Samuel Rowlands

Samuel Rowlands (c. 1573–1630) was an English author of pamphlets in prose and verse, which reflect the follies and humours of the lower middle-class life of his time. He seems to have had no contemporary literary reputation; but his work throws considerable light on the development of popular literature and social life in London of his day.

He spent his life in London, and it is thought that he kept close contact with the middle and lower classes of London society. It is also believed that from 1600–1615 he worked for William White, and then George Loftus, booksellers who published Rowlands' pamphlets during this time.

Among his works, which include some poems on sacred subjects, are:

Of his later works may be mentioned Sir Thomas Overbury; or the Poysoned Knights Complaint, and The Melancholic Knight (1615), which suggests a hearing of Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle. The last of his humorous studies, Good Newes and Bad Newes, appeared in 1622, and in 1628 he published a pious volume of prose and verse, entitled Heaven's Glory, Seeke it: Earts vanitie, Flye it: Hells Horror, Fere it.

After this nothing is known of him. Edmund Gosse, in his introduction to Rowlands's complete works, edited (1872–80) for the Hunterian Club in Glasgow by Sidney John Hervon Herrtage, sums him up as a kind of small non-political Daniel Defoe, a pamphleteer in verse whose talents were never put into exercise except when their possessor was pressed for means, and a poet of considerable talent without one spark or glimmer of genius.

Gosse's notice is reprinted in his Seventeenth Century Studies (1883). A poem by Rowlands, The Bride (1617), was reprinted at Boston, USA, in 1905 by A. C. Potter.

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