The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume IV. Prose and Poetry: Sir Thomas North to Michael Drayton.
§ 3. Abraham Fraunce
The same might fairly be said of Abraham Fraunce’s The Countesse of Pembrokes Emanuell, which appeared three years before Saint Peters Complaint. Fraunce, who was a fellow of Saint John’s college, Cambridge, and a distinguished lawyer, is of interest in the story of English prosody, since he belonged to the Cambridge group, including Gabriel Harvey and others, which attempted to force upon English poetry the classical metres. All his poems are in hexameters. In The Countesse of Pembrokes Emanuell, the poem on The Nativity is in which he calls riming hexameters; but as this means that the last syllable only of the lines is rimed in couplets, the effect is scarcely different from that of the unrimed hexameters, especially as in both cases he avails himself to excess of the convenience of participles ending in -ing. Like many poets of his and the succeeding age, he paraphrased some of the Psalms. A learned and laborious person rather than a poet, he freely translated Thomas Watson’s Latin poem Amyntas, and part of Tasso’s Amintà, and published the two in The Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch in 1591.