RICHARD, THE THIRD EARL OF DORSET,
Reading edition
Is described by his wife, the celebrated lady Anne Clifford, daughter of George earl of Cumberland, in the manuscript memoirs of her life, as a man “in his own nature of a just mind, of a sweet disposition, and very valiant in his own person. He had a great advantage in his breeding, by the wisdom and devotion of his grandfather, Thomas Sackville, earl of Dorset, and lord high treasurer of England, who was then held one of the wisest of that time; by which means he was so good a scholar in all manner of learning, that, in his youth, when he was at the university, there was none of the young nobility then students there that excelled him. He was also a good patriot to his country, and generally well beloved in it; much esteemed in all the parliaments that sat in his time, and so great a lover of scholars and soldiers, as that, with an excessive bounty towards them, or indeed any of worth that were in distress, he did much diminish his estate; and also with excessive prodigality in house-keeping, and other noble ways at court, as tilting, masking, and the like; prince Henry being then alive, who was much addicted to those noble exercises, and of whom he was much beloved.” He died at the age of 35, March 28th, 1624.
I should be very unwilling to deprive Corbet of the praise due to a poem of so much intrinsic merit; but as the following epitaph is printed among the poems of his contemporary, King, bishop of Chichester, and again attributed to the latter in MS. Ashmole, A 35, Corbet’s claim to the composition of it is rendered very disputable.
ON THE EARL OF DORSETS DEATH.
Let no prophane, ignoble foot tread here, This hallowed piece of earth, Dorset lyes there: A small poor relique of a noble spirit, Free as the air, and ample as his merit: A soul refin’d, no proud forgetting lord, But mindful of mean names, and of his word: Who lov’d men for his honour, not his ends, And had the noblest way of getting friends By loving first, and yet who knew the court, But understood it better by report Than practice: he nothing took from thence But the kings favour for his recompence. Who, for religion or his countreys good, Neither his honour valued, nor his blood. Rich in the worlds opinion, and mens praise, And full in all we could desire, but days. He that is warn’d of this, and shall forbear To vent a sigh for him, or shed a tear, May he live long scorn’d, and unpitied fall, And want a mourner at his funeral!