old English composers, Bull and Ford; or partook his canary with his "lov'd Alphonso," as he calls him, the Signor Ferrabosco.

We have not yet done with this delightful portion of our subject. Fletcher and Milton await us still; together with the pastoral poet William Browne; and a few other poets, who, though they wrote no pastorals, were pastoral men.

CHAPTER VIII.

ENGLISH PASTORAL-(CONTINUED); AND SCOTCH PASTORAL.

FLETCHER'S

OF

ITS

FAITHFUL SHEPERDESS.-PROBABLE REASON NON-SUCCESS.-COMUS AND LYCIDAS-DR. JOHNSON'S WORLD.BURNS AND ALLAN RAMSAY.

THE title and story of the "Sad Shepherd" of Ben Jonson, in combination with those of the "Faithful Shepherd" (Pastor Fido) of Guarini, appear to have suggested to Fletcher his "Faithful Shepherdess." This is undoubtedly the chief pastoral

play in our language, though with all its beauties we can hardly think it ought to have been such, considering what Shakspeare and Spenser have shown that they could have done in this

Arcadian region. The illustrious author, exquisite poet as he was, and son of a bishop to boot, had the misfortune, with his friend Beaumont, to be what is called a “man upon town;" which polluted his sense of enjoyment and rendered him but imperfectly in earnest, even when he most wished to be so. Hence his subserviency to the taste of those painful gentlemen called men of pleasure, and his piecing out his better sentiments with exaggeration. Hence the revolting character, in this play, of a "Wanton Shepherdess," which is an offence to the very voluptuousness it secretly intended to interest; and hence the opposite offence of the character of the "Faithful Shepherdess" herself, who is ostentatiously made such a paragon of chastity, and values herself so excessively on the self-denial, that the virtue itself is compromised, and you can see that the author had very little faith in it. And we have little doubt that this was the cause why the play was damned, (for such is the startling fact,) and not the ignorance of the audience, to which Beaumont and Ben Jonson indignantly attributed it. The audience could not reconcile such painful, and, as it must have appeared to them, such hypocritical contradictions: and very distressing to the author must it have been to find, that he had himself contributed to create that sceptical tone of mind in the public respecting both himself and the female sex, which refused to take him at his word when he was for putting on a graver face, and claiming their ultra-belief in all that he chose to assume. The "Faithful Shepherdess" is a young widow, who is always talking of devoting herself to her husband's memory; and her lover Thenot is so passionately enamoured of her, that he says if she were to give up the devotion, his passion would be lost. He entreats her at once to "hear him” and to " deny!" This child's play is what the audience could

not tolerate. It was a pity; for there are passages in the "Faithful Shepherdess" as lovely as poet could write. We are never tired of hearing—

"How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove,

First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes
She took eternal fire that never dies;
How she convey'd him softly in a sleep,
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
Head of old Latmos, where she stoops each night,
Gilding the mountain with her brother's light,
To kiss her sweetest."

So of the dessert gathered by the Satyr for the nymph
Syrinx -

66

Here be grapes, whose lusty blood

Is the learned poet's good;

Sweeter yet did never crown

The head of Bacchus; nuts more brown
Than the squirrel's teeth that crack them;
Deign, oh, fairest fair, to take them.

For these black-eyed Driope

Hath often times commanded me

With my clasped knee to climb;

See how well the lusty time

Hath decked their rising cheeks in red,

Such as on your lips is spread.

Here be berries for a queen,

Some be red, some be green;

These are of that luscious meat,

The great god Pan himself doth eat;

All these, and what the woods can yield,

The hanging mountain or the field,

I freely offer, and ere long

Will bring you more, more sweet and strong;

Till then humbly leave I take,

Lest the great Pan do awake,

That sleeping lies in a deep glade

Under a broad beech's shade.

I must go, I must run,

Swifter than the fiery sun."

See also the love made by the river-god at the end of the third Act, which we have not room to quote; and the Satyr's account of dawn, which opens with the four most exquisite lines perhaps in the whole play :

"See, the day begins to break,
And the light shoots like a streak
Of subtle fire.-The wind blows cold,
While the morning doth unfold."

Who has not felt this mingled charmingness and chilliness (we do not use the words for the sake of the alliteration) at the first opening of the morning! Yet none but the finest poets venture upon thus combining pleasure with something that might be thought a drawback. But it is truth; and it is truth, in which the beauty surmounts the pain; and therefore they give it. And how simple and straightforward is every word! There are no artificial tricks of composition here. The words are not suggested to the truth by the author, but to the author by the truth. We feel the wind blowing as simply as it does in nature; so that if the reader be artificially trained, and does not bring a feeling for truth with him analogous to that of the poet, the very simplicity is in danger of losing him the perception of the beauty. And yet there is art as well as nature in the verses; for art in the poet must perfect what nature does by her own art. Observe, for instance, the sudden and strong emphasis on the word shoots, and the variety of tone and modulation in the whole passage, with the judicious exceptions of the two