Note 1 — POEMS

Flatman has been condoled with on his name by Mr. Bullen, one of the few persons who have done him some justice in recent years.1 I should rather myself, for reasons which will be given presently, condole with him on his date. His father was probably Robert Flatman of Mendham, Norfolk, and it is supposed that the poet was born in London. The date of his birth, recorded here for the first time, was February 21, 1635, about 5.29 in the morning. So his horoscope, preserved by Ashmole,2 informs us. When he was elected at Winchester on Michaelmas Day, 1648, he was stated to be 'eleven years old'—a slight miscalculation. He himself in The Retirement, written in 1665, correctly speaks of his 'thirty years'. He actually entered Winchester in September, 1649. He was transferred in the usual (when uninterrupted) course to New College, Oxford; he was admitted as a probationer on September 11, 1654, but seems not to have matriculated till July 25, 1655; he became Fellow in 1656.3 There is no academic record, it would seem, of his ever having taken his degree, though he is spoken of as 'A.B. of Oxford' when, by the King's Letters, he was made M.A. of St. Catherine Hall, Cambridge, in 1666. He went from Oxford to the Inner Temple, in 1655, and was called to the Bar on May 11, 1662. Oldys has a half-satiric reference to his pleading.4 He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in April, 1668. In 1672 he married, his wife being favourably spoken of, and gossip—inevitable whether well founded or not—records that his 'Bachelor's Song' (v. inf.) was sung under his windows on the occasion by 'merry friends'. And he died in London on December 8, 1688. Beyond these meagre details, and a statement that he had property at Diss (the cure of Skelton and the home of Maria Jolly), we know little about him directly or by external evidence. By that of his poems he must have been a friend of good men—Walton, Cotton, Edward Browne5 (Sir Thomas's son), Faithorne the engraver, Oldham, and others. His miniature portraits are well spoken of;—one is in possession of the Duke of Buccleuch, seven are in the South Kensington Museum. That, however, which illustrates his Poems is from a painting by John Hayls, whom Pepys's Diary has made known to a wider circle than students of the History of English Painting.