LITMIR.BIZ

       "With Sorrow for my guide, as there I stood,

       A troop of men the most in arms bedight,

       In tumult clustered 'bout both sides the flood:

       'Mongst whom, who were ordained t' eternal night,

       Or who to blissful peace and sweet delight,

       I wot not well, it seemed that they were all

       Such as by death's untimely stroke did fall."

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      Sorrow acquaints him that these are all illustrious examples of the reverses which he was lately deploring, who will themselves relate to him their misfortunes; and that he must afterwards

      "Recount the same to Kesar, king and peer."

      The first whom he sees advancing towards him from the throng of ghosts is Henry duke of Buckingham, put to death under Richard III.: and his "Legend," or story, is unfortunately the only one which its author ever found leisure to complete; the favor of his illustrious kinswoman on her accession causing him to sink the poet in the courtier, the ambassador, and finally the minister of state. But he had already done enough to earn himself a lasting name amongst the improvers of poetry in England. In tragedy he gave the first regular model; in personification he advanced far beyond all his predecessors, and furnished a prototype to that master of allegory, Spenser. A greater than Spenser has also been indebted to him; as will be evident, I think, to all who compare the description of the figures on the shield of war in his Induction, and especially those of them which relate to the siege of Troy, with the exquisitely rich and vivid description of a picture on that subject in Shakespeare's early poem on Tarquin and Lucretia.

      The legend of the duke of Buckingham is composed in a style rich, free and forcible; the examples−204-

       -vol i- brought from ancient history, of the suspicion and inward wretchedness to which tyrants have ever been a prey, and afterwards, of the instability of popular favor, might in this age be accounted tedious and pedantic; they are however pertinent, well recited, and doubtless possessed the charm of novelty with respect to the majority of contemporary readers. The curses which the unhappy duke pours forth against the dependent who had betrayed him, may almost compare, in the energy and inventiveness of malice, with those of Shakespeare's queen Margaret; but they lose their effect by being thrown into the form of monologue and ascribed to a departed spirit, whose agonies of grief and rage in reciting his own death have something in them bordering on the burlesque.

      The mind of Sackville was deeply fraught, as we have seen, with classic stores; and at a time when England possessed as yet no complete translation of Virgil, he might justly regard it as a considerable service to the cause of national taste to transplant into our vernacular poetry some scattered flowers from his rich garden of poetic sweets. Thus he has embellished his legend with an imitation or rather paraphrase of the celebrated description of night in the fourth book of the Æneid. The lines well merit transcription.

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      "Midnight was come, when ev'ry vital thing

       With sweet sound sleep their weary limbs did rest;

       The beasts were still, the little birds that sing

       Now sweetly slept besides their mother's breast,

       The old and all were shrowded in their nest;

       The waters calm, the cruel seas did cease;

       The woods, the fields, and all things held their peace.