lii
The latter's persistent use of it in spite of its difficulty may indicate that he took some credit to himself for its inception; it at least shows his attention to matters of form. Of the five sonnets with inclosed instead of alternate rhymes, one, the fifth of the Amatoria, is written with a pretense of anonymity, and the rest are of much later date.[1] An examination of all the sonnets shows that more than half make the 'turn' at the end of the eighth instead of the twelfth line, though several are arranged as a series of quatrains with a final couplet.
It would be easy to illustrate from the poems the sins of the school of conceits, as for instance in the sonnet on the Armada (App. II, II), where the storm which aided in the defeat of the Spanish navy is attributed to the boisterous laughter of God, or the passage of the Uranie, quoted on page xxxv, in which the Bible is likened, among other things, to a bottomless ocean, a spring of eloquence, and a cornucopia. Here the author is following Du Bartas, whose influence on his British followers, whatever his original merits, must be considered wholly pernicious. As a final instance may be cited the sonnet on Archbishop Adamson's paraphrase of Job, which is spun entirely out of the supposed resemblance between the prelate's "gifts of sprite" and Job's "gifts of geare."
James is most nearly inspired on the subject of the divine right of kings; the sonnet to Henry at the beginning of the Basilikon Doron (App. II, V) opens with the finely Tamburlanian line,—
"God gives not Kings the stile of Gods in vaine."
and maintains something of this high and stately dignity throughout. Three other sonnets, written towards the close of the King's reign in Scotland, are easily distinguished from the rest as the summit of his achievement in poetry.
- ↑ In the present collection, XXXIV, XL VII, XLIX, and App. II, IV.
Fray in Sertum Poeticum, Edinburgh, 1600; one by Alexander Hume, Poems, S. T. S., p. 9; and a large number by Alexander Craig in his Poeticall Essayes, London, 1604, and Poeticall Recreations, Edinburgh, 1609.
