Rowlands at his best was but an indifferent poet,--hardly more
than a penny-a-liner. In his satirical pieces and epigrams, and in
that bit of genuine comedy, "Tis Merrie vvhen Gossips meete," his
work does have a real literary value, and is distinctly interesting as
presenting a vivid picture of London life at the beginning of the
seventeenth century. In "The Bride," it must be confessed, Rowlands
falls below his own best work. Yet the poem is by no means wholly
lacking in interest. If not his best work, "The Bride" is by no means
his worst. Like most of his poems, it is written in an heroic stanza
of six lines, and, as is not so common with him, is in dialogue form.
The dialogue for the most part is well sustained and sprightly. The
story of the birth of Merlin, it is true, seems to have been inserted
mainly to fill out the required number of pages; but this digression has an
interest of its own, in that the name here given to Merlin's mother,
"Lady Adhan," does not appear in the ordinary versions of the legend.

Of Rowlands's life almost nothing is known: that little is told in the
Memoir by Mr. Gosse prefixed to the Hunterian Club edition, and by
Mr. Lee in the Dictionary of National Biography, and need not be
repeated here. All that is known with certainty is that Samuel
Rowlands was a writer of numerous poems and pamphlets, published
between the years 1598 and 1628. During this period there appeared
almost every year a pamphlet bearing his name or the well known initials,
"S. R." Twenty-eight separate works, of which many passed through
several editions, are known to have been written by him. All of these
early editions are rare; at least two of the works have been lost; several
are extant only in the second or later editions; and of at least ten, only
single copies are known to exist. Beside the edition of the Works already
referred to, a number of Rowlands's tracts have been separately reprinted,
in limited editions, by Sir Walter Scott, by S. W. Singer, by