When Phoebus from the bed The morning, blushing red He shows in my Nymph's face, This pleasant lily-white, This Cynthia's silver-light, This sweet fair Dea spread, These sunbeams in my eye, These beauties, make me die ! AN EPIGRAM. Were I a king, I might command content; Answered thus by Sir Philip Sidney Wert thou a king, yet not command content, GEORGE PEELE. (1552?-1596.) PEELE held a high place among the Elizabethan dramatists. He was of Devonshire origin; graduated at Oxford as Master of Arts in 1579, and went to London, where he lived "on the Bankside over against Blackfriars,"1 says his historian; was made City-poet, and had the ordering of the pageants. Of his 1 Wood's Athena. non-dramatic verse three pieces are found in England's Helicon, while others are scattered in England's Parnassus, 1600, in Paradise of Dainty Devices, 1576, and the various miscellanies of the period. THE ENAMOURED SHEPHERD.1 O gentle Love, ungentle for thy deed! A bloody mark, With piercing shot to bleed. Shoot soft, sweet Love, for fear thou shoot amiss, For fear too keen Thy arrows been, And hit the heart where my Beloved is. Too fair that fortune were, nor never I Shall be so blest Among the rest, That Love shall seize on her by sympathy. Then, since with Love my prayers bear no boot,2 This doth remain To ease my pain, I take the wound, and die at Venus' foot. 1 From England's Helicon. 2 Are of no avail. EDMUND SPENSER. (1552-1599.) CO E are accustomed to regard the last half of Elizabeth's reign as the most brilliant period in our literary annals. This Golden Age of English poetry began when Elizabeth had been queen for nearly twenty-two years, and may be dated with still closer precision from the winter of the year 1579; for it was in that year, and in the winter of that year, that Edmund Spenser, hitherto known as a writer only among a coterie of college and literary friends, appeared for the first time in print, and was publicly recognised as the new poet." His first volume, entitled The Shepherd's Calendar, is also memorable as having helped more than any other single production to popularise pastoral poetry in England. 66 Pastoral poetry, or that kind of poetry which represents the life and talk of shepherds and rustics, had its origin, so far as we know, in the Idylls of Theocritus, a Sicilian Greek, who lived in the third century before our era. With his name are linked those of two of his contemporaries,-Bion, also a Sicilian, and Moschus, a native of Asia Minor. It is difficult to decide to what extent these ancient Idylls were literally descriptive of Greek life in Sicily; but it is natural to surmise that, so far as they go (for they touch upon only a few of the relations of human society), they do represent that life as their authors found it. The picture which these Greek Idylls have perpetuated is that of an extremely simple but artistically tempered people, as observed by writers of the highest possible culture and refinement. The pastorals of these three Greeks, composed in the Doric, or rustic, dialect, and in the Homeric measure, are still the most pure and perfect specimens of pastoral poetry in existence; and all poetry of this kind written since has been, directly or indirectly, in imitation of them. Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, had no contemporaries or successors of their own nation equal to them; but in the golden age of Latin literature Virgil (70-19 B.C.) composed his Eclogues or Bucolics, partly in imitation, partly in direct translation, of the Idylls of Theocritus. Some of Virgil's Eclogues were much more artificially constructed than those of Theocritus, and, while perfectly pastoral in form, were made to embody a passage of his own life, a satire, or a eulogy on some living person. This extension of the purpose of pastoral poetry led to the introduction into it by other writers of Allegory, more or less complicated. After Virgil's time, another and a greater gap occurred in the history of pastoral verse. During the fifteen hundred years which elapsed between the propagation of Christianity in Europe and the Revival of Letters, no pastoral poetry of note was produced, and the beauties of Theocritus and Virgil were almost forgotten. Mr. Hallam assigns to the Portuguese the honour of having first resuscitated this classic form of poesy. But it is probable that in every nation where pastoral habits of life existed side by side with an artistic and poetic national temperament, the expression of these would take the form of pastoral verses more or less cultured. It is also likely that, even through the middle ages, wherever there was access to the half-forbidden poetry of the Greek and Roman pagans, stray efforts were made to construct verses upon the classic pastoral model. In the list which our own Northumbrian Bede (676-735) has left of his numerous works, one notes a Latin Eclogue entitled The Conflict of Winter and Summer. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, at all events, pastoral poetry came again into fashion, and pastoral poems were produced in Italy which became popular throughout Europe. Angelo Poliziano, an eminent professor of Latin and Greek at Florence, who died in 1494, has left, in terza-rima, a pastoral story called Orfeo; and the Cefalo of Niccolo da Correggio was recited in public by its author in 1486. The most famous of all the medieval writers of pastoral poetry was Jacobo Sannazaro, a Neapolitan (1458-1532). His chief work, the Arcadia, published in 1504, was read not only in Italy, but also in Spain, Portugal, and France, and was quickly followed by a burst of pastorals in these countries. English readers of foreign poetry were intimate with Sannazaro and other continental writers, and the writings of our early Elizabethans contain allusions to them; but, until Spenser published his first volume of poems, the pastoral cannot be said to have made its way into our national literature as an accepted literary form. Barnaby Googe's Eclogs preceded Spenser's Calendar by sixteen years, and there is a certain resemblance of tone between the two sets of pastorals. It is indeed only fair to remember Googe as, in date, the first pastoral poet. But it was Spenser's genius, the grace and vigour of his imagination, and his scholarly mastery of this difficult and highly artificial form of composition, that finally popularised it in England. Before the age of Spenser and Sidney, although lyric verses written in a pastoral and rustic style were not wanting in our literature, the absence of any series of Eclogues or Idylls, properly and expressly so named, is very marked. Nor was this omission due to any lack of willingness among English writers to invest their energies in the forms which foreign poets of high culture and genius had adopted. The Sonnet is perhaps the most difficult kind of poem to write well, especially in the English tongue. The greatest poets have sometimes failed as sonneteers, and some of the most correct sonnets are very bad poetry. But no difficulty deterred our early Elizabethans from imitating the Petrarchian sonnet; and a large mass of the poetry of the sixteenth century consists of sonnets. After 1579, however, or after Spenser and Sidney had produced their famous pastorals, a distinct modification was apparent in our methods of poetic expression. The sonnet continued as hitherto a favourite form; the narrative poem was as much sought after as before, and indeed had acquired new importance from the services it rendered to the drama by supplying the dramatists with endless plots for their plays. Short poems of a sentimental or reflective character called "Sonnetts" or "Songes," |