His Hundred and Forty-ninth Psalm is likewise good; but I have given enough of Lord Bacon’s verse, and proceed to call up one who was a poet indeed, although little known as such, being a Roman Catholic, a Jesuit even, and therefore, in Elizabeth’s reign, a traitor, and subject to the penalties according.  Robert Southwell, “thirteen times most cruelly tortured,” could “not be induced to confess anything, not even the colour of the horse whereon on a certain day he rode, lest from such indication his adversaries might conjecture in what house, or in company of what Catholics, he that day was.”  I quote these words of Lord Burleigh, lest any of my readers, discovering weakness in his verse, should attribute weakness to the man himself.

It was no doubt on political grounds that these tortures, and the death that followed them, were inflicted.  But it was for the truth as he saw it, that is, for the sake of duty, that Southwell thus endured.  We must not impute all the evils of a system to every individual who holds by it.  It may be found that a man has, for the sole sake of self-abnegation, yielded homage, where, if his object had been personal aggrandizement, he might have wielded authority.  Southwell, if that which comes from within a man may be taken as the test of his character, was a devout and humble Christian.  In the choir of our singers we only ask:  “Dost thou lift up thine heart?” Southwell’s song answers for him:  “I lift it up unto the Lord.”

His chief poem is called St. Peter’s Complaint.  It is of considerable length—­a hundred and thirty-two stanzas.  It reminds us of the Countess of Pembroke’s poem, but is far more articulate and far superior in versification.  Perhaps its chief fault is that the pauses are so measured with the lines as to make every line almost a sentence, the effect of which is a considerable degree of monotony.  Like all writers of the time, he is, of course, fond of antithesis, and abounds in conceits and fancies; whence he attributes a multitude of expressions to St. Peter of which never possibly could the substantial ideas have entered the Apostle’s mind, or probably any other than Southwell’s own.  There is also a good deal of sentimentalism in the poem, a fault from which I fear modern Catholic verse is rarely free.  Probably the Italian poetry with which he must have been familiar in his youth, during his residence in Rome, accustomed him to such irreverences of expression as this sentimentalism gives occasion to, and which are very far from indicating a correspondent state of feeling.  Sentiment is a poor ape of love; but the love is true notwithstanding.  Here are a few stanzas from St. Peter’s Complaint: 

  Titles I make untruths:  am I a rock,
    That with so soft a gale was overthrown? 
  Am I fit pastor for the faithful flock
    To guide their souls that murdered thus mine own? 
  A rock of ruin, not a rest to stay;
  A pastor,—­not to feed, but to betray.