Browne, who had dropped these companion shepherds of the "pastoral and the rural song" three songs back, now needs them to scour the forests for the vanished Fida of his fiction. If he had not needed them for the narrative here resumed, might they not have attended the Ocean's queen with the other poets of England,—all, but Sidney, his personal friends,—as Fletcher and Beaumont? This is precisely the way in which Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, and Rafael introduced into their frescoes the Tornabuoni and Medici of their time. We may leave the inquisitive to follow them to that realm where, forsaking mythical and pastoral romance,
Many weary dayes
They now had spent in unfrequented wayes.
About the rivers, vallies, holts, and crags,
Among the ozyers and the waving flags,
They merely pry, if any dens there be,
Where from the Sun might harbour crueltie:
Or if they could the bones of any spy,
Or torne by beasts, or humane tyranny.
They close inquiry made in caverns blind,
Yet what they look for would be death to find.
Right as a curious man that would descry,
Led by the trembling hand of Jealousy,
If his fair wife have wrong'd his bed or no,
Meeteth his torment if he find her so.[93]
I cannot, however, refrain from pointing the venturesome researcher,—with irony—may be not Mephistophelian, but merely pyrrhonic,—to the dramatic misfortunes of Bellario, Aspasia, and Evadne, and other heroines of the dramatized romances in which Beaumont and Fletcher's theatre of the Globe was indulging at the time. And I would ask him after he has read the sage advice of Remond to the disconsolate shepherd, some two hundred lines further down, to turn to Fletcher's poem of 1613 Upon an Honest Man's Fortune, and decide whether the poet-philosopher of the one is not very much of the same opinion as the shepherd-philosopher of the other.[94]
FOOTNOTES:
[81] John Chamberlain to Mris. Carleton, 18 February, 1612-3, in State Papers (Domestic) James I, LXXII, No. 30. Quoted by Miss Sullivan, Court Masques of James I, p. 76 (1913).
[82] Foscarini in Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, XII, No. 832. Quoted by Miss Sullivan, op. cit., p. 77.
[83] Calendar State Papers (Domestic), 1611-1618, pp. 171, 172, 175.
[84] Dugdale's Origines Juridicales, as cited by Dyce, B. and F., II, 453. Inderwick, op. cit., II, xxxix-xlii, 72, 77, etc. Douthwaite, op. cit., 231. Nichols's Progresses of King James, II, 566, 591.
[85] To Worthy Persons, in the volume entitled The Scourge of Folly.