Subsequently Florio, in associating the earl’s name with his great Italian-English dictionary—the ‘Worlde of Wordes’—more soberly defined the earl’s place in the republic of letters when he wrote: ‘As to me and many more the glorious and gracious sunshine of your honour hath infused light and life.’
The congratulations of the poets in 1603.
The most notable contribution to this chorus of praise is to be found, as I have already shown, in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets.’ The same note of eulogy was sounded by men of letters until Southampton’s death. When he was released from prison on James I’s accession in April 1603, his praises in poets’ mouths were especially abundant. Not only was that grateful incident celebrated by Shakespeare in what is probably the latest of his sonnets (No. cvii.), but Samuel Daniel and John Davies of Hereford offered the Earl congratulation in more
prolonged strains. Daniel addressed to Southampton many lines like these:
The world had never taken so full note
Of what thou art, hadst thou not been undone:
And only thy affliction hath begot
More fame than thy best fortunes could have won;
For ever by adversity are wrought
The greatest works of admiration;
And all the fair examples of renown
Out of distress and misery are grown . . .
Only the best-compos’d and worthiest hearts
God sets to act the hard’st and constanst’st parts. [388a]
Davies was more jubilant:
Now wisest men with mirth do seem stark mad,
And cannot choose—their hearts are all so glad.
Then let’s be merry in our God and King,
That made us merry, being ill bestead.
Southampton, up thy cap to Heaven fling,
And on the viol there sweet praises sing,
For he is come that grace to all doth bring. [388b]
Many like praises, some of later date, by Henry Locke (or Lok), George Chapman, Joshua Sylvester, Richard Brathwaite, George Wither, Sir John Beaumont, and others could be quoted. Beaumont, on Southampton’s death, wrote an elegy which panegyrises him in the varied capacities of warrior, councillor, courtier, father, and husband. But it is as a literary patron that Beaumont insists that he chiefly deserves remembrance:
I keep that glory last which is the best,
The love of learning which he oft expressed
In conversation, and respect to those
Who had a name in arts, in verse or prose.