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Archaeologia Cantiana -  Vol. 57  1944  page 20

Henry Oxinden's Authorship by Dorothy Gardiner

So the first part ends on a God Save the King, and with the second the poet recalls the newly wed couple. He pays a compliment to the bridegroom's good looks and indirectly to his old flame, Madam Elizabeth Dixwell:
   "How sweet Basil couldst thou well be other
   Descending from so fair and wise a Mother?"

The bride is a more inspiring theme; to her he re-dedicates the lines which his own wife Katherine's charms had once suggested:
   "Some say so faire was Hero, Venus' Nun,
   As Nature wept, thinking she was undone
   Because she took more from her then she left
   And of such wondrous Beauty her bereft."

There are pretty touches in the description of Dorothy's every feature:
   "Her cheeks spread with a coulor of such hew
   So lovely as Aurora never knew,
   In which those jars are all composed seen
   Which 'twixt the white Rose and the red have been .......
   .......... Her Nose, her Chin and her well-hearing Ears
   Such whiteness as her lovely forehead wears,
   Her hands so pure, so innocent, nay such
   They are that Angels may bow down to touch ....... "1

The third section is devoted to an eulogy on Dorothy's virtue, which would not have displeased the elder Dorothy Osborne, her aunt:
   "Divinitie's the object of her will,
   She loves what's good, and hateth what is ill; .........
   Angelical's her gesture, and her gate,
   Most lovely sweet, humbly conjoyn'd with state.
   Pure Vertue is her Hand-maid, and her dress
   The richest Jewels of all godliness .......... "

The poem ends with a clumsy conceit on the names of bride and bridegroom:
   "Basil and Dorothy, both names so high
   As in them all may read Divinity,
   What is a King and gift from God conjoyn'd
   But Basilean Dorothy intwined?"

Henry's poem on the Restoration, "Carolus Triumphans", and his prose work "In praise of the Sacrament", cannot now be traced.2
  Ibid., p. 16.
   cf. O. and P. Letters, p. 257.

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