"My Muse wants eloquence and retoricke,
For to describe it more scollerlike,
And doth crave pardon for hir bold adventure,
When that upon these subjects she did enter.
'Tis eight months since this first booke was begun,
Come, Muse, breake off, high time 'tis to adone.
Travell no further in these martiall straines,
Till we know what will please us for our paines.
I know thy will is forward to performe,
What age doth now deny thy quill t' adorne,
Whose age is seventy-sixe, compleat in yeares,
Which in the Regester at large appeares."
&c. &c. &c. &c.
Cromwell died Sept. 3. 1658, and was interred in Westminster Abbey; but his bones were not removed and buried at Tyburn till the 30th of January, 1660; very soon after which it is most probable that this poem was written. Now if the author was, as he says, seventy-six at this time, he must have been born about 1583 or 1584, which will rightly correspond with the account given by Chalmers and others; and thus he would be about twenty-two or twenty-three years of age when he wrote his first poem of Δαϕνὶϛ Πολυδτέϕανοϛ, twenty-seven when he succeeded to the office of Master of the Revels. There appears to be no reason for supposing, with Ritson, that The Great Plantagenet, which was the second edition of that poem, and published in 1635, was done "by some fellow who assumed his name;" but that the variations, which are very considerable, were made by the author himself, and printed in his lifetime. The Dedication to Sir John Finch, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, signed "George Buck," and written exactly in his style; the three sets of commendatory verses addressed to the author by O. Rourke, Robert Codrington, and George Bradley, not in the first edition of the poem "Upon King Henrie the Second, the first Plantagenet of England," &c., added to this impression; all tend to show that the author was then living in 1635. We learn by the above quotations from his MS. poem, that his days were further prolonged till 1660.
Perhaps some of your numerous readers may be able to discover some corroborative proofs of this statement from other sources, and will be kind enough to favour me, through your paper, with any evidence which may occur to then, bearing upon the subject of my inquiries.
Thomas Corser.
Stand Rectory.
COSAS DE ESPAÑA.
The things of Spain are peculiar to a proverb, but they are not so exclusively national but we may find some connection with them in things of our own country. Any information from readers of Notes and Queries, on a few Spanish things which I have long sought for in vain, would prove most acceptable and useful to me.
1. In Catalogi Librorum Manuscriptorum, Angliæ et Hiberniæ, &c., under "Library of Westminster Abbey," at p. 29., I find mentioned the following MS.: Una Resposal del Reverend Padre Thomaso Cranmero. It is not now in that library—is it in any other? I suppose it may be a translation, made by Francisco Dryander or Enzinas, translator of the Spanish New Testament, 1543, of—"An Answer by the Right Rev. Father in God, Thomas, Abp. of Canterbury, unto a crafty and sophistical cavillation devised by Stephen Gardener," &c. Dryander came to this country with Bucer, recommended to Cranmer by Melancthon, and resided two months in the Archbishop's house before he went to Cambridge to lecture in Greek.
2. Ferdinando de Tereda, a Spanish Protestant, came to this country in 1620. The Lord Keeper Williams took him into his house to learn Spanish of him, in order to treat personally with the Spanish ambassador about the marriage of Prince Charles and the Infanta. At this instance, Tereda translated the English Liturgy into Spanish (1623), and was repaid by presentation to a prebend at Hereford. On the death of James, in 1625, he left, as he says, the Court, before the Court left him, and retired to Hereford. Here he adds: "I composed a large volume De Monachatu, in Latin; another De Contradictionibus Doctrinæ Ecclesiæ Romanæ, in the same language; and a third, entitled Carrascon, also in Latin." In 1631-2 he vacated his prebend, and went, I conjecture, to Holland, where he printed Carrascon in Spanish (1633), being a selection from the Latin. In the preface to this, which recently had been reprinted, he proposed to print the other works which he had prepared, if the Spanish Carrascon brought him "good news." Do his Latin works exist either in print or in manuscript?