Henry Constable, a Yorkshire man and a Catholic, may have been born about 1562 or earlier, judging by his degree taken at Cambridge in 1580. He passed much of his life abroad, and, on his return, part of it an the Tower, in the last years of Elizabeth. His sonnets ("Diana," 1592-1594) are pleasing, more tunable than many sonnets of his own and the succeeding age. Others have been exhumed from manuscript; some are devotional.
Willoughby's "Avisa" (the sonnet sequences usually bore girls' names) would be forgotten but for the magic initials "W. S." and allusions to W.'s love affairs. He may have been William Shakespeare; or he may have been Walter Smith, or William Smith, author of another such book as "Avisa," "Chloris" (1596). With him may pair off Lynch, with "Diella," and Griffin with "Fidessa," love-sonneteers.
Richard Barnfield (1574-1627), an Oxford man, was fertile in 1594-1598, publishing "The Affectionate Shepherd" (1594), "Cynthia" (1595), "The Encomion of Lady Pecunia" (1598). The Shepherd is much too affectionate for Christian and Northern tastes, in the style of Virgil's second Eclogue,
that horrid one
Beginning with formosum pastor Corydon,
as Byron describes it. In "Cynthia" he enthusiastically admires Spenser. If he wrote the sonnet "If Music and sweet Poetry agree," which appears in poems published with "Lady Pecunia," and the charming "As it fell upon a day" (often ascribed to Shakespeare), in the miscellany "England's Helicon," Barnfield was among the true lyrists of his time. "Lady Pecunia" is a satire on what wealth can do, and "The Complaint of Poetry for the death of Liberality," a satire on what it does not usually care to do. He made experiments in English hexameters: after the age of 24 he ceased to write or ceased to publish.
Thomas Campion (died in 1620) was, fortunately, a more persevering poet. Though his name was hardly known to modern readers till of recent years, because his lyrics were mainly published with music of his own composition, he was one of the most exquisite and delightful singers in the whole of English literature. Born in London, he went in 1581 to Peterhouse, Cambridge, left in 1585, and entered Gray's Inn in 1586. Five of his poems appear in a Miscellany of 1591: his Latin poems are of 1595. In 1601 appeared his first "Booke of Ayres," the music by himself and his friend Philip Rosseter. In 1602 he put forth "Observations on the Art of English Poesie," written, strange as it appears, in favour of verses in quantitative metres, without rhyme. He had taken the degree of Doctor of Medicine: he also wrote (1613) three Masques, one was for the wedding of the Princess Elizabeth, "the Queen of Hearts," another was for the shameful nuptials of the Earl of Somerset and Frances Howard, stained as they were with vice, vulgarity, and murder. Campion's later "Bookes of Ayres" are of 1612 and 1617. He died in March, 1619-1620.
Some of Campion's lyrics may have been suggested by and adapted to his own music, in other cases he composed the music for his own words. He employs a great number of metres, all tunable: with him music and sweet poesy agree. To think of these songs, as Thackeray said of some of Scott's novels, is to wish to run to the bookshelves, take them down and read them. Nothing can be more charming than the verses on "The Fairy Queen, Proserpina," and "Give Beauty all her right,"
Silly boy,'tis full moon yet,
Thy night as day shines clearly,
Now let her change I and spare not!
Since she proves strange, I care not!
Kind are her answers,
But her performance keeps no day,
Breaks time, as dancers
From their own music when they stray.
Drayton.
Michael Drayton (born at Hartshill in Warwickshire, 1563, died 1631) is a poet of nearly the same character and calibre as Daniel (of whom later), with the same beginnings as a sonneteer, the same prolixity in versifying history, and the same steady laborious cast of mind. From the age of 10, as he tells us, he was bent on being a Poet, and like greater poets, Burns, for example, he was usually inspired by some model, which, unlike Burns, he did not transfigure and excel. His earliest work, "The Harmony of the Church" (1591), contains rhymed paraphrases of Biblical songs and prayers. Drayton, like Milton, addresses the Heavenly Muse, singing "not of toys on Mount Ida, but of triumphs on Mount Sion". Thus from Exodus XV., the triumph over Egypt,