The Poems of Richard Corbet, late bishop of Oxford and of Norwich: 4th editionCorbet, Richard
General
The Poems of Richard Corbet, late bishop of Oxford and of Norwich: 4th edition
Corbet, Richard
English poetry
In this dearth of fact as to dates, I shall presume to suppose he married
about 1625 Alice the only daughter of his fellow-collegian Dr. Leonard
Hutton, a man of some eminence in his day as a divine and an antiquary,
and whose character is thus drawn by Antony Wood with a felicity that
rarely accompanies his pencil: “His younger years were beautified with
all kind of polite learning, his middle with ingenuity and judgment, and
his reverend years with great wisdom in government, having been often
subdean of his college.”
This union of wit and beauty was not looked upon with indifference, nor
was their epithalamium unsung, or the string touched by the hand of an
unskilful master:
Come, all ye Muses, and rejoyce
At this your nursling’s happy choyce;
Come, Flora, strew the bridemaid’s bed,
And with a garland crown her head;
Or, if thy flowers be to seek,
Come gather roses at her cheek.
Come, Hymen, light thy torches, let
Thy bed with tapers be beset,
And if there be no fire by,
Come light thy taper at her eye:
In that bright eye there dwells a starre,
And wise-men by it guided are[19].
The offspring of this marriage were a daughter named Alice, and a son
born the 10th of November, 1627, towards whom the beautiful poem at page
150 is an undecaying monument of paternal affection.
Of these descendants of the bishop I lament that I have discovered so
little: if this volume should be fortunate enough to excite attention to
its author, the loss may at some future period be supplied: they were
both living when their grandmother, Anne Hutton, made her will in 1642,
and the son administered to the testament in 1648.
In 1628 Corbet suffered a severe privation in the loss of his patron
Villiers duke of Buckingham, assassinated by Felton on the 23d of
August, who, whatever were his political crimes, was, like his amiable
and indulgent master, a liberal promoter of literature and science, and
to his death an encourager of Corbet’s studies. If, however, this event
checked his hopes of promotion for a season, it did not leave him without
a patron; for, upon the translation of Hewson to the see of Durham,
(to make way for Dr. Duppa to be dean of that church,) he was elected
bishop of Oxford the 30th of July, was consecrated at Lambeth the 19th of
October, and installed the 3d of November, 1629; “though,” in the opinion
of Wood, “in some respects unworthy of such an office[20].”
Warned by the many petulant remarks on the poetical character scattered
throughout the account of Oxford writers, one is little surprised at
this churlish remark on the part of honest Antony, who seems to have
considered all poetry as
... inopes rerum, nugæque canoræ,
and its indulgence inconsistent with the clerical profession. Corbet was
certainly no “precisian,” and perhaps his only fault was possessing a
species of talent to which Antony had no pretension.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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