Page 394 (Appendix), New England, &c.
References should be added to the Rump Coll., 1662, i. 95, and Loyal Songs, 1731, i. 92. “Isaack,” is probably Isaac Pennington. Hampden and others were meditating this journey to New England, until stopped, most injudiciously, by an order in Council, dated April 6, 1638.
We here give our additional Note, on the “Sessions of the Poets,” reserved from [p. 376].
§ 3.—SESSIONS OF POETS.
We believe that Sir John Suckling’s Poem, sometimes called “A Sessions of Wit,” was written in 1636-7; almost certainly before the death of Ben Jonson (6th August, 1637). Among its predecessors were Richard Barnfield’s “Remembrance of some English Poets,” 1598 (given in present volume, [p. 273]); and Michael Drayton’s “Censure of the Poets,” being a Letter in couplets, addressed to his friend Henry Reynolds; and the striking lines, “On the Time-Poets,” pp. 5-7 of Choyce Drollery, 1656. The latter we have seen to be anonymous; but they were not impossibly by that very Henry Reynolds, friend of Drayton; although of this authorship no evidence has yet arisen. Of George Daniel’s unprinted “Vindication of Poesie,” 1636-47, we have given specimens on pp. [272], [280-1], and [331-2]. Later than Suckling (who died in 1642), another author gave in print “The Great Assizes Holden in Parnassus by Apollo and his Assessors:” at which Sessions are arraigned Mercurius Britannicus, &c., Feb. 11th, 1644-5. This has been attributed to George Wither; most erroneously, as we believe. The mis-appropriation has arisen, probably, from the fact of Wither’s name being earliest on the roll of Jurymen summoned:
“Hee, who was called first in all the List,
George Withers hight, entitled Satyrist;
Then Cary, May, and Davenant were called forth,