obscure expressions.  It was commonly reported, that on the sunday before her husband’s death, she was sitting at dinner with him, she suddenly burst into tears, whereupon he asking her the occasion, she answered, “Husband, these are your funeral tears,” to which he replied, “Pray therefore spare your tears now, and I will be content that you shall laugh when I am dead.”  After Sir John’s death she lived privately at Parston in Hertfordshire, and an account was published of her strange and wonderful prophecies in 1609.  In 1626 Sir John was appointed lord chief justice of the King’s-bench, but before the ceremony of his installation could be performed he died suddenly of an apoplexy in the fifty-seventh year of his age, and was buried in the church of St. Martin’s in the Fields.  He enjoyed the joint applauses of Camden, Ben Johnson, Sir John Harrington, Selden, Donne, and Corbet; these are great authorities in our author’s favour, and I may fairly assert that no philosophical writers ever explained their ideas more clearly and familiarly in prose, or more harmoniously and beautifully in verse.  There is a peculiar happiness in his similies being introduced more to illustrate than adorn, which renders them as useful as entertaining, and distinguishes them from any other author.

In quality of a lawyer Sir John produced the following pieces: 

1.  A discovery of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued until his Majesty’s happy reign; printed in 4to.  London 1612, dedicated to the King with this Latin verse only.

  Principis est virtus maxima nosse suos.

2.  A declaration of our sovereign lord the King, concerning the title of his Majesty’s son Charles, the prince and duke of Cornwall; London 1614.

His principal performance as a poet, is a Poem on the Original, Nature, and Immortality of the Soul, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth.  It was republished by Nahum Tate, 1714, addressed to the Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, who was a great admirer of our poet, and the editor gives it a very just and advantageous character.  Without doubt it is the Nosce Teipsum so much admired by King James, printed 1519, and 1622, mentioned by Wood; to which were added by the same hand: 

Hymns of Astrea in acrostic verse; and Orchestra, or a poem expressing the antiquity and excellency of dancing, in a dialogue between Penelope and one of her Woers, containing 131 stanzas unfinished.  Mr. Wood mentions also epigrams, and a translation of several of King David’s Psalms, written by Sir John Davies, but never published.

Nosce Teipsum.

  Why did my parents send me to the schools,
  That I, with knowledge might enrich my mind,
  Since the desire to know first made men fools
  And did corrupt the root of all mankind.

  For when God’s hand, had written in the hearts,
  Of our first parents all the rules of good,
  So that their skill infus’d, surpass’d all arts,
  That ever were before or since the flood.