wrote not only the music but the words for his songs--that
he was at once an eminent composer and a lyric poet of the first rank.
He published a volume of Latin verse, which displays ease and fluency
(though the prosody is occasionally erratic); as a masque-writer he was
inferior only to Ben Jonson; he was the author of treatises on the arts
of music and poetry; and he practised as a physician. It would be
interesting to ascertain some facts about the life of this
highly-gifted man; but hitherto little information has been collected.
The Oxford historian, good old Anthony-a-Wood, went altogether wrong and
confused our Thomas Campion with another person of the same name who
took his degree in 1624--five years after the poet's death. It is
probable that our Thomas Campion was the second son of Thomas Campion of
Witham, Essex, and that he was distantly related to Edmund Campion the
famous Jesuit. His first work was his "Epigrammatum Libri duo,"
published in 1595, and republished in 1619. The first edition is
exceedingly rare; there is no copy in the British Museum. Francis Meres,
in his very valuable (and very tedious) "Wit's Treasury," 1598, mentions
Campion among the "English men, being Latin poets," who had "attained
good report and honorable advancement in the Latin empire." In 1601
Campion and Philip Rosseter published jointly "A Book of Airs." The
music was partly written by Campion and partly by Rosseter; but the
whole of the poetry may be safely assigned to Campion. From a dedicatory
epistle, by Rosseter, to Sir Thomas Monson, we learn that Campion's
songs, "made at his vacant hours and privately imparted to his friends,"
had been passed from hand to hand and had suffered from the carelessness
of successive transcribers. Some impudent persons, we are told, had
"unrespectively challenged" (_i.e._ claimed) the credit both of the
music and the poetry. The address _To the Reader_, which follows the
dedicatory epistle, is unsigned, but appears to have been written by
Campion. "What epigrams are in poetry," it begins, "the same are airs in
music: then in their chief perfection when they are short and well
seasoned. But to clog a light song with a long preludium is to corrupt
the nature of it. Many rests in music were invented either for necessity
of the fugue, or granted as an harmonical licence in songs of many
parts; but in airs I find no use they have, unless it be to make a
vulgar and trivial modulation seem to the ig