TO THE READER . . for his' plain co1;1ntry honesty. The vulgar were the more pleased with him for being so little courtly as to say, " If I should have been hung, I knew not how " To teach my body how to cringe and bow; u And to embrace a fellow's hinder quarters, " As if I meant to $teal away his garters. , " W.hen any bow~d to me with congees trim, "All I could do, was stand and laugh at him. " Bles!) me, thought I, what•will this coxcomb do I " When I perceiv'd one reaching at my shoe. Quarles yet out-went him, . mixing competent wit with piety (especially in hb Poem against rest on earth). Silvester on Du Bartas seems to me to out-go t'1em both. Sir Fulk Grevil, Lord Brook, (a man of great note in his age) hath a Poem latery printed for subject's liberty, which I greatly wonder this age would bear. There are no books that have been printed these twenty years, that I more wonder at, (that ever they .were endured) than Richard Hooker's eight books of ecclesiastical polity, dedicated by Bishop Gauden to our present king, and vindicated by him ; and these Poems of Sir Fulk Grevil, Lord Brook. Davie's Nosce teipsum is an excellent Poem in opening the nature, faculties, and certain immortality of man's soul. But I must confess, after all, that next the Scripture-Poems, there are none so savoury to me as Mr. George Herbert's, and Mr. George Saudys's. I know that Cowley and others far exceed Herbert in wit and accurate composure. But (as Seneca takes with me above all his contemporarie-s, because he speaketh things by words, feeli.ngly and seriOt~sly, like a man that is past jest, so) Herbert speak!: to God l-ike one that really believeth a God, and whose business 1n this world is most with God. Heart-work and Heaven-work make up his books. And Du Bartas is seriously divine. And George Sandy's Omne tulit punctum, dum miscuit utile dulci .
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