But the Elizabethan era had its share of light-heartedness. The songs of the dramatists and other lyrics exhibit very clearly the influence upon literature of the revival of ancient learning. As the art of Italy showed the old poetic grace risen again under new conditions, so the dominant art of England caught a light from the uncovered glory of Greece and Rome. It was the time of the great translations of Phaer, Golding, North, and Chapman; and as those translations are bold appropriations of antiquity, not timid attempts at satisfying the requisitions of scholarship, so the figures of the old mythology are used freely and ingenuously; they are naturalized in English verse far more positively than afterwards in the elegantia of the Queen Anne and Georgian periods. Ben Jonson’s Venus’ Runaway is an exquisite illustration of this rich, decorative use of the old fable. It was partly through this sportive appropriation of the myth of Amor, so vital in all literature, that the lullabies of the time came to get their sweetness. The poet, in putting songs into the mother’s mouth, is not so much reflecting the Virgin and Child as he is possessed with the spirit of Greek beauty, and his delicate fancy plays about the image of a little Love. Thus may we read the Golden Slumbers of Dekker, in his Patient Grissel. By a pretty conceit George Gascoigne, in his Lullaby of a Lover, captures the sentiment of a mother and babe, to make it tell the story of his own love and content. There is a touching song by Robert Greene in his Menaphon, where Sephestia puts into her lullaby the story of her parting with the child’s father:—
“Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee,
When thou art old, there’s grief enough for thee.
The wanton smiled, father wept,
Mother cried, baby leapt,
More thou crowed, more he cried,
Nature could not sorrow hide;
He must go, he must kiss
Child and mother, baby bless;
For he left his pretty boy,