Born in London, England, about 1557; educated at Oxford University; studied law in London; spent some time in Paris with members of the Walsingham family; settled in London, and acquired a high reputation by his pastoral and amatory poems, which rivaled in popularity those of his friends Spenser and Sidney. Died in 1592. He was the author of a translation of Sophocles’s “Antigone” in Latin (1581); “Ekatompathia, or Passionate Centurie of Love” (1582); “Melibœus, sive Ecloga in Obitum Domini Francisci Walsinghami” (1590); “The Tears of Fancie, or Love Disdained” (1593); and many other poetical works, some of which have perished. The three last named were carefully edited by Edward Arber in his “English Reprints” (1870). Watson’s love sonnets, many of which were imitations of Ferrabosco, Ronsard, and other foreign poets, were artificial and frigid.

	… worthy many epitaphs
	For his sweet poesy, for Amyntas’ tears
	And joys so well set down.

	And thou, my sweete Amyntas, vertuous minde,
	Should I forget thy learning and thy love,
	Well might I be accounted but unkinde,
	Whose pure affection I so oft did prove:
	Might my poore plaints hard stones to pitty move,
	His losse should be lamented of each creature,
	So great his name, so gentle was his nature.

	Amyntas, floure of shepheards pride forlorne,
	He whilest he liued was the noblest swaine,
	That euer piped in an oaten quill:
	Both did he other, which could pipe, maintaine,
	And eke could pipe himselfe with passing skill.

  A man he was that I dearely lou’d and honor’d, and for all things hath left few his equalls in England.

	Tom Watson … wrote
	Able to make Apollo’s self to dote
	Upon his Muse.

  Has he painted the natural emotions of the mind or the heart? Has he given

“a local habitation and a name”

to those airy nothings which more or less haunt every fancy? Or has he not sat down rather to exercise the subtlety of his wit than to discharge the fulness of his bosom.

  Of the sonnets of Watson, which were published about 1581, we … shall merely add here, that neither in their structure, nor in their diction or imagery, could they be, or were they, models for our author; and are indeed greatly inferior, not only to the sonnets of Shakspeare, but to those of almost every other poet of his day.

  In the “Hecatompathia,” to which we now turn, Watson’s genius appears often weighted down by his own learning. He has, as will be seen, prefixed to each poem a sort of preface, which must be assigned to his own authorship; and when we read these and the poems themselves, we feel strongly how new a thing in England was then the whole range of classical and “polite” literature; the peculiar air of the Renaissance hangs about the book; it is like a gay and genial school-boy exulting in his studies; it breathes a kind of innocent and attractive pedantry…. What place shall we give to our newly regained poet in this noble army? Below Sidney, but above Spenser, and the rest of that day, as an Amourist, was that which we proposed at the outset of our notice; Shakespeare being excepted from the survey.

  The “Passionate Century” is worth reading as a repertory of commonplace lover’s hyperboles. There never was so sweet a lady, never so fond nor so distraught a lover. Hand, foot, lip, eye, brow, and golden locks are all incomparable. The ages never have produced, and never will produce, such another; Apelles could not have painted her, Praxiteles could not have sculptured her, Virgil and Homer could not have expressed her, and Tully would not have ventured to repeat the number of her gifts. She is superior to all the mythological paramours of Jove. The various goddesses have contributed their best endowments, mental and physical, to make her perfect.

  Watson, in fact, was a purely literary poet. At Oxford, says Antony Wood, he spent his time “not in logic and philosophy, as he ought to have done, but in the smooth and pleasant studies of poetry and romance.” To these studies, however, his devotion was serious; for he mastered four languages, so that he writes as familiarly of Sophocles and Apollonius Rhodius as of Ovid, of Petrarch and Ariosto as of Ronsard. He translated the “Antigone” into Latin, and it was one of his Latin poems that gave him the fancy name of Amyntas, under which the poets of the time ranked him with Colin Clout and with Astrophel. But the literature that he affected most was the love-poetry of the Italians—of Petrarch and his followers, of Seraphine and Fiorenzuola, and many others that are quite forgotten now. Sometimes translating, sometimes paraphrasing, sometimes combining them, he tells the story of his imaginary love, its doubts and fears and hopes, its torments and disappointments and final death, in that melodius Elizabethan English which not even monotony and make-believe can wholly deprive of charm. But still, Watson and his kindred poets have little more than an historical interest. They are but the posthumous children of the Courts of Love; their occupation is to use the scholarship and the ingenuity of the Renascence to dress up the sentiment of the Middle Age—a sentiment no more real to them than it is to ourselves. They make no appeal to us; their note has nothing of the note of passion and of truth that rings in the verse of Sidney and of Shakespeare.

  It may be surmised that others besides his contemporaries have overestimated Watson.

  More important than Dyer, and much more important than Fraunce, was Thomas Watson, a rather short-lived bard who died in 1592 at the age of thirty-five, but who, save for a certain frigidity, would take a high place, and who perhaps, considering his earliness, deserves no low one as it is.

  Watson’s verse lacks passion, but is the accomplished work of a cultivated and well-read scholar. As a Latinist he stands first among contemporaries. It is as a sonneteer that he left his chief mark on English literature. He was the first English writer of sonnets after Surrey and Wyatt. Most of his sonnets were published before those of Sir Philip Sidney, and the popularity attending Watson’s sonneteering efforts was a chief cause of the extended vogue of the sonnet in England among poets and their patrons in the last decade of the sixteenth century. Watson’s sonnets were closely studied by Shakespeare and other contemporaries, and, despite their frigidity and imitative quality, actively influenced the form and topic of the later sonnets of the century. All manner of praise was bestowed on Watson at his death by his fellow poets and men of letters, who reckoned him the compeer of Spenser and Sidney.