It would be cruel to quote "Philomene," no stall-ballad creeps more tardily on a longer road than Gascoigne in his tale of her who sings, in a later poet's words,
Who hath remembered thee, who hath forgotten?
They have all forgotten, oh summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.
Sackville.
The poetry of Thomas Sackville (1536-1608) is not to be found in his dull tragedy, "Gorboduc," but in his contributions to a vast and once popular collection, "The Mirror for Magistrates". This work is intended to admonish men in power by rhymed histories of the falls of English peers and princes. This was the plan of Chaucer's Monk, in "The Monk's Tale," which that sound critic, the Host, could not long endure. The model was Boccaccio's work on "The Falls of Princes," Englished by Lydgate. The enterprise started by Baldwin and others in 1554-1559, suggests a dread lest English verse should return to Lydgate in the den of Giant Despair, and take up with sepulchral solemnity the tale of tragedies from the darkest days of the unfortunate ancient Britons. A mammoth compilation was gradually evolved, for doleful matter was not far to seek, but Sackville's two contributions, the "Induction," and the "Complaint of Buckingham"—the Buckingham executed under Richard III,—alone concern us.
In the "Induction" the poet describes the gloom of winter, and, in the mediaeval way, dwells long on the constellations. As he muses, he is met by a very deplorable female form—
With doleful shrieks that echoed in the sky.
She proclaims herself to be Sorrow, a goddess, and guides Sackville "to the grisly lake" of Avernus, over which no fowl may fly and live. A number of rueful figures of allegory are encountered, Dread, Revenge, Misery, Care, Old Age, and Sleep, and these are drawn with abundant vigour and variety. The stanza on Sleep gives the measure of the versification, which is rapid, concise, various, sustained, and in its music heralds the arrival of Spenser.
The body's rest, the quiet of the heart,
The travail's care, the still night's frere was he,
And of our life on earth the better part,
Reiver of sight, and yet in whom we see
Things oft that tide, and oft that never be,
Without respect, esteeming equally
King Croesus' pomp and Irus' poverty.
One stanza in the description of the home of the dead seems to have been suggested by famous lines in the Eleventh Book of the "Odyssey".
The "Induction" ends with the appearance of the spirit of Buckingham, who not only tells his own tragedy at great length, and in full historical detail, but introduces several other ancient tragedies, those of Cyrus, Cambyses, Brutus, Cassius, Besseus, Alexander the Great, Clitus, Phalaris, Pheræus, Camillus, and Hannibal. From these fallen princes we drop to