"There needeth no annotation at all before this passion, it is of itself so plain and easily conveyed. Yet the unlearned may have this help given them by the way to know what Galaxia is or Pactolus, which perchance they have not read of often in our vulgar rhymes. Galaxia (to omit both the etymology and what the philosophers do write thereof) is a white way or milky circle in the heavens, which Ovid mentioneth in this manner—

Est via sublimis cœlo manifesta sereno,
Lactea nomen habet, candore notabilis ipso.
—Metamorph. lib. 1.

And Cicero thus in Somnio Scipionis: Erat autem is splendissimo candore inter flammas circulus elucens, quem vos (ut a Graijs accepistis) orbem lacteum nuncupatis.

Pactolus is a river in Lydia, which hath golden sands under it, as Tibullus witnesseth in this verse:—

Nec me regna juvant, nec Lydius aurifer amnis.—Tibul. lib. 3.
Who can recount the virtues of my dear,
Or say how far her fame hath taken flight,
That cannot tell how many stars appear
In part of heaven, which Galaxia hight,
Or number all the moats in Phœbus' rays,
Or golden sands whereon Pactolus plays?
And yet my hurts enforce me to confess,
In crystal breast she shrouds a bloody heart,
Which heart in time will make her merits less,
Unless betimes she cure my deadly smart:
For now my life is double dying still,
And she defamed by sufferance of such ill;
And till the time she helps me as she may,
Let no man undertake to tell my toil,
But only such, as can distinctly say,
What monsters Nilus breeds, or Afric soil:
For if he do, his labour is but lost,
Whilst I both fry and freeze 'twixt flame and frost."

Now this is undoubtedly, as Watson's contemporaries would have said, "a cooling card" to the reader, who is thus presented with a series of elaborate poetical exercises affecting the acutest personal feeling, and yet confessedly representing no feeling at all. Yet the Hecatompathia is remarkable, both historically and intrinsically. It does not seem likely that at its publication the author can have had anything of Sidney's or much of Spenser's before him; yet his work is only less superior to the work of their common predecessors than the work of these two. By far the finest of his Century is the imitation of Ferrabosco—

"Resolved to dust intombed here lieth love."

The quatorzains of the Tears of Fancy are more attractive in form and less artificial in structure and phraseology, but it must be remembered that by their time Sidney's sonnets were known and Spenser had written much. The seed was scattered abroad, and it fell in congenial soil in falling on Watson, but the Hecatompathia was self-sown.

This difference shows itself very remarkably in the vast outburst of sonneteering which, as has been remarked, distinguished the middle of the last decade of the sixteenth century. All these writers had Sidney and Spenser before them, and they assume so much of the character of a school that there are certain subjects, for instance, "Care-charming sleep," on which many of them (after Sidney) composed sets of rival poems, almost as definitely competitive as the sonnets of the later "Uranie et Job" and "Belle Matineuse" series in France. Nevertheless, there is in all of them—what as a rule is wanting in this kind of clique verse—the independent spirit, the original force which makes poetry. The Smiths and the Fletchers, the Griffins and the Lynches, are like little geysers round the great ones: the whole soil is instinct with fire and flame. We shall, however, take the production of the four remarkable years 1593-1596 separately, and though in more than one case we shall return upon their writers both in this chapter and in a subsequent one, the unity of the sonnet impulse seems to demand separate mention for them here.