Samuel Rowlands


Samuel Rowlands was an English author of pamphlets in prose and verse which reflect the follies and humours of lower middle-class life in his day. He seems to have had no literary reputation at the time, but his work throws much light on the development of popular literature and social life in London, where he spent his life. His contact with the middle and lower classes of society included working in 1600–1615 for William White, and then George Loftus, booksellers, who published Rowlands's pamphlets in this time.

Selected sacred and secular poems

Of his later works may be mentioned Sir Thomas Overbury; or the Poysoned Knights Complaint, and The Melancholic Knight, 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.,
Nothing is known of him after that. Edmund Gosse, introducing Rowlands's complete works, edited in 1872–1880 for the Hunterian Club in Glasgow by Sidney John Hervon Herrtage, sums him up as a small, non-political Daniel Defoe, a pamphleteer in verse whose talents were never exercised except when their possessor was pressed for means, and a poet of considerable talent, yet without a spark or glimmer of genius.
Gosse's notice is reprinted in his Seventeenth Century Studies. A poem by Rowlands, The Bride, was reprinted at Boston, USA, in 1905 by A. C. Potter.,