You know the modest sunne full fifteene times
Blushing did rise, and blushing did descend,
While I in making of these ill made rimes,
My golden bowers unthriftily did spend.
Yet, if in friendship you these numbers prayse,
I will mispend another fifteene dayes."
The cause of quarrel between the two young lawyers is not known, but the "offence," whatever it was, was not slight. In the year 1622, when Davies reprinted his poetical works, we find that his feelings of resentment against his once "very friend" had not abated, for in place of the dedicatory sonnet to Richard Martin, is substituted a sonnet addressed to Prince Charles; and at the conclusion of the poem, he left a hiatus after the one hundred and twenty-sixth stanza, on account of the same quarrel.
Sir John Davies's celebrated poem, Nosce Teipsum (mentioned by Wood in the previous extract), is said to have gained the author the favour of James I., even before he came to the crown. Wood gives the precise period of its composition, and, I think, with every appearance of truth, although it does not accord with the statement of modern biographers, that it was written at twenty-five years of age. (See Campbell's Essay on Poetry, &c., ed. 1848, p. 184.) The first edition of this poem was printed in 4to. in the year 1599, and has for its title the following:—
"Nosce Teipsum. This Oracle expounded in Two Elegies. 1. Of Humane Knowledge. 2. Of the Soule of Man, and the Immortalitie thereof. London, Printed by Richard Field, for John Standish. 43 leaves."
As I am deeply interested in all that relates to the subject of this note, I have compiled a list of editions of the above poem, which shows its popularity for more than a century and a half:—