But for the rest concerning these early poems one must take his contemporary Jasper Heywood’s eulogy on trust:
_There Sackville’s sonnets sweetly sauced And featly finèd be._
A CONFERENCE OF ENGLISH AND SPANISH PLENIPOTENTIARIES AT SOMERSET HOUSE IN 1604
_From the painting by_ MARC GHEERHARDTS _at the National Portrait Gallery_
At the top right-hand corner, nearest the window, Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, K.G., Lord High Treasurer of England ]
It seems that Sackville’s works were all written in the first half of his life, and that later on, as honours came to him, he altogether abandoned what might have been a first-rate literary career for a second-rate political one—more’s the pity. “A born poet,” says Mr. Gosse, “diverted from poetry by the pursuits of statesmanship.” He is a very good instance of the disadvantage of fine birth to a poet. But for the fact that he was born the Queen’s cousin, through the Boleyns, and the son of a father holding various distinguished offices, he might never have entered a political arena where he was destined to have as competitors such statesmen as Burleigh, and such favourites as Leicester and Essex. Amongst his contemporary poets, Surrey and Wyatt both died while Sackville was still a child; when Spenser was born, Sackville was already sixteen; when Sidney was born, he was eighteen; when Shakespeare was born, he was a full-grown man of twenty-eight. He had thus the good fortune to be born at a time when English poets of much standing were rare, an opportunity of which he might have taken greater advantage had not the accident of his birth persuaded him to abandon poetry for more serious things as the dilettantism of his youth. For he was comparatively young when he wrote both _Gorboduc_ and the _Induction_ to the _Mirror for Magistrates_. _Gorboduc_ was first performed by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple before the Queen in 1561, when Sackville was twenty-five, and the _Induction_ was first published in 1563, when he was twenty-seven; but already in or about 1557, when he was only just over twenty, he had composed the plan for the whole of the _Mirror for Magistrates_, intending to write it himself, although subsequently from want of leisure he left the composition of all but the induction or introduction, and the _Complaint of Henry, Duke of Buckingham_, to others.