was dedicated to Mary, countess of Pembroke, Sir Philip Sidney's sister, by a writer signing himself ‘C. M.’ who deeply lamented Watson's recent death. The initials have been very doubtfully interpreted as Christopher Marlowe. The poem is in hexameters, and is divided into five ‘epistolæ.’
Finally there appeared a series of sixty sonnets in regular metre in English under the title of ‘The Tears of Fancie, or Love Disdained,’ London, for William Barley, 1593. John Danter obtained a license for the publication on 11 Aug. 1593. The only known copy is at Britwell, but it wants two leaves containing eight sonnets (Nos. 9–16).
Watson is represented in most of the poetical miscellanies of the end of the sixteenth century and early years of the seventeenth century. In the ‘Phœnix Nest’ (1593) there are three previously unpublished poems by ‘T. W., gent,’ of which the first is an English rendering of a passage from Watson's ‘Amyntas.’ In ‘England's Helicon’ (1600) are five poems, of which only one was new; this was superscribed ‘The nimphes meeting their May Queene, entertaine her with this dittie.’ In another poetical collection, Davison's ‘Poetical Rhapsodie,’ 1602, ten poems are quoted from the ‘Hekatompathia.’ Watson's name figures among the authors whose works are quoted in Bodenham's ‘Belvedére, or the Garden of the Muses’ (1600). ‘England's Parnassus’ (1606), gives twelve extracts from Watson, all from the ‘Ἑκατομπαθία’
Watson's verse lacks passion, but is the accomplished work of a cultivated and well-read scholar. As a Latinist he stands first among contemporaries. It is as a sonneteer that he left his chief mark on English literature. He was the first English writer of sonnets after Surrey and Wyatt. Most of his sonnets were published before those of Sir Philip Sidney, and the popularity attending Watson's sonneteering efforts was a chief cause of the extended vogue of the sonnet in England among poets and their patrons in the last decade of the sixteenth century. Watson's sonnets were closely studied by Shakespeare and other contemporaries, and, despite their frigidity and imitative quality, actively influenced the form and topic of the later sonnets of the century. All manner of praise was bestowed on Watson at his death by his fellow poets and men of letters, who reckoned him the compeer of Spenser and Sidney. Harvey in his ‘Four Letters’ (1592) highly commended his ‘studious endeavours in enriching and polishing his native tongue,’ ranking him with Spenser, Stanyhurst, Fraunce, Daniel, and Nash. In his ‘Pierce's Supererogation’ (1593) Gabriel Harvey mentions Watson as ‘a learned and gallant gentleman, a notable poet;’ Nash in his reply to Harvey in ‘Have with you to Saffron Walden’ (1596), says of Watson: ‘A man he was that I dearely lov'd and honor'd, and for all things hath left few his equalls in England.’ George Peele, in a prologue to his ‘Honour of the Garter’ (1593), refers
To Watson, worthy many Epitaphes
For his sweet Poesie for Amintas teares
And joyes so well set downe.
Spenser refers to him as a patron of the poets as well as a poet himself. In ‘Colin Clout's come home again’ (1595) Spenser, writing of Watson under the name of ‘Amyntas,’ deplores his recent death:
Amyntas, floure of shepheards pride forlorne,
He whilest he liued was the noblest swaine,
That euer piped in an oaten quill.
Both did he other, which could pipe, maintaine
And eke could pipe himselfe with passing skill.
William Clerke, in a work entitled ‘Polimanteia’ (1595), seems, when referring to Shakespeare's ‘Venus and Adonis,’ to dub Shakespeare ‘Watson's heire.’ Watson has been doubtfully identified, too, with ‘happie Menalcas,’ to whom Thomas Lodge addressed a laudatory poem in ‘A Fig for Momus’ (1595). Francis Meres, in ‘Palladis Tamia’ (1598), after honourable mention of Watson as a Latinist, treated him as the equal of Petrarch, and declared that his Latin pastorals ‘Amyntæ Gaudia’ and ‘Melibœus’ were worthy of comparison with the work of Theocritus, Virgil, Mantuanus, and Sannazarro. Professor Arber edited Watson's English poems (excluding the madrigals) in his series of English reprints in 1870. Another issue is dated 1895.
[Arber's Introduction; Brydges's British Bibliographer, iii. 1–17, Censura Literaria, iii. 33–5; Ritson's Bibliographia Poetica; Anthony à Wood's Athenæ Oxon. i. 601, ed. Bliss; the present writer's Life of William Shakespeare, 1898; Hunter's manuscript Chorus Vatum in Addit. MS. 24488, pp. 348 seq.]
WATSON, THOMAS (d. 1686), ejected divine, was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he was remarkable for hard study. After residing for some time with the family of Mary, the widow of Sir Horace Vere, baron Tilbury [q. v.], he was appointed in 1646 to preach at St. Stephen's, Walbrook. During the civil war he showed himself strongly presbyterian in his views,
