POEMS FROM

RELIQUIE WOTTONIANE.

I.

A POEM WRITTEN BY SIR HENRY WOTTON

IN HIS YOUTH.'

(Before 1602.)

FAITHLESS world, and thy most faithless part,

A woman's heart!

The true shop of variety, where sits
Nothing but fits

And fevers of desire, and pangs of love,
Which toys remove.

Why was she born to please? or I to trust
Words writ in dust,
Suffering her eyes to govern my despair,
My pain for air;

"Rel. Wotton." Also in Davison's "Poetical Rhapsody," 1602, &c., with Wotton's initials, as an Elegy." In ed. 1621, p. 202, it has the longer title, "Of a Woman's IIeart." Wrongly claimed for Rudyard in the "Poems of Pembroke and Rudyard," 1660, p. 34. A copy in MS. Rawl. Poet. 147, p. 74, signed "H. Wotton."

And fruit of time rewarded with untruth,
The food of youth?

Untrue she was; yet I believed her eyes,
Instructed spies,

Till I was taught, that love was but a school
To breed a fool.

Or sought she more, by triumphs of denial,
To make a trial

How far her smiles commanded my weakness?
Yield, and confess!

Excuse no more thy folly; but, for cure,
Blush and endure

As well thy shame as passions that were vain;
And think, 'tis gain,

To know that love lodged in a woman's breast, Is but a guest.

H. W.

II.

SIR HENRY WOTTON AND SERJEANT

HOSKINS RIDING ON THE WAY.1

Hoskins.

¡OBLE, lovely, virtuous creature,
Purposely so framed by nature,

To enthral your servant's wits:
Wo. Time must now unite our hearts,

Not for any my deserts,

But because methinks it fits.

1 "Rel. Wotton."

Ho. Dearest treasure of my thought,
And yet wert thou to be bought
With my life thou wert not dear:

Wo. Secret comfort of my mind,
Doubt no longer to be kind,

But be so, and so appear.

Ho. Give me love for love again;
Let our loves be clear and plain;
Heaven is fairest, when 'tis clearest :

Wo. Lest in clouds and in differing,
We resemble seamen erring,

Farthest off when we are nearest.
Ho. Thus with numbers interchanged,
Wotton's muse and mine have ranged;
Verse and journey both are spent:

Wo. And if Hoskins chance to say,
That we well have spent the day,
I, for my part, am content.

H. W.

III.

THE CHARACTER OF A HAPPY LIFE.1

(Circ. 1614.)

OW happy is he born and taught
That serveth not another's will;
Whose armour is his honest thought,

And simple truth his utmost skill;

"Rel. Wotton." Said to have been printed in 1614, with Overbury's "Wife," &c.; traced at Dulwich with the date

Whose passions not his masters are;
Whose soul is still prepared for death,
Untied unto the world by care

Of public fame or private breath;

Who envies none that chance doth raise,
Nor vice; who never understood

How deepest wounds are given by praise;
Nor rules of state, but rules of good;
Who hath his life from rumours freed;
Whose conscience is his strong retreat;
Whose state can neither flatterers feed,
Nor ruin make oppressors great;

Who God doth late and early pray
More of his grace than gifts to lend;
And entertains the harmless day
With a religious book or friend.

This man is freed from servile bands
Of hope to rise or fear to fall:
Lord of himself, though not of lands,

And, having nothing, yet hath all.
H. WOTTON.

1616; and quoted as Wotton's to Drummond by Ben Jonson in 1619. Mr. Collier has printed a copy from Ben Jonson's handwriting," Life of Alleyn," p. 53. Also as Wotton's in MS. Malone, 13, fol. 11; in MS. Malone, 19, p. 138; and in Clark's "Aurea Legenda," 1682, p. 96. There are many other old copies. Said to be almost identical with a German poem of the same age; "Notes and Queries," vol. ix., p. 420.

IV.

THIS HYMN

WAS MADE BY SIR H. WOTTON, WHEN HE WAS AN AMBASSADOR AT VENICE, IN THE

TIME OF A GREAT SICK

NESS THERE.1

TERNAL mover, whose diffused glory,
To show our grovelling reason what
Thou art,

Unfolds itself in clouds of nature's story,
Where man, thy proudest creature, acts his part,
Whom yet, alas, I know not why, we call
The world's contracted sum, the little all;

For what are we but lumps of walking clay?
Why should we swell? whence should our spirits
rise?

Are not brute beasts as strong, and birds as gay,—
Trees longer lived, and creeping things as wise?
Only our souls were left an inward light,
To feel our weakness, and confess Thy might.

Thou then, our strength, Father of life and death,
To whom our thanks, our vows, ourselves we owe,

"Rel. Wotton." Erroneously ascribed to Sir Walter Raleigh, as written "in the unquiet rest of his last sickness," in "Topographer," vol. i. p. 425, on the authority of a Brit. Mus. MS.