We have now completed the first section of our introductory survey of

pastoral literature. We have passed in review, in a necessarily rapid and

superficial, but, it is to be hoped, not altogether inadequate, manner,

the varions manifestations of the kind in the non-dramatic literature of

continental Europe. The Italian pastoral drama has been reserved for

separate and more detailed consideration in close connexion with that of

this country. It must, however, be borne in mind that in such a survey as

the present many of the byways and more or less obscure and devious

channels by which pastoral permeated the wide fields of literature have of

necessity been left unexplored. Nothing, for instance, has been said about

the pastoral interludes which occupy a not inconspicuous place in the

martial cantos both of the _Orlando_ and the _Gerusalemme_. Before passing

on, however, I should like to say a few words concerning one particular

department of renaissance literature, and that chiefly by way of

illustrating the limitations of the tradition of literary pastoral. I

refer to the _novelle_ or _nouvelles_, in which, although pastoral

subjects are occasionally introduced, the treatment is entirely

independent of conventional tradition. Without making any pretence at

covering the whole field of the _novellieri_, I may instance a tale of

Giraldi's, not lacking in the homely charm which belongs to that author,

of a child exposed in a wood and brought up by the shepherds. These are

represented as simple unpretending Lombard peasants, who look to their own

business and are credited with none of the arts and graces of their

literary fellows. More exclusively rustic in setting is an anecdote

concerning the amours of a shepherd and shepherdess, told with broad

humour in the _Cent Nouvelles nouvelles_ and elaborated with

characteristic gusto and extraordinarily graphic art by Pietro Fortini.

The crude obscenity of the subject alone serves to show how free the

writer was from any influence of the pastoral of polite literature.[71]

Numerous other stories concerning shepherds or _villani_ might be cited,

from Boccaccio to Bandello, the point of which, whether openly licentious

or ostensibly moral, is brought home with a brutal and physical directness

utterly foreign to the spirit of the regular pastoral. This is, on the

whole, what one would expect. The coarse realism that gave life and

vitality to the novel, that characteristic product of middle-class

cynicism and humour, finds no place in the pastoral of literary tradition.

The conventional grace of the pastoral could offer no material to the

novel. It is true that when we speak of the _bourgeois_ spirit of the

_novella_ on the one hand, and the 'ideal' pastoral on the other, it is

well to remember that the author of the _Decameron_ also wrote the first

modern pastoral romance; that the century and country which saw the

publication of the _Arcadia_, the _Aminta_, and the _Pastor fido_, also

welcomed the work of Fortini, Giraldi, and Bandello; and that to Margaret

of Navarre, the imitator of Sannazzaro and patroness of Marot, we are

likewise indebted for the _Heptameron_. Nevertheless the tendencies,

though sometimes united in the person of a single author, yet keep

distinct. Both alike had become a fashion, both alike followed a more or

less conventional type. The novel remained coarse and realistic; the

pastoral, whatever may be said of its morality, remained refined and at a

conscious remove from real life. To examine thoroughly the cause of this

disseverance from actuality which haunted the pastoral throughout its many

transformations would lead us beyond all possible bounds of this inquiry.

One important point may, however, here be noted. The pastoral, whatever

its form, always needed and assumed some external circumstance to give

point to its actual content. The interest seldom arises directly from the

narrative itself. In Theocritus and Sannazzaro this objective point is

supplied by the delight of escape from the over-civilization of the city;

in Petrarch and Mantuan, by their allegorical intention; in Sacchetti and

Lorenzo, by the contrast of town and country, with all its delicate

humour; in Boccaccio and Poliziano, by the opening it gave for golden

dreams of exquisite beauty or sensuous delight; in Tasso, by the desire of

that freedom in love and life which sentimental philosophers have always

associated with a return to nature. In all these cases the content _per

se_ may be said to be matter of indifference; it only receives meaning in

relation to some ulterior intention of the author. Realism under these

circumstances was impossible. Nor could satire call it forth, for no one

would be at pains to satirize actual rusticity. The only loophole left by

which a realistic treatment could find its way into pastoral was when, as

in Folengo's macaronics, it was not the actual rustic life but the

conventional representation of it that was the object of satire. But this

case was naturally a rare one.

Chapter II.

Pastoral Poetry in England

I

We have seen how there arose in the Italian songs of the fourteenth

century a spontaneous form of pastoral independent of the regular

tradition, and somewhat similar examples are furnished by the dramatic

eclogues of Spain. In the former case, however, pastoral was never more

than a passing note; while in the latter, the impulse, though possessing

some vitality, was early overwhelmed by the rising tide of Italian

influence. In England it was otherwise. On the one hand the spontaneous

and popular impulse towards a form of pastoralism appears to have been

stronger and more consistent than elsewhere; on the other the foreign and

literary influence never acquired the same supreme importance. As a resuit

the earlier native fashion affected in a noticeable degree later pastoral

work, colouring and blending with instead of being overpowered by the

regular tradition. Thus it is possible to trace two distinct though

mutually reacting tendencies far down the stream of English literature,

and to this double origin must be referred many of the peculiar phenomena

of English pastoral work. There was furthermore a constant struggle for

supremacy between the two traditions, in which now one now the other

appeared likely to go under. The greatest poets of their day, Spenser and

Milton, threw the weight of their authority on to the side of pastoral

orthodoxy. Spenser, however, was himself too much influenced by the

popular impulse for his example to be decisive in favour of the regular

tradition, while, by the time Milton wrote, a hybrid form had established

itself on a more or less secure basis and a _modus vivendi_ had already

been achieved. Meanwhile the bulk of pastofal poets affected a less

weighty and more spontaneous song, whether they wrote in the light

fanciful mood of Drayton or the more passionate and romantic spirit of

Browne.

To this double origin may be ascribed a certain noticeable vitality that

characterizes English pastoral composition. Since this quality has been

habitually overlooked by literary historians, I may be excused for

dwelling on it somewhat in this place. The stigma which, not altogether

undeservedly, attaches to pastoral as a whole has tempted critics to

confine their attention to the more notable examples of the kind, and to

treat these as more or less sporadic manifestations. Thus they have

failed, on the whole, to appreciate the relation in which these works

stand to the general pastoral tradition, which was mainly carried on in

works of little individual interest. It is no blame to them if they

considered that these undistinguished productions were of small importance

in the general history of literature: any one who goes through them with

care will probably arrive at a not very dissimilar conclusion.

Nevertheless the fact remains that the neglect of them has obscured both

the relative positions of the greater and more enduring works, and also

the general nature of the pastoral tradition in this country. That

tradition I believe to have been of a far more noteworthy character than

has hitherto been realized. I am not, of course, prepared to maintain that

pastoral composition in England ever attained, as a whole, to the rank of

great literature, or that it formed such a remarkable body of work as we

find, for example, in the Arcadian drama of Italy. But when we come to

regard the pastoral production of this country in the light of a more or

less connected tradition, it is impossible not be struck by the

originality and diversity of the various forms which it assumed. Though as

a literary kind it never rivalled its Italian model in fertility, it

evinced an individual and versatile quality which we seek in vain in other

countries. To substantiate this claim and to show how far the vitality of

the English pastoral was due to its hybrid origin will be my chief aim in

this chapter. When I come to deal with the main subject of this inquiry it

will be necessary to determine how far similar considerations apply in the

case of the pastoral drama.

In the first place we have to consider what was produced on the one hand

by the purely native impulse, and on the other under the sole inspiration

of foreign tradition, at a period when these two influences had not yet

begun to interact. As an argument in favour of the spontaneous and genuine

nature of the earlier fashion may be noticed its appearance in that

miscellaneous body of anonymous literature which, whatever may be its

origin--and it is impossible to enter on so controversial a subject in

this place--is at least 'popular' in the sense of having been long handed

down from generation to generation in the mouths of the people. The

acceptance of pastoral ballads into this great mass of traditional

literature is at least as good evidence of their popular character as that

of authorship could be. In such a body of literature it would indeed be

surprising had the _pastourelle_ motive not found entrance; but it is

noteworthy that whereas the French and Latin poems are habitually written

from the point of view of the lover, the English ballads adopt that of the

peasant maiden to whom the high-born suitor pays his court. At once the

simplest and most poetical of the ballads on this model is that printed by

Scott as _The Broom of Cowdenknows_, a title to which in all probability

it has little claim. It is a delightful example of the minor ballad

literature, and I am by no means inclined to regard it as a mere

amplification of the much shorter and rather abrupt _Bonny May_ of Herd's

collection, though the latter, so far as it goes, probably offers a less

sophisticated text. In either case a gentleman riding along meets a girl

milking, obtains her love, and ultimately returns and marries her. A

similar incident, in which, however, the seducer marries the girl under

compulsion and then discovers her to be of noble parentage, is told in a

ballad, of which a number of versions have been collected in Scotland

under the title of _Earl Richard_ or _Earl Lithgow_, and of which an

English version was current in the seventeenth century and was quoted more

than once by Beaumont and Fletcher.[72] This was printed by Percy in the

_Reliques_, and two broadsides of it dating from the restoration are

preserved in the Roxburghe collection. It is inferior to the northern

versions, but both are probably late, and contain stanzas belonging to or

copied from other ballads, notably the _Bonny Hynd_ of the Herd manuscript

and _Burd Helen_ (the Scotch version of _Child Waters_). The title of the

broadsides is interesting as betraying the influence of the regular

pastoral tradition: 'The beautifull Shepherdesse of Arcadia. A new

pastarell Song of a courteous young Knight, and a supposed Shepheards

Daughter.'[73] Again, apparently from the Aberdeen district, comes a

ballad on the marriage of a shepherd's daughter to the Laird of Drum. On

the other hand we find three somewhat similar ballads, _Lizie Lindsay_ or

_Donald of the Isles, Lizie Baillie_, and _Glasgow Peggie_, recording the

elopement of a town girl with a highland gentleman in the disguise of a

shepherd. These are obviously late, though a certain resemblance in style

with _Johnie Faa_ makes it possible that they are as old as the middle of

the seventeenth century. None of the pastoral ballads, indeed, can show

any credentials which would suggest an earlier date than the second half

of the sixteenth century, nor can any of them lay claim to first-rate

poetic merit.[74]

Another example of native pastoral, earlier and far more genuine in

character, is to be found in the religious drama. The romantic

possibilities of peasant life were to some extent reflected in the

ballads; it is the burlesque aspect that is preserved to us in the

'shepherd' plays of the mystery cycles. We possess the plays on the

adoration of the shepherds belonging to the four extant series, a

duplicate in the Towneley plays, and one odd specimen, making six in all.

The rustic element varies in each case, but it assumed the form of

burlesque comedy in all except the purely didactic 'Coventry' cycle of the

Cotton manuscript. Here, indeed, the treatment of the situation is

decorously dull, but in the others we can trace a gradual advance in

humorous treatment leading up to the genuine comedy of the alternative

Towneley plays. Thus, like Noah and his wife, the shepherds of the

adoration early became recognized comic characters, and there can be

little doubt of the influence exercised by these scenes upon the later

interludes. With the general evolution of the drama we are of course in no

wise here concerned: what it imports us to notice is that just as it was

the picture of the young gallant riding along on the mirk evening by the

fail dyke of the 'bought i' the lirk o' the hill' that caught the

imagination of the north-country milkmaids, so it was the rough

representation of rustic manners, with which they must have been familiar

in actual life, that appealed to the villagers flocking to York,

Leicester, Beverley, or Wakefield to witness the annual representation of

the guild cycle.[75]

It will be worth while to give some account of the form taken by this

genuine pastoral comedy, as we find it in its highest development in the

two Towneley plays. These belong to the latest additions to the cycle, and

were probably first incorporated when the repertory underwent revision in

the early years of the fifteenth century.[76] Each play falls into three

portions: first, a rustic farce; secondly, the apparition and announcement

of the angels; and thirdly, the adoration. The two latter do not

particularly concern us. Though in the Chester cycle the shepherds show

themselves amusingly ignorant of the meaning of the _Gloria_, in the

Towneley plays they are apt to fall out of character, and certainly

display a singular knowledge of the prophets,[77] for

Abacuc and ely prophesyde so,

Elezabeth and zachare and many other mo,

And david as veraly is witnes thereto,

Iohn Bapyste sewrly and daniel also.

More remarkable still is one shepherd's familiarity with the classics:

Virgill in his poetre sayde in his verse,

Even thus by gramere as I shall reherse;

'Iam nova progenies celo demittitur alto,

Iam rediet virgo, redeunt saturnia regna.'[78]

It is perhaps no matter for surprise that one of his less learned fellows

should break out with more force than delicacy:

Weme! tord! what speke ye here in myn eeres?

Tell us no clerge I hold you of the freres.

It is one of the little ironies of literature that in the earliest picture

of pastoral life in England the greatest pastoral writer of Rome should be

quoted, not as a pastoralist, but as a magician.

Before the appearance of the angels, however, there is nothing to lead one

to expect this strange display of learning. A rougher, simpler set of

countrymen it would have been hard to find in the England of Chaucer and

Langland. In the shepherd-play known as _prima pastorum_ the comic element

consists mostly in quarrels and feasting among the shepherds, but in the

_secunda pastorum_ it constitutes a regular little three-scene farce,

which at its date was absolutely unique in literature. It is thence only a

step, and a very short one, to John Heywood's interludes--though it is a

step that took more than a century to accomplish.

The first shepherd comes in complaining of the hard weather; his fingers

are chapped, the storms blow from every quarter in turn. 'Sely shepardes,'

moreover, are put upon by any rich upstart and have no redress. A second

shepherd appears with another grumble: 'We sely wedmen dre mekyll wo.'

Some men, indeed, have been known to desire two wives or even three, but

most would sooner have none at all. Whereupon enters Daw, a third

shepherd, complaining of portents 'With mervels mo and mo.' 'Was never syn

noe floode sich floodys seyn'; even 'I se shrewys pepe'--apparently a

portentous omen. At this point Mak comes on the scene. He is a notorious

bad character of the neighbourhood, who boasts himself 'a yoman, I tell

you, of the king,' and complains that his wife eats him out of house and

home. The shepherds suspect him of designs upon their flocks, so when they

lie down to rest they place him the middle man of three. As soon, however,

as the shepherds are asleep--'that may ye all here'--Mak borrows a sheep

and makes off. Arrived at home he would like to eat the sheep at once, but

he is afraid of being followed, so the animal is put in the cradle and

wrapped up to resemble a baby, and Mak goes back to take his place among

the shepherds. Before long these awake and rouse Mak, who, pretending he

has dreamt that Gill his wife has been brought to bed of another child,

goes off home. The shepherds miss one of their sheep and, following him,

find Gill on the bed while Mak sings a lullaby at the cradle. They proceed

to search the house, Gill the while praying she may eat the child in the

cradle if ever she deceived them. They find nothing, and are about to

depart when Daw insists on kissing the new baby. Gill vows she saw the

child changed by an elf as the clock struck midnight, but Mak pleads

guilty and gets off with a blanketing.

So far, intentionally in the case of the drama, and if not intentionally

at least practically in that of the ballads, the appeal of the native

pastoral impulse--tradition it could hardly yet be called--was to an

audience little if at all removed from the actual condition of life

depicted. This ensured at least essential reality, for though in the one

case there may be idealization in a romantic and in the other in a

burlesque direction, either implies that familiarity with the actual world

which appears to underlie all vital art.[79] It was not long, however,

before the pastoral began to address itself to a more cultivated society,

and in so doing sacrificed that wholesome corrective of a genuinely

critical audience which is needed in the long run to keep any literary

form from degeneration. The impulse is still, however, found in all its

freshness and genuineness in such a poem as the following

fifteenth-century nativity carol, which, in its blending of piety and

humorous rusticity, is strongly reminiscent of the dramatic productions we

have just been reviewing:

The shepherd upon a hill he sat,

He had on him his tabard and his hat,

His tar-box, his pipe, and his flagat,

His name was called Jolly, Jolly Wat!

For he was a good herds-boy,

Ut hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy.

Can I not sing but hoy.

* * * * *

The shepherd on a hill he stood,

Round about him his sheep they yode,

He put his hand under his hood,

He saw a star as red as blood.

Ut hoy! &c.

* * * * *

Now must I go there Christ was born,

Farewell! I come again to-morn,

Dog, keep well my sheep fro the corn!

And warn well Warroke when I blow my horn!

Ut hoy! &c.[80]

So, again, in the delightful poem that has won for Robert Henryson the

title of the first English pastoralist the warm blood of natural feeling

yet runs full. _Robene and Makyne_ stands on the threshold of the

sixteenth century, a modest and pastoral counterpart of the _Nut-Brown

Maid_, as evidence that there were poets of purely native inspiration

capable of writing verses every whit as perfect in form as anything

produced by the Italianizers of the next generation, and commonly far more

genuine in feeling. Even in the work of Surrey and Wyatt themselves we

find poems which, were it not for the general tradition to which they

belong, one would have no difficulty in regarding as a natural development

and conventionalization of the native tendency. Such is the _Harpelus'

Complaint_ of 'Tottel's Miscellany.' This was originally printed among

the poems of uncertain authors, but when it re-appeared in _England's

Helicon_, in 1600, it was subscribed with Surrey's name. The ascription

does not carry with it much authority, but is in no way inherently

improbable.[81] The opening stanzas may be quoted as conveying a fair idea

of the whole, which sustains its character of sprightly elegance for over

a hundred lines, ending with the luckless Harpelus' epitaph:

Phylida was a fayer mayde,

And fresh as any flowre:

Whom Harpalus the herdman prayed

To be his paramour.

Harpalus and eke Corin

Were herdmen both yfere:

And Phillida could twist and spin

And therto sing full clere.

But Phillida was all to coy

For Harpelus to winne.

For Corin was her onely joye,

Who forst her not a pynne.[82]

The relation of the early Italianizers to pastoral is rather strange.

Pastoral names, imagery and conventions are freely scattered throughout

their works, yet with the exception of the above there is scarcely a poem

to which the term pastoral can be properly applied. They borrowed from

their models a kind of pastoral diction merely, not their partiality for

the form: 'shepherd' is with them merely another word for lover or poet,

while almost any act of such may be described as 'folding his sheep' or

the like. Allegory has reduced itself to a few stock phrases. In this

fashion Surrey complains to his fair Geraldine, and a whole company of

unknown lovers celebrate the cruelty and beauty of their ladies. It is

rarely that we catch a note of fresher reminiscence or more spontaneous

song as in Wyatt's:

Ah, Robin!

Joly Robin!

Tell me how thy leman doth!

Happily the seed of Phillida's coyness bore fruit, and the amorous

pastoral ballad or picture, a true _idyllion_, became a recognized type in

English verse. It certainly owed something to foreign pastoral models,

and, like the bulk of Elizabethan lyrics, a good deal to Italian poetry in

general; but in its freshness and variety, as in its tendency to narrative

form, it asserts its independence of any rigid tradition, and justifies us

in regarding it as an outcome of that native impulse which we have already

noticed. Such a poem is Nicholas Breton's ever charming _Phyllida and

Corydon_, printed above his signature in _England's Helicon_.[83] Although

we are thereby anticipating, it may be quoted as a representative specimen

of its kind:

In the merry month of May,

In a morn by break of day,

Forth I walk'd by a wood-side,

When as May was in his pride:

There I spièd all alone,

Phyllida and Corydone.

Much ado there was, God wot!

He would love and she would not.

She said, never man was true;

He said, none was false to you.

He said, he had loved her long;

She said, Love should have no wrong.

Corydon would kiss her then;

She said, maids must kiss no men,

Till they did for good and all;

Then she made the shepherd call

All the heavens to witness truth

Never loved a truer youth.

Thus with many a pretty oath,

Yea and nay, and faith and troth,

Such as silly shepherds use

When they will not Love abuse,

Love which had been long deluded

Was with kisses sweet concluded;

And Phyllida, with garlands gay,

Was made the lady of the May.

We must now turn to the beginnings of regular pastoral tradition in this

country, springing up under direct foreign influence and in conscious and

avowed imitation of specific foreign models. Passing over the Latin

eclogues of Buchanan and John Barclay, as belonging properly to the sphere

of humanistic rather than of English letters, we come to the pretty

thoroughly Latinized pastorals of Alexander Barclay and Barnabe Googe.

Their preoccupation with the humanistic poets is, in Barclay's case at any

rate, no less dominant a factor than in that of the regular translators,

from whom it is neither very easy nor clearly desirable to distinguish

them. Of the professed translators themselves it may be well to say a few

words in this place and allow them at once to resume their veil of

well-deserved oblivion. Their influence may be taken as non-existent, and

their only interest lies in the indication they afford of the trend of

literary fashion. The earliest was George Turberville, who in 1567

translated the first nine of Mantuan's eclogues into English fourteeners.

The verse is fairly creditable, but the exaggeration of style,

endeavouring by sheer brutality of phrase to force the moral judgement it

lacks the art of more subtly stimulating, produces neither a very pleasing

nor a very edifying effect. This translation went through three editions

before the end of the century. The whole ten eclogues did not find a

translator till 1656, when Thomas Harvey published a version in

decasyllabic couplets. The next poet to appear in English dress was

Theocritus, of whose works 'Six Idillia, that is, Six Small, or Petty,

Poems, or Aeglogues,' were translated by an anonymous hand and dedicated

to E. D.--probably or possibly Sir Edward Dyer--in 1588. As before, the

verse, mostly fourteeners, is far from bad, but the selection is not very

much to our purpose. Three of the pieces, a singing match, a love

complaint, and one of the Galatea poems, are more or less pastoral; but

the rest--among which is the dainty conceit of Venus and the boar well

rendered in a three-footed measure--do not belong to bucolic verse at all.

Incidental mention may be also made of a 'dialogue betwixt two sea nymphs,

Doris and Galatea, concerning Polyphemus, briefly translated out of

Lucian,' by Giles Fletcher the elder, in his _Licia_ of 1593; and a

version of 'The First Eidillion of Moschus describing Love,' in Barnabe

Barnes' _Parthenophil and Parthenophe_, which probably appeared the same

year. Lastly we have the Bucolics and Georgics of Vergil, translated in

1589 by Abraham Fleming into rimeless fourteeners.[84] Besides these there

are a few odd translations from Vergil among the experiments of the

classical versifiers. Webbe, in his _Discourse of English Poetry_ (1586),

gives hexametrical translations of the first and second eclogues, while

another version of the second in the same metre appears first in Fraunce's

_Lawyer's Logic_ (1588), and again with corrections in his _Ivychurch_

(1591).[85] Several further translations followed in the seventeenth

century.

But one step, and that a short one, removed from these writers is

Alexander Barclay, translater of Brandt's _Stultifera Navis_, priest and

monk successively of Ottery St. Mary, Ely, and Canterbury. It seems to

have been about 1514, when at the second of these houses, that he composed

at least the earlier and larger portion of his eclogues. They appeared at

various dates, the first complete edition being appended, long after the

writer's death, to the _Ship of Fools_ of 1570.[86] They are there headed

'Certayne Egloges of Alexander Barclay Priest, Whereof the first three

conteyne the misereyes of Courtiers and Courtes of all princes in

generall, Gathered out of a booke named in Latin, Miseriae Curialium,

compiled by Eneas Silvius[87] Poet and Oratour.' This sufficiently

indicates what we are to expect of Barclay as of the Latin eclogists of

the previous century. The interlocutors in these three poems are Coridon,

a young shepherd anxious to seek his fortune at court, and the old Cornix,

for whom the great world has long lost its glamour. The fourth eclogue,

'treating of the behavour of Rich men against Poets,' is similarly 'taken

out of' Mantuan. In it Barclay is supposed to have directed a not very

individual but pretty lusty satire against Skelton.[88] He also

introduces, as recited by one of the characters, 'The description of the

Towre of vertue and honour, into which the noble Howarde contended to

enter by worthy actes of chivalry,' a stanzaic composition in honour of

Sir Edward Howard, who died in 1513. The fifth eclogue, 'of the

disputation of Citizens and men of the Countrey,' or the _Cytezen and

Uplondyshman_, as it was originally styled, again presents us with a

familiar theme treated in the conventional manner, and closes the series.

These poems are written in what would be decasyllabic couplets were they

reducible to metre--in other words, in the barbarous caesural jangle in

which many poets of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries

imagined that they reproduced the music of Chaucer, and which, refashioned

however almost beyond recognition by a born metrist, we shall meet again

in the _Shepherd's Calender_. The following lines from the fifth eclogue

may serve to illustrate Barclay's style:

I shall not deny our payne and servitude,

I knowe that plowmen for the most part be rude,

Nowe shall I tell thee high matters true and olde,

Which curteous Candidus unto me once tolde,

Nought shall I forge nor of no leasing bable,

This is true history and no surmised fable.

It is in justice due to Barclay to say that the fact of his composing this

eclogue in the vernacular should possibly be counted to him as an original

step. The step had, indeed, been taken in Italy before he was born, but of

this he may, in spite of his travels, have been ignorant. Such credit as

attaches to the innovation should be allowed him.

A somewhat more independent writer is Barnabe Googe--writer, indeed, as

original, may be, as the lesser Latin pastoralists of the renaissance. The

fact of his altering the conventional forms to fit the mood of a sturdy

protestantism, of a protestantism still bitter from the Marian

persecutions, is scarcely to be regarded so much as evidence of his

invention as of the stability of literary tradition under the varying

forms imposed by external circumstances. The collection of his poems,

'imprinted at London' in 1563,[89] includes eight eclogues written in

fourteeners, the majority of which may fairly be said to represent Mantuan

adjusted to the conditions of contemporary life in reformation England.

Others show the influence of the author's visit to Spain in 1561-3. The

best that can be said for the verse and style is that they pursue their

'middle flight' on the whole modestly, and that the diction is at times

not without a touch of simple dignity. There are, moreover, moments of

genuine feeling when the author recalls the fires of Smithfield, and of

generous if naïve appreciation when he speaks of his predecessors in

English song. A brief summary of contents will give some idea of the

nature of these poems. The first recounts the pains of love; in the second

Dametas rails on the blind boy and ends his song by dying. The third

treats of the vices of the city, not the least of them being religious

persecution. In the next Melibeus relates how Dametas, having as we now

learn killed himself for love, appeared to him amid hell-fire. Eclogue V

contains the pitiful tale of Faustus who courted Claudia through the

agency of Valerius. Claudia unfortunately fell in love with the messenger,

and finding him faithful to his master slew herself. This is imitated, in

part closely, from the tale of the shepherdess Felismena in the second

book of Montemayor's _Diana_, the identical story upon which Shakespeare

is supposed ultimately to have founded his _Two Gentlemen of Verona_,

though it is difficult at first sight to trace much resemblance between

the play and Googe's poem. In the sixth eclogue Faustus--the Don Felix of

the Spanish and the Proteus of Shakespeare--himself appears, for no better

reason it would seem than to give his interlocutor an opportunity of

enlarging on the delights of country life and introducing the remarks on

fowling borrowed from Sannazzaro by way of Garcilaso's second eclogue. The

next is a discussion somewhat after the manner of the _Nut-Brown Maid_,

again paraphrased from the _Diana_ (Book I); while the eighth, lastly, is

a homily on the superiority of Christianity over Roman polytheism, in

which under obsolete forms the author no doubt intended an allusion to

contemporary controversies. Thus it will be seen that Googe follows Latin

and Spanish traditions almost exclusively: the only point in which it is

possible to see any native inspiration is in his partiality for some sort

of narrative ballad motive as the subject of his poems.

So far the literary quality to be registered has not been high among those

owing allegiance to the regular pastoral tradition. The next step to be

taken is a long one. The pastoral writings of Spenser not only themselves

belong to a very different order of work, but likewise brings us face to

face with literary problems of a most complex and interesting kind.

II

In the _Shepherd's Calender_ we have the one pastoral composition in

English literature which can boast first-rate historical importance. There

are not a few later productions in the kind which may be reasonably held

to surpass it in poetic merit, but all alike sink into insignificance by

the side of Spenser's eclogues when the influence they exercised on the

history of English verse is taken into account. The present is not of

course the place to discuss this wider influence of Spenser's work: it is

with its relation to pastoral tradition and its influence upon subsequent

pastoral work that we are immediately concerned. This is an aspect of the

_Shepherd's Calender_ to which literary historians have naturally devoted

less attention. These two reasons--namely, the intrinsic importance of the

work and the neglect of its pastoral bearing--must excuse a somewhat

lengthy treatment of a theme that may possibly be regarded as already

sufficiently familiar.

The _Shepherd's Calender_[90], which first appeared in 1579, was published

without author's name, but with an envoy signed 'Immerito.' It was

dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, and contained a commentary by one E. K.,

who also signed an epistle to Master Gabriel Harvey, fellow of Pembroke

College, Cambridge. 'Immerito' was a name used by Spenser in his familiar

correspondence with Harvey, and can in any case have presented no mystery

to his Cambridge friends. Among these must clearly be reckoned the

commentator E. K., who may be identified with one Edward Kirke with all

but absolute certainty.[91] Within certain well defined limits we may also

accept E. K. as a competent exponent of his friend's work, and his

identity, together with that of Rosalind and Menalcas, being matters of

but indirect literary interest, may be left to Spenser's editors and

biographers to fight over. It will be sufficient to add in this place that

however 'literary' may have been Spenser's attachment to Rosalind there is

no reason to suppose that she was not a real person, while however little

response his advances may have met with there _is_ reason to suppose that

his sorrow at their rejection was not wholly conventional.

Spenser's design in turning his attention to the pastoral form would not

seem hard to apprehend. Less readily may we suppose that any deep

philosophical impulse directed his mind towards certain modes of

expression, than that in an age of catholic experiment he turned from the

penning of impossible iambic trimeters, 'minding,' as E. K. directly

informs us, 'to furnish our tongue with this kind, wherein it faulteth.'

He was qualified for the task by a wide knowledge of previous pastoral

writers from Theocritus and Bion down to Marot, and deliberately ranged

himself in line with the previous poets of the regular pastoral

tradition. Yet we find side by side in his work two distinct and

apparently antagonistic though equally conscious tendencies; the one

towards authority, leading him to borrow motives freely and even to resort

to direct paraphrase; the other towards individuality, nationality,

freedom, informing his general scheme and regulating the language of his

imaginary swains. It is this double nature of his pastoral work that

justifies us as regarding him, in spite of his alleged orthodoxy, as in

reality the first of a series of English writers who combined the

traditions of regular pastoral with the wayward graces of native

inspiration. It is true that in Spenser the natural pastoral impulse has

lost the spontaneity of the earlier examples, and has passed into the

realm of conscious and deliberate art; but it is none the less there,

modifying the conventional form. The individual debts owed by Spenser to

earlier writers have been collected with admirable learning and industry

by scholars such as Kluge and Reissert[92], but the investigation of his

originality presents at once a more interesting and more important field

of inquiry. So, indeed, Spenser himself appears to have thought, for the

only direct acknowledgement he makes in the work is to Chaucer, although,

as a writer to whom the humours of criticism are ever present has

remarked, 'it might almost seem that Spenser borrowed from Chaucer nothing

but his sly way of acknowledging indebtedness chiefly where it was not

due.'

The chief point of originality in the _Calender_ is the attempt at linking

the separate eclogues into a connected series. We have already seen how

with Googe the same characters recur in a sort of shadowy story; but what

was in his case vague and almost unintentional becomes with Spenser a

central artistic motive of the piece. The eclogues are arranged with no

small skill and care on somewhat of an architectural design, or perhaps we

should rather say with somewhat of the symmetry of a geometrical pattern.

This will best be seen in a brief analysis of the several eclogues,

'proportionable,' as the title is careful to inform us, 'to the twelve

monethes.'

In the 'January,' a monologue, Spenser, under the disguise of Colin

Clout, laments the ill-success of his love for Rosalind, who meets his

advances with scorn. He also alludes to his friendship with Harvey, who is

introduced throughout under the name of Hobbinol. The 'February' is a

disputation between youth and age in the persons of Cuddie and Thenot. It

introduces the fable of the oak and the briar, in which, since he ascribes

it to Tityrus, a name he transferred from Vergil to Chaucer, Spenser

presumably imagined he was imitating that poet, though it is really no

more in the style of Chaucer than is the roughly accentual measure in

which the eclogue is composed. For the 'March' Spenser recasts in English

surroundings Bion's fantasy of the fight with Cupid, without however

achieving any conspicuous success. In the April eclogue Hobbinol recites

to the admiring Thenot Colin's lay

Of fayre Eliza, Queene of shepheardes all,

Which once he made as by a spring he laye,

And tuned it unto the Waters fall.

This lay is in an intricate lyrical stanza which Spenser shows

considerable skill in handling. The following lines, for instance, already

show the musical modulation characteristic of much of his best work:

See, where she sits upon the grassie greene,

(O seemely sight!)

Yclad in Scarlot, like a mayden Queene,

And ermines white:

Upon her head a Cremosin coronet,

With Damaske roses and Daffadillies set:

Bay leaves betweene,

And primroses greene,

Embellish the sweete Violet.

In the 'May' we return to the four-beat accentual measure, this time

applied to a discussion by the herdsmen Palinode and Piers of the

lawfulness of Sunday sports and the corruption of the clergy. Here we have

a common theme treated from an individual point of view. The eclogue is

interesting as showing that the author, whose opinions are placed in the

mouth of the precise Piers; belonged to what Ben Jonson later styled 'the

sourer sort of shepherds.' A fable is again introduced which is of a

pronounced Aesopic cast. In the 'June' we return to the love-motive of

Rosalind, which, though alluded to in the April eclogue, has played no

prominent part since January. It is a dialogue between Colin and Hobbinol,

in which the former recounts his final defeat and the winning of Rosalind

by Menalcas. This eclogue contains Spenser's chief tribute to Chaucer:

The God of shepheards, Tityrus, is dead,

Who taught me homely, as I can, to make;

He, whilst he lived, was the soveraigne head

Of shepheards all that bene with love ytake:

Well couth he wayle his Woes, and lightly slake

The flames which love within his heart had bredd,

And tell us mery tales to keepe us wake

The while our sheepe about us safely fedde.

The July eclogue again leads us into the realm of ecclesiastical politics.

It is a disputation between upland and lowland shepherds, the descendant

therefore of Mantuan and Barclay, though the use of 'high places' as

typifying prelatical pride appears to be original. The confusion of things

Christian and things pagan, of classical mythology with homely English

scenery, nowhere reaches a more extravagant pitch than here. Morrell, the

advocate of the old religion, defends the hills with the ingeniously

wrong-headed argument:

And wonned not the great God Pan

Upon mount Olivet,

Feeding the blessed flocke of Dan,

Which dyd himselfe beget?

or else, gazing over the Kentish downs, he announces that

Here han the holy Faunes recourse,

And Sylvanes haunten rathe;

Here has the salt Medway his source,

Wherein the Nymphes doe bathe.

In the 'August' Spenser again handles a familiar theme with more or less

attempt at novelty. Willie and Peregot meeting on the green lay wagers in

orthodox fashion, and, appointing Cuddie judge, begin their singing

match. The 'roundel' that follows, a song inserted in the midst of

decasyllabic stanzas, is composed of alternate lines sung by the two

competitors. The verse is of the homeliest; indeed it is only a rollicking

indifference to its own inanity that saves it from sheer puerility and

gives it a careless and as it were impromptu charm of its own. Even in an

age of experiment it must have needed some self-confidence to write the

dialect of the _Calender_; it must have required nothing less than

assurance to put forth such verses as the following:

It fell upon a holy eve,

Hey, ho, hollidaye!

When holy fathers wont to shrieve;

Now gynneth this roundelay.

Sitting upon a hill so hye,

Hey, ho, the high hyll!

The while my flocke did feede thereby;

The while the shepheard selfe did spill.

I saw the bouncing Bellibone,

Hey, ho, Bonibell!

Tripping over the dale alone,

She can trippe it very well.

Many a reader of the anonymous quarto of 1579 must have joined in Cuddie's

exclamation:

Sicker, sike a roundel never heard I none!

Sidney, we know, was not altogether pleased with the homeliness of the

verses dedicated to him; and there must have been not a few among

Spenser's academic friends to feel a certain incongruity between the

polished tradition of the Theocritean singing match and the present poem.

Moreover, as if to force the incongruity upon the notice of the least

sensitive of his readers, Spenser followed up the ballad with a poem which

is not only practically free from obsolete or dialectal phrasing, but

which is composed in the wearisomely pedantic _sestina_ form. This song is

attributed to Colin, whose love for Rosalind is again mentioned.

Passing to the 'September' we find an eclogue of the 'wise shepherd' type.

It is composed in the rough accentual metre, and opens with a couplet

which roused the ire of Dr. Johnson:

Diggon Davie! I bidde her god day;

Or Diggon her is, or I missaye.

Diggon is a shepherd, who, in hope of gain, drove his flock into a far

country, and coming home the poorer, relates to Hobbinol the evil ways of

foreign shepherds among whom,

playnely to speake of shepheards most what,

Badde is the best.

The 'October' eclogue belongs to the stanzaic group, and consists of a

dialogue on the subject of poetry between the shepherds Piers and Cuddie.

It is one of the most imaginative of the series, and in it Spenser has

refashioned time-honoured themes with more conspicuous taste than

elsewhere. The old complaint for the neglect of poetry acquires new life

through the dramatic contrast of the two characters in which opposite

sides of the poetic temperament are revealed. In Cuddie we have a poet for

whom the prize is more than the praise[93], whose inspiration is cramped

because of the indifference of a worldly court and society. Things were

not always so--

But ah! Mecaenas is yclad in claye,

And great Augustus long ygoe is dead,

And all the worthies liggen wrapt in leade,

That matter made for Poets on to play.

And in the same strain he laments over what might have been his song:

Thou kenst not, Percie, howe the ryme should rage,

O! if my temples were distaind with wine,

And girt with girlonds of wild Yvie twine,

How I could reare the Muse on stately stage,

And teache her tread aloft in buskin fine,

With queint Bellona in her equipage!

Reading these words to-day they may well seem to us the charter of the new

age of England's song; and the effect is rendered all the more striking

by the rhythm of the last line with its prophecy of Marlowe and mighty

music to come. Piers, on the other hand, though with less poetic rage, is

a truer idealist, and approaches the high things of poetry more

reverentially than his Bacchic comrade. When Cuddie, acknowledging his own

unworthiness, adds:

For Colin fittes such famous flight to scanne;

He, were he not with love so ill bedight,

Would mount as high, and sing as soote as Swanne;

Piers breaks out in words fitting the poet of the _Hymnes_:

Ah, fon! for love doth teach him climbe so hie,

And lyftes him up out of the loathsome myre.

And throughout this high discourse the homely names of Piers and Cuddie

seem somehow more appropriate, or at least touch us more nearly, than

Mantuan's Sylvanus and Candidus, as if, in spite of all Spenser owes to

foreign models, he were yet conscious of a latent power of simple native

inspiration, capable, when once fully awakened, of standing up naked and

unshamed in the presence of Italy and Greece. One might well question

whether there is not more of the true spirit of prophecy in this poem of

Spenser's than ever went to the composition of Vergil's _Pollio_.

The 'November,' like the 'April,' consists for the most part of a lay

composed in an elaborate stanza--there a panegyric, here an elegy. This

time it is sung by Colin himself, and we again find reference to the

Rosalind motive. The subject of the threnody is a nymph of the name of

Dido, whose identity can only be vaguely conjectured. The chief point of

external form in which Spenser has departed from his model, namely Marot's

dirge for Loyse de Savoye, and from other pastoral elegies, is in the use

of a different form of verse in the actual lament from that in which the

setting of the poem is composed. Otherwise he has followed tradition none

the less closely for having infused the conventional form with a poetry of

his own. The change by which the lament passes into the song of rejoicing

is traditional--and though borrowed by Spenser from Marot, is as old as

Vergil. Both Browne and Milton later made use of the same device. Spenser

writes:

Why wayle we then? why weary we the Gods with playnts,

As if some evill were to her betight?

She raignes a goddesse now emong the saintes,

That whilome was the saynt of shepheards light,

And is enstalled nowe in heavens hight.

I see thee, blessed soule, I see

Walke in Elisian fieldes so free.

O happy herse!

Might I once come to thee, (O that I might!)

O joyfull verse!

Although some critics, looking too exclusively to the poetic merit of the

_Calender_ as the cause of its importance, have perhaps overestimated the

beauty of this and the April lyrics, the skill with which the intricate

stanzas are handled must be apparent to any careful reader. As the

_Calender_ in poetry generally, so even more decidedly in their own

department, do these songs mark a distinct advance in formal evolution.

Just as they were themselves foreshadowed in the recurrent melody of

Wyatt's farewell to his lute--

My lute, awake! perform the last

Labour that thou and I shall waste,

And end that I have now begun;

For when this song is sung and past,

My lute, be still, for I have done--

so they in their turn heralded the full strophic sonority of the

_Epithalamium_.

Lastly, in the 'December' we have the counterpart of the January eclogue,

a monologue in which Colin laments his wasted life and joyless, for

Winter is come, that blowes the balefull breath,

And after Winter commeth timely death.

Adieu, delightes, that lulled me asleepe;

Adieu, my deare, whose love I bought so deare;

Adieu, my little Lambes and loved sheepe;

Adieu, ye Woodes, that oft my witnesse were:

Adieu, good Hobbinoll, that was so true,

Tell Rosalind, her Colin bids her adieu.[94]

It will be seen from the above analysis that the architectonic basis of

Spenser's design consists of the three Colin eclogues standing

respectively at the beginning, in the middle, and at the close of the

year. These are symmetrically arranged: the 'January' and 'December' are

both alike monologues and agree in the stanza used, while the 'June' is a

dialogue and likewise differs in metrical form. This latter is supported

as it were by two subsidiary eclogues, those of April and August, in both

of which another shepherd sings one of Colin's lays and refers

incidentally to his passion for Rosalind. It is upon this framework that

are woven the various moral, polemical, and idyllic themes which Spenser

introduces. The attempt at uniting a series of poems into a single fabric

is Spenser's chief contribution to the formal side of pastoral

composition. The method by which he sought to correlate the various parts

so as to produce the singleness of impression necessary to a work of art,

and the measure of success which he achieved, though they belong more

strictly to the general history of poetry, must also detain us for a

moment. The chief and most obvious device is that suggested by the

title--_The Shepherd's Calender_--'Conteyning twelve Aeglogues

proportionable to the twelve monethes.' This might, indeed, have been no

more than a fanciful name for any series of twelve poems;[95] with Spenser

it indicates a conscious principle of artistic construction. It suggests,

what is moreover apparent from the eclogues themselves, that the author

intended to represent the spring and fall of the year as typical of the

life of man. The moods of the various poems were to be made to correspond

with the seasons represented; or, conversely, outward nature in its cycle

through the year was to reflect and thereby unify the emotions, thoughts,

and passions of the shepherds. This was a perfectly legitimate artistic

device, and one based on a fundamental principle of our nature, since the

appearance of objective phenomena is ever largely modified and coloured by

subjective feeling. Nor can it reasonably be objected against the device

that in the hands of inferior craftsmen it degenerates but too readily

into the absurdities of the 'pathetic fallacy,' or that Spenser himself is

not wholly guiltless of the charge.

Winter is come, that blowes the balefull breath,

And after Winter commeth timely death.

These lines bear witness to Spenser's intention. But the conceit is not

fully or consistently carried out. In several of the eclogues not only

does the subject in no way reflect the mood of the season--the very nature

of the theme at times made this impossible--but the time of year is not so

much as mentioned. This is more especially the case in the summer months;

there is no joy of the 'hygh seysoun,' and when it is mentioned it is

rather by way of contrast than of sympathy. Thus in June Colin mourns for

other days:

Tho couth I sing of love, and tune my pype

Unto my plaintive pleas in verses made:

Tho would I seeke for Queene-apples unrype,

To give my Rosalind; and in Sommer shade

Dight gaudy Girlonds was my common trade,

To crowne her golden locks: but yeeres more rype,

And losse of her, whose love as lyfe I wayd,

Those weary wanton toyes away dyd wype.

In the same eclogue we may trace a deliberate contrast between various

descriptive passages. Thus Hobbinol feels the magie of the summer woods--

Colin, to heare thy rymes and roundelayes,

Which thou were wont on wastfull hylls to singe,

I more delight then larke in Sommer dayes:

Whose Echo made the neyghbour groves to ring,

And taught the byrds, which in the lower spring

Did shroude in shady leaves from sonny rayes,

Frame to thy songe their chereful cheriping,

Or hold theyr peace, for shame of thy swete layes.

Closely following upon this stanza we have Colin's lament, 'The God of

shepheards, Tityrus, is dead,' containing the lines:

But, if on me some little drops would flowe

Of that the spring was in his learned hedde,

I soone would learne these woods to wayle my woe,

And teache the trees their trickling teares to shedde.

We have here a specifie inversion of the 'pathetic fallacy.' The moods of

nature are no longer represented as varying in sympathy with the passions

of man, but are deliberately used to heighten an effect by contrast. Even

this inverted correspondence, however, is for the most part lacking in the

subsequent eclogues, and it must be admitted that in so far as Spenser

depended on a cyclic correlation for the unifying of his design, he

achieved at best but partial effect. Another means by which he sought,

consciously or unconsciously, to produce unity of impression was by

consistently pitching his song in the minor key. This accounts for the

inverted correspondence just noted, and for the fact that even the

polemics have an undercurrent of regret in them. In this case the poet has

undoubtedly succeeded in carrying out the prevailing mood of the central

motive--the Rosalind drama--in the subsidiary scenes. Or should we not

rather say that he has extracted the general mood of the whole

composition, and infused it, in a kind of typical form, into the three

connected poems placed at critical points of the complex structure? The

unity, however, thus aimed at, and achieved, is very different from the

cyclic or architectonic unity described above, and of a much less definite

character.

It remains to say a few words concerning the language of the _Calender_

and the rough accentual metre in which parts of it are composed, since

both have a particular bearing upon Spenser's attitude towards pastoral in

general.

Ben Jonson, in one of those utterances which have won for him the

reputation of churlishness, but which are often marked by acute critical

sense, asserted that Spenser 'in affecting the Ancients writ no

Language.'[96] The remark applies first and foremost, of course, to the

_Calender_, and opens up the whole question of archaism and provincialism

in literature. This is far too wide a question to receive adequate

treatment here, and yet it appears forced upon us by the nature of the

case. For Spenser's archaism, in his pastoral work at least, is no

unmeaning affectation as Jonson implies. He perceived that the language of

Chaucer bore a closer resemblance to actual rustic speech than did the

literary language of his own day, and he adopted it for his imaginary

shepherds as a fitting substitute for the actual folk-tongue with which he

had grown familiar, whether in the form of rugged Lancashire or

full-mouthed Kentish. And the homely dialect does undoubtedly naturalize

the characters of his eclogues, and disguise the time-honoured platitudes

that they repeat from their learned predecessors. With our wider

appreciation of literary effect, and our more historical and less

authoritative manner of judging works of art, we can no longer endorse

Sidney's famous criticism:[97] 'That same framing of his stile, to an old

rustick language, I dare not alowe, sith neyther Theocritus in Greeke,

Virgill in Latine, nor Sanazar in Italian, did affect it.'[98] If a writer

finds an effective and picturesque word in an old author or in a homely

dialect it is but pedantry that opposes its use, and it matters little

moreover from what quarter of the land it may hail, as Stevenson knew when

he claimed the right of mingling Ayrshire with his Lothian verse. Even

such archaisms as 'deemen' and 'thinken,' such colloquialisms as the

pronominal possessive, need not be too severely criticized. What goes far

towards justifying Jonson's acrimony is the wanton confusion of different

dialectal forms; the indiscriminate use for the mere sake of archaism of

such variants as 'gate' beside the usual 'goat,' of 'sike' and 'sich'

beside 'such'; the coining of words like 'stanck,' apparently from the

Italian _stanco_; and lastly, the introduction of forms which owe their

origin to mere etymological ignorance, for instance, 'yede' as an

infinitive, 'behight' in the same sense as the simple verb, 'betight,'

'gride,' and many others--all of which do not tend to produce the homely

effect of mother English, but reek of all that is pedantic and

unnatural.[99]

The influence of Chaucer was not confined to the language: from him

Spenser borrowed the metre of a considerable portion of the _Calender_. It

may at first sight appear strange to attribute to imitation of Chaucer's

smooth, carefully ordered verse the rather rugged measure of, say, the

February eclogue, but a little consideration will, I fancy, leave no doubt

upon the subject. This measure is roughly reducible to four beats with a

varying number of syllables in the _theses_, being thus purely accentual

as distinguished from the more strictly syllabic measures of Chaucer

himself on the one hand and the English Petrarchists on the other. Take

the following example:

The soveraigne of seas he blames in vaine,

That, once sea-beate, will to sea againe:

So loytring live you little heardgroomes,

Keeping you beastes in the budded broomes:

And, when the shining sunne laugheth once,

You deemen the Spring is come attonce;

Tho gynne you, fond flyes! the cold to scorne,

And, crowing in pypes made of greene corn,

You thinken to be Lords of the yeare;

But eft, when ye count you freed from feare,

Cornes the breme Winter with chamfred browes,

Full of wrinckles and frostie furrowes,

Drerily shooting his stormy darte,

Which cruddles the blood and pricks the harte:

Then is your carelesse corage accoied,

Your careful heards with cold bene annoied:

Then paye you the price of your surquedrie,

With weeping, and wailing, and misery.[100]

The syllabic value of the final _e_, already weakening in the London of

Chaucer's later days, was more or less of an archaism even with his most

immediate followers, none of whom use it with his unvarying correctness,

and it soon became literally a dead letter. The change was a momentous

one for English prosody, and none of the fifteenth-century writers

possessed sufficient poetic genius to adapt their verse to the altered

conditions of the language. They lived from hand to mouth, as it were,

without arriving at any systematic tradition. Thus it was that at the

beginning of the sixteenth century Hawes could write such verse as:

Of dame Astronomy I dyd take my lycence

For to travayle to the toure of Chyvalry;

For al my minde, wyth percyng influence,

Was sette upon the most fayre lady

La Bell Pucell, so muche ententyfly,

That every daye I dyd thinke fyftene,

Tyl I agayne had her swete person sene.[101]

It is this prosody, dependent usually upon a strong caesural pause to

differentiate it from prose, which may account for the harshness of some

of Wyatt's verse, and which rendered possible the barbarous metre of

Barclay. It was obviously impossible for a poet with an ear like Spenser

to accept such a metrical scheme as this; but his own study of Chaucer

produced a somewhat strange result. The one point which the late

Chaucerians preserved of their master's metric was the five-stress

character of his decasyllabic line; but in Spenser's day all memory of the

syllabic _e_ had long since vanished, and the only rhythm to be extracted

from Chaucer's verse was of a four-stress type. Professor Herford quotes a

passage from the Prologue of the _Canterbury Tales_ as it appears in

Thynne's second edition (1542), which Spenser would inevitably have read

as follows:

When zéphirus éke wyth hýs sote bréth

Enspýred hath évery hólte and héth,

The téndre cróppes, and the yóng sónne

Háth in the Rám halfe hys cóurse yrónne,

And smále foules máken mélodýe

That slépen al nýght with ópen éye, &c.

This certainly bears on the face of it a close resemblance to Spenser's

measure. There are, moreover, occasional difficulties in this method of

scansion, some lines refusing to accommodate themselves to the Procrustean

methods of sixteenth-century editors, and exactly similar anomalies are to

be found in Spenser. Such, for instance, are the lines in the May eclogue:

Tho opened he the dore, and in came

The false Foxe, as he were starke lame.

Now these lines may be written in strict Chaucerian English thus:

Tho openëd he the dore, and innë came

The falsë fox, as he were starkë lamë,

and they at once become perfectly metrical. Under these circumstances

there can, I think, be little doubt as to the literary parentage of

Spenser's accentual measure.[102]

Like the archaic dialect, this homely measure tends to bring Spenser's

shepherds closer to their actual English brethren. And hereby, it should

be frankly acknowledged, the incongruity of the speakers and their

discourse is emphasized and increased. That discourse, it is true, runs on

pastoral themes, but the disguise and allegory have worn thin with

centuries of use. We can no longer separate the words from the allusions,

and consequently we can no longer accept the speakers in their

unsophisticated shepherd's rôle. Yet it was precisely the desire to give

reality to these transparent phantasms that led Spenser to endow them with

a rustic speech. Whether he failed or succeeded the paradox of the form

remains about equal.[103]

The importance of the _Shepherd's Calender_ was early recognized, not

only by friendly critics, but by the general public likewise, and six

editions were called for in less than twenty years. Not long after its

appearance John Dove, a Christ Church man, who appears to have been

ignorant of the authorship, turned the whole into Latin verse, dedicating

the manuscript to the Dean.[104] Another Latin version is found in

manuscript in the British Museum copy of the edition of 1597, and after

undergoing careful revision finally appeared in print in 1653. This was

the work of one Bathurst, a fellow of Spenser's own college of Pembroke at

Cambridge.[105]

The _Shepherd's Calender_ was Spenser's chief contribution to pastoral;

indeed it was by so much his most important contribution that it would

hardly be worth while examining the others did they not bear witness to a

certain change in his attitude towards the pastoral ideal.

The first of these later works is the isolated but monumental eclogue

entitled _Colin Clouts come Home again_, of which the dedication to

Raleigh is dated 1591, though it was not published till four years later.

This, perhaps the longest and most elaborate eclogue ever written,

describes how the Shepherd of the Ocean, that is Raleigh, induced Colin

Clout, who as before represents Spenser, to leave his rustic retreat in

the cooly shade

Of the greene alders by the Mallaes shore,

and try his fortune at the court of the great shepherdess Cynthia, and how

he ultimately returned to Ireland. The verse marks, as might be expected,

a considerable advance in smoothness and command of rhythm over the

non-lyrical portions of the _Calender_, and the dialect, too, is much less

harsh, being far advanced towards that peculiar poetic diction which

Spenser adopted in his more ambitions work. On the other hand, in spite of

a certain _allegrezza_ in the handling, and in spite of the Rosalind wound

being at least partially healed, the same minor key prevails as in the

earlier poems. In the spring of the great age of English song Spenser's

note is like the voice of autumn, not the fruitful autumn of cornfield and

orchard, but a premature barrenness of wet and fallen leaves--

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall.

Thus though time has purged the bitterness of his sorrow, the regret

remains; his early love is still the mistress of his thoughts, but years

have softened his reproaches, and he admits:

who with blame can justly her upbrayd,

For loving not; for who can love compell?--

a petard, it may be incidentally remarked, which, sprung within the bounds

of pastoral, is of power to pulverize in an instant the whole artificial

system of amatory ethics.

The most notable points in the poem are the loves of the rivers Bregog and

Mulla, the famous list of contemporary poets, and the presentation of the

seamy side of court life, recalling the more direct satire of the probably

contemporary _Mother Hubberd's Tale_. The first of these belongs to the

class of Ovidian myths already noticed in such works as Lorenzo's _Ambra_.

The subject, however, is treated in a more subtly allegorical manner than

by Ovid's direct imitators, and this mode of presentment likewise

characterizes Spenser's tale of Molanna in the fragment on

Mutability.[106] Browne returned to a more crudely metamorphical tradition

in the loves of Walla and Tavy, while a similarly mythological

_Naturanschauung_ may be traced in Drayton's chorographical epic.

Of the miscellaneous _Astrophel_, edited and in part composed by Spenser,

which was appended to _Colin Clout_, and of the _Daphnaïda_ published in

1596, though, like the former volume, containing a dedication dated 1591,

a passing mention must suffice. The former is chiefly remarkable as

illustrating the uniformly commonplace character of the verse called forth

by the death of one who, while he lived, was held the glory of Elizabethan

chivalry. It contains, beside other verse, pastoral elegies from the pens,

certainly of Spenser, and probably of the Countess of Pembroke, Matthew

Roydon, and Lodowick Bryskett. The last-named, or at any rate a

contributor with the same initiais, also supplied a 'Pastorall Aeglogue'

on the same theme. _Daphnaïda_ is a long lament in pastoral form on the

death of Douglas Howard, daughter of the Earl of Northampton.

Of far greater importance for our present purpose is the pastoral

interlude in the quest of Sir Calidore, which occupies the last four

cantos of the sixth book of the _Faery Queen_.[107] Here is told how Sir

Calidore, the knight of courtesy, in his quest of the Blatant Beast came

among the shepherd-folk and fell in love with the fair Pastorella, reputed

daughter of old Meliboee; how he won her love in return through his valour

and courtesy; how while he was away hunting she was carried off by a band

of robbers; how he followed and rescued her; and finally, how she was

discovered to be the daughter of the lord of Belgard--at which point the

poem breaks off abruptly. The story has points of resemblance with the

Dorastus and Fawnia, or Florizel and Perdita, legend; but it also has

another and more important claim upon our attention. For as Shakespeare in

_As You Like It_, so Spenser in this episode has, as it were, passed

judgement upon the pastoral ideal as a whole. He is acutely sensitive to

the charm of that ideal and the seductions it offers to his hero--

Ne, certes, mote he greatly blamed be,

says the poet of the _Faery Queen_ recalling the days when he was plain

Colin Clout--but the

perfect pleasures, which do grow

Amongst poore hyndes, in hils, in woods, in dales,

are not allowed to afford more than a temporary solace to the knight; the

robbers break in upon the rustic quietude, rapine and murder succeed the

peaceful occupations of the shepherds, and Sir Calidore is driven once

again to resume his arduous quest. The same idea may be traced in the

knight's visit to the heaven-haunted hill where he meets Colin Clout. In

the

hundred naked maidens lilly white

All raunged in a ring and dauncing in delight

to the sound of Colin's bagpipe, and who, together with the Graces and

their sovereign lady, vanish at the knight's approach, it is surely not

fanciful to see the gracious shadows of the idyllic poet's vision trooping

reluctantly away at the call of a more lofty theme. With this sense of

regret at the vanishing of an ideal long cherished, but at last

deliberately abandoned for matters of deeper and more real import, we may

turn from the work of the most important figure in English pastoral poetry

to his less famous contemporaries.

III

Besides its wider influence on English verse, and the stimulus it gave to

pastoral composition as a whole, the _Shepherd's Calender_ called forth a

series of direct imitations. Of these the majority are but of accidental

and ephemeral interest and of inconspicuous merit; and it is probable that

Spenser himself lived to see the end of this over-direct school of

discipleship. Several examples appeared in Francis Davison's famous

miscellany known as the _Poetical Rhapsody_, the first edition of which,

though it only appeared in 1602, contained the gleanings of the entire

sixteenth century.[108] Of these imitations, four in number, the first,

the work of the editor himself, is a very poor production. It is a love

lament, and the insertion of a song in a complicated lyrical measure in a

plain stanzaic setting is evidently copied from the _Calender_. The other

three poems are ascribed, either in the _Rhapsody_ itself or in Davison's

manuscript list, to a certain A. W., who so far remains unidentified, if,

indeed, the letters conceal any individuality and do not merely stand for

'Anonymous Writer,' as has been sometimes thought. The three eclogues at

any rate bear evidence of coming from the same pen, and the following

lines show that the writer was no incompetent imitator, and at the same

time argue some genuine feeling:

Thou 'ginst as erst forget thy former state,

And range amid the busks thyself to feed:

Fair fall thee, little flock! both rathe and late;

Was never lover's sheep that well did speed.

Thou free, I bound; thou glad, I pine in pain;

I strive to die, and thou to live full fain.

The first of these poems is a monologue 'entitled Cuddy,' modelled on the

January eclogue. The second is a lament 'made long since upon the death of

Sir Philip Sidney,' in which the writer wonders at Colin's silence, and

which consequently must, at least, date from before the appearance of

_Astrophel_ in 1595, and is probably some years earlier. It is in the form

of a dialogue between two shepherds, one of whom sings Cuddy's lament in

lyrical stanzas, thus recalling Spenser's 'November.' These stanzas do not

reveal any great metrical gift. The last poem is a fragment 'concerning

old age,' which connects itself by its theme with the February eclogue,

though the form is stanzaic.[109] Again we find mention of Cuddy, a name

evidently assumed by the author, though whether he can be identified with

the Cuddie of the _Calender_ it is impossible to say. Whoever he was, he

shows more disposition than most of his fellow imitators to preserve

Spenser's archaisms.

But undoubtedly the greatest poet who was content to follow immediately

in Spenser's footsteps was Michael Drayton, who in 1593 published a volume

entitled 'Idea The Shepheards Garland, Fashioned in nine Eglogs. Rowlands

Sacrifice to the nine Muses.' This connexion between the number of the

eclogues and the muses is purely fanciful; Rowland is Drayton's pastoral

name, and Idea, which re-appeared as the title of the 1594 volume of

sonnets, is that of his poetic mistress.[110] It can hardly be said that

the verse of these poems attains any very high order of merit, but the

imitation of Spenser is evident throughout. In the first eclogue Rowland

bewails, in the midst of spring, 'the winter of his grief.' In this and

the corresponding monologue at the end he clearly follows Spenser's

arrangement and likewise adopts his minor key--

Fayre Philomel, night-musicke of the spring,

Sweetly recordes her tunefull harmony,

And with deepe sobbes, and dolefull sorrowing,

Before fayre Cinthya actes her Tragedy.

In Eclogue II a 'wise' shepherd warns a youth against love, and draws a

somewhat gruesome picture of human fate--

And when the bell is readie to be tol'd

To call the wormes to thine Anatomie,

Remember then, my boy, what once I said to thee!

Even this, however, fails to shake the lover's faith in the gentle

passion, and his enthusiasm finds vent in an apostrophe borrowed from

Spenser:

Oh divine love, which so aloft canst raise,

And lift the minde out of this earthly mire.

The next eclogue, containing a panegyric on Elizabeth under the name of

Beta, is closely modelled on the 'April,' and abounds with such

reminiscences as the following:

Make her a goodly Chapilet of azur'd Colombine,

And wreath about her Coronet with sweetest Eglantine:

Bedeck our Beta all with Lillies,

And the dayntie Daffadillies,

With Roses damask, white, and red, and fairest flower delice,

With Cowslips of Jerusalem, and cloves of Paradice.

Here, however, Drayton shows himself more skilful in dealing with a

lyrical stanza than most of his fellow imitators. In the fourth eclogue

two shepherds sing a dirge made by Rowland on the death of Elphin, that is

Sidney. In the next Rowland himself sings the praises of Idea; and in the

sixth Perkin those of Pandora, doubtless the Countess of Pembroke. The

seventh is a singularly unentertaining dispute, in which typical

representatives of age and youth abuse one another by turns; the eighth is

a description of the golden age, a theme Spenser had omitted; and lastly,

in the ninth we return to the opening love-motive, this time, as in the

_Calender_, amid the frosts of winter.

These eclogues were reprinted in a different order in the 'Poems Lyric and

Pastoral' (_c._ 1606) with one additional poem there numbered the ninth.

This describes a rustic gathering of shepherds and nymphs, and contains

several songs. The verse exhibits no small advance on the earlier work,

and one song at least is in the author's daintiest manner. He seldom

surpassed the graceful conceit of the lines:

Through yonder vale as I did passe,

Descending from the hill,

I met a smerking bony lasse;

They call her Daffadill:

Whose presence as along she went,

The prety flowers did greet,

As though their heads they downward bent

With homage to her feete.

Spenser, in spite of the warning he addressed to his book--

Dare not to match thy pype with Tityrus his style,

Nor with the Pilgrim that the Ploughman playde awhyle--

could nevertheless assert in semi-burlesque rime:

It shall continewe till the worlds dissolution;

and his disciple is not to be outdone. Never was truer lover or sweeter

singer--

Oenon never upon Ida hill

So oft hath cald on Alexanders name,

As hath poore Rowland with an Angels quill

Erected trophies of Ideas fame:

Yet that false shepheard, Oenon, fled from thee;

I follow her that ever flies from me.

Thus Drayton endeavoured to follow in the footsteps of a greater than he,

and small success befell him in his uncongenial task. He knew little and

cared less about the moral and philosophical rags that clung yet about the

pastoral tradition. He sang, in his lighter vein at least, for the mere

pleasure that his song could afford to himself and others: the Spenserian

and traditional garb fits him ill. His golden age is rather amorous than

philosophical; he is more concerned that love should be free and true than

that the earth should yield her fruits unwounded of the plough; and even

so he hastens away from that colourless age to troll the delightful ballad

of Dowsabel. The inspiration for this he found, not in Spenser and his

learned predecessors, but in the popular romances, and in it we hear for

the first time the voice of the real Michael Drayton, the accredited bard

to the court of Faery. So again in the barren dispute of the seventh

eclogue, he turns aside from his theme as the shadow of the winged god

flits across his path--

That pretie Cupid, little god of love,

Whose imped winges with speckled plumes been dight,

Who striketh men below and Gods above,

Roving at randon with his feathered flight,

When lovely Venus sits and gives the ayme,

And smiles to see her little Bantlings game.

If these eclogues formed Drayton's only claim upon our attention as a

pastoral poet there would be no excuse for lingering over him. He left

other work, however, which, if but slightly pastoral in subject, is at

least thoroughly so in form and spirit. The _Muses Elizium_ did not appear

till 1630, and it is consequently not a little premature to speak of it in

this place. It is, however, so important as illustrating the freer and

more spontaneous vein traceable in many English pastoralists from Henryson

onwards, that it is worth while to place it for comparison side by side

with the more orthodox tradition as exemplified, in spite of his

originality, in the work of Spenser.

The _Muses Elizium_ is in truth the culmination of a long sequence of

pastoral work. Of this I have already discussed the beginnings when

dealing with the native pastoral impulse; and however much it was

influenced at a later date by foreign models it never submitted to the

yoke of orthodox tradition, and to the end retained much of its freshness.

The early anthologies are full of this sort of verse, the song-books are

full of it, and so are the romances and the plays. To this lyrical

tradition belong Breton's songs, of which one has already been quoted;

there was hardly a poet of note at the end of the sixteenth century who

did not contribute his quota. We find it once more, intermingling with a

certain formal strain, in Drayton's _Shepherds' Sirena_ containing the

delightful song, with its subtle interchange of dactylic and iambic

rhythms, so admirably characteristic of the author of the _Agincourt_

ballad:

Neare to the Silver Trent

Sirena dwelleth,

Shee to whom Nature lent

All that excelleth;

By which the Muses late

And the neate Graces,

Have for their greater state

Taken their places:

Twisting an Anadem

Wherewith to Crowne her,

As it belong'd to them

Most to renowne her.

On thy Bancke,

In a Rancke

Let thy Swanes sing her

And with their Musick

along let them bring her.

In this pervading impulse of pure and spontaneous pastoral the soul of

what is sweet and winning in things common and familiar as our household

fairies blends with the fresh glamour of early love and the dainty

delights of an ideal world, where despair is only less sweet than

fruition, and love only less divine than chastity, where, as Drayton

frankly tells us,

The winter here a Summer is,

No waste is made by time,

Nor doth the Autumne ever misse

The blossomes of the Prime;

The flower that July forth doth bring,

In Aprill here is seene,

The Primrose, that puts on the Spring,

In July decks each Greene,

a world, in short, in which the nymphs may strew the laureate hearse, not

only with all the flowers and fruits of earth, but with the Amaranth of

paradise and the stars of heaven if the fancy takes them. Of a spirit

compounded of these elements and of its quintessence are the 'Nymphals' of

the _Muses Elizium_. There are portions of the work, it is true, in which

the more vulgar strains of the conventional pastoral make themselves

heard, as in the satires of the fourth and tenth Nymphals; but for the

most part we are allowed to wander undisturbed among the woods and

pastures of an earthly paradise, and revel in the fairy laureate's most

imaginative work. There we meet Lirope, of whom

Some said a God did her beget,

But much deceiv'd were they,

Her Father was a Rivelet,

Her Mother was a Fay.

Her Lineaments so fine that were

She from the Fayrie tooke,

Her Beauties and Complection cleere

By nature from the Brooke.

There Naiis sings, roguishly enough, in the martial metre of _Agincourt_:

'Cloe, I scorne my Rime

Should observe feet or time,

Now I fall, then I clime,

What is't I dare not?'

'Give thy Invention wing,

And let her flert and fling,

Till downe the Rocks she ding,

For that I care not';

the song then breaking off into gamesome anapaests:

The gentle winds sally

Upon every Valley,

And many times dally

And wantonly sport,

About the fields tracing,

Each other in chasing,

And often imbracing,

In amorous sort.

There, again, we listen to the litany of the Muses, with the response:

Sweet Muse, perswade our Phoebus to inspire

Us for his Altars with his holiest fire,

And let his glorious, ever-shining Rayes

Give life and growth to our Elizian Bayes;

or else hear the fairy prothalamium, most irrepressible and inimitable of

bridal songs--

For our Tita is this day

Married to a noble Fay.

There, lastly, we behold the flutter of tender breasts half veiled when

Venus and her wayward archer are abroad, and listen as fair Lelipa reads

the decree:

To all th' Elizian Nimphish Nation,

Thus we make our Proclamation

Against Venus and her Sonne,

For the mischeefe they have done:

After the next last of May,

The fixt and peremptory day,

If she or Cupid shall be found

Upon our Elizian ground,

Our Edict mere Rogues shall make them,

And as such, who ere shall take them,

Them shall into prison put;

Cupids wings shall then be cut,

His Bow broken, and his Arrowes

Given to Boyes to shoot at Sparrowes;

And this Vagabond be sent,

Having had due punishment,

To mount Cytheron, which first fed him,

Where his wanton Mother bred him,

And there, out of her protection,

Dayly to receive correction.

Then her Pasport shall be made,

And to Cyprus Isle convayd,

And at Paphos, in her Shryne,

Where she hath beene held divine,

For her offences found contrite,

There to live an Anchorite.

We have here the very essence of whatever most delicately and quaintly

exquisite the half sincere and half playful ideal of pastoral had

generated since the days of Moschus.

How is it then, we may pause a moment to inquire, that in spite of its

crudities of language and even of metre, in spite of its threadbare themes

but half repatched with homelier cloth, in spite of its tedious

theological controversies, its more or less conventional loves and more or

less exaggerated panegyrics--how is it that in spite of all this we still

regard the _Shepherd's Calender_ as serious literature; while with all its

exquisite justness, as of ivory carved and tinted by the hand of a master

and encrusted with the sparkle of a thousand gems, the _Muses' Elizium_

remains a toy? It is not merely the prestige of the author's name: it is

not merely that we tend to accept the work of each at his own valuation.

We have to seek the explanation of the phenomenon in the fact that not

only has the _Shepherd's Calender_ behind it a vast tradition, reverend if

somewhat otiose--the devotion of men counts for something--but also that,

however stiffly laced in an unsuitable garb, it sought to deal with

matters of real import to man, or at any rate with what man has held as

such. It treated questions of religious policy which touched the majority

of men more nearly then than now; with moral problems calculated to

interest the mind of an age still tinged with medievalism; with

philosophical theories of human and divine love. In other words, the

_Shepherd's Calender_ lay in the main stream of literature, and reflected

the mind of the age, while the _Muses' Elizium_, in common with so much

pastoral work, did not. These considerations open up an interesting field

of speculation. Are we to suppose that there is indeed a line of

demarcation between great art and little art wholly independent of that

which divides good art from bad art? Are we to go further, and assume that

these two lines of division intersect, so that a work may be akin to

great art though it be not good art, while, however perfect a work of art

may be, it may remain little art for some wholly non-aesthetic reason? But

we digress.

IV

It will be convenient, in dealing with the considerable volume of English

pastoral verse which has come down to us from the late sixteenth and early

seventeenth centuries, to divide it into two portions, according as it

tends to attach itself to orthodox foreign tradition on the one hand, or

to the more spontaneous native type on the other. To the former division

belong in the main the more ambitious set pieces and eclogue-cycles, to

the latter the lighter and more occasional verse, the pastoral ballads and

the lyrics. The division is necessarily somewhat arbitrary, for the two

traditions act and react on one another incessantly, and the types merge

almost imperceptibly the one into the other; but that does not prevent the

spirit that manifests itself in Drayton's eclogues being essentially

different from that which produced Breton's songs. I shall not, however,

try to draw any hard and fast line between the two, but shall rather deal

first with those writers whose most important work inclines to the more

formal tradition, and shall then endeavour to give some account of the

lighter pastoral verse of the time.

After the appearance of the _Shepherd's Calender_ some years elapsed

before English poetry again ventured upon the domain of pastoral, at least

in any serious composition. In 1589, however, appeared a small quarto

volume, with the title: 'An Eglogue. Gratulatorie. Entituled: To the right

honorable, and renowmed Shepheard of Albions Arcadia: Robert Earle of

Essex and Ewe, for his welcome into England from Portugall. Done by George

Peele. Maister of arts in Oxon.' Like the 'A. W.' of the _Rhapsody_, Peele

followed Spenser more closely than most of his fellow imitators in the use

of dialect, but his eclogue on the not particularly glorious return of

Essex has little interest. His importance as a pastoralist lies elsewhere.

The following year the poet of the _Hecatompathia_, Thomas Watson, a

pastoralist of note according to the critics of his own age, but whose

work in this line is chiefly Latin, published his 'Ecloga in Obitum

Honoratissimi Viri, Domini Francisci Walsinghami, Equitis aurati, Divae

Elizabethae a secretis, & sanctioribus consiliis,' entitled _Meliboeus_,

and also in the same year a translation of the piece into English. The

latter is considerably shorter than the original, but still of tedious

length. The usual transition from the dirge to the paean is managed with

more than the usual lack of effect. The eclogue contains a good deal

beyond its immediate subject; for instance, a lament for Astrophel, a

passage in praise of Spenser, and a panegyric on

Diana, matchless Queene of Arcadie--

all subjects hardly possible for a poet to escape, writing _more

pastorali_ in 1590. Watson also left several other pastoral compositions

in the learned tongue, which, from their eponymous hero, won for him the

shepherd-name of Amyntas. Thus in 1585 he published a work in Latin

hexameter verse with the title 'Amyntas Thomae Watsoni Londinensis I. V.

studiosi,' divided into eleven 'Querelae,' which was 'paraphrastically

translated' by Abraham Fraunce into English hexameters, and published

under the title 'The Lamentations of Amyntas for the death of Phillis' in

1587. This translation, 'somewhat altered' to serve as a sequel to an

English hexametrical version of Tasso's _Aminta_, was republished in 'The

Countesse of Pembrokes Ivychurch' of 1591. Again in 1592 Watson produced

another work entitled _Amintae Gaudia_, part of which was translated under

the title _An Old-fashioned Love_, and published as by I. T. in 1594.[111]

Next in order--passing over Drayton, with whom we have been already

sufficiently concerned--is a writer who, without the advantage of original

genius or brilliant imagination, succeeded by mere charm of poetic style

and love of natural beauty, in lifting his work above the barren level of

contemporary pastoral verse. Richard Barnfield's _Affectionate Shepherd_,

imitated, as he frankly confesses, from Vergil's _Alexis_, appeared in

1594. Appended to it was a poem similar in tone and spirit, entitled _The

Shepherd's Content_, containing a description of country life and scenery,

together with a lamentation for Sidney, a hymn to love, a praise of the

poets, and other similar matters. The easy if somewhat monotonous grace

which pervades both these pieces is seen to better advantage in the

delightful _Shepherd's Ode_, which appeared in his _Cynthia_ of 1595, and

begins:

Nights were short and days were long,

Blossoms on the hawthorn hong,

Philomel, night-music's king,

Told the coming of the spring;

or in the yet more perfect song:

As it fell upon a day

In the merry month of May,

Sitting in a pleasant shade

Which a group of myrtles made,

Beasts did leap and birds did sing,

Trees did grow and plants did spring,

Everything did banish moan,

Save the nightingale alone;

She, poor bird, as all forlorn,

Lean'd her breast against a thorn,

And there sung the dolefull'st ditty,

That to hear it was great pity....

Ah, thought I, thou mourn'st in vain,

None takes pity on thy pain.

Senseless trees, they cannot hear thee;

Ruthless beasts, they will not cheer thee;

King Pandion he is dead,

All thy friends are lapp'd in lead[112];

All thy fellow birds do sing,

Careless of thy sorrowing;

Even so, poor bird, like thee,

None alive will pity me[113].

No particular interest attaches to the four eclogues included in Thomas

Lodge's _Fig for Momus_, published in 1595, but they serve to throw light

on a kind of pastoral freemasonry that was springing up at this period.

Spenser and Sidney, under the names of Colin and Astrophel, or more rarely

Philisides, were firmly fixed in poetic tradition; Barnfield, by coupling

them with these, made Watson and Drayton free of the craft in his

complaint to Love in the _Shepherd's Content_:

By thee great Collin lost his libertie,

By thee sweet Astrophel forwent his joy,

By thee Amyntas wept incessantly,

By thee good Rowland liv'd in great annoy.

Now we find Lodge dedicating his four eclogues respectively to Colin,

Menalcus, Rowland, and Daniel. Who Menalcus was is uncertain; not, it

would seem, a poet. The themes are serious, even weighty according to the

estimation of the author, and befit the mood of the poet who first sought

to acclimatize the classical satire[114]. These eclogues do not, however,

testify to any high poetic gift, any more than do the couple in a lighter

vein found in the _Phillis_ of 1593. Lodge was happier in the lyric verses

with which he strewed his romances--such for instance as the lines to

Phoebe in _Rosalynde_, though these did certainly lay themselves open to

parody[115]. In the same romance Lodge rose for once to a perfection of

delicate conceit unsurpassed from his day to ours:

Love in my bosom like a bee

Doth suck his sweet;

Now with his wings he plays with me,

Now with his feet.

Within mine eyes he makes his nest,

His bed amidst my tender breast;

My kisses are his daily feast,

And yet he robs me of my rest.

Ah, wanton, will ye?

The year 1595 also saw the publication of Francis Sabie's _Pan's Pipe_,

which contains, according to the not wholly accurate title-page, 'Three

Pastorall Eglogues, in English Hexameter.' These constituted the first

attempt in English at writing original eclogues in Vergilian metre, and

the injudicious experiment has not, I believe, been repeated. The subjects

present little novelty of theme, but the treatment illustrates the natural

tendency of English pastoral writers towards narrative and the influence

of the romantic ballad motives. The same volume contains another work of

Sabie's, namely, the _Fishermaris Tale_, a blank-verse rendering of

Greene's _Pandosto_[116].

The three pastoral elegies of William Basse, published in 1602, the last

work of the kind to appear in Elizabeth's reign, form in reality a short

pastoral romance. The court-bred Anander falls in love with the

shepherdess Muridella, and charges the sheep-boy Anetor to convey to her

the knowledge of his passion. His love proving unkind he turns shepherd,

and resolves to remain so until his suit obtains better grace. More than

half a century later, namely in 1653, Basse prepared for press a

manuscript containing a series of pastorals headed 'Clio, or The first

Muse in 9 Eglogues in honor of 9 vertues,' and arranged according to the

days of the week. The whole composition is singularly lacking alike in

interest and merit.[117]

It is not surprising to find the eclogues of the early years of James'

reign reflecting current events. In 1603 appeared a curious compilation,

the work of Henry Chettle, bearing the title: 'Englandes Mourning Garment:

Worne here by plaine Shepheardes; in memorie of their sacred Mistresse,

Elizabeth, Queene of Vertue while shee lived, and Theame of Sorrow, being

dead. To which is added the true manner of her Emperiall Funerall. After

which foloweth the Shepheards Spring-Song, for entertainement of King

James our most potent Soveraigne. Dedicated to all that loved the deceased

Queene, and honor the living King.' The book is a strange medley of verse

and prose, elegies on Elizabeth in the form of eclogues, and political

lectures written in the style of the pastoral romance. The most

interesting passage is an address to contemporary poets reproaching them

for their neglect of the praises of the late queen. The pastoral names

under which they are introduced appear to be merely nonce appellations,

but are worth recording as they refer to a set outside the usual pastoral

circle. Thus Corin is Chapman; Musaeus, of course Marlowe; English Horace,

no doubt Jonson; Melicert, Shakespeare; Coridon, Drayton; Anti-Horace,

most likely Dekker, and Moelibee, mentioned with him, possibly Marston. To

Musidore, 'Hewres last Musaeus' (no doubt corrupt), and the 'infant muse,'

it is more difficult to assign an identity.[118] Throughout Chettle

assumes to himself Spenser's pastoral title.

To the same or the following year belong the twelve eclogues by Edward

Fairfax, the translater of Tasso's _Gerusalemme_, which are now for the

most part lost. One, the fourth, was printed in 1737 from the original

manuscript, another in 1883 from a later transcript in the Bodleian, while

a third is preserved in a fragmentary state in the British Museum.[119]

All three deal chiefly with contemporary affairs, the two former being

concerned with the abuses of the church, while the last is a panegyric of

the 'present age,' and especially of English maritime adventure. This is

certainly the most pleasing of the three, though the style is at times

pretentious and over-charged with far-fetched allusions. There are,

however, fine passages, as for instance the lines on Drake:

And yet some say that from the Ocean maine,

He will returne when Arthur comes againe.

More directly concerned with the political events of the day is the

curious eclogue Δάφνις Πολυστέφανος by Sir George Buc, published in 1605,

in praise of the Genest crown, the royal right by Apollo's divine decree

of a long line of English kings, who are passed in review by way of

introduction to the praises of their latest representative. The work was

revised by an unknown hand for the accession of Charles, and republished

under the title of _The Great Plantagenet_ in 1635, as by 'Geo. Buck,

Gent.' Sir George held the post of Master of the Revels from 1608 to 1622,

and died the following year.

In 1607 appeared a poem 'Mirrha the Mother of Adonis,' by William

Barksted, to which were appended three eclogues by Lewes Machin.[120] Of

these, one describes the love of a shepherd and his nymph, while the other

two treat the theme of Apollo and Hyacinth. Composed in easy verse of no

particular distinction these poems belong to that borderland between the

idyllic and the salacious on which certain shepherd-poets loved to dally.

The years 1614 and 1615 saw the appearance of works of considerably

greater interest from every point of view, among others from that of what

I have described as pastoral freemasonry. In the former year there

appeared a small octavo volume entitled _The Shepherd's Pipe_. The chief

contributor was William Browne of Tavistock, the first book of whose

pastoral epic, _Britannia's Pastorals_, had appeared the previous year.

Besides seven eclogues from his pen, the volume contained one by

Christopher Brooke, one by Sir John Davies, and two by George Wither.

These last two were republished in 1615, with three additional pieces, in

Wither's collection entitled _The Shepherd's Hunting_. With the exception

of one or two of Browne's, these fourteen eclogues all deal with the

personal relation of the friends who disguise themselves respectively,

Browne as Willy, Wither as Roget (a name later exchanged for that of

Philarete), Brooke as Cuddie, and Davies as Wernock. Wither's were

written, as we learn from the title-page of the 1615 volume, while the

author was in prison in the Marshalsea for hunting vice with a pack of

satires in full cry, that is, the _Abuses Stript and Whipt_ of 1611. The

verse seldom rises above an amiable mediocrity, the best that can be said

for it being that it carries on, in a not wholly unworthy manner, the

dainty tradition of the octosyllabic couplet between the _Faithful

Shepherdess_ and Milton's early poems. Browne's eclogues are chiefly

remarkable for the introduction into the first of a long and rather

tedious tale derived from a manuscript of Thomas Occleve's. The last of

the series, an elegy on the death of Thomas, son of Sir Peter Manwood, has

been quoted as the model of _Lycidas_, but the resemblance begins and ends

with the fact that in either case the subject of the poem met his death by

drowning--a resemblance which will scarcely support a charge of

plagiarism[121].

In 1621 appeared six eclogues under the title of _The Shepherd's Tales_ by

the prolific miscellaneous writer Richard Brathwaite. Each in its turn

recounts the amorous misfortunes of some swain, which usually arise out of

the inconstancy of his sweetheart, and the prize of infelicity having been

adjudged, the author, not perhaps without a touch of malice, sends the

whole company off to a wedding. The _Tales_ are noteworthy for the very

pronounced dramatic gift they reveal, being in this respect quite unique

in their kind. The same year saw the publication of the not very

successful expansion of one of these eclogues into the pastoral narrative

in verse, entitled 'Omphale or the Inconstant Shepherdesse.' Brathwaite

had already in 1614 published the _Poet's Willow_, containing a

'Pastorall' which recounts the unsuccessful love of Berillus, an Arcadian

shepherd, for the nymph Eliza[122].

Pursuing the chronological order we come next to Phineas Fletcher's

'Piscatorie Eclogs' appended to his _Purple Island_ in 1633. Except that

the scene is laid on the banks of a river instead of in the pastures, and

that the characters spend their time looking after boats and nets instead

of tending flocks, they differ in nought from the strictly pastoral

compositions. They are seven in number, and deal either with personal

subjects or with conventional themes. As an imitation of the _Shepherd's

Calender_, without its uncouthness whether of subject or language, and

equally without its originality or higher poetic value, the work is not

wanting in merit, but it is most decidedly wanting in all power to arrest

the reader's attention.

The last collection that will claim our notice is that of Francis Quarles,

which appeared posthumously in 1646 under the title of 'The Shepheards

Oracles: Delivered in Certain Eglogues[123]. The interest of the volume

lies not so much in its poetic merit, which however is considerable, as in

the fact that it deals with almost every form of religious controversy at

a critical point in English history. Quarles was a stanch Anglican, and he

lashes Romanists and Precisians with impartial severity. One of the

eclogues opens with a panegyric on Gustavus Adolphus, in the midst of

which a messenger enters bearing the news of his death, thus fixing the

date of the poem in all probability in the winter of 1632-3. In the

eleventh and last the Puritan party is mercilessly satirized in the person

of Anarchus, in allusion to the supposed socialistic tendency of its

teaching. He is thus described in a dialogue between Philarchus and

Philorthus (the lovers of order and justice presumably):

_Philor._ How like a Meteor made of zeal and flame

The man appears!

_Philar._ Or like a blazing Star

Portending change of State, or some sad War,

Or death of some good Prince.

_Philor._ He is the trouble

Of three sad Kingdoms.

_Philar._ Even the very Bubble,

The froth of troubled waters.

_Philor._ Hee's a Page

Fill'd with Errata's of the present Age.

_Philar._ The Churches Scourge--

_Philor._ The devils _Enchiridion_--

_Philar._ The Squib, the _Ignis fatuus_ of Religion.

To their address Anarchus replies in a song which it would be easy to

illustrate from the dramatic literature of the time, and which well

indicates the estimation in which the faction was popularly held. Here is

one verse:

Wee'l down with all the Varsities,

Where Learning is profest,

Because they practise and maintain

The Language of the Beast:

Wee'l drive the Doctors out of doores,

And Arts what ere they be,

Wee'l cry both Arts, and Learning down,

And, hey! then up goe we.

The whole song for sheer rollicking hypocrisy is without parallel in the

language. The date of the poem is doubtful, but Quarles lived till 1644,

and after two years of civil strife the terms which the interlocutors in

the above passage apply to the Puritan party can hardly be regarded as

prophetic.

Besides the works we have examined above, several others are known to have

existed, though they are not now traceable. Thus 'The sweete sobbes, and

amorous Complaintes of Shepardes and Nymphes in a fancye confusde by An

Munday' was entered on the books of the Stationers' Company on August 19,

1583. Two years earlier, on August 3, 1581, had been entered 'A Shadowe of

Sannazar.' Again we know, alike from Wood's _Athenae_ and Meres' _Palladis

Tamia_, that Stephen Gosson left works of the kind of which we have now no

trace; while Puttenham in his _Art of English Poesy_ mentions an eclogue

of his own, addressed to Edward VI, and entitled _Elpine_. Puttenham and

Meres in dealing with pastoral writers also mention one Challener, no

doubt the Thomas Chaloner who contributed to the _Mirror for Magistrates_,

and Nashe in his preface to _Menaphon_ adds Thomas Atchelow, who may be

plausibly identified with the Thomas Achelly who contributed verses to

Watson's _Hecatompathia_ and various sententious fragments to _England's

Parnassus_, among them a not very happy rendering of those lines of

Catullus which might almost be taken as a motto to pastoral poetry as a

whole:

The sun doth set, and brings again the day,

But when our light is gone, we sleep for aye.

V

It is not easy to arrange the mass of occasional lyric verse of a pastoral

nature in a manner to facilitate a general survey. We may perhaps divide

it roughly into general groups which possess certain points in common and

can be treated more or less independently. Little would be gained by

following a strictly chronological order, even were it possible to do so.

We occasionally meet with translations, though from the nature of the case

these, as well as evidences of direct foreign influence, are less

prominent here than in the more formal type of pastoral verse. We have

already seen that Googe, besides borrowing from Garcilaso's version of a

portion of the _Arcadia_, himself paraphrased passages of the _Diana_ in

his eclogues, and the latter work also supplied material for the pen of

Sir Philip Sidney. His debt consists in translations of two songs from

Montemayor's romance, printed among his miscellaneous poems[124]. About a

dozen translations from the same source appeared in _England's Helicon_,

the work of Bartholomew Yong. They are for the most part very inferior to

the general average of the collection, but the opening of one at least is

worth quoting:

'Guardami las vaccas,

Carillo, por tu fé.--

Besami primero,

Yo te las guardaré.'

I prithee keep my kine for me,

Carillo, wilt thou? tell.--

First let me have a kiss of thee,

And I will keep them well.

Another translation is the poem headed 'A Pastorall' in Daniel's _Delia_

of 1592, a rendering of the famous chorus to the first act of Tasso's

_Aminta_.

When we turn to original verse, the first group of poets to arrest our

attention is the court circle which gathered round Sir Philip Sidney.

There is a poem by his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, preserved in

Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_, and there headed 'A Dialogue between two

Shepherds, Thenot and Piers, in Praise of Astrea.' It was composed for the

entertainment of the queen, and was no doubt sung or recited in character.

Such was likewise the mode of production of Sir Philip's 'Dialogue between

two Shepherds, uttered in a pastoral show at Wilton,'[125] which is more

rustic in character. _Astrophel and Stella_ supplies a graceful 'complaint

to his flock' against the cruelty of

Stella, fiercest shepherdess,

Fiercest, but yet fairest ever;

Stella, whom the heavens still bless,

Though against me she persever.

Though I bliss inherit never.

The _Poetical Rhapsody_ again preserves two others, the outcome of

Sidney's friendship with Greville and Dyer. The first is a song of

welcome; the second, headed 'Dispraise of a Courtly Life,' ends with the

prayer:

Only for my two loves' sake,

In whose love I pleasure take;

Only two do me delight

With the ever-pleasing sight;

Of all men to thee retaining,

Grant me with these two remaining.

Of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, the loyal admirer and biographer of

Sidney, who desired on his tomb no better passport to posterity than that

he had been Sir Philip's friend, we have among other works published in

1633 a series of so-called sonnets recording his love for the fair

Caelica. There is a thin veil of pastoralism over the whole, with here and

there a more definite note as in 'Sonnet' 75, a poem of over two hundred

lines lamenting his lady's cruelty--

Shepheardesses, yet marke well

The Martyrdome of Philocell.

Of Sir Edward Dyer's works no early edition was published. Such isolated

poems as have survived were collected by Grosart in 1872 from a variety of

sources. If the piece entitled _Cynthia_ is authentic, it gives him a

respectable place beside Greville among the minor pastoralists of his day.

Lastly, in connexion with Sidney we may note a curious poem which appeared

in the first edition of the _Arcadia_ only.[126] It is a 'bantering'

eclogue, in which the shepherds Nico and Pas first abuse one another and

then fall to a comic singing match. It is evidently suggested by the fifth

Idyl of Theocritus, and is a fair specimen of a very uncommon class in

English. Akin to this is the burlesque variety, of which we have already

met with examples in Lorenzo's _Nencia_ and Pulci's _Beca_, and which is

almost equally rare with us. A specimen will be found in the not very

successful eclogue in Greene's _Menaphon_. The following is as near as the

author was able to approach to Lorenzo's delicately playful tone:

Carmela deare, even as the golden ball

That Venus got, such are thy goodly eyes:

When cherries juice is jumbled therewithall,

Thy breath is like the steeme of apple pies.

It would, of course, be grossly unfair to judge Robert Greene, the

ever-sinning and ever-repentant, by the above injudicious experiment. His

lyrical powers appear in a very different light, for instance, in the

'Palmer's Ode' in _Never Too Late_ (1590), one of the most charming of his

many confessions:

As I lay and kept my sheepe,

Came the God that hateth sleepe,

Clad in armour all of fire,

Hand in hand with Queene Desire,

And with a dart that wounded nie,

Pearst my heart as I did lie,

That, when I wooke, I gan sweare

Phillis beautie palme did beare.

From the same romance I must do Greene the justice of quoting the

delightful, though but remotely pastoral, song of every loving nymph to her

bashful swain:

Sweet Adon, darest not glance thine eye--

N'oserez-vous, mon bel ami?--

Upon thy Venus that must die?

Je vous en prie, pity me:

N'oserez-vous, mon bel, mon bel--

N'oserez-vous, mon bel ami?

See how sad thy Venus lies--

N'oserez-vous, mon bel ami?--

Love in heart and tears in eyes;

Je vous en prie, pity me:

N'oserez-vous, mon bel, mon bel--

N'oserez-vous, mon bel ami?

It is hard to refrain from quoting half a dozen other pieces. There is the

courting of Phillis in _Perimedes the Blacksmith_ (1588), with its purely

idyllic close; or again the famous 'Shepherd's Wife's Song' from the

_Mourning Garment_ (1590):

Ah, what is love? It is a pretty thing,

As sweet unto a shepherd as a king;

And sweeter too,

For kings have cares that wait upon a crown,

And cares can make the sweetest love to frown:

Ah then, ah then,

If country loves such sweet desires do gain,

What lady would not love a shepherd swain?

No one not utterly callous to the pathos of human life, or warped by some

ethical twist beyond the semblance of a man, has ever been able to pass

unmoved by the figure of Robert Greene. We see him, the poet of all that

is truest and tenderest in human affection, abandoning his young wife and

child, drawn by the power of some fatal fascination into the whirlpool of

low life in London, and then, as if inspired by a sudden revelation of

objective vision, penning the throbbing lines of the forsaken mother's

song:

Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee,

When thou art old there's grief enough for thee.

We see him again amid the despair and squalor of his death-bed, warning

his friends against his own example, and addressing to the wife he had not

seen for years those words endorsed on a bill for ten pounds, words ever

memorable in the history of English letters: 'Doll, I charge thee by the

love of our youth, and by my soul's rest, that thou wilt see this man

paid; for if he and his wife had not succoured me I had died in the

streets.' Such are the scenes of sordid misery which underlie some of the

choicest of English songs. It is best to return to the surface.

The lyric 'sequences' published towards the close of the sixteenth

century frequently contain more or less pastoral matter. Barnabe Barnes

appended some poems of this sort to his _Parthenophil and Parthenophe_ (c.

1593), among others a version of Moschus' idyl of runaway love, a theme

which had long been a favourite one with pastoral writers. Poliziano's

Latin translation of Moschus[127] was commended by E. K. in his notes to

the _Shepherd's Calender_, and the same original supplied Tasso with the

subject of his _Amore fuggitivo_, which served as epilogue to the

_Aminta_. William Smith's _Chloris_ (1596), except for plentiful swearing

by pastoral deities, is less bucolic in spite of its dedication to Colin

Clout. The most important of the sequences from our present point of view

is Nicholas Breton's _Passionate Shepherd,_ which was not published till

1604. It contains five pastorals in praise of Aglaia:

Had I got a kingly grace,

I would leave my kingly place

And in heart be truly glad

To become a country lad,

Hard to lie and go full bare,

And to feed on hungry fare,

So I might but live to be

Where I might but sit to see,

Once a day, or all day long,

The sweet subject of my song;

In Aglaia's only eyes

All my worldly paradise.

This is a fair specimen of Breton's dainty muse, but his choicest work

appeared in that wonderful anthology published in 1600 under the title of

_England's Helicon_. To this collection Breton contributed such verses as

the following:

On a hill there grows a flower--

Fair befall the dainty sweet!--

By that flower there is a bower,

Where the heavenly muses meet.

In that bower there is a chair,

Fringèd all about with gold;

Where doth sit the fairest fair,

That ever eye did yet behold.

It is Phyllis fair and bright,

She that is the shepherd's joy;

She that Venus did despite,

And did bind her little boy.

Or again:

Good Muse, rock me asleep

With some sweet harmony;

The weary eye is not to keep

Thy wary company.

Sweet Love, begone awhile,

Thou knowest my heaviness;

Beauty is born but to beguile

My heart of happiness.

Another poem no less perfect has been already quoted at length. In its own

line, the delicate carving of fair images as in crystal or some precious

stone, Breton's work is unsurpassed. We cannot do better than take, as

examples of a very large class, some of the poems printed, in most cases

for the first time, in _England's Helicon_. Of Henry Constable, the poet

indicated doubtless by the initiais H. C., we have a charming song between

Phillis and Amaryllis, the counterpart and imitation of Spenser's

'Bonibell' ballad:

_P._ Fie on the sleights that men devise--

(Heigho, silly sleights!)

When simple maids they would entice.

(Maids are young men's chief delights.)

_A._ Nay, women they witch with their eyes--

(Eyes like beams of burning sun!)

And men once caught they do despise;

So are shepherds oft undone.

* * * * *

_P._ If every maid were like to me--

(Heigho, hard of heart!)

Both love and lovers scorn'd should be.

(Scorners shall be sure of smart.)

_A._ If every maid were of my mind--

(Heigho, heigho, lovely sweet!)

They to their lovers should prove kind;

Kindness is for maidens meet[128].

Of Sir John Wotton, the short-lived half-brother of the more famous Sir

Henry, there is a spirited song, betraying unusual command over a

complicated rhythm:

Jolly shepherd, shepherd on a hill,

On a hill so merrily,

On a hill so cheerily,

Fear not, shepherd, there to pipe thy fill;

Fill every dale, fill every plain;

Both sing and say, 'Love feels no pain.'

Another graceful poet of _England's Helicon_ is the 'Shepherd Tony,' whose

identity with Anthony Munday was finally established by Mr. Bullen. He

contributed, among other verses, a not very interesting reply to Harpelus'

complaint in 'Tottel's Miscellany,' and the well-known and exquisite:

Beauty sat bathing by a spring

Where fairest shades did hide her,

which reappears in his translation of the Castilian romance _Primelion_.

In Marlowe's 'Passionate Shepherd to his Love,' of which _England's

Helicon_ supplies one of three texts[129], we come to what is, with the

possible exception of _Lycidas_ alone, the most subtly modulated specimen

of pastoral verse in English. So far as internal evidence is concerned the

poem has absolutely nothing but its own perfection to connect it with the

name of Marlowe; it is utterly unlike all other verse, dramatic,

narrative, or lyric, ascribed to him. An admirable eclectic text, which

exhibits to the full the delicacy of the rhythm, has been prepared by Mr.

Bullen in his edition of Marlowe's works. It would be impossible not to

quote the piece in full:

Come live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove

That hills and vallies, dales and fields,

Woods or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,

Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks

By shallow rivers to whose falls

Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses

And a thousand fragrant posies,

A cap of flowers and a kirtle

Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.

A gown made of the finest wool

Which from our pretty lambs we pull;

Fair-lined[130] slippers for the cold,

With buckles of the purest gold.