SAMUEL

See also:

• ROWLANDS, RICHARD (fl. 1560–1620)
• SAMUEL ROWLANDS (c. 1573–1630)

ROWLANDS (c. 1573–1630)  , English author of pamphlets in prose and verse, which reflect the follies and humours of the lower middle-class life of his time, seems to have had no ROWLANDSON 787 contemporary literary reputation; but his work throws consider-able light on the social London of his day . Among his works, which include some poems on sacred subjects, are: The Betraying of Christ (1598); The Letting of Humours Blood in the Head-vaine (epigrams and satires) and A Mery Meetinge, or 'tis Mery when Knaves mete (1600)—the two latter being publicly burnt by order, but republished later under other names—(Humors Ordinarie and The Knave of Clubbes); Greenes Ghost haunting Conie-Catchers (1602), which he pre-tended to have edited from Greene's papers, but which is largely borrowed from his printed works; Tis Merrie when Gossips meete (1602), a dialogue between a Widow, a Wife, a Maid and a Vintner; Looke to it; for Ile stabbe ye (1604), in which Death describes the tyrants, careless divines and other evil-doers whom he will destroy;' Hells broke loose (16o5), an account of John of Leyden, and in the same year a Theatre of Divine Recreation (not extant), poems founded on the Old Testament; A Terrible Battell betwene . . Time and Death (1606); Democritus, or Doctor Merry-man his Medicines against Melancholy humors, reprinted, with alterations, as Doctor Merrie-man, and Diogenes Lanthorne (1607), in which " Athens " is London; The Famous History of Guy, Earl of Warwick (1607), a long romance in Rowlands's favourite six-lined stanza, and one of his hastiest, least successful efforts; Humors Looking Glasse (1608); and Martin Mark-all, Beadle of Bride-well (161o), a history of roguery containing much information about notable highwaymen and the completest vocabulary of thieves' slang up to that time . 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 Heavens Glory, Seeke it: Earts vanitie, Flye it: Hells Horror, Fere it . After this nothing is known of him . Mr Gosse, in his introduction to Rowlands's complete works, edited (1872–80) for the Hunterian Club in Glasgow by Mr S . J . H . Herrtage, sums him up as a " kind of small non-political 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." Mr Gosse's notice is reprinted in his Seventeenth Century Studies (1883) . A recently discovered poem by Rowlands, The Bride (1617), was reprinted at Boston, U.S.A., in 1905 by Mr A . C .

Potter .