Sir John Davies is perhaps the most interesting and the most representative of the minor poets of the 1590s. While studying law at the Middle Temple, he took a leading role in the quick-shifting literary fashions of the time, and he produced in Orchestra (1596) and Nosce Teipsum (1599) two works of enduring and general interest. Though often more "verser" than poet, he is nonetheless a verse maker of rare energy, inventiveness, skill, lucidity, and charm--and his poems at their best possess the sharpness, grace, and memorability of an impulse or a moment perfectly realized. He aimed always to be "speaking well ... / Hoping thereby honor and wealth to gain" (Epigram 34)--hoping, that is, to persuade his hearers of the merits both of his case and of himself. His frequent successes in poetry and affairs depended upon serving at once his own interests and those of some person or some idea...