tears. 
  The black ox treads not yet upon thy toe,
  Nor thy good fortune turns her wheel awaye;
  Thy flocks increase, and thou increasest so,
  Thy straggling goates now mild, and gentlely;
  And that fool love thou whipst away with rods;
  Then what sets thee, and joy so far at odds?

[Footnote 1:  Muses Library, p. 343.]

[Footnote 2:  Muses Library, p. 344.]

[Footnote 3:  Timanthes the painter, who designing the sacrifice of Iphigenia, threw a veil over the face of Agamemnon, not able to express a father’s anguish.]

* * * * *

THOMAS RANDOLPH,

A Poet of no mean genius, was born at Newnham, near Daintry in Northamptonshire, the 15th of June, 1605; he was son of William Randolph of Hams, near Lewes in Sussex, was educated at Westminster school, and went from thence to Trinity College in Cambridge, 1623, of which he became a fellow; he commenced Master of Arts, and in this degree was incorporated at Oxon[1], became famous (says Wood) for his ingenuity, being the adopted son of Ben Johnson, and accounted one of the most pregnant wits of his age.  The quickness of his parts was discovered early; when he was about nine or ten years old he wrote the History of the Incarnation of Our Saviour in verse, which is preserved in manuscript under his own hand writing.  Randolph receives from Langbaine the highest encomium.  He tells his readers that they need expect no discoveries of thefts, for this author had no occasion to practice plagiary, having so large a fund of wit of his own, that he needed not to borrow from others.  Were a foreigner to form a notion of the merit of the English poets from reading Langbaine, they would be in raptures with Randolph and Durfey, and others of their class, while Dryden, and the first-rate wits, would be quite neglected; Langbaine is so far generous, that he does all he can to draw obscure men into light, but then he cannot be acquitted of envy, for endeavouring to shade the lustre of those whose genius has broke through obscurity without his means, and he does no service to his country while he confines his panegyric to mean versifiers, whom no body can read without a certain degree of contempt.

Our author had done nothing in life it seems worth preserving, or at least that cotemporary historians thought so, for there is little to be learned concerning him.  Wood says he was like other poets, much addicted to libertine indulgence, and by being too free with his constitution in the company of his admirers, and running into fashionable excesses, he was the means of shortening his own days.  He died at little Haughton in Northamptonshire, and was buried in an isle adjoining to the church in that place, on the 17th of March, 1634.  He had soon after a monument of white marble, wreathed about with laurel, erected over his grave at the charge of lord Hatton