Imprinted stake his wordes and forme of face,
Ne to her lymmes care graunteth quiet rest.
The next morowe with Phœbus lampe the erthe
Alightned clere, and eke the dawninge daye
The shadowe danke gan from the pole remove.
3. Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset (1536–1608), was born at Buckhurst, in Sussex, and was educated both at Oxford and Cambridge. He was called to the Bar, entered Parliament, took part in many diplomatic and public missions, and was created Lord Buckhurst in 1566. His plain speaking did not recommend itself to Elizabeth, and for a time he was in disgrace. He was restored to favor, created Lord High Treasurer, and made Earl of Dorset in 1604.
In bulk Sackville’s poetry does not amount to much, but in merit it is of much consequence. Two poems, The Induction and The Complaint of Henry, Duke of Buckingham, appeared in a miscellany called The Mirror for Magistrates (1555). Both are composed in the rhyme royal stanza, are melancholy and elegiac in spirit and archaic in language, but have a severe nobility of thought and a grandeur of conception and of language quite unknown since the days of Chaucer. The poems undoubtedly assisted Spenser in the composition of The Faerie Queene.
Sackville collaborated with Norton in the early tragedy of Gorboduc (see p. [77]).
We add a few stanzas from The Induction to illustrate the somber graphical power of the poem:
And, next in order, sad Old Age we found,