Pastoral Poetry & Pastoral Drama / A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration Stage in England

by W. W. Greg

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.

A belt of straw and ivy-buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs;
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.

The shepherd-swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May-morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me, and be my love.

The popularity of this poem was testified by its widespread influence on the poets of the day. England's Helicon contains 'the Nymphs reply,' commonly attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, and also a long imitation; Donne wrote a piscatory version, and Herrick paid it the sincerest form of flattery, while less distinct reminiscences are common in the poetry of the time. Yet Kit Marlowe's verses stand unrivalled.

The pastoral influence in Shakespeare's verse, both lyric and dramatic, is too obvious to need more than passing notice. Every reader will recall 'Who is Sylvia,' from the Two Gentlemen, and 'It was a lover and his lass,' the song of which, in Touchstone's opinion, 'though there was no great matter in the ditty, yet the tune was very untuneable,' or again the famous speech of the chidden king:

O God! methinks it were a happy life,
To be no better than a homely swain;
(3 Henry VI, II. v. 21.)

and Arthur's exclamation:

By my christendom
So I were out of prison and kept sheep,
I should be as merry as the day is long.
(K. John, IV. i. 16.)

One poem, bearing a certain resemblance to verses of Barnfield's already discussed, may be quoted here. It was originally printed in the fourth act of Love's Labour's Lost in 1598, reappeared in the Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, and again in England's Helicon in 1600.

On a day--alack the day!--
Love, whose month was ever May,
Spied a blossom passing fair
Playing in the wanton air.
Through the velvet leaves the wind
All unseen gan passage find,
That the shepherd, sick to death,
Wish'd himself the heaven's breath.
Air, quoth he, thy cheeks may blow;
Air, would I might triumph so!
But, alas, my hand hath sworn
Ne'er to pluck thee from thy thorn;
Vow, alack, for youth unmeet,
Youth is apt to pluck a sweet.
[Do not call it sin in me
That I am forsworn for thee;]
Thou for whom Jove would swear
Juno but an Ethiope were,
And deny himself for Jove,
Turning mortal for thy love.[[131]]

Lastly, England's Helicon preserves two otherwise unknown poems of Drayton's, one probably an early work, having little to recommend it beyond the pretty though not original conceit:

See where little Cupid lies
Looking babies in her eyes!

the other similar in style to the eclogue first published in the collection of c. 1606. About contemporary possibly is the anonymous ballad 'Phillida flouts me,' which in command alike of rhythm and language is remarkably reminiscent of some, and that some of the best, of Drayton's work.

Oh, what a plague is love!
How shall I bear it?
She will unconstant prove,
I greatly fear it.

It so torments my mind
That my strength faileth;
She wavers with the wind,
As the ship saileth.
Please her the best you may,
She looks another way;
Alas and well-a-day!
Phillida flouts me[[132]].

I have already had occasion to mention the mysterious A. W. in Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, but I cannot refrain from calling attention to one other poem of his. It is headed 'A fiction, how Cupid made a nymph wound herself with his arrows,' and is perhaps the nearest thing in English to a Greek idyllion, though in the manner of Moschus rather than of Theocritus. The opening scene will give an idea of the style:

It chanced of late a shepherd's swain,
That went to seek a strayèd sheep,
Within a thicket on the plain,
Espied a dainty nymph asleep.

Her golden hair o'erspread her face,
Her careless arms abroad were cast, Her quiver had her pillow's place,
Her breast lay bare to every blast.

The shepherd stood, and gazed his fill;
Nought durst he do, nought durst he say;
When chance, or else perhaps his will,
Did guide the god of love that way.

And so the long pageant troops by, not without its passages of dullness, its moments of pedestrian gait, for it must be borne in mind that the poems quoted above are for the most part the choice of what has survived in a few volumes, and that this in its turn represents the gleanings from a far larger body of verse that once existed. In spite of its perennial freshness the charge of want of originality has not unreasonably been brought even against the best compositions of the kind. It could hardly be otherwise. Except in the rarest cases originality was impossible. The impulse was to write a certain kind of amatory verse, for which the fashionable medium was pastoral; not to write pastoral for its own sake. The demand was for convention, the familiar, the expected; never for originality or truth. The fault was in the poetic requirements of the age, and must not be laid to the charge of those admirable craftsmen who gave the age what it wanted; especially when in so doing they enriched English poetry with some of its choicest gems.

The pastoral lyric of the next two reigns is far too wide a subject to be entered upon here. Grave or gay, satirical or idyllic, coy or wanton, there is scarcely a poet of note or obscurity who did not contribute his share. Nowhere is a rarer note of pastoral to be found than in L'Allegro, with its

every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the vale.

Before, however, saying farewell to this, the lighter side of English pastoral verse, I would call attention to a poem which perhaps more than any other illustrates the spirit of voluttà idillica, characteristic of so much that possesses abiding value in pastoral. Unfortunately Carew's Rapture is almost throughout of a nature that forbids reproduction except in a scientific edition, or an admittedly erotic collection. Though its licence is coterminous with the bounds of natural desire, the candour of its appeal to unvitiated nature saves it from reproach, and the perfection of its form makes it an object of never-failing beauty. The idea with which the poem opens, the escape to a land where all conventional restrictions cease to have a meaning, was of course suggested by the first chorus of the Aminta:

quel vano
Nome senza soggetto,
Quell' idolo d' errori, idol d' inganno;
Quel che dal volgo insano
Onor poscia fu detto--
Che di nostra natura 'l feo tiranno.

I can only extract one short passage out of Tom Carew's poem, that which describes how

Daphne hath broke her bark, and that swift foot
Which th' angry Gods had fast'ned with a root
To the fix'd earth, doth now unfetter'd run
To meet th' embraces of the youthful Sun.
She hangs upon him, like his Delphic Lyre;
Her kisses blow the old, and breath new, fire;
Full of her God, she sings inspired lays,
Sweet odes of love, such as deserve the Bays,
Which she herself was. Next her, Laura lies
In Petrarch's learned arms, drying those eyes
That did in such sweet smooth-paced numbers flow,
As made the world enamoured of his woe.

This is not itself pastoral, but it belongs to that idyllic borderland which we previously noticed in dealing with Italian verse. And again, as in Italy, so in England, we find the same spirit infusing the mythological tales. Did time and space allow it would be an interesting diversion to trace how the pastoral spirit evinced itself in such works as Peele's Tale of Troy, Lodge's Scilla's Metamorphosis, Drayton's Man in the Moon, Brathwaite's Narcissus Change (in the Golden Fleece), and found articulate utterance in the voluptuous cadences of Venus and Adonis.

VI

There are two specimens of English pastoral verse which I have reserved for separate discussion in this place, namely, Lycidas and Britannia's Pastorals. The one is probably the most perfect example of the allegorical pastoral produced since first the form was invented by Vergil, the other the longest and most ambitious poem ever composed on a pastoral theme.[[133]]

Milton's poem was written on the occasion of the death of Edward King, fellow of Christ's College, who was drowned on his way to Ireland during the long vacation of 1637, and first appeared in a collection of memorial verses by his Cambridge friends published in 1638. It gathers together within its narrow compass as it were whole centuries of pastoral tradition, fusing them into an organic whole, and inspiring the form with a poetic life of its own.

Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more
Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never sear,
I com to pluck your Berries harsh and crude,
And with forc'd fingers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

For Lycidas is dead and claims his meed of song.

Begin then, Sisters of the sacred well,
That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring;
Begin, and somwhat loudly sweep the string.

Sing first their friendship, nursed upon the self-same hill, their youth spent together. But oh! the heavy change; now the very caves and woods mourn his loss. Where then were the Muses, that their loved poet should die? And yet what could they do for Lycidas, who had no power to shield Orpheus himself,

When by the rout that made the hideous roar,
His goary visage down the stream was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore.

What then avails the poet's toil? Were it not better to taste the sweets of love as they offer themselves since none can count on reward in this life? The prize, however, lies elsewhere--

Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.

But such thoughts are too lofty for the swains of Arethusa and Mincius. Listen rather as the herald of the sea questions the god of winds about the fatal wreck. It was no storm drove the ill-starred boat to destruction:

The Ayr was calm, and on the level brine,
Sleek Panope with all her sisters play'd,

sounds the reply. Next, footing slow, comes the tutelary deity of Alma Mater, and in one sad cry mourns the promise of a life so soon cut short. Lastly, 'The Pilot of the Galilean lake,' with denunciation of the corrupt hirelings of a venal age, laments the loss of the church in the death of Lycidas. As his solemn figure passes by, the gracious fantasies of pastoral landscape shrink away: now

Return Alpheus, the dread voice is past,
That shrunk thy streams,

bid the nymphs bring flowers of every hue,

To strew the Laureat Herse where Lycid lies--

and yet indeed even this comfort is denied, we dally with false imaginings,

Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world,

or on the Cornish coast,

Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold.

But enough!

Weep no more, woful Shepherds weep no more,
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watry floar,
So sinks the day-star in the Ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new spangled Ore,
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.

On this note the elegy ends, and there follow eight lines in which the poet glances at his own pastoral self that has been singing, and realizes that the world will go on even though Lycidas be no more, and that there are other calls in life than that of piping on an oaten reed. These lines correspond to the plain stanzaic frames in which Spenser set his lyrics in the Shepherd's Calender:

Thus sang the uncouth Swain to th' Okes and rills,
While the still morn went out with Sandals gray,
He touch'd the tender stops of various Quills,
With eager thought warbling his Dorick lay:
And now the Sun had stretch'd out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the Western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch'd his Mantle blew:
To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new.

The poem, in common with the whole class of allegorical pastorals, is undoubtedly open to the charge of artificiality, since, in truth, the pastoral garb can never illustrate, but only distort and obscure subjects drawn from other orders of civilization. Yet none but a great master could, to produce a desired effect, have utilized every association which tradition afforded with the consummate skill observable in Milton's poem. He has been blamed for the introduction of St. Peter, on the ground of incongruity; but he has tradition on his side. St. Peter, as we have already seen, figures, under the name of Pamphilus, in the eclogues of Petrarch, and his introduction by Milton is in nicest keeping with the spirit of the kind. The whole poem, and indeed a great deal more, must stand or fall with the Pilot of the Galilean Lake, for to censure his introduction here is to condemn the whole pastoral tradition of three centuries, a judgement which may or may not be just, but which is not a criticism on Milton's poem. So again with the flowers that are to be strewn on the laureate hearse. Three kinds of berries and eleven kinds of flowers are mentioned, and it has been pointed out with painful accuracy that nine of the latter would have been over, and none of the former ripe on August 11, when King was drowned; while all the flowers, with the exception of the amaranth, if it were of the true breed, would have been dead and rotten in November, when the poem was presumably written. It would be foolish to quarrel with Milton on this point, since where all is imaginary such licence is as natural as the strictest botany; yet it must not be forgotten that it is just this disseverance from actuality that has made the eclogue the type of all that is frigid and artificial in literature. The dissatisfaction felt by many with Lycidas was voiced by Dr. Johnson, when he wrote: 'It is not to be considered the effusion of real passion, for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions.... Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief[[134]].' This is so absolutely true, with regard to the present poem at all events, that it would appear hardly worth saying were it not that there have always been found persons to maintain the contrary. There is no reason whatever to suppose that Milton felt any keen personal grief at the death of Edward King. There is nothing spontaneous, nothing, one might almost say, genuine in the lament. This is indeed strictly irrelevant to the question of its artistic merit, but it must nevertheless be admitted that there is thus much justice in the censure, that the poem purports to be the expression of an intimate sorrow, of the reality of which the reader is never wholly convinced. In so far as it lacks this 'soul-compelling power,' it may be said, not unfairly, to fail of its own artistic purpose.

One further question, however, inevitably presents itself when we have to consider such a work as Lycidas, a work, that is, in which art has attained the highest perfection in one particular kind. Although the objections urged against the individual poem may be shown to miss their mark as criticisms on that poem, may they not have force as criticisms on the class? The allegorical pastoral, though in one sense, as I have said, created by Vergil, was yet, in another, a plant of slow growth, and represents a tradition gradually evolved to meet the needs of a long line of poets. Petrarch, Mantuan, Marot, Spenser were more than mere imitators of Vergil or of one another; they wrote in a particular form because it answered to particular requirements, and they fashioned it in the using. Nevertheless it may be urged with undoubted force, that the requirements were not primarily of an artistic nature, being ever governed by some alien purpose, and that consequently the form which evolved itself in answer to those requirements and to fulfil that purpose, was not by nature calculated to yield the highest artistic results. And thus, though any attempt to question the perfection of the art which Milton brought to the composition of his elegy must needs be foredoomed to failure, the question of the propriety of the form as an artistic medium remains open; and in so far as critical opinion tends to give an unfavourable answer, in so far does the form of pastoral instituted by Vergil and handed down without break from the fourteenth century to Milton's own time stand condemned in its most perfect flower.

Few things could be less like Lycidas than the work which next claims our attention. Unique of its kind, and, in spite of its shortcomings, possessed of no small poetic interest, William Browne's Britannia's Pastorals may be regarded at pleasure either as a pastoral epic or as a versified romance. It resembles the prose romances in being by nature discursive, episodic and inconsequent, and like not a few it remained unfinished. Little would be gained by giving any detailed analysis of the plot developed through the leisurely amplitude of its 10,000 lines, while any attempt to deal, however slightly, with the sources and literary analogues of the work would lead us far beyond the scope of the present chapter[[135]]. With regard to the latter, it must suffice to note that among the works to which incidents can be directly traced are Tasso's Gerusalemme, Montemayor's Diana, and Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, while a more general indebtedness may in particular be observed to Chaucer, Piers Plowman, and the Faery Queen. The plot involves two more or less connected threads of action, the one dealing with the adventures of the swains and shepherdesses, the other concerned with the progress of Thetis and her court. This latter recalls the poetic geography of Drayton's Polyolbion. The principal episodes in the former are the loves of Celandine and Marina, and the allegorical story of Fida and Aletheia, each of which leads to numerous ramifications. Indeed, so far as the pastoral action is concerned, the whole is one string of barely connected episodes.

Celandine loves the shepherdess Marina, who is readily brought to return his affection. To the love thus easily won he soon becomes indifferent, and Marina in despair seeks to end her sorrows in a stream. Saved by the god of the fountain, she is carried off to Mona, and there imprisoned in a cave by the monster Limos (hunger). With her loss, Celandine's love revives, and in his search for her he is led to visit the faery realm, where he finds Spenser lying asleep. The poem ends abruptly in the midst of his adventures. The story of Fida centres round the slaughter of her pet hind by the monster Riot. From the mangled remains of the animal rises the beautiful form of Aletheia (truth). The new-transformed nymph is the daughter of Chronos (time), born, Pallas-like, without a mother. The narrative of her rejection by the world gives occasion for some biting satire on the ill-living of the religious orders, the vanity of the court, and the dishonesty of the crafts. Meanwhile Riot, who from this point ceases to be an embodiment of cruelty, and comes to typify fallen humanity--the Humanum Genus of the moralities--passing successively by Remembrance, Remorse, and Repentance, is purged of his foul shape, and appears as the shepherd Amyntas, finally to be united in marriage with Aletheia. With these adventures is interwoven the progress of Thetis, who comes to view her dominions. From the Euxine and the Hellespont her train sweeps on by Adriatic and Atlantic shores, past lands which call up the names of a long line of poets--Vergil, Ovid, Ariosto, Petrarch, Tasso, Du Bartas, Marot, Ronsard--till ultimately she arrives off the coast of Devon--the Devon of Browne and Drake. Here the shepherds assemble to do her honour, from Colin Clout down to Browne's immediate circle, Brooke, Davies, and Wither, and here the poet entertains her with the tale of Walla and Tavy, which forms a charming incidental piece. The nymph Walla loved the river-god Tavy, and while gathering flowers to weave a garland for him was surprised by a satyr, who pursued her into a wood. She sought refuge in a cave, where, being overtaken by her pursuer, she prayed to Diana, and in the last resort to Ina, by whom she was transformed into a spring, which, after drowning the venturesome satyr, ran on to join its waters with those of her beloved Tavy. Thus Browne wove the common names of his familiar home into a romance of pastoral invention. The metamorphosis of Arethusa pursued by Alpheus, of Ambra by Ombrone, of the nymphs by the satyrs of the Salices, or as frescoed on the temple of Pales in the Arcadia, the loves of Mulla and Mollana in Spenser, and the mythological impersonations of the Polyolbion, find, as it were, a meeting-place in Browne's lay of Walla.

The three parts of Britannia's Pastorals did not appear together. Book I was published during the winter of 1613-14, Book II in 1616, each containing five songs; while the fragment of Book III, containing two songs only, remained in manuscript till 1853, when it was discovered in the Cathedral Library at Salisbury, and printed for the Percy Society[[136]].

The narrative, as may have been inferred from what has already been said, is sufficiently fantastic. In the introduction of allegorical characters Browne was probably influenced by Spenser, and in a lesser degree by the masque literature of his day and by the study of Langland. Since the work is unfinished, we may in charity suppose that had Browne completed his design the whole would have presented a somewhat less incongruous appearance; there is, however, a marked tendency towards the accumulation of unexplained incidents, which may most plausibly be referred to the influence of the Spanish romances, especially of the Diana, which was already accessible in Yong's translation, and one incident of which Browne did undoubtedly borrow.

In style and poetic merit Browne's work is most astonishingly unequal, though the general level of Britannia's Pastorals is distinctly higher than that of the Shepherd's Pipe. The author passes at times abruptly from careful and loving realism to the most stilted conventionality, and from passages of impassioned eloquence to others grotesquely banal. In some of his peculiarities, as in the perpetuai use of elaborate similes and in the indulgence in inflated paraphrases, he anticipates some of the worst faults of style cultivated by writers of the next century. There are portions of the poem where the narrative is literally carried on through a succession of highly wrought comparisons, each paragraph beginning with an 'As' followed by a correlative 'So' half a page further on. No such series of pictures, however fairly wrought--and Browne's too often end in bathos--can possibly convey the impression of continuons action. It is the same with periphrasis. Used with discretion it may be one of the subtlest ornaments of style, and even when fulfilling no particular purpose is capable of imparting a luxuriant and somewhat rococo richness to the verse. The effect, however, is frequently one of unrelieved frigidity, as in the lines:

And now Hyperion from his glitt'ring throne
Sev'n times his quick'ning rays had bravely shown
Unto the other world, since Walla last
Had on her Tavy's head the garland plac'd;
And this day, as of right, she wends abroad
To ease the meadows of their willing load.
(II. iii. 855.)

At times it was Browne's moral preoccupation that curbed his muse, as in his description of the golden age where, for the sensuous glow of Tasso and for Carew's pagan paradise, he substitutes the insipid convention of a philosophical age of innocence[[137]]. In his genuine mood as a loving observer of country life he is a very different poet. His feeling is delicate in tone and his observation keen; he was familiar with every tree that grew in the woods, every fish that swam in the waters of his beloved Devon; he entered tenderly into the homely life of the farm--

By this had chanticleer, the village clock,
Bidden the goodwife for her maids to knock,
And the swart ploughman for his breakfast stay'd,
That he might till those lands were fallow laid;
The hills and vailles here and there resound
With the re-echoes of the deep-mouth'd hound;
Each shepherd's daughter, with her cleanly peal,[[138]]
Was come afield to milk the morning's meal.
(I. iv. 483.)

When, however, naturalism of this kind is introduced into pastoral it is already on the high road toward ceasing to be pastoral at all. Nor are touches of higher poetic imagination wanting, as when Time is described as

a lusty aged swain,
That cuts the green tufts off th' enamell'd plain,
And with his scythe hath many a summer shorn
The plough'd-lands lab'ring with a crop of corn.
(I. iv. 307.)

The love of his country is, however, the altar at which Browne's poetic genius takes fire:

Hail, thou my native soil! thou blessed plot,
Whose equal all the world affordeth not!
Show me who can so many crystal rills,
Such sweet-cloth'd valleys or aspiring hills,....
And if the earth can show the like again,
Yet will she fail in her sea-ruling men.
Time never can produce men to o'ertake
The fames of Grenville, Davies, Gilbert, Drake,
Or worthy Hawkins, or of thousands more
That by their power made the Devonian shore
Mock the proud Tagus, for whose richest spoil
The boasting Spaniard left the Indian soil
Bankrupt of store, knowing it would quit cost
By winning this, though all the rest were lost.
(II. iii. 601.)

It is after all in such a passage as this that we see the true William Browne, with all his high-handedness and worthy enthusiasm, the poet who not only loves his country with a lover's passion and cannot tolerate that any should be compared to her in fairness of feature, in stateliness of stature, or in virtue of mind; but who, first perhaps among English poets, has that more local patriotism, narrower and more intimate, for his own home, for its moors, its streams, its associations, all the actual or imagined surroundings of his beloved Tavistock, and carries in his heart for ever the cry of the wild west--

Devon, O Devon, in wind and rain!

VII

Approaching the romance, as we do, from the point of view rather of the development of the pastoral ideal than of the history of prose narrative or of the novel, we may spare ourselves any detailed consideration of the famous work of John Lyly. Although in the novel which has made 'Euphuism' a word and a bye-word in the language he supplied the literary medium for the work of subsequent pastoral writers such as Greene and Lodge, his own compositions in this kind are confined entirely to the drama.

The translations in this department are for the most part negligible. There is, however, one notable exception, namely, the rendering by Bartholomew Yong or Young of Montemayor's Diana, together with the continuations of Ferez and Gil Polo. Completed as early as May, 1583, the work remained in manuscript until 1598, when it was published in the form of a handsome folio. Although, as we have already had occasion to notice, the verse portions were not for the most part of a nature to add lustre to an anthology such as England's Helicon, the whole forms a not unworthy Tudor translation. We learn from Yong's preface that portions of the romance had already been Englished by Edward Paston, a descendant of the famous Norfolk letter-writers, who had family relations with Spain and possessed an intimate knowledge of the language. Of this work nothing further is known. Some two years, however, before Yong's version issued from the press, the first book of Montemayor's portion was again translated by Thomas Wilson, and of this a manuscript yet survives[[139]]. Passing mention may also be made of Angel Day's translation of Daphnis and Chloe containing the original insertion of the Shepherd's Holiday with the praises of Elizabeth in verse, and of Robert Tofte's Honours Academy (1610), distantly following Ollenix du Mont-Sacré's Bergerie de Juliette, but which, as also John Pyper's version of d'Urfé's Astrée (1620), have received sufficient notice in being recorded in connexion with their originals.

Earlier in date of publication and belonging to an elder tradition than the Arcadia, though later in date of composition, and it may be at times betraying a familiarity with Sidney's manuscript, the romances of the Bohemian Robert Greene, and the buccaneer-physician Thomas Lodge, are naturally the first to claim our attention.

With the exception of Menaphon, Greene's romances offer little that is important in pastoral, apart from the more notable works which they inspired. And even Menaphon, in so far as the general conception is concerned, can hardly be said necessarily to involve the existence of any antecedent pastoral tradition. Greene's novel is, indeed, far from being purely pastoral; no more than in Sidney's, to use Professor Herford's happy phrase, are we allowed to forget that Arcadia bordered on Sparta. In this it undoubtedly resembles the Spanish romances, but the resemblance does not appear to go much further; it is on the whole warlike without being chivalric, the tone Greek, or what Greene considered such, rather than medieval--indeed it might be argued that in its martial incidents it rather recalls Daphnis and Chloe than the Diana. There is certainly nothing chivalric about King Democles, who, when some ten score shepherds are besieging a castle, sends to the 'General of his Forces,' and not only has ten thousand men brought secretly and by night at three days' notice--in itself a notable piece of strategy--but when they arrive on the scene places furthermore the whole force in ambush! No wonder that when the soldiers are let loose out of their necessarily cramped quarters, they kill many of the shepherds, and putting the rest to flight remain masters of the situation.

The plot might perhaps be considered improbable as well as intricate for anything but a pastoral or chivalric romance: judged by the standards prevailing in these species it is neither. Democles, king of Arcadia, has a daughter Sephistia, who contrary to his wishes has contracted a secret marriage with Maximus. When the birth of a son leads to discovery, Democles has them placed in an oarless boat and so cast adrift. A storm arising they are not unnaturally wrecked, and ultimately husband and wife are cast upon different points of the Arcadian coast(!), where, either supposing the other to have perished, they adopt the pastoral life, assuming the names respectively of Melicertus and Samela. The young mother has with her child Pleusidippus, but while still in early boyhood he is carried off by pirates and presented as a gift to the King of Thessaly. In the meantime Menaphon, 'the king's shepherd of Arcadia,' has fallen in love with Samela, but while accepting his hospitality she meets her husband in his shepherd's guise, and without recognizing one another husband and wife again fall in love. Years pass on and Pleusidippus, who has risen to fame at court, hears of the beauty of the shepherdess of Arcadia, and must needs go to test the truth of the report himself. He does so, and promptly falls in love with his own mother. Nor is this all, for Democles equally hears of Samela's fame, and disguising himself as a shepherd falls in love with his own daughter. He endeavours to command Samela's affection by revealing to her his own identity, but Pleusidippus is beforehand with more drastic measures, and with the help of a few associates carries Samela off to a neighbouring castle, to which Democles and the shepherds, headed by Melicertus, proceed to lay siege. A duel between father and son is unceremoniously interrupted by the inroad of Democles' soldiery. Upon this the identity of Samela is revealed by a convenient prophetess, and all ends happily.

In the relation of verse and prose Greene's work differs from that of Sannazzaro and Sidney, the former being of considerably greater merit than the latter. The style adopted exhibits a very marked Euphuism, and the whole form of narrative is characterized by that fondness for petty conceit which not seldom gives an air of puerility to the lighter Elizabethan prose. Puerile in a sense it had every right to be, for modern prose narration was then in its very infancy in this country. No artistic form destined to contribute to the main current of literature is born perfect into the world; the early efforts appear not only tentative, uncouth, at times rugged, but often childish and futile, unworthy the consideration of serions men. The substance of the Gesta Romanorum and the style of the Novellino appear so, considered in relation to the Decameron; the mystery plays are an obvious instance, not to be explained by any general immaturity of medieval ideas. Traces of the tendency may even be noticed where revival or acclimatization, rather than original invention, is the aim; we find it in the Shepherd's Calender, nor was it absent in the days of the romantic revival, either from the German Lenores or the English Otrantos. And so it is with the novelists of the Elizabethan age. Renouncing the traditions of the older romance, which was adult and perfect a hundred years before in Malory, but had now fallen into a second childhood, and determined on the creation of a new and genuine form of literary expression, they paid the price of originality in the vein of childishness that runs through their writings.

If, however, Greene was content in the main to adopt the style of the new novel, he, as indeed Lyly too, could at times snatch a straightforward thought or a vigorous phrase from current speech or controversial literature, and invest it with all the greater effectiveness by contrasting it with its surroundings. Here, as an example of euphuistic composition, is Democles' address to the champions about to engage in single combat:

Worthy mirrors of resolved magnanimitie, whose thoughts are above your fortunes, and your valour more than your revenewes, know that Bitches that puppie in hast bring forth blind whelpes; that there is no herbe sooner sprung up than the Spattarmia nor sooner fadeth; the fruits too soone ripe are quickly rotten; that deedes done in hast are repented at leisure: then, brave men in so weightie a cause,... deferre it some three daies, and then in solemn manner end the combat[[140]].

With this we may contrast the closing sentence of the work:

And lest there should be left any thing imperfect in this pastorall accident, Doron smudged himselfe up, and jumped a marriage with his old friend Carmela.

This is, of course, intentionally cast in a homely style in contrast to the courtliness of the main plot; but Greene, as some of his later works attest, knew the value of strong racy English no less than his friend Nashe, who, in the preface he prefixed to this very work, pushed colloquialism and idiom to the verge of affectation and beyond.

The incidental verse, on the other hand, though very unequal, is of decidedly higher merit. Sephistia's famous song should alone suffice to save any book from oblivion, while there are other verses which are not unworthy of a place beside it. I may instance the opening of the 'roundelay' sung by Menaphon, the only character strictly belonging to pastoral tradition, with its picture of approaching night:

When tender ewes brought home with evening Sunne
Wend to their foldes,
And to their holdes
The shepheards trudge when light of day is done.

Such as it was, Menaphon appealed in no small degree to the taste of the moment. We know how great was Greene's reputation as an author, how publishers were ready to outbid one another for the very dregs of his wit. Thomas Brabine was but voicing the general opinion when, in some verses prefixed to Menaphon, he wrote, condescending to an inevitable pun, but also to a less excusable mixed metaphor:

Be thou still Greene, whiles others glorie waine.

Of his other romances it is sufficient in this place to mention that Pandosto, which contains the pastoral loves of Dorastus and Fawnia, and supplied Shakespeare with the outlines of the Winter's Tale, appeared the year before Menaphon, while the year after saw his Never Too Late, which is likewise of a generally pastoral character, but does not appear to have suggested or influenced any subsequent work.

The remarks that have been made concerning Greene apply in a large measure also to his fellow euphuist Thomas Lodge. His earliest romance, Forbonius and Prisceria, published in 1584, is partly pastoral in plot, a faithful lover being driven by the opposition of his lady's father into assuming the pastoral habit; but it is chiefly the connexion of his Rosalynde of 1590 with Shakespeare's As You Like It that gives him a claim upon our attention. Rosalynde is not only on this account the best-known, but is also intrinsically the most interesting of his romances. The story is too familiar to need detailing. Its origin, as is also well known, is the Tale of Gamelyn, the story which Chaucer intended putting into the mouth either of the cook, or more probably of the yeoman, and the hero of which apparently belongs to the Robin Hood cycle. The interest centres round the three sons of Sir John of Bordeaux, who retains his name with Lodge and is Shakespeare's Sir Roland de Bois, and whose youngest son, Lodge's Rosader and Shakespeare's Orlando, is named Gamelyn, and the outlaw king, Lodge's king of France and Shakespeare's Duke senior[[141]]. The entire pastoral element, as well as the courtly scenes of the earlier portion of the novel, are Lodge's own invention. His shepherds, whether genuine, as Coridon and Phoebe, or assumed, as Rosalynde and Rosader, are all alike Italian Arcadians, equally polished and poetical. Montanus, a shepherd corresponding to Shakespeare's Silvius, is a dainty rimester, and is not only well posted in the loves of Polyphemus and Galatea, but can rail on blind boy Cupid in good French, and on his mistress too--

Son cuer ne doit estre de glace, Bien que elle ait de Neige le sein.

Thus Lodge added to the original story the figures of the usurper, Rosalynde, Alinda (Celia), and the shepherds Montanus (Silvius), Coridon (Corin) and Phoebe, while to Shakespeare we owe Amiens, Jacques, Touchstone, Audre, and a few minor characters; whence it appears that Lodge's contribution forms the mainstay of the plot as familiar to modern readers. Moreover, in spite of the stiltedness of the style where the author yet remembers to be euphuistic, in spite of the long 'orations,' 'passions,' 'meditations' and the like, each carefully labelled and giving to the whole the air of a series of rhetorical exercises, in spite of the mediocre quality of most of the verses, if we except its one perfect gem, the romance yet retains not a little of its silvan and idyllic sweetness.

Before leaving the school of Lyly, which included a number of more or less famous writers, I may take the opportunity of mentioning two authors usually reckoned among them. One, John Dickenson, left two works of a pastoral nature. His short romance entitled Arisbas appeared in 1594, and may have supplied Daniel with a hint for the kidnapping of Silvia in Hymen's Triumph. Another yet shorter work, entitled the Shepherd's Complaint, which is undated, but was probably printed in the same year, is remarkable for being composed more than half in verse, largely hexameters. In it the author falls asleep and is transported in his dreams to Arcady, where he listens to the lament of a shepherd for the love of Amaryllis. The cruel nymph is, however, soon punished, for, challenging Diana in beauty, she falls a victim to the shafts of the angry goddess, and is buried with full bucolic honours, whereupon the author awakes. The other writer is William Warner, well known from his Albion's England, published in 1586, who left a work entitled Pan his Syrinx, which appeared in 1584; but in this pastoralism does not penetrate beyond the title-page.

Of the books which everybody knows and nobody reads, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia is perhaps the most famous[[142]]. Yet though an account of the romance may be found in the pages of every literary textbook, the history of how the work came to be printed has never been fully cleared up[[143]]. The Arcadia, as it remained at Sidney's death, was fragmentary. Two books and a portion of a third were all that had undergone revision, and possibly represented the portion which Sidney compiled while living with his sister at Wilton, after his retirement from court in 1581--the portion for the most part actually written in his sister's presence. Even of this trustworthy manuscripts were rare, most of those that circulated being copies of the unrevised text. Sidney died on October 17, 1586, and even before the end of the year we find his friend Fulke Greville, afterwards Lord Brooke, writing to Sidney's father-in-law, Sir Francis Walsingham, to the effect that the bookseller, William Ponsonby, had informed him that some one was about to print the Arcadia, and that if they were acting without authority a notification of the fact should be lodged with the archbishop. Greville proceeds to say that he had sent to Walsingham's daughter, that is, Lady Sidney, the corrected manuscript of the work 'don 4 or 5 years sinse, which he left in trust with me; wherof there is no more copies, and fitter to be reprinted then the first, which is so common[[144]].' A complaint was evidently lodged, and the publication stayed, and we may assume that Ponsonby was rewarded for his notification by being entrusted with the publication of the revised manuscript mentioned by Greville, for it was from his house that issued the quarto edition of 1590. Evidence that it was Greville who was responsible for the publication of the Arcadia is found in the dedication of Thomas Wilson's manuscript translation from the Diana, where, addressing Greville, the translater speaks of Sir Philip's Arcadia, 'w^ch by yo^r noble vertue the world so hapily enjoyes.' In this edition, containing the first two and a half books only, the division into chapters and the arrangement of the incidental verse were the work of the 'over-seer of the print.' The text, however, was not considered satisfactory, and when the romance was reprinted in 1593 the division into chapters was discarded, certain alterations were made in the arrangement of the verse, and there was added another portion of the third book, together with a fourth and fifth, compiled by the Countess of Pembroke from the loose sheets sent her from time to time by her brother. This edition has been commonly regarded as the first published with due authority, and the term 'surreptitious' has been quite unjustly applied to the original quarto. The charge, indeed, receives colour from the preface, signed H. S., to the second edition; but, whoever H. S. may have been, there is nothing to make one suppose that he was speaking with authority. The quarto of 1590 having been duly licensed on August 23, 1588, the rights of the work were in Ponsonby's hands, and to him the publication of the revised edition had to be entrusted. In 1598 a third edition, to which other remains of the author were for the first time added, was also published by Ponsonby. There still remained, however, a lacuna in Book III, which was not remedied till 1621, when a supplement was added from the pen of Sir William Alexander. In the edition of 1627 a sixth book was appended, the work of one Richard Beling, whose initials alone, however, appear. The early editors seem to have assumed that the unfinished state of the work, or rather the unrevised state of the later portions, was due to the author's early death, but most of it must have been written between the years 1581 and 1583, and it may well be questioned whether in any case Sidney would have bestowed any further attention upon it. Jonson, indeed, has preserved the tradition that it had been Sir Philip's intention 'to have transform'd all his Arcadia to the stories of King Arthure[[145]],' though how the transformation was to be accomplished he forbore to hint; but the more familiar tradition of Sidney's having expressed on his death-bed a desire that the romance should be destroyed assorts better with what else we know of his regard for his 'idle worke.'

For the name of his romance Sidney was no doubt indebted to Sannazzaro, whom he twice mentions as an authority in his Defence of Poesy, but there in all probability his direct obligation ends, since even the rime sdrucciole, which he occasionally affected, may with equal probability be referred to the influence of the Diana. It was, undoubtedly, Montemayor's romance which served as a model for, or rather suggested the character of, Sidney's work[[146]]. Thus the chivalric element, unknown to Sannazzaro, is with Sidney even more prominent than with Montemayor and his followers. It is, however, true that, like Greene's, his heroes are rather of a classical than a medieval stamp, and he also chose to lay the scene of the action in Greece rather than in his native land, as was the habit of Spanish writers. The source upon which Sidney chiefly drew for incidents was the once famous Amadis of Gaul, but a diligent reading of the other French and Spanish romances of chivalry would probably lengthen the list of recorded creditors. Heliodorus supplies several episodes, and an acquaintance at least can be traced with both Achilles Tatius and Chariton.

The intricate plot, with its innumerable digressions, episodes, and interruptions, need not here be followed in detail, especially as we shall have ample opportunity of becoming familiar with its general features when we come to discuss the plays founded upon it. Here it will be sufficient to note one or two points. In the first place the romance contains no really pastoral characters, the personae being all either shepherds in their disguise only, or else, like Greene's Doron and Carmela, burlesque characters of the rustic tradition. Secondly, it may be observed that the amorous confusion is even greater than in Menaphon, Pyrocles disguising himself as an Amazon in order to enjoy the company of his beloved Philoclea, which leads to her father Basilius falling in love with him in his disguise, and endeavouring to use his daughter to forward his suit, while her mother Gynecia likewise falls in love with him, having detected his disguise, and becomes jealous of her daughter, who on her part innocently accepts her lover as bosom companion[[147]].

In general the Arcadia is no more than it purports to be, the 'many fancies' of Sidney's fertile imagination poured forth in courtly guise for the entertainment of his sister, though his own more serious thoughts occasionally find expression in its pages, and he even introduces himself under the imperfect anagram of Philisides, and shadows forth his friendship with the French humanist Languet. More than this it would be rash to assert, and Greville did his friend an equivocal service when he sought to find a deep philosophy underlying the rather formal characters of the romance[[148]]. These characters, as we have seen, are for the most part essentially courtly; the pastoral guise is a mere veil shielding them from the crude uncompromising light of actuality, with its prejudice in favour of the probable; while the few rustic personages merely supply a not very successful comic antimasque.

To the popularity of the Arcadia it is hardly necessary to advert. It has been repeatedly printed, added to, imitated, abbreviated, modernized, popularized; four editions appeared during the last decade of the sixteenth century, nine between the beginning of the seventeenth and the outbreak of the civil wars[[149]]. It was first published at a moment when the public was beginning to tire of Euphuism, and when the heroic death of the author had recently set a seal upon the brilliance of his fame. Looking back in after years, writers who, like Drayton, had lived through the movement from its very birth, could speak of Sidney as of the author who

did first reduce
Our tongue from Lyly's writing then in use,

and could praise his style as a model of pure English. In spite of the generous, if misguided, efforts of occasional critics, posterity has not seen fit to endorse this view. While finding in Sidney's style the same historical importance as in Lyly's, we cannot but recognize that in itself Arcadianism was little if at all better than Euphuism. It is just as formal, just as much a trick, just as stilted and unpliable, just as painful an illustration of the fact that a figure of rhetoric may be an occasional ornament, but cannot by any degree of ingenuity be made to serve as a basis of composition. In the same way as Euphuism is founded upon a balance of the sentence obtained by antithetical clauses, and the use of intricate alliteration, together with the abuse of simile and metaphor drawn from what has been aptly termed Lyly's 'un-natural history'; so Sidney's style in the Arcadia is based on a balance usually obtained by a repetition of the same word or a jingle of similar ones, together with the abuse of periphrasis, and, it may be added, of the pathetic fallacy. These last have been dangers in all periods of stylistic experiment; the former, figures duly noted as ornaments by contemporary rhetoricians, Sidney no doubt borrowed from Spain. There in one famous example they were shortly to excite the enthusiasm of the knight of La Mancha--'The reason of the unreason which is done to my reason in such manner enfeebles my reason that with reason I lament your beauty'--a sentence which one is sometimes tempted to imagine Sidney must have set before him as a model. Thus it would appear that, for their essential elements, Euphuism and Arcadianism, though distinct, alike sought their models, direct or indirect, in the Spanish literature of the day. Almost any passage, chosen at random, will illustrate Sidney's style. Observe the balance of clauses in the following sentence from Kalander's speech, which inclines perhaps towards Euphuism:

I am no herald to enquire of mens pedegrees, it sufficeth me if I know their vertues, which, if this young mans face be not a false witnes, doe better apparrell his minde, then you have done his body. (1590, fol. 8v.)

Or again, as an instance of the jingle of words, take the following from the steward's narration:

I thinke you thinke, that these perfections meeting, could not choose but find one another, and delight in that they found, for likenes of manners is likely in reason to drawe liking with affection; mens actions doo not alwaies crosse with reason: to be short, it did so in deed. (ib. fol. 20.)

Of Sidney's power of description the stock example is his account of the Arcadian landscape (fol. 7), and it is perhaps the best and at the same time the most characteristic that could be found; the author's peculiar tricks are at once obvious. There are 'the humble valleis, whose base estate semed comforted with refreshing of silver rivers,' and the 'thickets, which being lined with most pleasant shade, were witnessed so to by the chereful deposition of many wel-tuned birds'; there are the pastures where 'the prety lambs with bleting oratory craved the dams comfort,' where sat the young shepherdess knitting, whose 'voice comforted her hands to work, and her hands kept time to her voices musick,' a country where the scattered houses made 'a shew, as it were, of an accompanable solitarines, and of a civil wildnes,' where lastly--si sic omnia!--was the 'shepheards boy piping, as though he should never be old.' It must not be supposed that these are occasional embroideries; they are the very cloth of which the whole pastoral habit is made. The above examples all occur within a few pages, and might even have been gathered from a yet smaller plot. It is, however, on the prose, such as it is, that the reputation of the Arcadia rests; a good deal of occasional verse is introduced, but it has often been subject of remark how wholly unworthy of its author most of it is.

Given the widespread popularity of the work, the influence exercised by the story on English letters is hardly a matter for wonder. Of its general influence on the drama it will be my business to speak later; at present we may note that while yet in manuscript it probably supplied Lodge with certain hints for his Rosalynde, and so indirectly influenced As You Like It. One of the best-known episodes, again, that of Argalus and Parthenia, was versified by Quarles in 1632, and, adorned with a series of cuts, went through a large number of editions before the end of the century, besides being dramatized by Glapthorne. The incident of Pyrocles heading the Zelots has been thought to have suggested the scene in the Two Gentlemen of Verona in which Valentine consents to lead the robber band, while to Sidney Shakespeare was likewise indebted, not only for the cowards' fight in Twelfth Night, but in the 'story of the Paphlagonian unkinde king,' for the original of the Gloster episode in King Lear. A certain prayer out of the later portion of the romance was, as is well known, a favourite with Charles I in the days of his misfortune, but the controversial use made of the fact by Milton it is happily possible to pass over in silence.

Finally, it is worth mentioning as illustrating the vogue of Sidney's romance, that it not only had the very singular honour of being translated into French in the first half of the seventeenth century, but that two translations actually appeared, the rivalry between which gave rise to a literary controversy of some asperity[[150]].

Thus we take leave of the pastoral novel or romance, a kind which never attained to the weighty tradition of the eclogue, or the grace of the lyric, nor was subjected to the rigorous artistic form of the drama[[151]]. It remained throughout nerveless and diffuse, and, in spite of much incidental beauty, was habitually wanting in interest, except in so far as it renounced its pastoral nature. As Professor Raleigh has put it: 'To devise a set of artificial conditions that shall leave the author to work out the sentimental inter-relations of his characters undisturbed by the intrusion of probability or accident is the problem; love in vacuo is the beginning and end of the pastoral romance proper.' A similar attempt is noticeable in the drama, but the conditions soon came to be recognized as impossible for artistic use. The operation of human affection under utterly imaginary and impossible conditions is not a matter of human interest; the resuit was a purely fictitious amatory code, as absurd as it was unhealthy, and, when sustained by no extrinsic interest of allegory or the like, the kind soon disappeared. As it is, in the pastoral novel, it is only when the enchanted circle is broken by the rough and tumble of vulgar earthly existence that on the featureless surface of the waters something of the light and shade of true romance replaces the steady pitiless glare ot a philosophical or sentimental ideal.