Originally The True Character of a Happy Life: written and printed about 1614, and reprinted by Percy (1765) from the Reliquiæ Wottonianæ of 1651. Says Drummond of Ben Jonson, ‘Sir Edward (sic) Wotton's verses of a Happy Life he hath by heart.’ Of Wotton himself it was reserved for Cowley to remark that
He did the utmost bounds of knowledge find, And found them not so large as was his mind;
And when he saw that he through all had passed He died—lest he should idle grow at last.
See Izaak Walton, Lives.
[III], [IV]
From Underwoods (1640). The first, An Ode, is addressed to an innominate not yet, I believe, identified. The second is part of that Ode to the Immortal Memory of that Heroic Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry Morrison, which is the first true Pindaric in the language. Gifford ascribes it to 1629, when Sir Henry died, but it seems not to have been printed before 1640. Sir Lucius Cary is the Lord Falkland of Clarendon and Horace Walpole.
[V]
From The Mad Lover (produced about 1618: published in 1640). Compare the wooden imitations of Dryden in Amboyna and elsewhere.
[VI]
First printed, Mr. Bullen tells me, in 1640. Compare X. (Shirley, post, p. [20]), and the cry from Raleigh's History of the World: ‘O Eloquent, Just, and Mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the World hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the World and despised: thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched Greatness, all the Pride, Cruelty, and Ambition of Man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, “Hic Jacet.”’