Some of my readers will observe that in many places I have given a reading different from that in the best-known copy of the poem.  I have followed a manuscript in the handwriting of Ben Jonson.[70] I cannot tell whether Jonson has put the master’s hand to the amateur’s work, but in every case I find his reading the best.

Sir John Davies must have been about fifteen years younger than Sir Fulk Grevill.  He was born in 1570, was bred a barrister, and rose to high position through the favour of James I.—­gained, it is said, by the poem which the author called Nosce Teipsum,[71] but which is generally entitled On the Immortality of the Soul, intending by immortality the spiritual nature of the soul, resulting in continuity of existence.  It is a wonderful instance of what can be done for metaphysics in verse, and by means of imagination or poetic embodiment generally.  Argumentation cannot of course naturally belong to the region of poetry, however well it may comport itself when there naturalized; and consequently, although there are most poetic no less than profound passages in the treatise, a light scruple arises whether its constituent matter can properly be called poetry.  At all events, however, certain of the more prosaic measures and stanzas lend themselves readily, and with much favour, to some of the more complex of logical necessities.  And it must be remembered that in human speech, as in the human mind, there are no absolute divisions:  power shades off into feeling; and the driest logic may find the heroic couplet render it good service.

Sir John Davies’s treatise is not only far more poetic in image and utterance than that of Lord Brooke, but is far more clear in argument and firm in expression as well.  Here is a fine invocation: 

  O Light, which mak’st the light which makes the day! 
    Which sett’st the eye without, and mind within;
  Lighten my spirit with one clear heavenly ray,
    Which now to view itself doth first begin.

* * * * *

Thou, like the sun, dost, with an equal ray,
Into the palace and the cottage shine;
And show’st the soul both to the clerk and lay,              learned and
By the clear lamp of th’ oracle divine.                     [unlearned

He is puzzled enough to get the theology of his time into harmony with his philosophy, and I cannot say that he is always triumphant in the attempt; but here at least is good argument in justification of the freedom of man to sin.

  If by His word he had the current stayed
    Of Adam’s will, which was by nature free,
  It had been one as if his word had said,
    “I will henceforth that Man no Man shall be.”

* * * * *

  For what is Man without a moving mind,
    Which hath a judging wit, and choosing will? 
  Now, if God’s pow’r should her election bind,
    Her motions then would cease, and stand all still.