And in a dance such measures to observe
As all the world their motion should preserve.'
With this compare Lucian (as Englished by Jasper Mayne): 'First, then, you plainly seem to me not to know that dancing is no new invention or of yesterday's or the other day's growth, or born among our forefathers or their ancestors. But they who most truly derive dancing, say it sprung with the first beginning of the universe, and had a birth equally as ancient as love.' It would be easy to multiply instances. Of course Davies' borrowings from Lucian do not for a moment detract from his poem's merit: indeed they give an added zest.
In the 1596 edition Orchestra ends with a compliment to Queen Elizabeth, and stanzas in praise of Spenser, Daniel, and others. Davies had evidently intended to write a sequel; for, when Orchestra was republished in the collective edition of his poems (1622), it was described on the title-page as 'not finished,' some new stanzas were added, and it ended abruptly in the middle of a simile. The poem is quite long enough as we have it in the 1596 edition, and we need not lament that Davies failed to carry out his intention of continuing it: μηδὲν ἄγαν.
To his youthful days belong the Epigrams, which were bound up with Marlowe's translation of Ovid's Amores (with a Middleburgh imprint): occasionally indecorous, they are seldom wanting in wit and pleasantry.
In February 1597-8, Davies was disbarred for a breach of discipline. He quarrelled with Richard Martin (afterwards Recorder of London)—to whom he had dedicated Orchestra—and assaulted him at dinner in the Middle Temple Hall, breaking a cudgel over his head. Retiring to Oxford, he engaged in the more peaceful occupation of composing Nosce Teipsum, a poem on the immortality of the soul, which was published in 1599. It was an ambitious task that this young disbarred bencher took in hand, but he acquitted himself ably. Some of his modern admirers have exceeded all reasonable bounds in their praise of the poem. Rejecting these extravagant eulogies, we may claim that Davies, while he was leading the life of an inns-of-court man of fashion, had remained a steadfast lover of learning and letters; that he had stored his mind richly; and that his well-turned quatrains have had an inspiring influence on later poets. Young, in Night Thoughts, was under special obligation to Davies. Matthew Arnold had no enthusiasm for Elizabethan writers; but, unless I am greatly mistaken, he had glanced at Nosce Teipsum. In 'A Southern Night' Arnold wrote—
... 'And see all things from pole to pole,[3]
And glance, and nod, and bustle by,
And never once possess our soul