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The prince he raiseth huge and mighty walls,

Castilio frames a wight of noble fame:

The King with gorgeous tissue clads his halls,

The court with golden virtue decks the same

Whose passing skill, lo, Hoby’s pen displays

To Britain folk a work of worthy praise.

But for the rest concerning these early poems one must take his contemporary Jasper Heywood’s eulogy on trust:

There Sackville’s sonnets sweetly sauced

And featly finèd be.

A CONFERENCE OF ENGLISH AND SPANISH PLENIPOTENTIARIES AT SOMERSET HOUSE IN 1604

From the painting by Marc Gheerhardts at the National Portrait Gallery At the top right-hand corner, nearest the window, Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, K.G., Lord High Treasurer of England

It seems that Sackville’s works were all written in the first half of his life, and that later on, as honours came to him, he altogether abandoned what might have been a first-rate literary career for a second-rate political one—more’s the pity. “A born poet,” says Mr. Gosse, “diverted from poetry by the pursuits of statesmanship.” He is a very good instance of the disadvantage of fine birth to a poet. But for the fact that he was born the Queen’s cousin, through the Boleyns, and the son of a father holding various distinguished offices, he might never have entered a political arena where he was destined to have as competitors such statesmen as Burleigh, and such favourites as Leicester and Essex. Amongst his contemporary poets, Surrey and Wyatt both died while Sackville was still a child; when Spenser was born, Sackville was already sixteen; when Sidney was born, he was eighteen; when Shakespeare was born, he was a full-grown man of twenty-eight. He had thus the good fortune to be born at a time when English poets of much standing were rare, an opportunity of which he might have taken greater advantage had not the accident of his birth persuaded him to abandon poetry for more serious things as the dilettantism of his youth. For he was comparatively young when he wrote both Gorboduc and the Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates. Gorboduc was first performed by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple before the Queen in 1561, when Sackville was twenty-five, and the Induction was first published in 1563, when he was twenty-seven; but already in or about 1557, when he was only just over twenty, he had composed the plan for the whole of the Mirror for Magistrates, intending to write it himself, although subsequently from want of leisure he left the composition of all but the induction or introduction, and the Complaint of Henry, Duke of Buckingham, to others.