IV.—Tue Poems or Tuomas Tuirp Lorp Fairrax. 
(From the Bodleian MS. Fairfax 40; formerly MS. Add. A. 120.) 
In the annals of England the name of Thomas, third Lord Fair- 
fax, is deservedly illustrious. As a general, he was an intrepid 
fighter and a skilful commander; in his private life, a man of 
scholarly tastes, happy in his country estates, which he preferred 
to the court. Policy and self-advancement were far from his thoughts, 
despite his great opportunities for aggrandizement; and the simplic- 
ity of his character, at which his enemies sneered, was but a proof 
of his sincerity. To sketch his life in detail is unnecessary, yet his 
poems will gain significance if, in the briefest manner, we review 
his interesting career. 
The son of Fernandino, second Lord Fairfax, and Mary, daughter 
of Lord Sheffield, he was born at Denton, Yorkshire, in 1612, of 
a family long distinguished for its soldierly qualities. In 1620 his 
erand-father, Thomas, first Lord Fairfax, then a man of sixty, joined, 
with two of his sons, the single regiment sent by James I to the 
support of the Elector of the Palatinate. He was obliged to return 
to England to take part in the Parliamentary elections, but his two 
sons died at Frankenthal at the head of their troops. Fernandino 
did not make this campaign, and his father spoke of him as a 
“tolerable country justice, but a mere coward at fighting” 1; yet 
Fernandino took the field against Charles I, and certainly did not 
deserve this taunt. 
The early years of our poet were spent in Yorkshire, and he un- 
doubtedly enjoyed in his first studies the guidance of his great 
uncle, Edward Fairfax, the translator of Tasso. In 1626 he entered 
St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he remained four years, and 
then, following the family traditions, he went to the Low Countries, 
to serve under Lord Vere against the Spaniards. Another young 
volunteer in the same camp was Turenne. After witnessing the 
capture of Bois-le-Duc, he traveled and studied in France for eighteen 
months, returned to England in 1632, and requested permission to 
volunteer under Gustavus Adolphus, but his family opposed it, and 
he retired to the Yorkshire estates to live the life of a country gentle- 

1 A Life of the Great Lord Fairfax, by Clements R. Markham, London, 
1870, p. 12 
