126. Arcadia, 1590, fol. 237 verso.
127. Opera, Basel, 1553, p. 622.
128. The song is said to be between 'two nymphs, each answering other line for line'; but the simple alternation adopted by Spenser makes nonsense of the present poem. The above arrangement seems to distribute the lines best; viz. the first quatrain to Phillis, with interposition of lines 2 and 4 by Amaryllis, the second quatrain to Amaryllis, with interposition of line 2 only by Phillis.
129. Others in the Passionate Pilgrim, 1599, and Walton's Complete Angler, 1653.
130. So, rather than 'Fair-lined,' as Bullen prints; but query 'Fur-lined.'
131. This is the text of England's Helicon, which is superior to that in the play, except for the omission of the couplet in brackets, and possibly in the reading 'hath sworn' for 'is sworn,' in l. 11.
132. From E. K. Chambers' English Pastorals, p. 113. The date is uncertain, but a tune of the name was extant in 1603. The earliest recorded text is a broadside, of about 1650, in the Roxburghe collection (III. 142). The conjecture of an 'original issue, circa 1600,' is on the whole plausible. In that case there was, somewhere, a poet capable of anticipating the particular cadences of Sirena and Agincourt, and that poet is more likely to have been Drayton than another. See Ebsworth's edition for the Ballad Society (Roxburghe Ballads, vi. p. 460).
133. Lycidas is almost too familiar, one might suppose, to need comment, but such irreconcilable views have been held by different authorities, from Dr. Johnson onwards, that it may not be idle to attempt to view the work critically in relation to pastoral tradition as a whole.
134. When Johnson went on to describe the form of the poem as 'easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting,' he was but exhibiting a critical incapacity which seriously impairs his authority in literary matters.
135. For a detailed account of the poem, as well as for a number of parallel passages--as well as some of doubtful relevance--the reader may be referred to F. W. Moorman's monograph. I use the text of G. Goodwin's edition of Browne's poems, with introduction by A. H. Bullen, 2 vols., 1894.