In Titum
Titus the brave and valorous young gallant
Three years together in the town hath beene,
Yet my Lo. Chancellors tombe he hath not seene,
Nor the new water-worke, nor the Elephant.
I cannot tell the cause without a smile:
Hee hath been in the Counter all the while.
Colonel Cunningham has pointed out another reference in Basse's Metamorphosis of the Walnut Tree (1645), where he tells how 'in our youth we saw the Elephant'. Grosart's suggestion that the Elephant was an Inn is absurd.
Davies' Epigrams were first published along with Marlowe's version of Ovid's Elegies, but no date is affixed to any of the three editions which followed one another. But a MS. in the Bodleian which contains forty-five of the Epigrams describes them as English Epigrammes much like Buckminsters Almanacke servinge for all England but especially for the meridian of the honourable cittye of London calculated by John Davies of Grayes Inne gentleman Ano 1594 in November.[2] This seems much too exact to be a pure invention, and if it be correct it is very unlikely that the allusions would be to ancient history. Banks' Horse, the performing Ape, and the Elephant were all among the sights of the day, like the recently erected tomb of Lord Chancellor Hatton, who died in 1591. The atmosphere of the first Satyre, as of Davies' Epigrams, is that of 1593-5. The phrase 'the Infanta of London, Heire to an India', in which commentators have found needless difficulty, contains possibly, besides its obvious meaning, an allusion to the fact that since 1587 the Infanta of Spain had become in official Catholic circles heir to the English throne. In 1594 Parsons' tract, A Conference about the next Succession to the Crown of England. By R. Doleman, defended her claim, and made the Infanta's name a byword in England.
If H51 is thus approximately right in its dating of the first Satire it may be the better trusted as regards the other two, and there is at least nothing in them to make this date impossible. The references to poetry in the second acquire a more vivid interest when their date or approximate date is remembered. In 1593 died Marlowe, the greatest of the brilliant group that reformed the stage, giving
ideot actors means
(Starving 'themselves') to live by 'their' labour'd sceanes;
and Shakespeare was one of the 'ideot actors'. Shakespeare, too, was one of the many sonneteers who 'would move Love by rithmes', and in 1593 and 1594 he appeared among those 'who write to Lords, rewards to get'.
It would be interesting if we could identify the lawyer-poet, Coscus, referred to in this Satire. Malone, in a MS. note to his copy of 1633 (now in the Bodleian Library), suggested John Hoskins or Sir Richard Martin. Grosart conjectured that Donne had in view the Gullinge Sonnets preserved in the Farmer-Chetham MS., and ascribed with probability to Sir John Davies, the poet of the Epigrams just mentioned. Chambers seems to lean to this view and says, 'these sonnets are couched in legal terminology.' Donne is supposed to have mistaken Davies' 'gulling' for serious poetry. This is very unlikely. Moreover, only the last two of Davies' sonnets are 'couched in legal terminology':
My case is this, I love Zepheria bright,
Of her I hold my harte by fealty:
and
To Love my lord I doe knights service owe
And therefore nowe he hath my wit in ward.
Nor, although Davies' style parodies the style of the sonneteers (not of the anonymous Zepheria only), is it particularly harsh. It is much more probable that Donne, like Davies, has chiefly in view this anonymous series of sonnets—Zepheria. Ogni dì viene la sera. Mysus et Haemonia juvenis qui cuspide vulnus senserat, hac ipsa cuspide sensit opem. At London: Printed by the Widow Orwin, for N. L. and John Busby. 1594. The style of Zepheria exactly fits Donne's description:
words, words which would teare
The tender labyrinth of a soft maids eare.
'The verbs "imparadize", "portionize", "thesaurize", are some of the fruits of his ingenuity. He claims that his Muse is capable of "hyperbolised trajections"; he apostrophizes his lady's eyes as "illuminating lamps" and calls his pen his "heart's solicitor".' Sidney Lee, Elizabethan Sonnets. The following sonnet from the series illustrates the use of legal terminology which both Davies and Donne satirize: