246 E. B. Reed, 
Wher I fall short but you have reached to, 
Making that Good wisest of Kings hath said, 
Th’ Living’s not soe Prayse-worthy then |szc|] the dead. 
A few pages further on, we come to a more formal elegy on 
Henry of Navarre. 
Ah is itt then Great Henry soe fam’d 
For taming men, himself by death is tam’d! 
Whatt eye his glory saw, now his sad doome, 
But must desolve in Teares, sigh out his Soule, 
Soe small a shred of Earth should him intombe 
Whos acts deserv’d pocession of the whole. 
Though this poem has its defects, it is, on the whole, a better 
piece of writing than the elegy on Lady Fairfax. This consideration, 
together with the fact that Henry of Navarre was assassinated two 
years before Fairfax was born, and that there seems to be no special 
reason why he should lament his death, makes one suspect that 
the lines are a translation from the French. Such is the case, for 
I find that the poem is taken word for word from an elegy by Anne 
de Rohan which Fairfax read at the end of Agrippa d’Aubigne’s 
Histoire Universelle, published 1626, for d’Aubigne does not quote 
the whole poem, and Fairfax translates only as much as he gives.! 
With this hint I have looked in the French literature of the period 
for the originals of the other poems. On a Fountain is a trans- 
lation of an epigram of Malherbe that was a favorite one,” to judge 
from its appearance in a French anthology (Les Delices de la Poesie 
Francaise, 1615), while Fairfax’s best poem, the one that gives the 
manuscript its title, is a translation of Saint-Amant’s La Solitude. 
Other sources I have not found, but I feel convinced that many of 
the poems are translations, as for example, Of a Faire Wife, to 
Coregio, which is probably taken from the Italian. Others better read 
in Continental literature of the period may discover his models.’ 
We are now in a position to see the significance of these poems. 
They are not fine examples of English verse; they are rather to 
be regarded as documents that show us what an English gentleman 

1 Histoire Universelle par Agrippa d’Aubigné (Paris, 1879), Vol. 9, pp. 
472—15. 
2 See Oeuvres complétes de Malherbe (Paris, 1862), Vol. 1, p. 225. 
’ Mr. Lewis C. Everard, Yale Phi Beta Kappa Fellow, 1908—1909, has 
searched in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, for other French originals, 
but without results. 
