Poems. By George Cavendish
The Poems of George Cavendish, which accompany the Life of Wolsey in the Original Autograph Manuscript, consist of a series of Visions upon the Fortunes and Fall of the most eminent Persons of his time.
The reader is here presented with the Prologue; the Legend of Wolsey; and the Author’s Address to his Book; with two stanzas from a long Epitaph on Queen Mary. This specimen, it is presumed, will be deemed sufficient to convey an idea of the style of Cavendish in verse. It should be remembered, that the Mirror for Magistrates, which subsequently became so popular, had not then been given to the world. Cavendish, therefore, may have formed his plan from Lydgate’s Fall of Princes. Traces of the same kind of versification, which is evidently intended to depend more on rhythmical cadence than the number of feet in the verse, will be found in Skelton, in Stephen Hawes, Nicholas Grimoald, and other contributors to Tottel’s Miscellany of Songes and Sonnettes. In the MS. copy there is no punctuation; but instead we have the mark of the pause or cæsura in the middle and occasionally at the end of the line; as may be remarked in the example on the plate of fac-similes.