Compare the ballads of _The Brave Lord Willoughby_
and _The Honour of Bristol_ in the seventeenth century, the
song of _The Arethusa_ in the eighteenth, and in the nineteenth
a choice of such Tyrtaean music as _The Battle of the Baltic_,
Lord Tennyson's _Ballad of the Fleet_, and _The Red Thread of
Honour_ of the late Sir Francis Doyle.
II
Originally _The True Character of a Happy Life_: written and
printed about 1614, and reprinted by Percy (1765) from the
_Reliquiae Wottonianae_ of 1651. Says Drummond of Ben Jonson, 'Sir
Edward (_sic_) Wotton's verses of a Happy Life he hath by heart.'
Of Wotton himself it was reserved for Cowley to remark that
He did the utmost bounds of knowledge find,
And found them not so large as was his mind;
* * * * * *
And when he saw that he through all had passed
He died--lest he should idle grow at last.
See Izaak Walton, _Lives_.
III, IV
From _Underwoods_ (1640). The first, _An Ode_, is addressed to an
innominate not yet, I believe, identified. The second is part of
that _Ode to the Immortal Memory of that Heroic Pair, Sir Lucius
Cary and Sir Henry Morrison_, which is the first true Pindaric in
the language. Gifford ascribes it to 1629, when Sir Henry died,
but it seems not to have been printed before 1640.
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