XXIV. Argentile and Curan. ......................................................................................
This piece is extracted from an ancient historical poem in thirteen books,
intitledAlbion's England, by William Warner: "an author," says a former editor, "only
unhappy in the choice of his subject and measure of his verse. His poem is an epitome
of the British history, and written with great learning, sense, and spirit; in some places
fine to an extraordinary degree, as I think will eminently appear in the ensuing
episode [ofArgentile and Curan]-- a tale full of beautiful incidents in the romantic
taste, extremely affecting, rich in ornament, wonderfully various in style; and in short
one of the most beautiful pastorals I ever met with." [Muses Library, 1738, 8vo.] To
his merit nothing can be objected, unless perhaps an affected quaintness in some of
his expressions, and an indelicacy in some of his pastoral images.
Warner is said, by A. Wood,[1] to have been a Warwickshire man, and to have
been educated in Oxford, at Magdalen-hall: as also in the latter part of his life to have
been retained in the service of Henry Cary Lord Hunsdon, to whom he dedicates his
poem. However that may have been, new light is thrown upon his history, and the
time and manner of his death are now ascertained, by the following extract from the
parish register book of Amwell, in Hertfordshire; which was obligingly
communicated to the Editor by Mr. Hoole, the very ingenious translator of Tasso, &c.
[1608--1609.]"Master William Warner, a man of good yeares and of honest
reputation; by his profession an atturnye of the Common Pleas; author of Albions
England, diynge suddenly in the night in his bedde, without any former complaynt or
sicknesse, on thursday night beeinge the 9th daye of March; was buried the satturday
following, and lyeth in the church at the corner under the stone of Walter Ffader."
"Signed. Tho. Hassall, Vicarius.
Though now Warner is so seldom mentioned, his contemporaries ranked him
on a level with Spenser, and called them the Homer and Virgil of their age.[2] But
Warner rather resembled Ovid, whose Metamorphosis he seems to have taken for his
model, having deduced a perpetual poem from the deluge down to the era of
Elizabeth, full of lively digressions and entertaining episodes. And though he is
sometimes harsh, affected, and obscure, he often displays a most charming and
pathetic simplicity; as where he describes Eleanor's harsh treatment of Rosamond:
"With that she dasht her on the lippes
So dyed double red:
Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
Soft were those lippes that bled."
The edition ofAlbion's Englandhere followed was printed in 4to. 1602; said
in the title-page to have been "first penned and published by William Warner, and
now revised and newly enlarged by the same author." The story ofArgentile and
Curanis, I believe, the poet's own invention; it is not mentioned in any of our
chronicles. It was however so much admired, that not many years after he published
it, came out a larger poem on the same subject in stanzas of six lines, intitled, "The
most pleasant and delightful historie of Curan, a prince of Danske, and the fayre
princesse Argentile, daughter and heyre to Adelbright, sometime king of
Northumberland, &c." By William Webster, London, 1617, in eight sheets 4to. An
indifferent paraphrase of the following poem. This episode of Warner's has also been
altered into the common ballad "of the two young Princes on Salisbury Plain," which