The Jesuits, 1534-1921: A History of the Society of Jesus from Its Foundation to the Present TimeCampbell, Thomas J. (Thomas Joseph)
History
The Jesuits, 1534-1921: A History of the Society of Jesus from Its Foundation to the Present Time
Campbell, Thomas J. (Thomas Joseph)
Jesuits -- History
No less a personage than Isaac Watts, the English hymnologist, makes
Mathias Sarbiewski (Sarbievius), the Pole, another Horace, though his
poetry was mostly Pindaric. Grotius puts him above Horace (Brucker,
505). He was a court preacher, a companion of the king in his travels, a
musician and an artist. He wrote four books of lyrics, a volume of
epodes, another of epigrams, and there is a posthumous work of his
called "Silviludia." His muse was both religious and patriotic, and
because of the former, he was called by the Pope to help in the revision
of the hymns of the Breviary; and for that work he was crowned by King
Wladislaw. His prose works run into eight volumes. There are twenty-two
translations of his poems in Polish, and there are others in German,
Italian, Flemish, Bohemian, English and French.
Gosse in his "Seventeenth Century Studies" says that Famian Strada who
wrote "The Nightingale" was not professedly a poet but a lecturer on
rhetoric. "The Nightingale" was first published in Rome in 1617 in a
volume of "Prolusiones" on rhetoric and poetry, and occurs in the sixth
lecture of the second course. "This Jesuit Rhetorician," Gosse informs
us, "had been trying to familiarize his pupils with the style of the
great Classic poets, by reciting to them passages in imitation of Ovid,
Lucretius, Lucian and others. 'This,' he told them 'is an imitation of
the style of Claudian,' and so he gives us the lines which have become
so famous. That a single fragment in a schoolbook should so suddenly
take root and blossom in European literature, when all else that its
voluminous author wrote and said was promptly forgotten, is very curious
but not unprecedented." In England, the first to adopt the poem was John
Ford in his play of "The Lover's Melancholy" in 1629; Crashaw came next
with his "Music's Duel," Ambrose Philips essayed it a century later; and
in our own days, François Coppée introduced it with charming effect in
his "Luthier de Crémone."
The French Jesuit Sautel was a contemporary of Strada and Balde. He was
considered the Ovid of his time, and was as remarkable for the holiness
of his life as for his unusual poetical ability.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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