Short answers, pulled from the story.
Francis Meres was an English churchman and author born in 1565 in Lincolnshire. His 1598 commonplace book, Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury, contains the first critical account of Shakespeare's poems and early plays, and its list of plays has helped scholars establish their chronology.
Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury is a commonplace book published by Francis Meres in 1598. It includes moral and critical reflections, sections on books, philosophy, music, and painting, and a chapter comparing English poets from Chaucer onward with classical Greek, Latin, and Italian writers.
Francis Meres was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he received a BA in 1587 and an MA in 1591. Oxford subsequently incorporated him as an MA two years after that.
Meres published a sermon called Gods Arithmeticke in 1597, and in 1598 he issued two translations from the Spanish of Luis de Granada: Granada's Devotion and The Sinners' Guide.
From 1602, Francis Meres served as rector of Wing in Rutland. He also ran a school there and was buried at the parish Church of St Peter and St Paul in Wing when he died on the 29th of January 1647.
Charlotte Stopes claimed in her 1904 study Shakespeare's Sonnets that Meres was the brother-in-law of John Florio, but George Greenwood's subsequent investigations suggest that claim was an error.