Note 1. Southwell was a Jesuit priest who was executed under Elizabeth’s Acts against the Romanists after being “thirteen times most cruelly tortured” to make him confess with whom he had been hiding. His best-known poems are “The Burning Babe,” and others upon the Nativity, where his quaintness is less out of place than in penitential verse. His longest effort, “St Peter’s Complaint,” though by no means without genuine feeling, is hard to read, owing to the merciless coruscation of conceits, and the monotony arising from over-elaborate balance and want of variety in the pause. There are also occasional lapses in taste. But, compared with Crashaw, his sentimental peccadilloes are inconsiderable. Now and then he writes a perfect epigram, as in the final couplet of “Scorn not the Least”—
