III.--THOMAS CAMPION


Thomas Campion is among English poets the perfect minstrel. He takes love
as a theme rather than is burned by it. His most charming, if not his most
beautiful poem begins: "Hark, all you ladies." He sings of love-making
rather than of love. His poetry, like Moore's--though it is infinitely
better poetry than Moore's--is the poetry of flirtation. Little is known
about his life, but one may infer from his work that his range of amorous
experience was rather wide than deep. There is no lady "with two pitch
balls stuck in her face for eyes" troubling his pages with a constant
presence. The Mellea and Caspia--the one too easy of capture, the other
too difficult--to whom so many of the Latin epigrams are addressed, are
said to have been his chief schoolmistresses in love. But he has buried
most of his erotic woes, such as they were, in a dead language. His
English poems do not portray him as a man likely to die of love, or even
to forget a meal on account of it. His world is a happy land of song, in
which ladies all golden in the sunlight succeed one another as in a
pageant of beauties. Lesbia, Laura, and Corinna with her lute equally
inhabit it. They are all characters in a masque of love, forms and figures
in a revel. Their maker is an Epicurean and an enemy to "the sager sort":

My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love,
And, though the sager sort our deeps reprove,
Let us not weigh them. Heav'n's great lamps do dive
Into their west, and straight again revive.