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: