Neville Among the Muses

In the previous chapter, Jonson wrote, “Who now calls on thee, Nevil, is a Muse.” Three other contemporary publications also associate Neville with the Muses.

Chamber and the Muses

John Chamber wrote that Neville had often asked him to put Barlaam’s writings into print. The claim appears in Chamber’s Latin address to Neville as ambassador, printed with his edition of Barlaam’s Logistica in Paris in 1600. The poem brings public office, learning and literary praise together around a specific request for publication.¹

The entire poem shows how that literary characterization leads into an account of publication. The translation below follows its twelve couplets; the English lineation is a reading aid rather than a metrical imitation.¹

Although you may count your lineage and ancestors in a long succession,
and the lofty halls of the prince stand open to you,
nothing amid such great fortune deserves greater esteem
than the honour of your virtue and the distinction of your talent.

Through that talent you govern all your affairs and conduct such weighty business;
through it you leave the earth behind and gladly approach the stars.
Gladly you approach the stars, where your abundant virtue,
making you immortal, claims you for the gods before your time.

You would seem to have achieved too little in rising above earth and the crowd,
unless the kindly company of Muses made your name resound.
The Muse gave you varied arts; cultivated Thalia gave you
the power to pour forth whatever you wished in rounded speech.

Euclid teaches you, opening his sources and elements;
the old man of Pelusium leads you to the stars.
Not content even with these things, you are accustomed to stir
the shade and buried ashes of Barlaam the monk.

I need not now recount how earnestly, or how often, you asked
that I should put his writings under the press.
Here, then, at last, are the monk’s learned writings for you,
now answering with learned sound beneath the blows of type.

Had Savile not been first in deserving this praise,
Barlaam would now owe his ransom to you.
For through your prompting and your request alike
the man’s Muse survives, which otherwise would have perished.

The lines on Thalia read:

Et superasse parum terras, vulgumque videris,
Te nisi musarum personet alma cohors.
Musa dedit varias artes, dedit ore rotundo
Fundere quae Velles, culta Thalia tibi.

The Muses confer fame; Thalia also confers expression. Fundere, to pour forth, and quae velles, whatever he wished, credit Neville himself with fluent, wide-ranging speech.

The wording is more literary than a translation into general “culture” would suggest. Chamber is adapting Horace’s Art of Poetry:

Grais ingenium, Grais dedit ore rotundo
Musa loqui …

To the Greeks the Muse gave genius; to the Greeks she gave
speech with rounded fullness …

In Horace the passage concerns the Greeks’ artistic gifts and their pursuit of praise. Chamber transfers the distinctive combination—Musa, dedit, ore rotundo—to Neville. A reader who recognized the source would hear a compliment measured against an eminent classical account of literary excellence.²

Chamber then names Thalia. Her association with comedy is real and was current in Neville’s lifetime: Hendrick Goltzius’s engraving of 1592 represents her as the Muse of comedy, and its inscription explicitly names Comedia. Her literary range also includes pastoral poetry. Virgil calls his pastoral Muse Thalia at the opening of the sixth Eclogue. These associations give Chamber’s choice more precision than the interchangeable use of a decorative goddess. They also leave room for several kinds of poetic achievement.³

Euclid, astronomy and mathematical recovery form a scholarly portrait animated by poetry: Barlaam’s shade is stirred, his ransom paid and his Muse saved as print restores his voice.

In Chamber’s preliminaries, the poem printed before this one makes Savile Barlaam’s rescuer from the dead. The poem to Neville preserves Savile’s priority while crediting Neville with persistently urging the printing: their sequence presents a cooperation.

Quotiesque rogasti, “how often you asked,” records repeated prompting before publication. The printed book answers those requests, giving Neville a role in its survival beyond ceremonial dedication.

Fitzgeoffrey’s “Aonian Neville”

In 1601 Charles Fitzgeoffrey published a Latin epigram welcoming Richard Carew the younger (c.1580–1643) home from France. He was the son of the antiquary Richard Carew (1555–1620) and nephew of George Carew (c.1556–1612), who had travelled with Neville and Savile, as described in Chapter 2. Chapter 25 examines the elder Richard’s writing alongside The Merry Wives of Windsor. In the poem, the younger Carew returns to his parents laden with the treasures of learning acquired in Paris and Orléans. In describing his visit to the French king’s court, Fitzgeoffrey names the company he kept:

Qua tibi Aonii latus Nevilli
Phaebaeumque Trelaunium sequuto
Aulam invisere curiam magni
Regis contigit, aemulam Tonantis.

There, following at the side of Aonian Neville
and Phoebean Trelawny, you had the good fortune
to visit the court of the great king,
a rival to the Thunderer’s court.⁴

“Aonian” joins Neville to the Muses; “Phoebean” joins Trelawny to Apollo. The paired epithets characterize the embassy’s company through poetic inspiration rather than diplomatic rank.

The Neville is identifiable from more than the surname. Carew’s own retrospective account, published by Samuel Hartlib in 1654, says that his father sent him to France with “Sir Henry-Nevill,” then resident ambassador to Henri IV, to learn French. Carew’s subject is language teaching: he contrasts the French he acquired through practice with the Latin he had learned slowly through grammatical rules. That independent recollection fixes the personal setting of Fitzgeoffrey’s welcome.⁵

Fitzgeoffrey’s own usage helps recover the force of the epithet. In the same book of Affaniae, Fitzgeoffrey explicitly praises John Harington as a poet and names his literary achievements. He also celebrates Thomas Bodley for giving the Aonian divinities a home in his library. The Muses’ vocabulary accommodates the writer and the benefactor of writing; its presence need not settle which capacity is foremost.⁶

Carleton: poetry under Neville’s protection

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George Carleton’s Heroici characteres, printed by Joseph Barnes at Oxford in 1603, puts Henry Neville’s name on the title page and addresses him in a substantial opening poem. The work gives poetic portraits of heroes; the prefatory address places Neville’s experience among examples of virtue subjected to suffering.⁷

The address is one continuous poem across three pages. It passes through images of trial, changing fortune, and deliverance, including Joseph’s emergence from imprisonment. Near its conclusion Carleton turns to the poems he is presenting and to the relationship that permits their presentation:

Si licet, o nostris qui feceris otia musis,
Nominis umbra tui magnorum emblemata parva
Protegat Heroum …

If it may be, you who have made leisure for our Muses,
may the shadow of your name protect these little emblems
of great heroes …

Umbra, “shadow,” makes Neville’s name shelter the book. The patronage formula is personal: he has made leisure for Carleton’s Muses.

The line recalls the opening of Virgil’s first Eclogue, where Tityrus explains that a god has made his leisure possible: deus nobis haec otia fecit. Carleton’s nostris … feceris otia musis adapts that language to his own recipient. The classical echo helps identify the relationship being asserted: the poet acknowledges the conditions under which he can write.⁸

Carleton develops the appeal through an image drawn from the tragic stage. The closing passage reads:

Illa quidem maioribus attollenda cothurnis
Quis negat? ultro etiam tenuis tentamina musae
Agnosco, nec in hac quicquam me gloria laude
Sollicitat: nec me vatis pro crimine nomen
Obiectum fallit. Quin contra murmura vatum
Tu clypeo defende tuum. Cantata per orbem
Et sine vate sibi per se celeberrima gesta
Heroum, sat erit nostram tentasse Camoenam.

Who denies that those deeds deserve to be raised on greater buskins?
I readily acknowledge these efforts of a slender Muse;
no desire for glory in such praise entices me.
Nor am I unaware that the name of poet is cast as an accusation.
Rather, against the murmuring of poets,
defend your own with your shield. It will be enough
that my Muse has attempted the deeds of heroes, sung throughout the world
and supremely famous in themselves, even without a poet.⁹

A buskin was a high boot associated with actors in ancient tragedy. Its Latin name, cothurnus, consequently became a shorthand for tragedy itself and for the elevated style appropriate to heroic subjects. The contrasting soccus, the low shoe or “sock,” represented comedy. Horace uses the two together in his Ars poetica and later associates the buskin with Aeschylus’s lofty dramatic speech.

Carleton’s “greater buskins” therefore give his appeal a specifically theatrical resonance: these heroic deeds deserve the elevation of tragedy. He contrasts their scale with the “slender Muse” of his own poems, then asks Neville to shield his poet from criticism. Addressed to Neville, the passage brings the Muses, tragic ambition and literary protection together. Its immediate subject is Carleton’s poetry and the treatment his heroes deserve; the force of the comparison lies in the literary terms in which he expects Neville to receive his appeal.

Chamber credits Thalia’s eloquence; Carleton seeks protection for heroic subjects deserving tragic elevation. Together they place Neville in discussions of genre, classical models and the conditions of composition.

Neville’s preference about the dedication

Neville did not want to remain in the position Carleton had given him. Writing from Nuffield to Dudley Carleton on 22 October 1617, George Carleton discussed printing his poems again abroad. He wanted an introduction to Hugo Grotius and envisaged a dedication to the prince. He recalled:

Sir Henry Nevil in his lifetime wished that the dedication had been altered, and the verses written to him placed in some other part of the book, which may be done with a little alteration.¹⁰

The verses could stay; Neville wanted them away from the opening dedication. Carleton’s letter does not give the date or motive of the request. It records a precise preference about public prominence from a man whose assistance had helped other writers reach print. Set beside his attempts to prevent an incomplete account of his conduct from circulating (Chapter 6), it shows his attention to how a book presented his name. The parallel concerns control of presentation; Carleton supplies no motive that would justify identifying the request with a plan to conceal literary authorship.

Three tributes to Neville and the Muses

Chamber credits Thalia with Neville’s eloquence; Fitzgeoffrey places “Aonian Neville” among the Muses; Carleton thanks him for making leisure for his Muses and asks his name to shelter the poems. Published in 1600, 1601 and 1603, these three tributes repeatedly associate Neville with literary expression and the conditions that enable others to write. Taken together with Jonson’s epigram, they establish a strong, recurring association between Neville and the Muses in contemporary print.