Page:New Poems by James I.djvu/58

 sixes" with some approach to dignity. This and the Complaint of his Mistressis Absence from Court (XVI) were written some years later than the other pieces of the Amatoria, and show the progress he was making toward a sounder conception of poetry. They are not, like most of the early poems, a mere jumble of fantastic conceits. They are chiefly commendable, however, the first poem for the ingenious comparison of the alteration at court to changed weather at sea, and the second for the skill with which the poet interprets the tokens left by his mistress. Like the Phœnix, an allegorical elegy on the death of d'Aubigny (Essayes of a Prentise), the Satire against Woemen (XVIII), and the Admonition (LI), the two pieces display a cleverness of invention which somewhat atones for the absence of more poetical qualities.

In his short poems, the King's favorite form is the sonnet, a form suited, according to the Reulis and cautelis, not only for love matters, but for the "compendious praysing of any bukes, or the authoris thairof, or any argumentis of uther historeis"; and the rhyme-scheme he adopts is of especial interest in connection with the practice of contemporary writers. Hoffmann has already pointed out that the arrangement of the rhymes in Spenser's Amoretti, abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee, was employed also by Montgomerie in thirty-seven of his seventy-two sonnets, and that one of these was published in The Essayes of a Prentise in 1584, the first appearance of the form in print. But it is notable that the King and the other sonneteers in the Essayes adopt the same scheme, and that James adheres to it strictly in all save four of his published sonnets. Little significance need be attached to the actual date of publication, and Spenser must have written sonnets — other than the unrhymed translations from Petrarch and Du Bellay — earlier than