this purpose his Majesty hath signified his royal pleasure to the Right Reverend father in God Thomas Lord Bishop of Rochester forthwith to prepare a form of religious service and public thanksgiving which may be suitable to this occasion; which form of service and public thanksgiving his Ma. jesty will cause to be printed and published and to be distributed throughout

the several and respective dioceses of this kingdom, to be observed and used in the churches and chapels of this kingdom and dominion aforesaid, upon the several and respective days before mentioned. Given June, 1688, in the fourth year of our at our Court at Whitehall the 10th day of reign. God save the King.

"London. Printed by Charles Hills, Henry Hills, and Thomas Newcomb, Printers to the King's most excellent Majesty. 1688."

He

Our second communication is from Mr. JOHN D'ALTON, of Dublin. sends us a copy of an ORIGINAL DOCUMENT in connection with the old falsehoods RESPECTING THE PRINCE'S BIRTH. The story to which it relates-whatever it precisely was-was evidently not entitled to the slightest attention. That it was listened to by Bishop Burnet, and, upon his introduction of Mrs. Lucy Armstrong, by Queen Mary, and that it gained Mrs. Lucy flattering words and a pension, are singular evidences of the extent to which the infection of the popular delusion had spread, and how easily persons even of intelligence allowed themselves to be led away by the current fables. In a nation and at a time when a third-rate retailer of beggarly tittle-tattle was rewarded with a pension of "fourscore guineas a-year," it is not wonderful that no "plot" was too gross for credence, or too entirely baseless to be beyond belief.

"The case of Mrs. Lucy Armstronge,

wife to Colonel Andrew Armstronge.

"That in the year 1688, being very particularly informed by one Mrs. Arnell, that had it from Mrs. Wilks' own maid, Queen Mary's midwife, an account of the great imposition she had put upon both King James and the nation by the birth of the Pretender; which relation was very surprising in the circumstance, and I thought myself in conscience and duty

*Mrs. Wilks, the midwife, gave evidence in full details to the genuineness of the birth, before many members of the Privy Council convened to ascertain the facts. Amongst them was Prince George of Denmark. See Cobbett's State Trials, vol. xii.

bound to make a discovery of so base an abuse, upon which I went to my good friend Mrs. Delves, afterwards Sir Thomas Delves' lady, and told her the story as I heard it; upon which I was sent for by the then Bishop of Sarum, that introduced me to her Majesty Queen Mary, of ever glorious and blessed memory, that thought it highly necessary to have my affidavit taken before the Secretary of State, which accordingly was done, and I was charged to bring my author, the foresaid Mrs. Arnell, before the Secretary, and she then owned she had told me what was then by me set forth, and she hoped to see me hanged for revealing it.

"For what reason I know not she was afterwards dismist, so that she imme

diately gave Mrs. Wilks notice of it, that with father Lowick and father Goodwin all made their escape together; so that by next morning her house was emptied, and the goods sold in the Broad Way in Westminster, and she with the two priests gone off to France. Their sudden going away made great noise, and I being given out as the occasion of it, was made very uneasy by many gross abuses and threats, so as that my life was in danger. King William and his Royal Consort, upon my great sufferings, thought me that worthy of a pension of four-score guineas a-year, paid me out of the privy purse constantly by her Majesty Queen Mary, as an earnest of something better when a vacancy should offer about her Majesty's person, of which I had a promise, being honoured with the epithet of a friend by both their Majesties when I was mentioned by them; and through my hearty zeal to serve the best of Kings, I entirely lost the affection of my husband, that has ever since refused me not only his bed but the maintenance of a wife, though he had a good fortune as well as raised in his preferment by my interest, as by my good fortune after dear Queen Mary's death to be the person that took Captain Counter, who came from Rome on the vile design to overthrow our kingly government by assassinating King William, and taking also all the treasonable papers along with him that made a full discovery of their hellish popish villainy, to destroy our religion and murder our dear King, that was our great and good deliverer. In the procuring this said Captain Counter, and his treasonable black box under his head, in a cellar under ground covered over with piles of wood, I was forced to employ several, together with my own son, that lost his life for his pains. The assistants, together with the informers, swallowed up most of the

1,000l. was given for the taking of this Counter, which when the King was given to understand, he renewed his promise of a further and particular care of me and mine; but that glorious and grateful Prince's untimely death cropt all my hopes in the loss of the very first of Kings and friends, The Bishop of Carlisle, now Lord Almoner, upon a view of this my hard case, thought I had a just right to King George's bounty and favour, which his Lordship promised to lay before his Majesty, to whom I have been a good instrument by my services to King William."

On the opposite side of the leaf on which this statement is drawn, Mrs. Armstrong makes the following communication to the Archbishop of Dublin (the celebrated Archbishop King).

"May it please your Grace,-To pardon the liberty of this after so long a case that does not enter into particulars of the imposition of the Pretender's birth, hoping to have the honour to do that myself to your Grace, it's too long as it is,-and how I was persecuted and threatened even husband for a subsistence thither, where I in Flanders, when I followed my wicked was abandoned, and called informer by the Scotch whore my husband kept, who ample of by that innocent good Prince of said she hoped to see me made an exWales I had so basely endeavoured to prove an impostor, and had worked my husband up to have been my murderer, as Colonel Evans can now testify, that knows my life was threatened there so much I was advised to make all the haste from Breda imaginable, as I did, for none there was willing to give house-room to a person so threatened as I was. I humbly beg your Grace to pardon this trouble, that the great experience I have had of your Grace's extraordinary kindness to me has encouraged me to presume upon. With all humility,

"Your Grace's most dutiful and most grateful humble servant,

"LUCY ARMSTRONGE."

This original instrument is directed to "The Most Reverend His Grace the Lord Arch-Bishop of Dublin, These," &c. It is endorsed in the prelate's handwriting, "Lucy Armstronge's case, given me Deer 22, 1716,' and is preserved among the manuscripts of the library founded by his Grace's predecessor, Archbishop Marsh.

THE HISTORY OF WINCHELSEA.*

(With two Plates.)

"I went over to that poor skeleton of Ancient Winchelsea. It is beautifully situated on the top of a steep hill, and was regularly built in broad streets, crossing each other and encompassing a very large square, in the midst of which was a large church now in ruins." Rev. John Wesley's Diary, Oct. 7, 1790.

THIS now-deserted town of the middle ages has an historical character peculiarly its own. In the ordinary history of our ancient towns, the continuity of their annals, and the gradual but unceasing changes of time, produce an obliterating effect on the realities of the past. The threads are lost in the ever-varying web, and we find ourselves at a loss where to trace their beginnings or where their terminations. In the history of Winchelsea, this "port upon a hill," founded on a known occasion, and sinking into obscurity within a period also far removed from our own days, we are presented with a subject definite in its limits, distinct in its character, and as striking in its details as the manners and sentiments of its æra and its position were different from those of our more advanced stage of civilisation.

The maritime population of former times were habitually men of violence. They lived in a constant struggle, not only with the elements, but with the world at large. They watched, like spiders, for the unhappy strangers whose ill fate it was to be wrecked upon their inhospitable coasts. They pursued their fisheries or their commerce in combination with deeds of hardier prowess and bolder daring, in which the law chiefly recognised was the law of the strongest. Leland has briefly, but graphically, described the history of such a community in his account of Fowey in Cornwall.

cept that its " glorie" was of still earlier date. The antiquity of what were called the Five Ports, namely, Sandwich, Dover, Romney, Hythe, and Hastings, is beyond memory, and at so early a period did the towns of Rye and Winchelsea assert their place among them that it is suggested by Mr. Cooper (p. 6) that they were added to the number by William the Conqueror. We do not find that this was literally the case, as there never was any change in the number or designation of the Cinque Ports; but, whilst all the neighbouring villages were regarded as members of one or other of them, the towns of Winchelsea and Rye were the "nobiliora membra Quinque Portuum," as they are styled in a record of the reign of John. Placed in the centre of the confederacy, Winchelsea seems in fact to have become the principal town of the whole, and in the reigns of our Norman kings it was the chief port of communication with France.

Though it is not mentioned by name in the Domesday survey, the author before us concludes it to have been the "new burgh" mentioned within the manor of Rameslie, in which there were sixty-four burgesses. It is known to have been then existing, as the Conqueror landed here in 1067, the year after his first invasion. Henry II. also landed here in 1188. It had attained its greatest prosperity in the thirteenth century, during the reigns of John and Henry III. In 1216, when threatened by Louis of France, to whom a large part of England had then submitted, the barons of Winchelsea received the permission of their trembling sovereign to compound for the safety of the town by a ransom of 200 marks; and it was from the neighJust so it was with Winchelsea: ex- bouring town of Rye that Prince

"The glorie of Fawey rose by the warres in king Edward the I. and the III. and Henry the V. dayes, partely by feates of warre, partly by pyracie; and so waxing riche felle all to merchaundise, so that the towne was hauntid with shippes of divers nations, and their shippes went to all nations."

*The History of Winchelsea, one of the Ancient Towns added to the Cinque Ports. By William Durrant Cooper, F.S.A. 1850. 8vo.

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