Note 408 — APPENDIX

Thomas Sackville, the author of the Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates and other poetical pieces, and part author of Gorboduc, was born plain ‘Thomas Sackville,’ and was ordinarily addressed in youth as ‘Mr. Sackville.’ He wrote all his literary work while he bore that and no other designation. He subsequently abandoned literature for politics, and was knighted and created Lord Buckhurst. Very late in life, in 1604—at the age of sixty-eight—he became Earl of Dorset. A few of his youthful effusions, which bore his early signature, ‘M. [i.e. Mr.] Sackville,’ were reprinted with that signature unaltered in an encyclopædic anthology, England’s Parnassus, which was published, wholly independently of him, in 1600, after he had become Baron Buckhurst. About the same date he was similarly designated Thomas or Mr. Sackville in a reprint, unauthorised by him, of his Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates, which was in the original text ascribed, with perfect correctness, to Thomas or Mr. Sackville. There is clearly no sort of parallel (as has been urged) between such an explicable, and not unwarrantable, metachronism and the misnaming of the Earl of Pembroke ‘Mr. W. H.’ As might be anticipated, persistent research affords no parallel for the latter irregularity.