GREVILE, SIR FULKE, afterwards LORD BROOKE, was born in 1554. He was the only son of Sir Fulke Grevile of Beauchamp Court in Warwickshire, and his mother was a daughter of Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland. He became a fellow-commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge, hut afterwards studied at Oxford. Having then travelled on the continent, he was Introduced at court on his return, and soon appointed to a lucrative office In the Court of the Marches of Wales. Possessed however by the adventurous spirit of the times, he made several attempts to escape into foreign service, which were always defeated by Queen Elizabeth's refusal of leave. In 1585 like wise he and Sir Philip Sidney, his distant kinsman and most cherished friend, were brought back by a royal meascoger when they had already embarked to accompany Drake to the West Indies. Next year Sir Philip was killed at Zutphen. Grevile, knighted in 1597, sat repeatedly for his native county in parliament, and continued to receive tokens of the royal favour till the queen's death. King James was equally well disposed, bestowing on him Warwick Castle (which he repaired at a large expense); but he is said to have disagreed with Secretary Cecil, and did not obtain any now advancement till after that minister's death. In 1615 he was appointed under-treasnrer and chancellor of the exchequer, and in 1620 he was raised to the peerage by the title of Baron Brooke of Beauchamp Court. Next year, resigning his post in the exchequer, he became a lord of the bed-chamber. Soou afterwards be founded a history-lecture in the University of Cambridge, endowing It with 100k a year. On the 30th of September 1628, being in his man,lon in llolborn, he had an altercation with an old serving-man, who, irritated by what passed, stabbed him mortally in the back, and then destroyed himself. Lord Brooke was burled in St. Mary's church, Warwick, under a monument which he had himself erected, with this inscription FnIke Grevile, servant to Queen Elizabeth, counsellor to King James, and friend to Sir Philip Sidney. Trophmum Peccati.' He was never married.
Three volumee of his writings were printed after his death :-1. 'Certain Learned and Elegant Workes of the Right Honorable Fulke Lord Brooke, written in his youth and familiar exercise with Sir Philip Sidney; 1633, small folio. This volume contains three didactic poems, (a ' Treatise of Human Learning,' an ' Inquisition upon Fame and Honour,' a' Treatise of Warms'), two tragedies on the model of Seneca Alahain' and ' Mustapha '), 'Caslica ' (being a collection of 109 small poems, called sonnets, though not answering to the name), and two prose letters, one of which is really • long moral essay. 2. 'The
Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney : with the True Interest of England, as it then stood in relation to all Foreign Princes,' &c.
1652, 12mo. 3. ' The Remains of Sir Fulke Grevile, Lord Brooke, being poems of Monarchy and Religion, never before published,' 1670, 8vo. All known copies of the volume of 1633 want the first twenty two pages, and it has been conjectured that these contained the ' Treatise on Religion,' and were cancelled as objectionable probably by order of Laud. Short specimens of his poetry are selected by Campbell and Ellis; his didactic poems are given at full length in Southey'a 'Select Works of the British Poets,' 1831; and his 'Life of Sidney' was reprinted by Sir Egerton Budges.
Lord Brooke was alike proud of being Sidney's friend and of being the patron of Camden, Daverant, and other men of letters. His own literary fame, io modern times, has scarcely been equal to his merits.
He is more remarkable however for power and subtlety of thought than for originality of imagery or for felicity of language. His prose is lumbering and disaertative : his life of Sidney is a commentary, not a narrative. His rhymed tragedies too, in form as undramatic as those of his contemporary Sir William Alexander (to which they bear some resemblance), are not less undramatic in substance. Indeed they are hardly so much as intelligible, as representations either of incident or of character. But even in them there is much of that which constitutes the charm of his didactic poems—the pointed enunciation of elevated moral sentiments or of refined metaphysical reflections. There could be culled from his works, and most abundantly from his noble 'Treatise on Human Learning,' a rich store of sentcutious and fluely-thought apophthegms, of the kind which sparkle in the lines of Pope. This poet indeed owes to Lord Brooke several obligations. One of the lines oftenest quoted from the ' Essay on Man ' is but an alteration of his line, "Men would be tyrants, tyrants would be gods." The prevailing fault is obscurity of language, caused partly by an anxious straining after conciseness, partly by want of mastery over the mechanism of verse, and partly perhaps by indistinctuess in some of the conceptions which flowed in with such variety and swiftness upon his active and searching intellect. Southey had good reason for calling Lord Brooke the most difficult of our poets, but equally good reason for recalling attention to his didactic poems.