246 E. B. Rccd, 



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 [sic] 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 

 tiistoire Universelle, published 1626, for dAubigne 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 Dclices de la Poe'sie 

 Frangaise, 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 man}' 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 



* Ilutoire Universelle par Agrippa d'Aubigne (Paris, 1879), Vol. 9, pp. 

 472-75. 



- See Oenvres completes de Malherbe (Paris, 18(32), Vol. 1, p. 225. 



•■' Mr. Lewis C. Everard, Yale Phi Beta Kappa Pellow, 1908—1909, has 

 searched in the Bibliotheque Rationale, Paris, for other Prench originals, 

 but Avitliout I'esults. 



