Note 1. This poem first appeared, with music, in 1624, in Michael Este’s Sixt Set of Books, and was numerously reprinted in divers collections for fifty years afterwards. Sir Henry Wotton, its author, was not the amorous man that his poem paints him. At the time of its writing he was a staid diplomatist of 52. The lady it praises was Elizabeth, daughter of James I. and wife of the Elector Palatine Frederick V., unhappily chosen King of Bohemia, September 19, 1619. Sir Henry, says Quiller-Couch, was employed on several embassies on behalf of this unhappy Queen, whose reign in Prague lasted but one winter. Howell reports in Familiar Letters that in “the Low Countries and some parts of Germany she is called the Queen of Boheme, and for her winning princely comportment the Queen of Hearts.” “Her later life,” says Prof. Schelling (A Book of Elizabethan Lyrics, p. 294), “was one of much trial and vicissitude, through which she appears to have preserved the amiability and something of the levity of the Stuarts.” This poem has been ascribed to Montrose, and even by Robert Chambers, in his Scottish Songs, to “Darnly in praise of Queen Mary before their marriage.” Hannah, quoting Rel. Wotton, records many variations in the words; and Quiller-Couch adds that the poem invited many imitators to add to it stanzas of their own manufacture. Line 1, You meaner beauties: cf. Carew’s line:
