There is more than dexterity, there is consummate art--the art of a conscious master--in the inter-weaving of the lines and stanzas of "Nosce Teipsum." Professor Craik recognised the difficulty and the triumph, but fails by ultra-ingenuity in accounting for either the selection of the measure or the miracle of its continuous success. His criticism is worth recalling, thus:--"A remarkable poem of this age ... is the 'Nosce Teipsum' of Sir John Davies ... a philosophical poem, the earliest of the kind in the language. It is written in rhyme, in the common heroic ten-syllable verse, but disposed in quatrains, like the early play of Misogonus, already mentioned, and other poetry of the same era, or like Sir Thomas Overbury's poem of 'The Wife,' the 'Gondibert' of Sir William Davenant, and the 'Annus Mirabilis' of Dryden, at a later period. No one of these writers has managed this difficult stanza so successfully as Davies: it has the disadvantage of requiring the sense to be in general closed at certain regularly and quickly-recurring turns, which yet are very ill adapted for an effective pause; and even all the skill of Dryden has been unable to free it from a certain air of monotony and languor,--a circumstance of which that poet may be supposed to have been himself sensible, since he wholly abandoned it after one or two early attempts. Davies, however, has conquered its difficulty; and, as has been observed, 'perhaps no language can produce a poem, extending to so great a length, of more condensation of thought, or in which fewer languid verses will be found.' (Hallam, as before.) In fact, it is by this condensation and sententious brevity, so carefully filed and elaborated, however, as to involve no sacrifice of perspicuity or fulness of expression, that he has attained his end. Every quatrain is a pointed expression of a separate thought, like one of Rochefoucault's maxims; each thought being, by great skill and painstaking in the packing, made exactly to fit and to fill the same case. It may be doubted, however, whether Davies would not have produced a still better poem if he had chosen a measure which would have allowed him greater freedom and real variety; unless, indeed, his poetical talent was of a sort that required the suggestive aid and guidance of such artificial restraints as he had to cope with in this; and what would have been a bondage to a more fiery and teeming imagination, was rather a support to his."[49] [Footnote 49: _A Compendious History of English Literature_, &c., Vol. I., p. 577, edn. 1866.]