Inferiors, with the nature of protection: And ev'n this sacred band, this heavenly breath Pure onely, where God makes the spirits pure; Offer these truths to pow'r, will she obey? Makes God their lord, and casts them at his foot, This truth they cannot wave, yet will not do, Shew these to arts; those riddles of the sin Those mortal forms, moulded of humane error, Shew it to laws; God's law, the true foundation, Proves how they build up earth, and loose the heaven; Gives things eternal, mortal limitation, Ore-ruling him from whom their laws were given : God's laws are right, just, wise, and so would make us; Mans, captious, divers, false, and so they take us. * * * M * ROBERT SOUTHWELL was born in the year 1560, at St. Faith's in Norfolk, and received his early education in the English College at Douay. At the age of sixteen, while residing in Rome, he was admitted into the Society of the Jesuits. In 1584, he returned, as a missionary priest, to his native country, but he appears to have been disheartened by the vainness of his attempts to stay the progress of the Reformation, "living like a foreigner, finding among strangers that which in his nearest blood, he presumed not to seek." In England, notwithstanding, he continued to reside, labouring diligently and with sincerity, until the year 1592, when he was arrested on a charge of sedition, and committed to a dungeon, in the Tower, so noisome and filthy, that his father was induced, successfully, to petition Queen Elizabeth that "his son being a gentleman he might be treated as such." He continued three years in prison, and, it is said, was ten several times put to the rack. At length, death appearing more easy and welcome than such continued torture, he applied to the Lord Treasurer Cecil, that he might be brought to trial; the brutal answer of the Lord Treasurer is recorded: "If he was in such haste to be hanged, he should quickly have his desire." On the 20th February, 1595, he was tried at Westminster, on a charge of High Treason, "in that he being a Popish Priest born in the dominions of the crown of England, had come over thither from beyond sea, and had tarryed there longer than three days without conforming and taking the oaths." He was found guilty on his own confession, and was executed at Tyburn, according to the horrible practice of the age, on the day following his trial-meeting death, as the giver of a crown of martyrdom, with calmness and intrepidity; and adding one to the long list of victims sacrificed to the inveterate and unchristian spirit which characterized the early stages of the Reformation. The poems of Southwell are all upon sacred subjects; he was, undoubtedly, a sincere, fervent, and zealous believer in the faith he preached, and for which he suffered. The uncertainty of life, the hollowness of human pleasures, the consolations of religion, the anticipations of future glory,-such are the leading themes that filled his heart and occupied his pen. There is an impassioned energy in his verse which shows that he was deeply in earnest-that he had devoted an enlarged mind to the spread of principles in which alone he trusted for salvation. If he was a Papist and a Jesuit, he was also a man and a Christian; and though because of his "much zeal," during a season of strong excitement and general agitation, he was considered dangerous and doomed to perish in the prime of life, his biographer must bear testimony to the holiness of his thoughts, the purity of his verse, and the kindliness and benignity of his nature. The longest of his poems is "St. Peter's Complaint"- the Apostle's lamentation over the weakness that induced him to deny and desert his master. But there is more poetry and a deeper interest in some of his shorter compositions. His declared object was to bring back the Poets from "the follies and feignings of love" in which they so continually indulged, to those "solemn and devout matters, to which, in duty, they owe their abilities:"-to accomplish this end, he was induced "to weave a new web of their own loom." The themes he selected generally harmonized with the melancholy character of his mind-for the most part, according to his own quaint expression, his "tunes are teares; "- but they are such as cannot fail to receive a welcome from all by whom the consolations of religion are appreciated, and who agree with the Poet Cowley, that "amongst all holy and consecrated things which the Devil ever stole and alienated from the service of the Deity, there is none which he so universally and so long usurpt as Poetry." That Southwell had genius of a very rare order is undeniable-genius worthy of the high and ennobling themes of which he wrote, and in the treatment of which he has been seldom if ever uncharitable. They consist of "St. Peter's Complaint and St. Mary Magdalen's Funeral Teares, with sundry other selected and devout Poems"-" Mæoniæ, or certain excellent Poems and Spiritual Hymns"-and "The Triumphs over death, or a Consolatory Epistle for afflicted minds, on the affects of dying friends: first written for the consolation of one, but now published for the good of all." It is remarkable, observes Mr. Ellis, that the few copies of his works which now exist, are the remnant of at least twenty-four different editions, of which eleven were printed between 1593 and 1600. They must therefore have obtained considerable popularity, although now but little known and rarely read. LOVE'S SERVILE LOT. LOVE, mistresse is of many minds, Yet few know whom they serve; They reckon least how little Love Their service doth deserve. The will she robbeth from the wit, The sense from reason's lore; Shee is delightfull in the rynde, Corrupted in the core. Shee shroudeth vice in vertue's veil, Pretending good in ill; then unu. Ane tuches u oninu gruttany na character of his mind-for the most part, according to his own quaint expression, his "tunes are teares; "-- but they are such as cannot fail to receive a welcome from all by whom the consolations of religion are appreciated, and who agree with the Poet Cowley, that" amongst all holy and consecrated things which the Devil ever stole and alienated from the service of the Deity, there is none which he so universally and so long usurpt as Poetry." That Southwell had genius of a very rare order is undeniable-genius worthy of the high and ennobling themes of which he wrote, and in the treatment of which he has been seldom if ever uncharitable. They consist of "St. Peter's Complaint and St. Mary Magdalen's Funeral Teares, with sundry other selected and devout Poems"-" Mæoniæ, or certain excellent Poems and Spiritual Hymns" and "The Triumphs over death, or a Consolatory Epistle for afflicted minds, on the affects of dying friends: first written for the consolation of one, but now published for the good of all." It is remarkable, observes Mr. Ellis, that the few copies of his works which now exist, are the remnant of at least twenty-four different editions, of which eleven were printed between 1593 and 1600. They must therefore have obtained considerable popularity, although now but little known and rarely read. LOVE, mistresse is of many minds, Yet few know whom they serve; They reckon least how little Love Their service doth deserve. The will she robbeth from the wit, The sense from reason's lore; Shee is delightfull in the rynde, Corrupted in the core. Shee shroudeth vice in vertue's veil, Pretending good in ill; |