Is described by his wife, the celebrated lady Anne Clifford, daughter of
George earl of Cumberland, in the manuscript memoirs of her life, as a
man “in his own nature of a just mind, of a sweet disposition, and very
valiant in his own person. He had a great advantage in his breeding, by
the wisdom and devotion of his grandfather, Thomas Sackville, earl of
Dorset, and lord high treasurer of England, who was then held one of
the wisest of that time; by which means he was so good a scholar in all
manner of learning, that, in his youth, when he was at the university,
there was none of the young nobility then students there that excelled
him. He was also a good patriot to his country, and generally well
beloved in it; much esteemed in all the parliaments that sat in his
time, and so great a lover of scholars and soldiers, as that, with an
excessive bounty towards them, or indeed any of worth that were in
distress, he did much diminish his estate; and also with excessive
prodigality in house-keeping, and other noble ways at court, as tilting,
masking, and the like; prince Henry being then alive, who was much
addicted to those noble exercises, and of whom he was much beloved.” He
died at the age of 35, March 28th, 1624.
I should be very unwilling to deprive Corbet of the praise due to a poem
of so much intrinsic merit; but as the following epitaph is printed among
the poems of his contemporary, King, bishop of Chichester, and again
attributed to the latter in MS. Ashmole, A 35, Corbet’s claim to the
composition of it is rendered very disputable.