This poem, subscribed M. T. (perhaps invertedly for T. Marshall[570]) is preserved in The Paradise of Daintie Devises. The two first stanzas may be found accompanied with musical notes in "An howres recreation in musicke, &c. by Richard Alison, Lond. 1606, 4to." usually bound up with three or four sets of "Madrigals set to music by Tho. Weelkes, Lond. 1597, 1600, 1608, 4to." One of these madrigals is so compleat an example of the bathos, that I cannot forbear presenting it to the reader:—
"Thule, the period of cosmographie,
Doth vaunt of Hecla, whose sulphureous fire
Doth melt the frozen clime, and thaw the skie,
Trinacrian Ætna's flames ascend not hier:
These things seeme wondrous, yet more wondrous I,
Whose heart with feare doth freeze, with love doth fry.
"The Andelusian merchant, that returnes
Laden with cutchinele and china dishes,
Reports in Spaine, how strangely Fogo burnes
Amidst an ocean full of flying fishes:
These things seeme wondrous, yet more wondrous I,
Whose heart with feare doth freeze, with love doth fry."
Mr. Weelkes seems to have been of opinion, with many of his brethren of later times, that nonsense was best adapted to display the powers of musical composure.
[Percy's conjecture that the author is Marshall is not a happy one. Sir Egerton Brydges, in his edition of the Paradise, 1810 (British Bibliographer, vol. iii.), attributes it to M. Thorn, whose name is signed to another poem, numbered 52:—
"Now mortall man beholde and see,
This worlde is but a vanitie,"
written in much the same spirit. The heading to the Sturdy Rock is:—
"Man's flitting life fyndes surest stay,
Where sacred vertue beareth sway.">[