LXIII

TRUCE, gentle Love, a parley now I crave,
Methinks 'tis long since first these wars begun ;
Nor thou, nor I, the better yet can have ;
Bad is the match where neither party won.
I offer free conditions of fair peace,
My heart for hostage that it shall remain.
Discharge our forces, here let malice cease,
So for my pledge thou give me pledge again.
Or if no thing but death will serve thy turn,
Still thirsting for subversion of my state,
Do what thou canst, raze, massacre, and burn;
Let the world see the utmost of thy hate;

I send defiance, since if overthrown,

Thou vanquishing, the conquest is mine own.

FIDESSA

MORE CHASTE THAN KIND

BY

B. GRIFFIN, GENT.

BARTHOLOMEW GRIFFIN

THE author of Fidessa has gained undeserved notice from the fact that the piratical printer W. Jaggard, included a transcript of one of his sonnets in a volume that he put forth in 1599, under the name of Shakespeare. It would be easy to believe, in spite of the doubtful rimes characteristic of Fidessa, that sonnet three was not Griffin's, for no singer in the Elizabethan choir was more skilful in turning his voice to other people's melodies than was he. He has been called "a gross plagiary;" yet it must be realised that the sonneteers of that time felt they had a right, almost a duty, to take up the poetic themes used by their models. Griffin shows great ingenuity in the manipulation of the stock-themes, and the lover of Petrarch and all the young Abraham-Slenders of the day must have been delighted with the familiar "designs " as they re-appeared in Fidessa.

Bartholomew Griffin was buried in Coventry in 1602. In 1596 he dedicated his "slender work" Fidessa to William Essex of Lamebourne in Berkshire. He adds an address to the Gentle

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men of the Inns of Court, whom he begs to censure mildly as protectors of a poor stranger” and "judge the best as encouragers of a young beginner." Of the poet little further is known. From the sonnets themselves we learn that Fidessa was "of high regard," the child of a beautiful mother and of a renowned father; she sprang in fact from the same root with the poet himself, who writes "Gent." after his name on the title-page. She had been kind to him in sickness and had "yielded to each look of his a sweet reply." After giving these slight hints, he pushes forth from the moorings of realism and sets sail on the ocean of the sonneteer's fancy, meeting the usual adventures. His sonnets, while showing versatility and ingenuity, lack spontaneous feeling and have serious defects in form; yet these defects are in part offset by their conversational ease and dramatic vividness.