a great effect for
generations. The man of pure science may regret that generations should
have busied themselves about anything so thoroughly unscientific; but with
that point of view we are unconcerned. The important thing is that the
generations in question learnt from Sylvester to take a poetical interest
in the natural world.

John Davies of Hereford, who must have been born at about the same time as
Sylvester, and who certainly died in the same year, is another curiosity of
literature. He was only a writing-master,--a professor of the curious,
elaborate penmanship which is now quite dead,--and he seems at no time to
have been a man of wealth. But he was, in his vocation or otherwise,
familiar with very interesting people, both of the fashionable and the
literary class. He succeeded, poor as he was, in getting thrice married to
ladies born; and, though he seems to have been something of a coxcomb, he
was apparently as little of a fool as coxcombry will consist with. His work
(of the most miscellaneous character and wholly in verse, though in subject
as well as treatment often better suiting prose) is voluminous, and he
might have been wholly treated (as he has already been referred to) with
the verse pamphleteers, especially Rowlands, of an earlier chapter. But
fluent and unequal as his verse is--obviously the production of a man who
had little better to offer than journalism, but for whom the times did not
provide the opening of a journalist--there is a certain salt of wit in it
which puts him above the mere pamphleteers. His epigrams (most of which are
contained in _The Scourge of Folly_, undated, like others of his books) are
by no means despicable; the Welsh ancestors, whom he did not fail to
commemorate, seem to have endowed him with some of that faculty for
lampooning and "flyting" which distinguished the Celtic race. That they are
frequently lacking in point ought hardly to be objected to him; for the age
had construed the miscellaneous examples of Martial indulgently, and Jonson
in his own generation, and Herrick after him (two men with whom Davies
cannot compare for a moment in general power), are in their epigrams
frequently as pointless and a good deal coarser. His variations on English
proverbs are also remarkable. He had a respectable vein of religious
moralising, as the following sonnet from _Wit's Pilgrimage_ will show:--

"When Will doth long to effect her own desires,
She makes the Wit, as