The last collection that will claim our notice is that of Francis Quarles, which appeared posthumously in 1646 under the title of 'The Shepheards Oracles: Delivered in Certain Eglogues[[123]]. The interest of the volume lies not so much in its poetic merit, which however is considerable, as in the fact that it deals with almost every form of religious controversy at a critical point in English history. Quarles was a stanch Anglican, and he lashes Romanists and Precisians with impartial severity. One of the eclogues opens with a panegyric on Gustavus Adolphus, in the midst of which a messenger enters bearing the news of his death, thus fixing the date of the poem in all probability in the winter of 1632-3. In the eleventh and last the Puritan party is mercilessly satirized in the person of Anarchus, in allusion to the supposed socialistic tendency of its teaching. He is thus described in a dialogue between Philarchus and Philorthus (the lovers of order and justice presumably):
Philor. How like a Meteor made of zeal and flame
The man appears!Philar. Or like a blazing Star
Portending change of State, or some sad War,
Or death of some good Prince.Philor. He is the trouble
Of three sad Kingdoms.Philar. Even the very Bubble, The froth of troubled waters.
Philor. Hee's a Page
Fill'd with Errata's of the present Age.Philar. The Churches Scourge--
Philor. The devils Enchiridion--
Philar. The Squib, the Ignis fatuus of Religion.
To their address Anarchus replies in a song which it would be easy to illustrate from the dramatic literature of the time, and which well indicates the estimation in which the faction was popularly held. Here is one verse:
Wee'l down with all the Varsities,
Where Learning is profest,
Because they practise and maintain
The Language of the Beast:
Wee'l drive the Doctors out of doores,
And Arts what ere they be,
Wee'l cry both Arts, and Learning down,
And, hey! then up goe we.
The whole song for sheer rollicking hypocrisy is without parallel in the language. The date of the poem is doubtful, but Quarles lived till 1644, and after two years of civil strife the terms which the interlocutors in the above passage apply to the Puritan party can hardly be regarded as prophetic.
Besides the works we have examined above, several others are known to have existed, though they are not now traceable. Thus 'The sweete sobbes, and amorous Complaintes of Shepardes and Nymphes in a fancye confusde by An Munday' was entered on the books of the Stationers' Company on August 19, 1583. Two years earlier, on August 3, 1581, had been entered 'A Shadowe of Sannazar.' Again we know, alike from Wood's Athenae and Meres' Palladis Tamia, that Stephen Gosson left works of the kind of which we have now no trace; while Puttenham in his Art of English Poesy mentions an eclogue of his own, addressed to Edward VI, and entitled Elpine. Puttenham and Meres in dealing with pastoral writers also mention one Challener, no doubt the Thomas Chaloner who contributed to the Mirror for Magistrates, and Nashe in his preface to Menaphon adds Thomas Atchelow, who may be plausibly identified with the Thomas Achelly who contributed verses to Watson's Hecatompathia and various sententious fragments to England's Parnassus, among them a not very happy rendering of those lines of Catullus which might almost be taken as a motto to pastoral poetry as a whole:
The sun doth set, and brings again the day,
But when our light is gone, we sleep for aye.
V
It is not easy to arrange the mass of occasional lyric verse of a pastoral nature in a manner to facilitate a general survey. We may perhaps divide it roughly into general groups which possess certain points in common and can be treated more or less independently. Little would be gained by following a strictly chronological order, even were it possible to do so.
We occasionally meet with translations, though from the nature of the case these, as well as evidences of direct foreign influence, are less prominent here than in the more formal type of pastoral verse. We have already seen that Googe, besides borrowing from Garcilaso's version of a portion of the Arcadia, himself paraphrased passages of the Diana in his eclogues, and the latter work also supplied material for the pen of Sir Philip Sidney. His debt consists in translations of two songs from Montemayor's romance, printed among his miscellaneous poems[[124]]. About a dozen translations from the same source appeared in England's Helicon, the work of Bartholomew Yong. They are for the most part very inferior to the general average of the collection, but the opening of one at least is worth quoting: