The house, in a deer park of about 400 acres, had been built by Richard Beere, who was abbot of Glastonbury between the years 1493 and 1524. His successor, Richard Whiting, who objected to the dissolution of the monasteries, was seized at Sharpham, kept about two months a prisoner, then dragged on a hurdle to the top of Tor Hill, and there hanged and quartered for "robbing Glastonbury Church." Henry VIII. took all, without being hanged for it, and granted Sharpham to Edward Dyer, the poet's father. There, no very long time afterwards, Sidney's friend was born. Dyer was sent in due time to Oxford, left the University without

having graduated, travelled beyond seas, came home, and served in the court of Elizabeth, by whom he was employed in several embassies. He was one of an embassy to Denmark in the year 1589, three years after Sidney's death; and in that year George Puttenham published an "Art of English Poesy," in which Dyer is praised as "for elegy most sweet, solemn and of high conceit." Mr. Edward Dyer was not a knight in his friend Sidney's life-time. He was not knighted until the year 1596, when he was also made Chancellor of the Garter. He died in 1607, and was buried in the chancel of St. Saviour's, Southwark. From among the few pieces that remain in evidence of his genius, let us take these two:

20

1 Wine, of Niobe. Tears. Niobe, daughter of Tantalus and wife of King Amphion, being overproud of her six sons and seven daughters thought herself greater than Latona, the mother of Apollo and Diana Therefore Latona slew with darts of Apollo and Diana the children of Niobe, and her husband Amphion killed himself. Her grief is told by Ovid in a passage of the sixth book of his "Metamorphoses," which I give as translated in Elizabeth's reign by Arthur Golding. The translation was first published in 1567. Niobe's sons were dead, her husband was dead, six of her seven daughters were dead"At last as yet remainéd one; and for to save that one, Her mother with her body whole did cling about her fast, And wrying her did over her her garments wholly cast, And cried out, Oh, leave me one, this little one yet save; Of many but this only one, the least of all, I crave!!

But while she prayed for whom she prayed was killed. Then down she sat,

Bereft of all her children quite and drawing to her fate,
Among her daughters and her sons and husband newly dead.
Her cheeks wax hard; the air could stir no hair upon her head;
The colour of her face was dim, and clearly void of blood;
And sadly, under open ids, her eyes unmovéd stood.
In all her body was no life; for even her very tongue
And palate of her mouth was hard, and each to other clung.
Her pulses ceased for to beat, her neck did cease to bow,
Her arms to stir, her feet to go, all power forwent as now,
And into stone her very womb and bowels also bind,
Pnt yet she wept; and being hoist by force of whirling wind,
Was carried into Phrygie. There upon a mountain's top
She weepeth still, in stone; from stone the drerie tears do drop."

But best were thee to hide,

And never come to light;

For in the world can none but thee These accents sound aright.

160

And so an end; my tale is told;

His life is but disdained

Whose sorrows present pain him so His pleasures are full feigned.

Fulke Greville, born in 1554, was the only son of a father of the same name, whose family seat was at Beauchamp Court, in Warwickshire, and who had married a daughter of Ralph Nevile, Earl of Westmoreland. Fulke Greville, the poet, was born at Beauchamp Court; he was eleven years old when his father was knighted, and over fifty when his father died. In his tenth year he was sent to Shrewsbury School. A boy of the same age, Philip Sidney joined the school at the same time, and on the roll of scholars Greville's name was the next entered after Sidney's. At Shrewsbury began the friendship that strengthened until death made it imperishable. In 1568 Fulke Greville, aged fourteen, was admitted to Jesus College, Cambridge. When he had left Cambridge his heart stirred him to join the combatants in the Low Countries, and he had already shipped his horses when he was stopped by the Queen's mandate, her messenger being his friend Edward Dyer. In other like attempts he was checked by the Queen, until he quietly permitted her to shut him off from enterprise abroad. Greville's close friendship for Philip Sidney, and his own worth, that we find proved by his poems, caused Philip's father, Sir Henry Sidney, as Lord President of Wales, to secure

2 Feres, companions.

3 DY ERE thou let's his name be known. The conceit of telling his name while declaring that he will not tell it, is of a piece with the rest of this "Fancy," which is but an exercise in the art of ingenious lamentation, a pleasant trial of skill upon the knightly theme to which, by convention, a large class of fashionable poems was still, in Elizabeth's time, restricted.

In

to his son's friend very lucrative employment in the civil service of the Principality. As Clerk of the Signet to the Council of Wales, Fulke Greville had more than two thousand a year, when money had at least four times its present value; and in 1583-the year of Philip Sidney's marriage-he obtained a grant for life of the more valuable post of Secretary for the Principality. Thus well provided for, and with ample private estate, Greville remained throughout a long life unmarried. 1599 he was appointed for life Treasurer of the Navy; in 1603, at the coronation of James I., he was made Knight of the Bath, and he had afterwards a grant of Warwick Castle. In 1614 began a swift rise, from Under Treasurer to Treasurer, and thence to the offices of Chancellor of the Exchequer and Privy Councillor. In 1820 Fulke Greville became Lord Brooke; taking his title from the family of Elizabeth, daughter and sole heiress of

FULKE GREVILLE, LORD BROOKE. From an Original in the possession of Lord Willoughby de Broke,. engraved for "Lodge's Portraits."

Robert Lord Brooke, who had married Sir Fulke Greville, his grandfather, and added Brooke House, in Warwickshire, to his inheritance. Fulke Greville had been Lord Brooke for eight years when, in Brooke House, Holborn, at the age of seventy-four, he was stabbed in the back by an old servant who found that he had been left out of his master's will, and, therefore, in a crazy fit killed both his master and himself. The love of Greville's boyhood, of his youth, and of his manhood, was the love still of his age; for he directed that he should be described on his monument only as "Fulke Greville, Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Councillor to King James, Friend to Sir Philip Sidney." There were but two added words, and they described the stately tomb he had himself prepared in St. Mary's Church at Warwick:-"Trophæum Peccati" (the trophy of sin). Sin brought into the world death, and thus the

stately marble raised over the dead was but sin's trophy.

Except a few short poems that found their way into Miscellanies of his time, and the play of "Mustapha," published in 1609, but not of his own publishing, no verse of Fulke Greville's was printed before his death. That he did wish his works to live and serve the world, is shown by the fact that he revised and transcribed them all for publication. "Certaine learned and elegant Works," by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, appeared in a folio volume in 1633, and his "Life of Sir Philip Sidney" was first published in 1652, but there was no complete collection of his prose and verse till the Rev. A. B. Grosart, in 1870, gave to them four volumes of his privately printed "Fuller Worthies' Library." Yet Lord Brooke is a poet of real mark, weighty with thought always, hard to follow sometimes, and not seldom quickened by the fire of genius, aglow with life and feeling, and flashing a wisdom like Bacon's into pithy musical lines. It is to be remembered that Fulke Greville's verse represents forty years of mature life added to the measure of his friend Sidney's years. There is a series of a hundred and ten short poems, various in length and measure, called Sonnets, and gathered under the head of "Coelica." The love-poems in it are addressed to Colica, Myra, Cynthia, and the lover of Cœlica is called Philocell, a word formed of Philo-coel, and meaning "lover of Coelica," as Astrophel meant "lover of Stella." The poems in this series seem to have been written at

1 The "Fuller Worthies' Library" is a series of thirty-nine handsome volumes edited by the Rev. Alexander B. Grosart, of Blackburn, in which the works of many good English poets have been for the first time collected, printed with great accuracy from original texts often extremely scarce, and provided with biographical and critical introductions and current notes most carefully and genially. Although the method of private subscription makes the volumes of such a series as the "Fuller Worthies' Library" themselves too scarce and costly, it has the advantage of securing to an energetic lover of old literature like Mr. Grosart an unbounded field of work. Any author, the records of whose genius a hundred, or even fifty or even thirty students care to have collected for them, can by this method be put in the way of having proper justice done to him by posterity. The number of English readers who care for more than the amusement of the hour increases so rapidly that there is a public now willing to buy many a book that some years ago could only have been printed by subscription. Mr. Grosart is already producing editions for the public at large of some of his "Worthies." And it is no small thing for one worker to have turned to such good account the facilities given by the method of a private subscription to meet printers' expenses that he should have been the first to furnish collective and critical editions of the works of Worthies such as these-The Fletchers (Giles and Phineas, 5 vols.), Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (4 vols.), Henry and Thomas Vaughan, the Silurists (4 vols.), Sir John Davies (3 vols.), Dean Donne (2 vols.), Sir Philip Sidney (2 vols.), Richard Crawshaw (2 vols.), Robert Southwell (1 vol.), Andrew Marvell (4 vols.), Sir John Beaumont (1 vol.), Dr. Thomas Washbourne (1 vol.), Joseph Fletcher (1 vol.), George Herbert and Christopher Harvey (4 vols.), the Poems of Thomas Fuller (1 vol.), and four volumes of "Miscellanies," viz., the Poems of Lord Bacon, Bishop Jeremy Taylor, William Herbert, Humfrey Gifford, Dr. William Loe, John Andrews, Henry Lok, Gervase Markham, Abraham Fraunce, Thomas Tuke, John Norris, Viscount Falkland, Dr. Giles Fletcher, Christopher Lever, Sir Edward Dyer, Lord Vaux, Earl of Oxford, Earls of Essex, Christopher Brooke, &c. &c. The poems of Sidney and Dyer, just given, and of Lord Brooke's now to be given, are all taken (with revision of spelling and punctuation) from editions of their works by Mr. Grosart, and the drawing for our woodcut from the portrait of Sidney once possessed by Fulke Greville was made from an excellent steel engraving of it in Mr. Grosart's quarto edition of Sidney's works.

intervals distant enough to place many years between the earliest and latest. Always thoughtful, they are at first occasionally playful, but when the poet has passed middle life he is more completely and directly occupied with the chief interests of man.

Some of his later poems in "Cœlica" contain the essence of such speculation as he followed out more fully in his "Treatise on Monarchy," one of the longer English poems written in the reign of James I. Other poems of his were as rightly called "Treatises "-" of Religion;" "of Human Learning;" "of Wars;" "an Inquisition upon Fame and Honour;" and in all these was the generous mind of a poet in full sympathy with the best aims of humanity, employed in philosophical analysis of life akin to that of Bacon in his Essays. Lord Brooke wrote also two plays, or rather dramatic poems-" Alaham" and "Mustapha" -wherein he used the dramatic form, that accorded with his strong interest in life, for the same study of social problems. He was so far from any thought of a stage use of his plays, that he had it in mind to arrange the Treatise-Poems as so many choruses between the acts. Let us turn now to his verse, and illustrate first the quick feeling without which one may, perhaps, be a philosopher, but certainly can have no right to the name of philosophic poet. Thesewhich were first published in "The Phoenix Nest are his

LINES ON THE DEATH OF PHILIP SIDNEY.

Silence augmenteth grief, writing increaseth rage,

Stall'd are my thoughts, which lov'd and lost the wonder of our age,

Yet quickened now with fire, though dead with frost ere now, Enrag'd I write I know not what: dead, quick, I know not how.

Hardhearted minds relent, and Rigour's tears abound,

And Envy strangely rues his end in whom no fault she found;

Knowledge his light hath lost, Valour hath slain her knight,— Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world's delight.

Place pensive wails his fall whose presence was her pride,
Time crieth out, My ebb is come, his life was my spring tide! 10
Fame mourns in that she lost the ground of her reports;
Each living wight laments his lack, and all in sundry sorts.

He was―wo worth that word!-to each well-thinking mind
A spotless friend, a matchless man, whose virtue ever shined,
Declaring in his thoughts, his life, and that he writ,
Highest conceits, longest foresights, and deepest works of wit.

He, only like himself, was second unto none.

Where death-though life-we rue and wrong, and all in

vain do moan,

Their loss, not him, wail they that fill the world with cries: Death slew not him, but he made death his ladder to the skies.

20

Now, sink of sorrow, I,-who live, the more the wrong,
Who wishing death, whom Death denies, whose thread is all
too long,

Who tied to wretched life, who looks for no relief,—
Must spend my ever dying days in never ending grief.

Heart's ease and only I, like parallels run on,

Whose equal length keep equal breadth and never meet in one;

1 Compare the language of strong emotion in this poem with the merely poetical suggestion of extreme emotion by a mind itself unmoved in the piece last quoted, Dyer's "Fancy." One might compare in like manner the two pieces quoted from Dyer himself. The one of them that is strong with a real energy of thought and feeling finds its way straight to our hearts, and ranks with the best lyrics in the language.

Well-fare nothing, once a year. I am ready once a year, if need be, to say farewell to a Cynthia, who is nothing to me if her love be for

another.