William Warner, born 1558, died 1609, was a native of Oxfordshire, an attorney of the Common Pleas, and the author of “Albion’s England.” This poem, published in 1586, is a history of England from the Deluge to the reign of James I. It supplanted in popular favour the “Mirror for Magistrates.”

  Master William Warner, a man of good yeares and of honest reputation; by his profession an Atturnye of the Common Pleas; author of Albions England, diynge suddenly in the night in his bedde, without any former complaynt or sicknesse, on thursday night beeinge the 9th daye of March; was buried the satturday following, and lyeth in the church at the corner under the stone of Walter Ffader.

  In his absolute “Albion’s England,” hath most admirably penned the history of his own country from Noah to his time, that is, to the reign of Queen Elizabeth. I have heard him termed of the best wits of both our Universities, our English Homer. As Euripides is the most sententious among the Greek poets: so is Warner among our English poets.

  A good honest plain writer of moral rules and precepts, in that old-fashioned kind of seven-footed verse, which yet sometimes is in use, though in different manner, that is to say, divided into two.

  An Author only unhappy in the Choice of his Subject, and Measure of his Verse.

  To his merit nothing can be objected, unless perhaps an affected quaintness in some of his expressions, and an indelicacy in some of his pastoral images…. Warner rather resembled Ovid, whose Metamorphosis he seems to have taken for his model, having deduced a perpetual poem from the deluge down to the era of Elizabeth, full of lively digression and entertaining episodes. And though he is sometimes harsh, affected, and obscure, he often displays a most charming and pathetic simplicity.

  There is in Warner occasionally a pathetic simplicity that never fails of engaging the heart. His tales, though often tedious, and not unfrequently indelicate, abound with all the unaffected incident and artless ease of the best old ballads, without their cant and puerility. The pastoral pieces that occur are superior to all the eclogues in our language, those of Collins only excepted.

  The astonishing popularity of this poem, which by Warner’s contemporaries was even preferred to their favourite “Mirror for Magistrates,” is a proof that he possessed the most valuable talent of a poet, that of amusing and interesting his readers. This he affected partly by means of numerous episodes, which are always lively though not always to the purpose, and partly by means of a style which, at the time, was thought highly elegant, and which certainly possesses the merit of uncommon ease and simplicity.

  Of the singular production of Warner, there is, I believe, no modern edition, yet few among our elder poets more deserve the attention of the lover of nature and rural simplicity.

  His contemporaries compared him to Virgil, whom he certainly did not make his model. Dr. Percy thinks he rather resembled Ovid, to whom he is, if possible, still more unlike. His poem is, in fact, an enormous ballad on the history, or rather on the fables appendant to the history of England; heterogeneous, indeed, like the Metamorphoses, but written with an almost doggrel simplicity. Headley has rashly preferred his works to our ancient ballads; but with the best of these they will bear no comparison. Argentile and Curan has indeed some beautiful touches, yet that episode requires to be weeded of many lines to be read with unqualified pleasure; and through the rest of his stories we shall search in vain for the familiar magic of such ballads as Chevy Chase or Gill Morrice.

  Has at least the equivocal merit of great length. It is rather legendary than historical: some passages are pleasing; but it is not a work of genius, and the style, though natural, seldom rises above that of prose.

  Its most obvious fault is the awkwardness with which it oscillates between the rude simplicity of the ballad, and the regularity of the sustained narrative poem: but it contains some very pleasing passages in a quiet strain.

  After having conscientiously waded through immense masses of uninteresting rhyme, as we have been compelled to do in the preparation of these notices, we confess, with a not unmalicious exultation, that we know Warner’s poem only by description and extracts. Albion is an ancient name for Great Britain; and Albion’s England is a metrical history—“not barren,” in the author’s own words, “of inventive intermixtures”—of the southern portion of the island, beginning at the deluge, and ending with the reign of James I. As James might have said, “After me the deluge,” Warner’s poem may be considered as ending in some such catastrophe as that with which it begins. The merit of Warner is that of a story-teller, and he reached classes of readers to whom Spenser was hardly known by name. The work is a strange mixture of comic and tragic fact and fable, exceedingly gross in parts, with little power of imagination or grace of language, but possessing the great popular excellence of describing persons and incidents in the fewest and simplest words. The best story is that of Argentile and Curan, and it is told as briefly as though it were intended for transmission by telegraph at the cost of a dollar a word. Warner has some occasional touches of nature and pathos which almost rival the old ballads for directness and intensity of feeling.

  Albion’s England is undoubtedly a work of very remarkable talent of its kind…. It is one of the liveliest and most amusing poems ever written. Every striking event or legend that the old chronicles afford is seized hold of, and related always clearly, often with very considerable spirit and animation. But it is far from being a mere compilation; several of the narratives are not to be found anywhere else, and a large proportion of the matter is Warner’s own, in every sense of the word. In this, as well as in other respects, it has greatly the advantage over the “Mirror for Magistrates,” as a rival to which work it was perhaps originally produced, and with the popularity of which it could scarcely fail considerably to interfere…. For fluency, combined with precision and economy of diction, Warner is probably unrivalled among the writers of English verse…. His command of the vulgar tongue, in particular, is wonderful. This indeed is perhaps his most remarkable poetical characteristic; and the tone which was thus given to his poem (being no doubt that of his own mind) may be conjectured to have been in great part the source both of its immense popularity for a time, and of the neglect and oblivion into which it was afterwards allowed to drop. That Warner’s poetry and that of Spenser could have ever come in one another’s way is impossible. “Albion’s England” must from the first have been a book rather for the many than the few,—for the kitchen rather than the hall; its spirit is not, what it has been sometimes called, merely naïve, but essentially coarse and vulgar. We do not allude so much to any particular abundance of warm description, or freedom of language, as to the low note on which the general strain of the composition is pitched. With all its force and vivacity, and even no want of fancy, at times, and graphic descriptive power, it is poetry with as little of high imagination in it as any that was ever written.

  His poem was of Albion’s England, because it did not, like Albion, include Scotland. It was an easy, lively, homely history of England, from the Deluge down to Warner’s own time, homely in use of simple idiomatic English, full of incidents and stories, often rudely told, and often with a force or delicacy of touch that came of the terse directness with which natural feeling was expressed. Warner’s poem had for a time great popularity. He was not a great poet, but the times were stirring, and they drew ten thousand lines of lively verse upon his country, even out of an attorney.

  The first of the so-called historians, William Warner, belongs in point of poetical style to the pre-Spenserian period, and like its other exponents employs the fourteener; while, unlike some of them, he semes quite free from any Italian influence in phraseology or poetical manner. Nevertheless “Albion’s England” is not merely in bulk but in merit far ahead of the average work of our first period, and quite incommensurable with such verse as that of Grove or even of Turberville.

  He does not always escape the tendency of his metre to drop into a jog-trot, yet in the main he canters briskly along with a very fair proportion of spirited lines.