his lame, halting rhymes.”  There are few more startling paradoxes in literature than that it should have been this hater of rhymes who did more than any other writer to bring the art of rhyme to perfection in the English language.  The bent of his intellect was classical, as we see in his astonishing Observations on the Art of English Poesy, in which he sets out to demonstrate “the unaptness of rhyme in poesy.”  The bent of his genius, on the other hand, was romantic, as was shown when, desiring to provide certain airs with words, he turned out—­that seems, in the circumstances, to be the proper word—­“after the fashion of the time, ear-pleasing rhymes without art.”  His songs can hardly be called “pot-boilers,” but they were equally the children of chance.  They were accidents, not fulfilments of desire.  Luckily, Campion, writing them with music in his head, made his words themselves creatures of music.  “In these English airs,” he wrote in one of his prefaces, “I have chiefly aimed to couple my words and notes lovingly together.”  It would be impossible to improve on this as a description of his achievement in rhyme.  Only one of his good poems, “Rosecheek’d Laura,” is to be found among those which he wrote according to his pseudo-classical theory.  All the rest are among those in which he coupled his words and notes lovingly together, not as a duty, but as a diversion.

Irish critics have sometimes hoped that certain qualities in Campion’s music might be traced to the fact that his grandfather was “John Campion of Dublin, Ireland.”  The art—­and in Campion it was art, not artlessness—­with which he made use of such rhymes as “hill” and “vigil,” “sing” and “darling,” besides his occasional use of internal rhyme and assonance (he rhymed “licens’d” and “silence,” “strangeness” and “plainness,” for example), has seemed to be more akin to the practices of Irish than of English poets.  No evidence exists, however, as to whether Campion’s grandfather was Irish in anything except his adventures.  Of Campion himself we know that his training was English.  He went to Peterhouse, and, though he left it without taking a degree, he was apparently regarded as one of the promising figures in the Cambridge of his day.  “I know, Cambridge,” apostrophized a writer of the time, “howsoever now old, thou hast some young.  Bid them be chaste, yet suffer them to be witty.  Let them be soundly learned, yet suffer them to be gentlemanlike qualified”; and the admonitory reference, though he had left Cambridge some time before, is said to have been to “sweet master Campion.”

The rest of his career may be summarized in a few sentences.  He was admitted to Gray’s Inn, but was never called to the Bar.  That he served as a soldier in France under Essex is inferred by his biographers.  He afterwards practised as a doctor, but whether he studied medicine during his travels abroad or in England is not known.  The most startling fact recorded of his maturity is that