[In the following essay, Wilkes examines Davies's poetry, discusses his ideas, themes, and influences, and surveys the issues debated by his critics.]

There is no justification at present for calling attention to Sir John Davies as a neglected poet, or for claiming any higher position for him than he now enjoys. As the author of Nosce teipsum he has always had a certain repute, and more recently Orchestra has come into prominence as an aid to the exposition of the Elizabethan world picture. We are in no danger of overlooking Davies or of mistaking his stature: the danger is that we may mistake the kind of poet that he was. The isolation of Orchestra and Nosce teipsum from the rest of his work is tending to place Davies' poetry in a false perspective, and even to promote the misinterpretation of these two poems themselves.

When he published the last edition of his verse in 1622, Davies had completed sixteen years as solicitor-general for Ireland, had sat as a member of the House of Commons, and was shortly to be appointed chief justice. The poems themselves, however, had been written a quarter of a century earlier, in his days as a courtier and a law-student, before he settled down to a serious career. Davies was not a professional poet, nor did he continue to write verse beyond his early thirties. Perhaps the best way of coming to terms with his work is to approach it through the poems excluded from the 1622 collection.

Davies' earliest writing is to be found in the Epigrammes published along with Marlowe's translation of Ovids Elegies, and ordered to be burnt by the decree of the archbishop of Canterbury on June 1, 1599. The Epigrammes belong to Davies' period at the Middle Temple in the early nineties, topical allusions stamping several of them as written about 1594.¹ Defining an epigram as that

Which taxeth under a particular name,
A generall vice that merites publike blame,(2)

Davies has the same targets as his fellow satirists—the gull, the poetaster, the whore, the puritan, the braggart, the pretentious fop—seeking his quarry in the playhouse and the ordinary, and adding to the allusions to “Banks his horse” and “Lepidus his printed dogge.” On his own valuation, he is one of the earliest of the new satirical school, claiming that

Haywood which did in Epigrams excell,
Is now put down since my light muse arose,
As buckets are put downe into a well,
Or as a Schoole-boy putteth downe his hose

(“No. 29”)

and regretting, in the envoy to the collection,

That from hence forth each bastard cast forth rime,
Which doth but savour of a libell vaine,
Shall call me father. …

(“No. 48”)

The references to Davies' epigrams in the 1590's outnumber those to any other of his poems. He draws the fire of other writers in the genre like Harington and Bastard;³ he figures in Skialetheia (1598) as “our English Martiall” (No. 20); and in The Second Part of the Return to Parnassus, Judicio characterizes him:

Acute John Davies, I affect thy rymes,
That jerck in hidden charmes these looser times:
Thy playner verse, thy unaffected vaine,
Is graced with a fayre and sooping trayne.
[Martiall & hee may sitt upon one bench,
Either wrote well & either lov'd his wench.](4)

There were more of Davies' epigrams in circulation than got into print, for they are still being recovered from manuscript now,⁵ and certainly it was as a satirist that he first became known.

In his twenty-fifth epigram, “In Decium,” Davies ridicules a conceit used by Drayton in Ideas Mirrour (Amour 8). The satirist's conventional attack on “whimpring Sonnets, puling Elegies”⁶ is carried further in three satires grouped at the end of some editions of the Epigrammes, and found also in a manuscript at Trinity College, Dublin (MS.F.4.20, fol. 358^r-v). One satire will serve to indicate the temper of all three:

Faith (wench) I cannot court thy sprightly eyes,
With the bace viall plac'd betweene my thyghs,
I cannot lispe nor to some fidell sing,
Nor runne upon a high strecht minikin,
I cannot whine in puling Elegies,
Intombing Cupid with sad obsequies,
I am not fashioned for these amorous times,
To court thy beawtie with lascivious rimes:
I cannot dally, caper, daunce, and sing,
Oyling my saint with supple sonnetting.
I cannot crosse my armes or sigh ay me,
Ay me forlorne? egregious foppery,
I cannot busse thy fist, play with thy haire,
Swearing by Jove thou art most debonaire:
          Not I by God, but shal I tell thee roundly,
          Harke in thine eare. Zoundes I can (                              ) thee soundly.

The mockery of the Petrarchan fashion is more systematic, however, in the series of Gulling Sonnets which Davies likewise omitted from collections of his verse. He presented them to Sir Anthony Cooke as further evidence of the versatility of his pen:

Here my Camelion Muse her selfe doth chaunge
to divers shapes of gross absurdities
and like an Antick mocks with fashion straunge
the fond admirers of lewde gulleries.

These nine poems deride the extravagances of the Petrarchan love sonnet. The lover whose pains are too severe for man to endure is turned into an ass, that he may bear them more equably. The heart that is as hard as flint becomes as flint, the heart that is true as steel becomes as steel, and the impasse is overcome as the flame of love is kindled between them. The eighth sonnet, directed more particularly at the sequence Zepheria (1594), ponders the rights at law of the lover whose mistress has his heart. She holds it by distraint when he has not defaulted in his payments, keeps it impounded despite his efforts to replevy, gives the answer of “esloynde” when he seeks its return—the whole transaction is legally indefensible. The satire of the fifth sonnet is more comprehensive:

Myne Eye, mine eare, my will, my witt, my harte
did see, did heare, did like, discerne, did love:
her face, her speche, her fashion, judgem't, arte,
wch did charme, please, delighte, confounde and move.
Then fancie, humor, love, conceipte, and thoughte
did soe drawe, force, intyse, perswade, devise,
that she was wonne, mov'd, caryed, compast, wrought
to thinck me kinde, true, comelie, valyant, wise;
that heaven, earth, hell, my folly and her pride
did worke, contrive, labor, conspire and sweare
to make me scorn'd, vile, cast of, bace, defyed
Wth her my love, my lighte, my life, my deare:
So that my harte, my witt, will, eare, and eye
doth greive, lament, sorrowe, dispaire and dye.

Davies' antagonism to the conventions he ridicules could not have been very deep, because they belong to a form of verse he practised himself. The Gulling Sonnets can be dated roughly from the dedication to Sir Anthony Cooke, who was knighted in 1596 and died in 1604. Within this period Davies published his Hymnes of Astraea (1599), a series of twenty-six lyrics with the initial letters of the lines of each poem spelling downward “Elisabetha Regina.” In this “gay poesie” there is no sense that Davies is struggling with a secretly uncongenial mode. The execution is effortless, and the language is in the smooth style of courtly compliment proper in an address to the Queen. The same is true of the adroit and engaging “Contention betwixt a Wife, a Widdowe and a Maide,” written as part of an entertainment for Elizabeth given by Sir Robert Cecil in 1602, and included with two other pieces of the same kind, “A Lotterie” and “Yet other 12. wonders of the world,” in Davison's Poetical Rhapsody. There is nothing to suggest that Davies “progressed” from these flimsy compositions to the sardonic view of the Gulling Sonnets. Even to raise the question of such a development is to ascribe to him a more serious attitude to poetry than he is known to have possessed. In his twenty-third epigram Davies had declared himself “as good a man” as Cineas,

For vault, and daunce, and fence, and rime I can,

and his rhyming is best regarded as one gentlemanly accomplishment among many.

This minor verse provides the context in which Orchestra should be seen. It was entered in the Stationers' Registers in 1594, the same year in which Davies probably wrote his epigrams “In Titum” (“No. 6”), “In Decium” (“No. 25”), and “In Afrum” (“No. 40”), besides others lacking topical references by which they might be more certainly dated. Since E. M. W. Tillyard has represented Orchestra as “not freakish and exceptional but central to Renaissance ways of thinking,”⁷ we have come to regard it as a work of some gravity. At the time of its publication, however, Orchestra seems to have been taken as a jeu d'esprit. In his catalogue of frivolous writers in Lenten Stuffe (1599), Nashe refers to one who “capers it up to the spheares in commendation of daunsing,”⁸ and Marston, ridiculing the antics of “spruce skipping Curio” in his Scourge of Villanie (1598), declares:

Prayse but Orchestra, and the skipping art,
You shall commaund him, faith you have his hart
Even capring in your fist. A hall, a hall,
Roome for the Spheres, the Orbes celestiall
Will daunce Kemps Jigge. They'le revel with neate jumps
A worthy Poet hath put on their Pumps.(9)

Although for Marston and Nashe ridicule is part of a stock in trade, their comments suggest the class in which Orchestra was placed in contemporary opinion. Davies himself took no pains to conceal its sportive nature, for he published it incomplete, admittedly written in fifteen days, and characterised as “this suddaine, rash, halfe-capreol of my wit.”¹⁰

The subtitle of 1622 points to another feature of the poem that is too easily overlooked. As “A Dialogue betweene Penelope and one of her Wooers,” Orchestra is allied to the Elizabethan school of mythological and amatory verse. Davies professes to relate an episode neglected by Homer: the courtship of Penelope by Antinous, and the persuasions with which he “wooed y^e Queene to dance.”¹¹ The structure of the poem is a pattern of entreaty and reply, culminating in Antinous' prayer for Love's assistance, and the intervention of Love as the page with a crystal mirror showing the wonders of the Elizabethan court. The fiction of “the Courtly love Antinous did make” (st. 5) is Davies' warrant for the use of the imagery and elaboration of the erotic poem. Penelope is inspired with such beauty by Pallas that she is lovelier than Venus rising from the waters, her blush is “like to a cleare and rosie eventide” (st. 14), and the grace of her utterance is in keeping:

This sayd; the Queene with her sweet lips divine
Gently began to move the subtile ayre,
Which gladly yielding, did it selfe incline
To take a shape betweene those rubies fayre
And being formed, softly did repayre
          With twenty doublings in the emptie way,
Unto Antinous eares, and thus did say. …

(st. 25)

Davies has no need to sigh, “Oh, that I could … smooth my rimes with Delias servants file.”¹²

It is true that this “Poeme of Dauncing” has a range of implication not nowadays associated with its subject. Antinous draws on a universe of analogy in his courtship of the queen: he traces the origin of dancing to the time the elements agreed through

Loves persuasion, Natures mighty King,
To leave their first disordred combating;
          And in a daunce such measure to observe,
          As all the world their motion should preserve

(st. 17)

and he implores Penelope to join this concord, imitating the harmony of music, the fair order and proportion of the commonwealth, and the starry wheels of “the turning vault of heaven” (st. 19). But in Davies' adroit manipulation of these correspondences, we must not look for anything so solemn as a treatment of the theme of “order” under the symbol of the dance. The true motive of Orchestra, declared again and again in the manner of its execution, is one which governs more Elizabethan verse than we usually recognise. The fineness of the “invention” is what the Elizabethans would have prized: the cleverness of the analogies, the ingenuity of their elaboration, the brilliance with which the whole undertaking is sustained—almost, in fact, “the daintiness of the device.”¹³

We have only to compare this treatment of the cosmic dance to that of a poem like John Norden's Vicissitudo Rerum (London, 1600), to be convinced of the playfulness of Davies' approach. To Norden the motion of the spheres is a token of the reign of mutability in the world; in the interaction of the elements he finds that “each on other makes alternate breach”; and in the varying courses of the planets he sees God's design

That all the Creatures that he made so fast,
Shall by Degrees alter, weare and wast.

(st. 43)

In Orchestra the universality of motion is described with none of this consciousness of vicissitude, and with no sense of impending dissolution. There is one passing reference to “that fatall instant” when “all to nothing should againe resolve” (st. 28) and a single allusion to Chance on her “round slipperie wheele that rowleth ay” (st. 59). Untroubled by the thoughts which the motion of the cosmos aroused in so many of his contemporaries, Davies sees it as a challenge to his resourcefulness and a stimulus to his wit. Bidding “Terpsichore, my light Muse sing,” he compels one analogy to spring from the tail of another without regard for extravagance or absurdity—so ingenious that he can weave poetry from the air:

For when you breath, the ayre in order moves,
Now in, now out, in time and measure trew;
And when you speake, so well the dauncing loves,
That doubling oft, and oft redoubling new,
With thousand formes she doth herself endew:
          For all the words that from your lips repaire,
          Are naught but tricks and turnings of the aire.

(st. 44)

Orchestra holds its special place in Elizabethan verse not as an exposition of the world order, but as a poem in which ideas are used for a purpose best described as “aesthetic,” as materials for the fashioning of a work which has no end but its own excellence, and the pleasure its cleverness may give.

The first edition of Orchestra was dedicated to Richard Martin, who had been at Broadgates Hall (Pembroke) at about the same time as Davies was at Queen's College, and who was now his fellow-student at the Middle Temple. Although he is described as “my deerest frend” in 1596, the friendship suffered an interruption shortly after. On February 9, 1597, Davies entered the hall of the Middle Temple with his cloak about him and his hat on his head, armed with a dagger and attended by two men with swords. Going up to the table where Martin sat at his dinner, he suddenly drew a cudgel from under his cloak and beat his “frend” repeatedly over the head, with such violence that the cudgel shivered in pieces.¹⁴ Snatching a sword from one of his attendants, Davies then flourished it at Martin, and making his way out of the Temple with the naked blade still in his hand, flung himself into a boat. This incident led to Davies' immediate expulsion from the Middle Temple and to the period of enforced retirement at Oxford of which Nosce teipsum is thought to be the outcome.

Entered in the Stationers' Registers in April 1599 and published the same year, Nosce teipsum seems the work of a graver and wiser man. Encouraged by references in the poem to the power of affliction to “Teach us to know our selves, beyond all bookes,” and by the author's admission that “This Mistresse lately pluckt me by the Eare,”¹⁵ critics have been inclined to see Nosce teipsum as “the fruit of his humiliation and repentance,”¹⁶ the product of an interval of “penitent self-inspection and worthier aspiration”¹⁷ following Davies' disbarment. This theory is overdue for revision.

First, the possibility that Nosce teipsum had been written before Davies' expulsion must be reckoned with. In a manuscript of the poem in the British Museum (Add. MS. 25,304) the dedicatory verses to Queen Elizabeth have the date “July 11, 1592.” This manuscript is not a holograph, but a late seventeenth-century transcript of Nosce teipsum, in which one section is headed “Innate Ideas in the Soul”—and the OED records no instance of the phrase “innate ideas” before 1690-1692. The date “July 11, 1592” had already appeared in the folio edition of Nosce teipsum (1688-1689) by W. R., based on “One of the Impression” published “nigh One Hundred Years since.”¹⁸ It recurs in a number of subsequent editions of the poem, including that of Nahum Tate (1697), and those deriving from it.¹⁹

The appearance of the date “July 11, 1592” in these later texts of Nosce teipsum is puzzling. There is nothing to suggest that the 1599 edition (entered April 14) is not the first, and in any event the allusion to Egerton's appointment as Lord Keeper²⁰ precludes the assigning of this text of the poem to any date earlier than 1596. But if the later editors of Nosce teipsum fail to reveal their authority for “July 11, 1592,” they would have had nothing to gain by inventing or forging such a date. And there is one piece of quite independent evidence to support it. It is the reference in Nashe's Strange Newes (1592) to “John Davies soule.”²¹ It is difficult to see what else but Nosce teipsum could be intended, and this indicates that at least the longer of the two poems comprising it, “Of the Soule of Man, and the immortalitie thereof,” existed in some form as early as 1592. This is five years before Davies' expulsion from the Middle Temple.

Did he then take advantage of his enforced leisure to write the introductory piece, “Of Humane knowledge,” and issue the treatise in 1599 with its compliment to Egerton and its dedication to the Queen? The romantic view of Davies sunk in “self-scrutiny and penitence”²² should perhaps yield to a more realistic conception of a poet seeking to repair his fortunes with his pen. To the period of his disbarment belong the acrostic Hymnes of Astraea (1599), another bid for royal favor and one of the most nimble of Davies' performances in verse. His chastened and regenerate muse was also to prove equal to the debonair piece “A Lotterie,” written for Egerton's entertainment of the Queen at Harefield House in July 1602, and then to the “Contention betwixt a Wife, a Widdowe and a Maide,” another ingenious compliment to Elizabeth, on the occasion of her visit to Sir Robert Cecil's house in the Strand in December 1602.²³ Davies' efforts to retrieve his position had by this time proved successful. It is recorded that Nosce teipsum was “so well rellisht that the Queen encouraged him in his studdys, promising him preferment, and had him sworn her servant in Ordinary,”²⁴ and on October 30, 1601 the Parliament of the Middle Temple forgave him his offense. In that year Davies sat in the Commons as member for Corfe Castle, and in 1603 his appointment as solicitor-general for Ireland inaugurated the legal career which was about to be crowned by the office of chief justice, when he died suddenly in 1626.

We are not bound to attribute Nosce teipsum to any spiritual crisis, causing Davies to renounce the frivolity of Orchestra and become a serious poet. Rather it shows his versatile talent addressing itself to another genre—already explored, it would seem, in 1592—which in 1599 offered a way to respectability that Davies would be unwilling to refuse. The Renaissance author who set himself to propound the dictum “Know thyself” immediately came into alignment with a long homiletic tradition. Already in Barclay's Ship of Fools the drift of Davies' poem is prescribed for him:

Ye people that labour the worlde to mesure
Therby to knowe the regyons of the same
Knowe first your self / that knowlege is most sure
For certaynly it is rebuke and shame
For man to labour onely for a name
To knowe the compasse of all the worlde wyde
Nat knowynge hym selfe / nor howe he sholde hym gyde.(25)

Nosce teipsum is significant not as a personal document, but as a skilful and persuasive versification of accepted ideas.

Davies presents “this Oracle expounded in two Elegies,”²⁶ the first “Of Humane knowledge,” and the second “Of the Soule of Man, and the immortalitie thereof.” The theme of the first discourse is the “desire to know” in man, the presumption and vanity of his aspiration to knowledge. Davies' sentiments are the approved and conventional ones: that the desire to know first “did corrupt the roote of all mankind,” that it is now beyond man's pitiful wit to recover his lost patrimony, and that in attempting it he can only become more conscious of his degeneration. It is on the fact of human incapacity that Davies insists:

What can we know? or what can we discerne?
          When Error chokes the windowes of the mind;
          The diverse forms of things, how can we learne,
          That have bene ever from our birth-day blind?
When Reasons lampe which (like the Sunne in skie)
          Throughout Mans litle world her beams did spread;
          Is now become a Sparkle, which doth lie
          Under the Ashes, halfe extinct, and dead;
How can we hope, that through the Eye and Eare,
          This dying Sparkle, in this cloudie place,
          Can recollect these beames of knowledge cleare,
          Which were enfus'd in the first minds by grace?(27)

To the skills in verse displayed in the minor poems and in Orchestra, Davies now adds the art of memorable statement. His thinking is not adventurous, and rarely agitated, but the ideas are always brought to finality of utterance. The peroration to this first elegy, on the theme of the self-knowledge won through affliction, becomes one of the classic Renaissance statements of the dilemma of man in the world:

I know my Bodi's of so fraile a kinde,
          As force without, feavers within can kill;
          I know the heavenly nature of my minde,
          But tis corrupted both in wit and will:
I know my Soule hath power to know all things,
          Yet is she blind and ignorant in all;
          I know I am one of Natures litle kings,
          Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.
I know my life's a paine, and but a span,
          I know my Sense is mockt with every thing,
          And to conclude, I know my selfe a Man,
          Which is a proud and yet a wretched thing.

The exploration of the “inward selfe” continues in the second discourse, “Of the Soule of Man, and the immortalitie thereof.” This poem led T. S. Eliot in 1926 to attribute to Davies “an independent mind,” claiming that “the plan, the versification, and the content of Nosce teipsum are, in that age, highly original.”²⁸ The dissipation of the poem's originality of content, however, had already been begun by E. H. Sneath, who sought its foundations in Aristotle, Nemesius, Cicero, and Calvin; M. Seemann added the influence of Aquinas; L. I. Bredvold assigned it to the Platonic tradition, seeing a continuity with the De immortalitate animae of Augustine and tabulating parallel passages from Primaudaye's The French Academie; and G. T. Buckley has argued that the influence of Philip de Mornay is no less pervasive.²⁹ Although the investigation of sources is not yet at an end, it has shown the wide occurrence of the ideas Davies uses, suggesting to a bystander that what we have in this poem is a digest of Renaissance opinion in favor of the soul's immortality, a formulation of the views available to an educated man. The inference may be that if we encounter some of these views in yet another place, we need not postulate still another “source.”

Yet this study of sources, by setting aside such issues as “originality,” allows the poetic achievement of Nosce teipsum to emerge more clearly. The poem falls in the tradition in which verse had for centuries been recognized as an auxiliary to writing of an instructive, persuasive, or hortatory kind. Boethius had interspersed verse and prose in the Consolatio, and when Walton translated it entirely into verse in 1410, his rendering proved so popular in the sixteenth century because (as Howard Patch remarks) “the general reader, for several centuries at least, liked to take his philosophy that way.”³⁰ The same motive led Thomas Tusser to versify his “hundreth good pointes of husbandrie” in 1557 (they had grown to five hundred, with “as many of good huswifery,” by 1573), as it prompted William Hunnis to make his verse-rendering of the Book of Genesis, A Hyve Full of Hunnye, in 1578. When Hunnis' friend Newton commended the work as presenting “hault Philosophye” in “curraunt meeter, roundlie coucht,” declaring

Great thankes (no doubt) thou hast deserv'de of all that thyrst for grace,
Syth thus thou Minced hast the Foode, which Goodmen al embrace,(31)

he was the spokesman of the viewpoint of the age. In the exposition of knowledge profitable and edifying to men, verse was esteemed as making a work more agreeable and more memorable, as a stimulus to the mind and an aid to digestion.

Nosce teipsum is a vindication of the theory. As Davies describes the operation of the soul's various faculties and argues that it is more than a blend of the humors of the body, and that one soul has not the power to beget another, the smoothness and flexibility of his style are exploited to grace his ideas as he expounds them. Although a thought may be conventional, the manner of its statement allows us to encounter it freshly:

God first made Angels bodilesse pure minds,
          Then other things, which mindlesse bodies bee;
          Last he made Man th'Horizon twixt both kinds,
          In whom we do the worlds abridgement see,

and even when conventional thought is matched by conventional figure, there may be felicity in the matching:

Wit is the minds chief Judge, which doth Comptroule
          Of fancies Court the judgements false and vaine;
          Will holds the royall Scepter in the Soule,
          And on the passions of the hart doth raigne.(32)

“The task of an author,” Dr. Johnson once remarked, “is, either to teach what is not known, or to recommend known truths by his manner of adorning them.”³³ It is the second task that Davies here performs so successfully.

This discourse “Of the Soule of Man” is also something more than effective exposition. It is a polemical work, in which for over four hundred stanzas Davies argues for the immortality of the soul like an attorney with a brief. He sifts the rival conceptions of the soul's nature, inquires why it should be naturally corrupt when created directly by God, and demonstrates its immortality through an ordered series of “Objections” and “Answers.” The task of reasoning in verse has not for Davies the perplexity that can attend it in Greville or the disturbance and congestion found in Chapman; he is fluent and adroit in disposing his material, with the skill so to pose a question that it invites assent, and the ease of persuasion that comes from varying the grounds of appeal. When, for instance, he suggests that the soul is immortal because men hope and believe it to be so, Davies begins with a rhetorical question to disarm protest:

For how can that be false, which every tong
          Of every mortall man, affirmes for true?
          Which truth hath in all ages bene so strong,
          As lodestone-like all harts it ever drew,

reinforces it with the authority of flat generalization:

None that acknowledge God, or providence,
          Their Soules eternitie did ever doubt,
          For all religion takes her roote from hence,
          Which no poor naked nation lives without,

and then makes an appeal to logic, from which the only retreat is through impiety:

For since the world for man created was,
          (For onely man the use thereof doth know)
          If man do perish like a withered grasse,
          How doth Gods wisdome order things below?(34)

So the process of affirmation, query, and appeal flows on. The depth of Davies' own conviction, either in this poem or in “Of Humane knowledge,” would be hard to estimate, and perhaps of little value when known. Nosce teipsum has the same quality as has been found in Dryden's criticism of Shakespeare: its merit lies not so much in making an original contribution to thought, as in giving “heightened expression to what others were thinking.”³⁵ Davies' success in this may be partly judged from the reissues of the poem in 1602, 1608, 1619, and 1622. Its reputation did not diminish after his death, for it continued to be recommended to the public as “useful in Promoting Religion and Morality,”³⁶ achieving an illustrated edition in 1653, and being rendered into prose in 1658.³⁷ Before 1800 it had already been printed at least fourteen times.

We do not detract from Davies' achievement in Nosce teipsum by seeing the poem in this perspective, any more than we do by placing Orchestra in the setting of his minor verse. There is as little warrant for regarding the one poem as a confessional document or profound philosophical enquiry as there is for seeking in the sportiveness of the other for an underlying gravity of purpose. Orchestra is to be prized as a tour de force and Nosce teipsum as a brilliant exploitation of the resources of verse for argument and persuasion. Each poem attains the highest excellence in its kind and gains nothing by being praised for the wrong reasons. The impression given by Davies' verse as a whole—epigrams, gulling sonnets, acrostic verses, occasional poems—is an impression of eager versatility, of readiness to spill his energies into any form that beckoned. If this spirit had subsided in some degree by the time the former solicitor-general came to assemble the octavo of 1622, the verses unacknowledged there allow us to recover it. Those who insist on the “gravity” of Davies should attend rather to his Discoverie of the True Causes why Ireland was never entirely Subdued, The Question Concerning Impositions, Tonnage, Poundage … &c., and his Perfect Abridgment of the eleven books of Coke's Reports. They occupy two volumes in Grosart's edition in the Fuller Worthies' Library, where in most copies I have encountered the pages are still uncut.

Notes

1. See J. M. Nosworthy, “The Publication of Marlowe's Elegies and Davies' Epigrams,” in Review of English Studies, N.S., IV (1953), 260-261.

2. “Ad Musam,” Epigrammes, No. 1. Unless otherwise cited, quotations of Davies' poems are from Clare Howard's edition of The Poems of Sir John Davies (New York, 1941).

3. See Sir John Harington's A New Discoverie of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), sig. D3^v, K1^r; Thomas Bastard's Chrestoleros (1598), sig. D2^v; Jonson's Epigrammes (1616), No. 18.

4. The Three Parnassus Plays (1598-1601), ed. J. B. Leishman (London, 1949), p. 240.

5. See Percy Simpson, “Unprinted Epigrams of Sir John Davies,” RES, N.S., III (1952), 49-50; R. F. Kennedy, “Unprinted Epigrams by Davies,” Times Literary Supplement, August 7, 1959, p. 459.

6. Skialetheia (1598), sig. B8^r.

7. In the introduction to his edition of Orchestra (London, 1947), p. 12. See also the treatment of the poem in The Elizabethan World Picture (London, 1943) and in Five Poems, 1470-1870 (London, 1948).

8. Lenten Stuffe (1599), in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, III (London, 1905), 177.

9. “Humours” (Satyre X), in The Scourge of Villanie (1598), sig. H3^v.

10. “To his very Friend, Ma: Rich: Martin,” Orchestra (1596), A2^v.

11. Orchestra, st. 11. According to an anecdote in Jonson's Conversations, “A Gentleman reading a Poem yt began with ‘Wher is that man that never yet did hear / of fair Penelope, Ulisses Queene,’—calling his Cook asked if he had ever hard of her, who answering no, demonstrate to him ‘Lo ther the man that never yet did hear / of fair Penolpe Ulisses Queene.’” Ben Jonson, the Man and the Work, ed. C. H. Hereford and Percy Simpson (Oxford, 1925), I, 147.

12. Orchestra (1596), st. 128. The reference is of course to Samuel Daniel.

13. See C. S. Lewis on “Invention” in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954), pp. 270-271.

14. “… (subito sub toga detrahens baculum quem vulgariter vocant a Bastinado) ter quaterve tanto cum impetu super caput feriret, ut baculus praedictus tam violentibus ictibus in quamplures partes frangeretur.” The official report of the episode is given by Lord Stowell in his “Observations on … the Proceedings had in the Parliament of the Middle Temple, respecting a Petition of Sir John Davies.” Archaeologia, XXI (1827), 107-112. See also Middle Temple Records, ed. Charles H. Hopwood (London, 1904), I, 379-380, 416.

15. Nosce teipsum (1599), sig. [B4^r].

16. Elias H. Sneath, Philosophy in Poetry (New York, 1903), p. 25.

17. Alexander B. Grosart, in his Early English Poets edition of Davies (London, 1876). The interpretation goes back to Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (London, 1691), I, col. 430.

18. Nosce teipsum: or, a Leading-Step to the Knowledge of Our Selves (London, 1689), sig. A2^r. The date is found at sig. [Aa2^v]. See further Richard H. Perkinson, “The Polemical Use of Davies' Nosce teipsum,” SP, XXXVI (1939), 597-608.

19. The relationship of these later editions to one another and to B.M. Add. MS. 25, 304 is a problem I hope to take up elsewhere. See further John Sparrow, “Some Later Editions of Sir John Davies' Nosce teipsum,” The Library, Fifth Series, I (1946), 136-142; R. H. Perkinson, “Additional Notes on the Later Editions of Nosce teipsum,” The Library, Fifth Series, II (1947), 61-63; R. H. Bowers, “An Elizabethan Manuscript ‘Continuation’ of Sir John Davies' Nosce teipsum,” Modern Philology, LVIII (1960), 11n. These and other problems are being explored by the editor of Davies, A. E. Rodger of Exeter College, Oxford, to whom I am indebted for some helpful correspondence.

20. Sig. C4^v, “the man whom she doth now advance, / Upon her gracious mercie Seate to sit.” The 1602 edition has a marginal note against this stanza: “Sir Thomas Egerton Lord Keeper of the great Seale.”

21. Works, I, 258; IV, 157—a reference I owe to Miss Helen Gardner.

22. Grosart, I, xxiv.

23. For texts and commentary, see A Poetical Rhapsody, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, I (Cambridge, Mass., 1931), 247-255, 345. The third set of verses printed here, “Yet Other 12. Wonders of the World,” although undated, also appears to belong to the turn of the century.

24. From the “Notes of the Life of Sr John Davys” in the Bodleian (MS. Carte 62, foll. 590-591). Grosart assumed that Carte was the author, but the “Notes” are dated May 2, 1674, and Carte was born in 1686. The Bodleian has also a brief life of Davies by Aubrey (MS. Autog. d. 21, fol. 147), seemingly overlooked by Aubrey's editors.

25. Stultifera navis, trans. Alexander Barclay (London, 1509), sig. &6^r.

26. An “oracle” because “Nosce te ipsum” was believed to be a saying of the oracle at Delphi. There is a summary of Renaissance views on the derivation of the phrase in Sir Thomas Elyot's The Governour, ed. Henry H. S. Croft (London, 1883), II, 203-204, and notes.

27. Nosce teipsum, sig. B2^r.

28. “Sir John Davies,” in On Poetry and Poets (London, 1957), p. 133—an essay first published in 1926.

29. See E. H. Sneath, Philosophy in Poetry (New York, 1903) and M. Seemann, Sir John Davies (Leipzig, 1913), passim. See also L. I. Bredvold, “The Sources Used by Davies in Nosce teipsum,” PMLA, XXXVIII (1923), 745-769; G. T. Buckley, “The Indebtedness of Sir John Davies' Nosce teipsum to Philip Mornay's Trunesse of the Christian Religion,” MP, XXV (1927), 67-78.

30. The Tradition of Boethius (New York, 1935), p. 73.

31. “T. N. In the Commendation of His Frendes Travayle,” A Hyve Full of Hunnye (London, 1578).

32. Nosce teipsum, sig. F3^v, H2^v.

33. The Rambler, I, 3, 19.

34. Nosce teipsum, sig. L3^r-v.

35. David Nichol Smith, John Dryden (Oxford, 1950), p. 83.

36. As it was in Nahum Tate's edition of 1697 (sig. A4^v).

37. These two editions (both styled A Work for None But Angels & Men) were by Thomas Jenner. See further R. H. Perkinson, “The Polemical Use of Davies' Nosce teipsum,” SP, XXXVI (1939), 597-608. The conversion of the treatise into prose in the later seventeenth century is taken by Perkinson as reflecting the change in the intellectual climate.