This beautiful little love-poem re-appears, as Song 77, in Windsor Drollery, 1672, p. 63. (There had been a previous edition of that work, in 1671, which we have examined: it is not noted by bibliographers, and is quite distinct.) A few variations occur. Verse 2. are wrack’d; 3. In love is not commended; only sweet, All praise, no pity; who fondly; 4. Shall shortly by dead Lovers lie; hallow’d; 5. He which all others els excels, That are; 6. Will, though thou; 7. the Bells shall ring; While all to black is; (last line but two in parenthesis;) Making, like Flowers, &c.
[Page 4.] Nor Love nor Fate dare I accuse.
By Richard Brome, in his “Northerne Lasse,” 1632, Act ii., sc. 6. It is also given in Westminster-Drollery, 1671, i. 83 (the only song in common). But compare with it the less musical and tender, “Nor Love, nor Fate can I accuse of hate,” in same vol. ii. 90, with Appendix Note thereunto, p. lxiii.
[Page 5.] One night the great Apollo, pleased with Ben.
This remarkable and little-known account of “The Time-Poets” is doubly interesting, as being a contemporary document, full of life-like portraiture of men whom no lapse of years can banish from us; welcome friends, whom we grow increasingly desirous of beholding intimately. Glad are we to give it back thus to the world; our chief gem, in its rough Drollery-setting: lifted once more into the light of day, from out the cobwebbed nooks where it so long-time had lain hidden. Our joy would have been greater, could we have restored authoritatively the lost sixteenth-line, by any genuine discovery among early manuscripts; or told something conclusive about the author of the poem, who has laid us under obligation for these vivid portraits of John Ford, Thomas Heywood, poor old Thomas Churchyard, and Ben’s courageous foeman, worthy of his steel, that Thomas Dekker who “followed after in a dream.”
In deep humility we must confess that nothing is yet learnt as to the authorship. Here, in the year 1656, almost at fore-front of Choyce Drollery, the very strength of its van-guard, appeared the memorable poem. Whether it were then and there for the first time in print, or borrowed from some still more rare and now-lost volume, none of us can prove. Even at this hour, a possibility remains that our resuscitation of Choyce Drollery may help to bring the unearthing of explanatory facts from zealous students. We scarcely dare to cherish hope of this. Certainly we may not trust to it. For Gerard Langbaine knew the poem well, and quoted oft and largely from it in his 1691 Account of the English Dramatick Poets. But he met with it nowhere save in Choyce Drollery, and writes of it continually in language that proves how ignorant he was of whom we are to deem the author. Yet he wrote within five-and-thirty years behind the date of its appearance; and might easily have learnt, from men still far from aged, who had read the Drollery on its first publication, whatever they could tell of “The Time-Poets:” if, indeed, they could tell anything. Five years earlier, William Winstanley had given forth his Lives of the most famous English Poets, in June, 1686; but he quotes not from it, and leaves us without an Open Sesame. Even Oldys could not tell; or Thomas Hearne, who often had remembered whatever Time forgot.
As to the date: we believe it was certainly written between 1620 (inclusive) and 1636; nearer the former year.
We reconcile ourselves for the failure, by turning to such other and similar poetic groupings as survive. We listen unto Richard Barnfield, when he sings sweetly his “Remembrance of some English Poets,” in 1598. We cling delightedly to the words of our noble Michael Drayton—whose descriptive map of native England, Polyolbion, glitters with varie-coloured light, as though it were a mediæval missal: to whom, enditing his Epistle to friend Henry Reynolds—“A Censure of the Poets”—the Muses brought each bard by turn, so that the picture might be faithful: even as William Blake, idealist and spiritual Seer, believed of spirit-likenesses in his own experience. And, not without deep feeling (marvelling, meanwhile, that still the task of printing them with Editorial care is unattempted), we peruse the folio manuscripts of that fair-haired minstrel of the Cavaliers, George Daniel of Beswick, while he also, in his “Vindication of Poesie,” sings in praise of those whose earlier lays are echoing now and always “through the corridors of Time:”—
Truth speaks of old, the power of Poesie;
Amphion, Orpheus, stones and trees could move;