Dr. Thomas Campion, lyric poet, musician, and doctor of medicine,--who, of the three liberal arts that he practiced, is remembered now mainly for his poetry,--was born about the middle of the sixteenth century; the precise date and place being unknown. It has been conjectured that he came of an Essex family; but the evidence for this falls through. Nor was he, as has been ingeniously supposed, of any relationship to his namesake Edmund Campion, the Jesuit. What is certain, and thrice interesting in the case of such a poet, is that he was so nearly a contemporary of Shakespeare's. He was living in London all through the period of Shakespeare's mastery of the English stage, and survived him only by some three or four years. From an entry in the register of St. Dunstan's-in-the-West, Fleet Street, we learn that Campion was buried there in February, 1619-20. But although it is clear that the two poets, one the most famous, the other well-nigh the least known, in the greater Elizabethan galaxy, must have often encountered in the narrower London of that day, there is no single reference in the lives or works of either connecting one with the other. We first hear of Campion at Gray's Inn, where he was admitted a member in 1586, from which it is clear that his first idea was to go in for law. He tired of it before he was called to the bar, however; and turning to medicine instead, he seems to have studied for his M.D. at Cambridge, and thereafter repaired again to London and begun to practice as a physician,--very successfully, as the names of some of his more distinguished patients show. A man of taste, in the very finest sense,--cultured, musical, urbane,--his own Latin epigrams alone would show that he had all that social instinct and tact which count for so much in a doctor's career. He was fortunate, too, in finding in London the society best adapted to stimulate his finely intellectual and artistic faculty. The first public sign of his literary art was his book of 'Poemata,' the Latin epigrams referred to, which appeared in 1595, and every copy of which has disappeared. Fortunately a second series of epigrams, written in maturer years, gave him an excuse to republish the first series in connection with them, in the year of his death, 1619. From the two series we learn many interesting facts about his circle of friends and himself, and the evident ease and pleasantness of his life, late and early. There is the same sense of style in his Latin verse that one finds in his English lyrics; but though he had a pretty wit, with a sufficient salt in it on occasion,--as in his references to Barnabe Barnes,--his faculty was clearly more lyrical than epigrammatical, and his lyric poems are all that an exacting posterity is likely to allow him to carry up the steep approach to the House of Fame.