On the Time-Poets
One night the great Apollo pleas’d with Ben,
Made the odde number of the Muses ten;
The fluent Fletcher, Beaumont rich in sense,
In Complement and Courtships quintessence;
Ingenious Shakespeare, Massinger that knowes
The strength of Plot to write in verse and prose:
Whose easie Pegassus will amble ore
Some threescore miles of Fancy in an houre;
Cloud-grapling Chapman, whose Aerial minde
Soares at Philosophy, and strikes it blinde;
Danbourn [Dabourn] I had forgot, and let it be,
He dy’d Amphibion by the Ministry;
Silvester, Bartas, whose translatique part
Twinn’d, or was elder to our Laureat:
Divine composing Quarles, whose lines aspire
The April of all Poesy in May, [Tho. May.]
Who makes our English speak Pharsalia;
Sands metamorphos’d so into another [Sandys]
We know not Sands and Ovid from each other;
He that so well on Scotus play’d the Man,
The famous Diggs, or Leonard Claudian;
The pithy Daniel, whose salt lines afford
A weighty sentence in each little word;
Heroick Draiton, Withers, smart in Rime,
The very Poet-Beadles of the Time:
Panns pastoral Brown, whose infant Muse did squeak
At eighteen yeares, better than others speak:
Shirley the morning-child, the Muses bred,
And sent him born with bayes upon his head:
Deep in a dump Iohn Ford alone was got
With folded armes and melancholly hat;
The squibbing Middleton, and Haywood sage,
Th’ Apologetick Atlas of the Stage;
Well of the Golden age he could intreat,
But little of the Mettal he could get;
Three-score sweet Babes he fashion’d from the lump,
For he was Christ’ned in Parnassus pump;
The Muses Gossip to Aurora’s bed,
And ever since that time his face was red.
Thus through the horrour of infernall deeps,
With equal pace each of them softly creeps,
And being dark they had Alectors torch, [Alecto’s]
And that made Churchyard follow from his Porch,
Poor, ragged, torn, & tackt, alack, alack
You’d think his clothes were pinn’d upon his back.
The whole frame hung with pins, to mend which clothes,
In mirth they sent him to old Father Prose;
Of these sad Poets this way ran the stream,
And Decker followed after in a dream;
Rounce, Robble, Hobble, he that writ so high big[;]
Basse for a Ballad, John Shank for a Jig: [Wm. Basse.]
Sent by Ben Jonson, as some Authors say,
Broom went before and kindly swept the way:
Old Chaucer welcomes them unto the Green,
And Spencer brings them to the fairy Queen;
The finger they present, and she in grace
Transform’d it to a May-pole, ’bout which trace
Her skipping servants, that do nightly sing,
And dance about the same a Fayrie Ring.