comparatively little is known.  He sprang from an old and highly respectable family in Lincolnshire, and was born in 1565, the son of Thomas Meres, of Kirton in Holland in that county.  After graduating from Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1587, proceeding M.A. in 1591 at his own University, and subsequently by ad eundem at Oxford, he settled in London, where in 1597, having taken orders, he was living in Botolf Lane.  He was presented in July 1602 to the rectory of Wing in Rutland, keeping a school there.  He remained at Wing till his death, in his eighty-first year, January 29, 1646-7.  As Charles FitzGeoffrey, in a Latin poem in his Affaniae addressed to Meres, speaks of him as ‘Theologus et poeta’, it is possible that the ‘F.M.’ who was a contributor to the Paradise of Dainty Devices is to be identified with Meres.  In addition to the Palladis Tamia, Meres was the author of a sermon published in 1597, a copy of which is in the Bodleian, and of two translations from the Spanish, neither of which is of any interest.

Meres’s Discourse is, like the rest of his work, mainly a compilation, with additions and remarks of his own.  Much of it is derived from the thirty-first chapter of the first book of Puttenham; with these distinctions, that Meres’s includes the poets who had come into prominence between 1589 and 1598, and instituted parallels, biographical and critical, between them and the ancient Classics.  It is the notices of these poets, and more particularly the references to Shakespeare’s writings, which make this treatise so invaluable to literary students.  Thus we are indebted to Meres for a list of the plays which Shakespeare had produced by 1598, and for a striking testimony to his eminence at that date as a dramatic poet, as a narrative poet, and as a writer of sonnets.  The perplexing reference to Love’s Labour’s Won has never been, and perhaps never will be, satisfactorily explained.  To assume that it is another title for All’s Well that Ends Well in an earlier form is to cut rather than to solve the knot.  It is quite possible that it refers to a play that has perished.  The references to the imprisonment of Nash for writing the Isle of Dogs, to the unhappy deaths of Peele, Greene, and Marlowe, and to the high personal character of Drayton are of great interest.  Meres was plainly a man of muddled and inaccurate learning, of no judgment, and of no critical power, a sort of Elizabethan Boswell without Boswell’s virtues, and it is no paradox to say that it is this which gives his Discourse its chief interest.  It probably represents not his own but the judgments current on contemporary writers in Elizabethan literary circles.  And we cannot but be struck with their general fairness.  Full justice is done to Shakespeare, who is placed at the head of the dramatists; full justice is done to Spenser, who is styled divine, and placed at the head of narrative