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Acknowledgments
Notes
References
This poem, "Beauty", by an unknown poet, was first published in The Passionate Pilgrim, an unauthorized anthology of various authors, published by Jaggard in 1599. Susan has copied only the first stanza, perhaps because she was running out of room on the last original page of her folio. (She later added some pages for the remaining poetry.) She has made some punctuation changes and has modernized "vadeth" to "fadeth". (Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse, E.K. Chambers, Oxford University Press, 1932):
BeautyBeauty is but a vain and doubtful good;
A shining gloss that vadeth suddenly;
A flower that dies when first it 'gins to bud;
A brittle glass that's broken presently:
A doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower,
Lost, vaded, broken, dead within an hour.
And as goods lost are seld or never found,
As vaded gloss no rubbing will refresh,
As flowers dead lie withered on the ground,
As broken glass on cement can redress,
So beauty blemished once for ever lost,
In spite of physic, painting, pain, and cost.