The Poems and Amyntas of Thomas Randolph Author:Thomas Randolph General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1917 Original Publisher: Yale university press Subjects: History / General Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Poetry / General Poetry / American / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations ... more »and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: Of Randolph's personal appearance we are able to form a fairly clear idea; a portrait of him,1 probably engraved by Marshall, appears in the frontispiece of the 1640 edition of the Poems, and in some, but not all, of the copies of each of the subsequent editions.2 Aubrey tells us that "he was of a pale ill complexion and pock-bitten," and Randolph himself tells us that he was marked by the small-pox. His hair was of very light flaxen, almost white, and was flaggy as may be seen from his picture. He was of middle height or slightly less; "of about my stature or scarce so tall" says Aubrey, who tells us elsewhere that he himself was of middle stature. III. The Character or His Writings Randolph's fame was great indeed in his own day, but it was as "one of the most pregnant wits of his age," rather than as a poet, that most people thought of him. Even those who did apply to him the term "poet" were thinking, as they did so, rather of his "witty" and "ingenious" poems, his timely satire, and his clever comedies, than of these qualities which we usually associate with the idea of true poetry. Randolph's verse is by no means devoid of these attributes, for although it lacks any great depth of feeling he does exhibit considerable lightness and grace in much of his work. But these qualities were common to the age and were possessed in equal or even greater degree by a number of his contemporaries, so that they alone would not suf...« less