FULKE GREVILE, Lord Brooke, "servant to Queen Elizabeth, counsellor to King James, and friend to Sir Philip Sidney," was born at Alcaster, Warwickshire, in 1554. He was educated both at Oxford and at Cambridge, and obtained the favour of Queen Elizabeth, of whose court he was one of the brightest ornaments, and by whom he was rewarded with many profitable employments. He was created a Knight of the Bath at the coronation of James the First, was afterwards appointed sub-treasurer and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and elevated to the Peerage in 1621. He was suddenly stabbed by one of his own retainers, who had served him long and faithfully, and who perhaps committed the act in a moment of madness, for he immediately afterwards destroyed himself. Lord Brooke died of the wound on the 30th of September, 1628. The memorable epitaph we have quoted, and which he ordered to be inscribed on his tomb-stone, has rendered his name more familiar to the general reader than his many poems. He was the relative as well as the "friend" of Sir Philip Sidney; with whom he lived in "familiar exercise," and of whose friendship he boasts as the highest honour in the life of one who lived in favour with crowned Monarchs and was the "Counsellor" of Kings.

His Poems consist of various long and uninviting "Treatises" on Humane Learning, Warres, Monarchie, and Religion:—and an Inquisition upon Fame and Honour. The Treatise on Monarchie is divided into fifteen sections, each section discussing such topics as "Strong Tyrants," "the excellency of Monarchy" compared with "Aristocracy," ," "Democracy," and both "joyntly," and including the subjects of Peace, War, the Church, Commerce, Crown Revenue, &c. They were first published in 1633; and there are twenty-two pages wanting in all the copies that have yet been examined. They were doubtless cancelled, after the work was printed, because of something that was deemed censurable in their contents. It is probable, however, that these "erasures" may yet be recovered.

"His writings," observes Dr. Southey, "have an additional value, if (as may be believed) they represent the feelings and opinions of Sir Philip Sidney as well as his own-and, perhaps, we may be justified in imagining that the friendship between the two great men and great Poets was recorded by Sidney in the following exquisite lines:

"My true love hath my heart and I have his,

By just exchange one for another given,

I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss,
There never was a better bargain driven;
My true love hath my heart and I have his.
His heart in me keeps him and me in one,
My heart in him his thoughts and senses guide,
He loves my heart, for once it was his own,
I cherish his, because in me it bides;
My true love hath my heart and I have his."

We may observe that it was usual for the older poets to address their friends by such endearing epithets as are now only applied to women. Portia calls Antonio the "bosom lover" of her lord; and the rough Menenius boasts of Coriolanus as his "lover." A more remarkable instance in illustration of this, mingling the real and the imaginative, will be found in the extracts from the poems of Shakspeare.

Learning, sound judgment, and good intentions in the writer, are more apparent than poetry in the "Poems" and "Remains" of the statesman and the scholar. At times his meaning is so obscure as to be absolutely unintelligible. Now and then, however, he breaks forth in a strain of impassioned eloquence. His versification, though occasionally harsh and uncouth, is more often easy, and even harmonious. It is evident, at the same time, that he gave deeper consideration to the matter than to the manner of his writing; and was more anxious to impress upon the minds of his readers the weight and value of momentous truths than to please the fancy or even to interest the feelings;

The Poems of Lord Brooke, although by no means attractive as a whole, contain enough to establish his character as a poet, and afford abundant proof that he was an enlightened statesman, a good citizen, and an upright man-one, in short, worthy to bear the title he so much coveted "the friend of Sir Philip Sidney."

THUS see we how these ugly furious spirits,
Of warre, are cloth'd, colour'd, and disguis'd,
With stiles of vertue, honour, zeale, and merits,
Whose owne complexion, well anatomis'd,
A mixture is of pride, rage, avarice,
Ambition, lust, and every tragicke vice.

Some love no equals, some superiours scorne,
One seekes more worlds, and he will Helene have,
This covets gold, with divers faces borne,

These humours reigne, and lead men to their grave:
Whereby for bayes, and little wages, we

Ruine our selves, to raise up tyranny.

And as when winds among themselves doe jarre,
Seas there are tost, and wave with wave must fight:
So when pow'rs restlesse humours bring forth warre,
There people beare the faults, and wounds of might:
The error, and diseases of the head

Descending still, untill the limmes be dead.

Yet are not peoples errors, ever free

From guilt of wounds they suffer by the warre;
Never did any publike misery

Rise of it selfe; Gods plagues still grounded are
On common staines of our humanity :

And to the flame, which ruineth mankind,
Man gives the matter, or at least gives wind.

Nor are these people carried into blood
Onely, and still with violent giddy passion,
But in our nature, rightly understood,
Rebellion lives, still striving to disfashion
Order, authority, lawes, any good,

That should restraine our liberty of pleasure,
Bound our designes, or give desire a measure.

So that in man the humour radicall

Of violence, is a swelling of desire;

To get that freedome, captiv'd by his fall;

Which yet falls more by striving to clime higher: Men would be tyrants, tyrants would be gods, Thus they become our scourges, we their rods.

FROM A TREATISE OF RELIGION.

FOR what else is religion in mankind,
But raising of Gods image there decay'd?
No habit, but a hallowed state of mind
Working in us, that he may be obey'd;

As God by it with us communicates,
So we by duties must with all estates:

With our Creator, by sincere devotion;
With creatures, by observance and affection;
Superiors, by respect of their promotion,

Inferiors, with the nature of protection :
With all, by using all things of our own
For others good, not to our selves alone.

And ev❜n this sacred band, this heavenly breath
In man his understanding, knowledge is ;
Obedience, in his will; in conscience, faith;
Affections, love; in death it self a bliss;
In body, temp'rance; life, humility,
Pledge to the mortal of eternity.

Pure onely, where God makes the spirits pure;
It perfect grows, as imperfection dies;
Built on the rock of truth, that shall endure;
A spirit of God, that needs must multiply;
He shews his glory, cleerly to the best,
Appears in clouds and horror to the rest.

Offer these truths to pow'r, will she obey?
It prunes her pomp, perchance ploughs up the root;
It pride of tyrants humors doth allay,

Makes God their lord, and casts them at his foot,

This truth they cannot wave, yet will not do,
And fear to know because that binds them too.

Shew these to arts; those riddles of the sin
Which error first creates, and then inherits;
This light consumes those mists they flourish in,
At once deprives their glory and their merit;

Those mortal forms, moulded of humane error,
Dissolve themselves by looking in this mirror.

Shew it to laws; God's law, the true foundation,
Proves how they build up earth, and loose the heaven;
Gives things eternal, mortal limitation,

Ore-ruling him from whom their laws were given:

God's laws are right, just, wise, and so would make us ; Mans, captious, divers, false, and so they take us.

ROBERT SOUTHWELL was born in the year 1560, at St. Faith's in Norfolk, and received his early education in the English College at Douay. At the age of sixteen, while residing in Rome, he was admitted into the Society of the Jesuits. In 1584, he returned, as a missionary priest, to his native country, but he appears to have been disheartened by the vainness of his attempts to stay the progress of the Reformation, "living like a foreigner, finding among strangers that which in his nearest blood, he presumed not to seek." In England, notwithstanding, he continued to reside, labouring diligently and with sincerity, until the year 1592, when he was arrested on a charge of sedition, and committed to a dungeon, in the Tower, so noisome and filthy, that his father was induced, successfully, to petition Queen Elizabeth that "his son being a gentleman he might be treated as such." He continued three years in prison, and, it is said, was ten several times put to the rack. At length, death appearing more easy and welcome than such continued torture, he applied to the Lord Treasurer Cecil, that he might be brought to trial; the brutal answer of the Lord Treasurer is recorded: "If he was in such haste to be hanged, he should quickly have his desire." On the 20th February, 1595, he was tried at Westminster, on a charge of High Treason, "in that he being a Popish Priest born in the dominions of the crown of England, had come over thither from beyond sea, and had tarryed there longer than three days without conforming and taking the oaths." He was found guilty on his own confession, and was executed at Tyburn, according to the horrible practice of the age, on the day following his trial-meeting death, as the giver of a crown of martyrdom, with calmness and intrepidity; and adding one to the long list of victims sacrificed to the inveterate and unchristian spirit which characterized the early stages of the Reformation.

The poems of Southwell are all upon sacred subjects; he was, undoubtedly, a sincere, fervent, and zealous believer in the faith he preached, and for which he suffered. The uncertainty of life, the hollowness of human pleasures, the consolations of religion, the anticipations of future glory,-such are the leading themes that filled his heart and occupied his pen. There is an impassioned energy in his verse which shows that he was deeply in earnest--that he had devoted an enlarged mind to the spread of principles in which alone he trusted for salvation. If he was a Papist and a Jesuit, he was also a man and a Christian; and though because of his "much zeal," during a season of strong excitement and general agitation, he was considered dangerous and doomed to perish in the prime of life, his biographer must bear testimony to the holiness of his thoughts, the purity of his verse, and the kindliness and benignity of his nature. The longest of his poems is "St. Peter's Complaint" - the Apostle's lamentation over the weakness that induced him to deny and desert his master. But there is more poetry and a deeper interest in some of his shorter compositions. His declared object was to bring back the Poets from "the follies and feignings of love" in which they so continually indulged, to those "solemn and devout matters, to which, in duty, they owe their abilities:"-to accomplish this end, he was induced "to weave a new web of their own loom." The themes he selected generally harmonized with the melancholy character of his mind-for the most part, according to his own quaint expression, his "tunes are teares; "- but they are such as cannot fail to receive a welcome from all by whom the consolations of religion are appreciated, and who agree with the Poet Cowley, that "amongst all holy and consecrated things which the Devil ever stole and alienated from the service of the Deity, there is none which he so universally and so long usurpt as Poetry." That Southwell had genius of a very rare order is undeniable-genius worthy of the high and ennobling themes of which he wrote, and in the treatment of which he has been seldom if ever uncharitable. They consist of "St. Peter's Complaint and St. Mary Magdalen's Funeral Teares, with sundry other selected and devout Poems"-" Mæoniæ, or certain excellent Poems and Spiritual Hymns" and "The Triumphs over death, or a Consolatory Epistle for afflicted minds, on the affects of dying friends: first written for the consolation of one, but now published for the good of all."

It is remarkable, observes Mr. Ellis, that the few copies of his works which now exist, are the remnant of at least twenty-four different editions, of which eleven were printed between 1593 and 1600. They must therefore have obtained considerable popularity, although now but little known and rarely read.