Gervase Markham - sir, teares and holles

MARKHAM, GERVASE (or JERvis) (1568?-1637), Eng lish poet and writer, third son of Sir Robert Markham of Cotham, Nottinghamshire, was born probably in 1568. He was a soldier of fortune in the Low Countries, and later was a captain under the earl of Essex's command in Ireland. He was acquainted with Latin and several modern languages, and had an exhaustive prac tical acquaintance with the arts of forestry and agriculture. He was a noted horse-breeder, and is said to have imported the first Arab. Very little is known of the events of his life. The story of the murderous quarrel between Gervase Markham and Sir John Holles related in the Biographia Britannica (s.v. Holles) has been generally connected with him, but in the Dictionary of Na tional Biography, Sir Clements R. Markham, a descendant from the same family, refers it to a contemporary of the same name. Gervase Markham was buried at St. Giles's, Cripplegate, London, on Feb. 3, 1637.

Markham's writings include:

The most Honorable Tragedy of Sir Richard Grinvile (1595), reprinted (1871) by Professor E. Arber; The Poem of Poems, or Syon's Muse (1595), dedicated to Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Philip Sidney ; Devoreux, Vertues Teares (i597) ; The Teares of the Beloved (r600) and Marie Magdalene's Teares (i6or) long and rather commonplace poems on the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, both reprinted by Dr. A. B. Grosart in the Miscellanies of

the Fuller Worthies Library (1871) ; Herod and Antipater, a Tragedy (1622) was written with William Sampson, and with Henry Machin he wrote a comedy called The Dumbe Knight (r608). A Discourse of Horsemanshippe (1593) was followed by other popular treatises on horsemanship and farriery. Honour in his Perfection (1624) is in praise of the earls of Oxford, Southampton and Essex, and the Souldier's Accidence (1625) turns his military experiences to account. He edited Juliana Berners's Boke of Saint Albans under the title of The Gentleman's Academie (1595), and produced numerous books on hus bandry, many of which are catalogued in Lowndes's Bibliographer's Manual (Bohn's ed., 1857-64).