Although he left no published work of prose--despite the fact that Ben Jonson called him "father" ("'twas he that polished me") and that Sir Walter Ralegh had him review his style while a fellow prisoner in the Tower--John Hoskyns was a man revered in his time for the soundness of his rhetorical advice and his wit. Similarly, his verse--though scattered about the countryside on gravestones, etched on college cloister walls, or embedded in a host of literary miscellanies--helped shape the design of poetry in the early seventeenth century. "There were few or none that published books of poetry," wrote Anthony Wood in his Athenæ Oxoniensis (1691, 1692), "but did celebrate his memory in them ... and fewer but did lay them at his feet for approbation before they went to the press." Hoskyns was one of those enigmatic characters from the Renaissance who knew everybody. At Winchester School he met...