Write love to you: I would not willingly Be pointed at in every company, As was that little tailor, who till death Was hot in love with Queen Elizabeth. And for the last, in all my idle days I never yet did living woman praise In prose or verse. A sufficient disavowal, this, of the foolish love songs attributed to him by an uncritical posterity. As for this "strange letter," as he denominates it, from which I have quoted, the sincere, as well as brusque, humour attests more than ordinary acquaintance with, and genuine admiration of, Elizabeth, the poetic and only child of Sir Philip Sidney. The Countess lived but twenty-five miles north-west of Charnwood, and in the same country of Leicestershire. One can see the towers from the heights above Grace-Dieu. The Beaumonts undoubtedly had been at Belvoir, time and again. "If I should sing your praises in my rhyme," says he to her of the "white soul" and "beautiful face," I lose my ink, my paper and my time And nothing add to your o'erflowing store, And tell you nought, but what you knew before. Nor do the virtuous-minded (which I swear, Madam, I think you are) endure to hear Their own perfections into question brought, But stop their ears at them; for, if I thought You took a pride to have your virtues known, (Pardon me, madam) I should think them none. Many a writer of the day agreed with Beaumont concerning Elizabeth Sidney,--"every word you speak is sweet and mild." She, said Jonson to Drummond of Hawthornden, "was nothing inferior to her father in poesie"; she encouraged it in others. But her husband, Roger, fifth Earl of Rutland, though a lover of plays himself, does not appear to have favoured his Countess's patronage of literary men. He burst in upon her, one day when Ben Jonson was dining with her, and "accused her that she kept table to poets." Of her excellence Jonson bears witness in four poems. Most pleasantly in that Epistle included in his _The Forrest_, where speaking of his tribute of verse, he says: With you, I know my off'ring will find grace: For what a sinne 'gainst your great father's spirit, Were it to think, that you should not inherit His love unto the Muses, when his skill Almost you have, or may have, when you will? Wherein wise Nature you a dowrie gave, Worth an estate treble to that you have. Beauty, I know is good, and blood is more; Riches thought most: but, Madame, think what store The world hath scene, which all these had in trust, And now lye lost in their forgotten dust. And in an Epigram[97] _To the Honour'd ---- Countesse of ----_, evidently sent to her during the absence of her husband on the continent, he compliments her conduct,-- Not only shunning by your act, to doe Ought that is ill, but the suspition too,-- at a time when others are following vices and false pleasures. But "you," he says,