But out, alas, such mists do blear our eyes!
And Crystal Glass doth glister so therewith,
That Kings conceive their care is wondrous great
Whenas they beat their busy restless brains
To maintain pomp and high triumphal sights,
To feed their fill of dainty delicates,

To glad their hearts with sight of pleasant sports,
To fill their ears with sound of instruments,
To break with bit the hot courageous horse,
To deck their halls with sumptuous cloth of gold,
To clothe themselves with silk of strange device,
To search the rocks for pearls and precious stones,
To delve the ground for mines of glistering gold;
And never care to maintain peace and rest,
To yield relief where needy lack appears,
To stop one ear until the poor man speak,
To seem to sleep when justice still doth wake,
To guard their lands from sudden sword and fire,
To fear the cries of guiltless suckling babes,
Whose ghosts may call for vengeance on their blood
And stir the wrath of mighty thundering Jove.

THOMAS SACKVILLE.

(1536 ?-1608.).

A MISCELLANY of a somewhat different kind from Tottel's appeared in 1559, entitled the Mirrour for Magistrates. This collection of poems by various authors has a long and somewhat intricate history; but its importance as a literary production is derived mainly from the fact that a portion of it was the composition of Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset, one of the principal statesmen of Queen Elizabeth's reign, successor of Burleigh in 1598 as Lord High Treasurer of England, and known otherwise as the author, in part, of Gorboduc, the first English tragedy. The Mirrour for Magistrates was devised, in the first instance, in the reign of Queen Mary, and was intended to be a continuation in verse, with English heroes instead of foreign ones, of Boccaccio's prose work De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, of which Lydgate's Fall of Princes was a verse

translation. The publication of the Mirrour was delayed by Bishop Gardiner, Mary's Chancellor; and the book did not appear till 1559. The title was as follows:

"A MYRROURE FOR MAGISTRATES, wherein may be seen by esample of others with howe grevous plages vices are punished, and howe frayl and unstable worldly prosperity is founde, even of those whom Fortune seemeth most highly to favour. Felix quem faciunt aliena pericula cautum. Anno 1559. Londini, in ædibus Thomæ Marshe."

The book thus marshalled into publicity consisted of nineteen Legends of unfortunate and illustrious Englishmen, from the reign of Richard II. to that of Edward IV., twelve of which are ascribed to Richard Baldwin, its editor. It was not in this edition of 1559, however, but in a second, published in 1563, that Sackville himself first appeared as a contributor. Sackville's conception, unlike that of the originators of the Mirrour, was borrowed rather from Dante's Inferno than from Boccaccio and Lydgate. Baldwin's ghosts appear to the poet in dreams; but Sackville represents himself as conducted in a waking state to the region of departed spirits by Sorrow, as Dante had been conducted by Virgil. And, if the entire series had been completed by him as projected, we should have had an Induction or prefatory poem, followed by recitations of the lives of illustrious Englishmen, from the Conquest downwards. This was Sackville's plan; but he achieved only the Induction and the recited story of one departed spirit, namely that of Henry Duke of Buckingham, slain by King Richard III. Fragmentary as this composition is, it is all we have of Sackville's non-dramatic writings. The series of melancholy Legends thus started was extended by successive editors and authors; but not until 1610 did it attain its final form. At this date it had grown in bulk from the nineteen Legends, devised and executed by Baldwin and his companions, to a thick quarto volume, containing a vast collection of Lives and Legends by miscellaneous writers, together with two Inductions, in addition to Sackville's, and carrying the series of tragic stories from Brutus, the mythical founder of Britain, to the sixteenth century. Even in this extended form, Sackville's

Induction and Legend, comprising little more than five hundred lines in all, are the only portions of the book to which our modern critics assign any considerable literary value. Warton places Sackville's Induction in dignified juxtaposition with Dante's Inferno, and quotes largely from Elizabethan writers, including Sir Philip Sidney and Chapman, in proof of the high esteem in which this poem and the entire Mirrour was held. The poet Campbell reviews the gloomy monotony of these ghostly recitations with less reverence than Warton, but perhaps with more judgment, when he remarks that "Sackville's contribution to the Mirror for Magistrates is the only part of it that is tolerable." Hallam, with his usual judicial fairness, gives Sackville what we may regard as his correct place in literature when he calls him "the herald in the first days of Elizabeth's reign of the splendour in which it was to close."

FROM THE INDUCTION.

SORROW.

And straight, forth stalking with redoubled pace,
For that I saw the night drew on so fast,
In black all clad, there fell before my face
A piteous wight whom woe had all forwaste.1
Forth from her eyen the crystal tears outbrast ;2
And, sighing sore, her hands she wrong and fold,3
Tare all her hair, that ruth was to behold:

Her body small, forwithered and forspent,
As is the stalk that summer's drought opprest;
Her welkèd face with woeful tears besprent ;5
Her colour pale; and, as it seemed her best,
In woe and plaint reposèd was her rest.
And, as the stone that drops of water wears,
So dented were her cheeks with fall of tears.

Her eyes swoln, with flowing streams afloat,
Wherewith her looks thrown up full piteously,
Her forceless hands together oft she smote,

1 Wasted away.

4 Clouded.

2 Burst forth.
5 Besprinkled.

3 Wrung and folded.

With doleful shrieks that echoed in the sky :
Whose plaint such sighs did straight accompany,
That, in my doom,1 was never man did see
A wight but half so woe-begone as she.

OLD AGE.

And, next in order, sad Old Age we found,
His beard all hoar, his eyes hollow and blind;
With drooping cheer, still poring on the ground,
As on the place where Nature him assigned
To rest, when that the Sisters had untwined
His vital thread, and ended with their knife
The fleeting course of fast declining life.

Crook-backed he was, tooth-shaken, and blear-eyed;
Went on three feet, and sometime crept on four;2
With old lame bones that rattled by his side;
His scalp all pilled,3 and he with eld forlore ;4
His withered fist still knocking at Death's door;
Trembling and drivelling as he draws his breath:
For brief, the shape and messenger of Death.

WAR.

Lastly, stood War in glittering arms y-clad,
With visage grim, stern looks, and blackly hued;
In his right hand a naked sword he had,
That to the hilt was all with blood imbrued;
And in his left, that kings and kingdoms rued,
Famine and fire he held; and therewithal

He rased towns, and threw down towers and all.

GEORGE TURBERVILLE.

(1530 ?-1594 ?)

GEORGE TURBERVILLE was descended from an ancient family of Bere-Regis in Dorsetshire. He was born at Whitchurch in that county, was educated at Oxford, and became a noted sonneteer in Elizabeth's reign. His writings included a volume 1 Judgment.

2 Went with a stick or staff, and sometimes with two sticks or crutches. 3 Bald.

4 With old age forlorn,

of Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets, 1567, and some prose Tragical Tales, translated from the Italian, 1576. He spent some time in Russia, where he held the post of Secretary to Sir Thomas Randolph, the Queen's Ambassador to the Russian Emperor; and his poetical epistles, descriptive of Russian customs and manners, published in 1568, are contained in Hakluyt's Voyages, vol. i., p. 384, etc.1 He also translated the Eclogues of Mantuan, and the Heroical Epistles of Ovid. His Epitaphs, etc., are reprinted in Chalmers's edition of the Poets.

A LOVER'S vow.

When Phoenix shall have many makes,2
And fishes shun the silver lakes,

When wolves and lambs y-fere3 shall play,
And Phoebus cease to shine by day,
When grass on marble stone shall grow,
And every man embrace his foe,

When moles shall leave to dig the ground,
And hares accord with hateful hound,
When Pan shall pass Apollo's skill,
And fools of fancies have their fill,
When hawks shall dread the silly fowl,
And men esteem the nightish owl,
When pearl shall be of little price,
And golden virtue friend to vice,
When fortune hath no change in store,-
Then will I false, and not before !
Till all these monsters1 come to pass,

I am Timetus, as I was.

My love as long as life shall last,
Not forcing any fortune's blast;
No threat, no thraldom, shall prevail
To cause my faith one jot to fail;
But, as I was, so will I be,

A lover, and a friend to thee.