Note 59 — KNOLE HOUSE, KENT.
Reading edition
The Sackvilles are an ancient and very distinguished family, dating from the Conquest. The first Peer, the famous Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset, succeeded Burleigh as Lord Treasurer, an office in which he was confirmed by King James. He is more celebrated, however, as the author of the earliest English Tragedy in blank verse, “Gordubuc,” and “The Induction to a Mirrour for Magistrates,” one of the noblest Poems in the language. Gordubuc is praised by Sidney for its “notable moralitie;” and the Poem is believed to have given use to the Fairy Queen. All contemporaries agree in bearing testimony to the virtues of this truly noble man. One of them thus draws his character:—“How many rare things were in him! who more loving unto his wife! who more kind unto his children! who more fast unto his friend! who more moderate unto his enemy! who more true to his word!” The sixth Earl of Dorset is also celebrated in the History of Literature: he was one of the wits of the licentious court of Charles the Second; the associate of Rochester, Villiers, and Sedley; but subsequently the patron of Prior, Dryden, Butler, Congreve, Addison, and Pope. Prior he rescued from a vintner’s tap, and Butler “owed to him that the court tasted his ‘Hudibras.’” His reputation as an author rests upon a Poem consisting of no more than eleven stanzas—the “song” beginning
“To all ye ladies now at land,”—
said to have been written on shipboard, on the night preceding a sea-fight. It is an elegant composition, and manifests a “heedlessnesse of danger” natural to a gallant youth. Pope hails him as
“the grace of courts, the Muses’ pride;”
and there can be no doubt that he was not only a generous and liberal friend to men of letters, but a judicious patron to those who needed help.