Wrote “The Praise of Musike” (1586); “Parthenophil and Parthenophe” (1593); “A Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets” (1595); “Four Books of Offices: Enabling private persons for the Speciall service of all good Princes and Policies” (1606); “The Devil’s Charter” (1607); “The Battle of Hexham,” an unprinted play; and some verses prefixed to Harvey’s “Pierce’s Supererogation” (1593), Florio’s “Worlde of Wordes” (1598), and Ford’s “Fame’s Memoriall” (1606).

  In the main, however, the poetry of Barnes moves in a world of imagination, into which the virtue of any real incidents has entered invisibly through the solvent of beauty; it is a land of clear colours, and smooth air; a “region of shadowless hours;” mighty Pan presides over it; the lovely Virgin Mary is a shepherdess who may be gained by the promise of a firstling of the flock to further lovers; Apollo is a saint of the religion of joy. But it is not only the Renaissance with its rehabilitation of the senses which we find in these poems; there is in them also the Renaissance with its ingenuity, its fantasticality, its passion for conceits, and wit, and clever caprices, and playing upon words. With this it is harder and perhaps not wholesome to attempt to enter into sympathy. The sympathy of the most favourably disposed modern reader would be somewhat stringently tested by a poem of many lines in which the marks of punctuation, comma, and colon, and period, are constrained to become the emblems and exponents of passion.

  Now that Barnes’s secular poems are removed from the category of unattainable things, and a study of them becomes practicable, Dr. Grosart having recently (1875) reprinted and edited, from the unique exemplar in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, the long-hidden and all but unheard-of “Parthenophil and Parthenophe” (1593), there can be little doubt that this fine old singer, hitherto so strangely neglected, and known only to the few by his later “Divine Centurie” (also reprinted by Dr. Grosart) as a minor but sweet and fervid voice in England’s antiphon, is at length on the eve of having justice rendered him. It may be predicted with some confidence that it is on the recovered treasure that Barnes’s fame will henceforth mainly rest. The Sonnets, of which it largely consists, are of special importance in a study of the development of that species of composition in our literature. Apart from their essential poetical qualities, which, though considerable and undoubted, are surpassed by those of the Odes and Madrigals, with their passionate adoration of beauty, their sensuous delight, their glories of pure and lovely colour, and fragrance of choice flowers, they entitle Barnes to rank as one of the most artistic sonneteers of Elizabeth’s reign; for while on every side the sonnet-form was deteriorating, we find this poet habitually, though not invariably, employing in the service of his Parthenophe a stanza as obedient to technical prescription—the inevitable riming couplet of the period always excepted—as those in which Laura’s name is laid up for ever, or those Mr. Rossetti has given us towards “The House of Life.”

  As a sonnetteer and lyrist Barnes takes high rank among the minor Elizabethans. His sonnets, fervent, and richly coloured, suffer from over-elaboration and conceit; but these were the faults of the age. His imagery is not of the cheap, commonplace character affected by Watson, but testifies to rare imaginative power joined to the gift of true poetic expression. The madrigals, fine and free (but unfortunately too few), prove him to have been a born singer.

  His poetical worth, though there are fine passages in “The Devil’s Charter” and in the “Divine Centurie,” must rest on “Parthenophil.”… The style, both verbal and poetical, needs chastising in places, and Barnes’s expression in particular is sometimes obscure. He is sometimes comic when he wishes to be passionate, and frequently verbose when he wishes to be expressive. But the fire, the full-bloodedness, the poetical virility, of the poems is extraordinary. A kind of intoxication of the eternal-feminine seems to have seized the poet to an extent not otherwise to be paralleled in the group, except in Sidney; while Sidney’s courtly sense of measure and taste did not permit him Barnes’s forcible extravagances.

  That isolated Ronsardist among our London poets, published no lyrics after 1595. His plays, perhaps, were Jacobean, but we possess only one of them, “The Devil’s Charter,” not printed till 1607, which seems to belong to the school of Marlowe.