This huge quarto of 875 pages, all in verse, is the final form, though far from the latest impression, of a poetical miscellany which had been swelling and spreading for nearly sixty years without ever losing its original character.  We may obtain some imperfect notion of the Mirror for Magistrates if we imagine a composite poem planned by Sir Walter Scott, and contributed to by Wordsworth and Southey, being still issued, generation after generation, with additions by the youngest versifiers of to-day.  The Mirror for Magistrates was conceived when Mary’s protomartyrs were burning at Smithfield, and it was not finished until James I. had been on the throne seven years.  From first to last, at least sixteen writers had a finger in this pie, and the youngest of them was not born when the eldest of them died.

It is commonly said, even by such exact critics as the late Dean Church, that the Mirror for Magistrates was planned by the most famous of the poets who took part in its execution, Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst.  If a very clever man is combined in any enterprise with people of less prominence, it is ten to one that he gets all the credit of the adventure.  But the evidence on this point goes to prove that it was not until the work was well advanced that Sackville contributed to it at all.  The inventor of the Mirror for Magistrates seems, rather, to have been George Ferrers, a prominent lawyer and politician, who was master of the King’s Pastimes at the very close of Henry VIII.’s reign.  Ferrers was ambitious to create a drama in England, and lacked only genius to be the British Aeschylus.  The time was not ripe, but he was evidently very anxious to set the world tripping to his goatherd’s pipe.  He advertised for help in these designs, and the list of persons he wanted is an amusing one; he was willing to engage “a divine, a philosopher, an astronomer, a poet, a physician, an apothecary, a master of requests, a civilian, a clown, two gentlemen ushers, besides jugglers, tumblers, fools, friars, and such others,” Fortune sent him, from Oxford, one William Baldwin, who was most of these things, especially divine and poet, and who became Ferrers’ confidential factotum.  The master and assistant-master of Pastimes were humming merrily on at their masques and triumphs, when, the King expired.  Under Queen Mary, revels might not flourish, but the friendship between Ferrers and Baldwin did not cease.  They planned a more doleful but more durable form of entertainment, and the Mirror for Magistrates was started.  Those who claim for Sackville the main part of this invention, forget that he is not mentioned as a contributor till what was really the third edition, and that, when the first went to press, he was only eighteen years of age.