The Catholic World, Vol. 17, April, 1873 to September, 1873: A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and ScienceVarious
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 17, April, 1873 to September, 1873: A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
do not despair of a voluntary reversal of the first judgment.”
ARIS WILMOTT
pronounced Southwell to be the Goldsmith of our early poets; and
‘Content and Rich,’ and, ‘Dyer’s phansie turned to a Sinner’s
Complaint’ warrant the great praise. But beneath the manner recalling
Goldsmith, there is a purity and richness of thought, a naturalness, a
fineness of expression, a harmony of versification, and occasionally a
tide-flow of high-toned feeling, not to be met with in him.
“Nor will Prof. Lowell deem his (I fear) hasty (mis)judgment’s
reconsideration too much to count on, after the present Archbishop of
Dublin’s well-weighed words in his notes to his _Household Book of
English Poetry_ (1868):
“‘Hallam thinks that Southwell has been of late praised at least as
much as he deserves. This may be so; yet, taking into account the
finished beauty of such poems as this (“Lewd Love is Loss”) and No.
2 (“Times go by Turns”) of this collection, poems which, as far as
they go, leave nothing to be desired, he has scarcely been praised
more than he deserves. How in earlier times he was rated, the fact
that there were twenty-four editions of his poems will sufficiently
testify; though probably the creed be professed, and the death which
he died, may have had something to do with this. Robert Southwell
was a seminary priest, and was executed at Tyburn in the reign of
Queen Elizabeth, in conformity with a law, which even the persistent
plottings of too many of these at once against the life of the
sovereign and the life of the state must altogether fail to justify or
excuse’ (pp. 391-392).
“To Archbishop Trench’s I add, as equally weighty and worthy, the
fine and finely sympathetic yet discriminative judgment of Dr. George
Macdonald in _Antiphon_ as follows:
“‘I proceed to call up one WHO WAS A POET INDEED, although
little known as such, being a Roman Catholic, a Jesuit even, and
therefore, in Elizabeth’s reign, a traitor and subject to the
penalties according (accruing)? Robert Southwell, thirteen times most
cruelly tortured, could “not be induced to confess anything, not even
the color of the horse whereon he rode on a certain day, lest from
such indication his adversaries might conjecture in what house, or in
company of what Catholics, he that day was,’ etc.
“I believe, then,” concludes Dr. Grosart, “I shall not appeal in vain
to Prof. Lowell to give a few hours behind his ‘Study Windows’ to a
reperusal of some of the poems of Southwell named by us and these
sufficiently qualified critics.”
SOMETHING ABOUT LACE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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