The poets whom I had intended to include, and upon whom I had bestowed
more or less labour, but who now suffer exclusion, were Heath,
Flecknoe, Hawkins, Beedome, Prestwich, Lawrence, Pick, Jenkyn, and a
certain 'Philander'. Of these I chiefly regret Heath--the pretty title
of whose _Clarastella_ is not ill-supported by the text, and who
would have 'taken out the taste' of Whiting satisfactorily for some
people--Hawkins, Lawrence, and Jenkyn. Henry Hawkins in _Partheneia
Sacra_ has attained a sort of mystical unction which puts him not so
very far below Crashaw, and perhaps entitles him to rank with that
poet, Southwell, and Chideock Tichborne earlier as the representative
quartette of English Roman Catholic poetry in the major Elizabethan
age. Lawrence's _Arnalte and Lucetida_, not a brilliant thing in
itself, has real literary interest of the historical-comparative kind
as representing a Spanish romance by Diego de San Pedro (best known
as the author of the _Carcel de Amor_) and its French translation by
Herberay, the translator of _Amadis_. But such things remain to be
taken up by some general historian of the 'Heroic' Romance. As for
'Patheryke' [_sic_] Jenkyn he attracted me many years ago by the
agreeable heterography of his name (so far preferable to more recent
sham-Celticizings thereof) and held me by less fantastic merits.
Flecknoe pleaded for a chance against the tyranny of 'glorious John'.
But when it was a question between keeping these and the others with
further delay and letting them go, there could not be much doubt in
which way England expected this man to do his infinitesimal duty.
One instance, not of subtraction but of addition to the original
contents, seems to require slight notice. The eye-weakness just
mentioned having always prevented me from making any regular study of
palaeography, I had originally proposed only to include work already
printed. I was tempted to break my rule in the case of Godolphin: and
made rather a mess of it. An errata list in the present volume (p.
552) will, I believe, repair the blunder. The single censurer of this
(I further believe) single serious lapse of mine was, I remember,
troubled about it as a discredit to the University of Oxford. I
sincerely trust that he was mistaken. None of us can possibly do
credit to our University; we can only derive it from her. To throw any
discredit on her is equally impossible: though of course any member
may achieve such discredit for himself. Let me hope that the balance
against me for indiscreet dealing with perhaps one per cent. of my
fifteen hundred or two thousand pages is not too heavy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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