SOURCE: Pyle, Fitzroy. “Thomas Sackville and A Mirror for Magistrates.” Review of English Studies 14 (July 1938): 315-21.

In the following essay, Pyle attempts to date the composition of “Induction” and “Complaint” and goes on to discuss William Baldwin's role in editing the two poems included in The Mirror for Magistrates.

Thomas Sackville is one of the great might-have-beens of literature. He appears to have written nothing after the age of twenty-four and comparatively little before that; yet not alone was he the outstanding poet of the age in which he was writing, but it is generally agreed that “his contributions to the Mirror for Magistrates contain the best poetry written in the English language between Chaucer and Spenser.” These poems, the “Induction” and the “Complaint of the Duke of Buckingham,” survive in two forms—as separate but continuous pieces in the 1563 and subsequent editions of A Mirror for Magistrates...