Latin composition was still commonplace in the seventeenth century, John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and John Milton being among the major poets who wrote substantial works in this language to stand beside their works in English. But John Owen was among the last writers to use Latin as a primary vehicle for the composition of poetry (another such writer in the British Isles was George Buchanan, 1506-1582). For both sharpness of wit and ingenuity of style, Owen is one of the foremost writers ever to compose Latin epigrams, and in the seventeenth century he was certainly the most famous of the poets working in that language. Indeed in his own age he was the best-known poet of the British Isles, his work having been widely disseminated abroad and translated into several vernacular languages. Part of his success is undoubtedly due to a fashionable taste for epigrammatic satire...