SIR P. SIDNEY

THE MARRIAGE OF PARTHENIA

WITHIN some days after, the marriage between Argalus

and the fair Parthenia being to be celebrated, Daïphantus and Palladius selling some of their Jewels, furnished themselves of very fair apparel, meaning to do honour to their loving host, who, as much for their sakes as for their marriage, set forth each thing in most gorgeous manner. But all the cost bestowed did not so much enrich, nor all the fine decking so much beautify, nor all the dainty devices so much delight, as the fairness of Parthenia, the pearl of all the maids of Mantinea, who as she went to the temple to be married, her eyes themselves seemed a temple, wherein love and beauty were married; her lips, though they were kept close with modest silence, yet, with a pretty kind of natural swelling, they seemed to invite the guests that looked on them; her cheeks blushing, and withal, when she was spoken unto, a little smiling, were like roses, when their leaves are with a little breath stirred, her hair being laid at the full length down her back, bare show as if the vaward failed, yet that would conquer.

ARCADIA

The third day after, in the time that the morning did strow roses and violets in the heavenly floor against the coming of the sun, the nightingales, striving one with the other which could in most dainty variety recount their wrong caused sorrow, made them put off their sleep; and, rising from under a tree, which that night had been their pavilion, they went on their journey, which by and by welcomed Musidorus' eyes with delightful prospects. There were hills which garnished their proud heights with stately trees; humble valleys whose base estate seemed comforted with the refreshing of silver rivers; meadows enamelled with all sorts of eye-pleasing

flowers; thickets which, being lined with most pleasant shade, were witnessed so to, by the cheerful disposition of many well-tuned birds; each pasture stored with sheep feeding with sober security, while the pretty lambs, with bleating oratory, craved the dam's comfort: here a shepherd's boy piping, as though he should never be old; there a young shepherdess knitting and withal singing: and it seemed that her voice comforted her hands to work, and her hands kept time to her voice music. As for the houses of the country— for many houses came under their eye-they were all scattered, no two being one by the other, and yet not so far off as that it barred mutual succour ; a show, as it were, of an accompanable solitariness, and of a civil wildness.

THOMAS NASHE

(THE UNFORTUNATE TRAVELLER)

To tell you of the rare pleasures of their gardens, their baths,

their vineyards, their galleries, were to write a second part of the Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Devices. Why, you should not come into any man's house of account, but he had fish-ponds and little orchards on his leads. If by rain or any other means those ponds were so full they need to be sluiced or let out, even of their superfluities they made melodious use, for they had great wind instruments, instead of leaden spouts, that went duly on consort, only with this water's rumbling descent. I saw a summer banqueting house belonging to a merchant, that was the marvel of the world, and could not be matched except God should make another Paradise. It was built round of green marble like a theatre without within, there was a heaven and earth comprehended both under one roof; the heaven was a clear overhanging vault of crystal, wherein the sun and moon and each visible star had his true similitude, shine, situation, and, motion, and, by what

enwrapped art I cannot conceive, these spheres in their proper orbs observed their circular wheelings and turnings, making a certain kind of soft angelical murmuring music in their often windings and goings about; which music, the philosophers say, in the true heaven, by reason of the grossness of our senses, we are not capable of. For the earth, it was counterfeited in that likeness that Adam lorded out it before his fall. A wide vast spacious room it was, such as we would conceit Prince Arthur's hall to be, where he feasted all his Knights of the Round Table together every Pentecost. The floor was painted with the beautifullest flowers that ever man's eye admired; which so lineally were delineated that he that viewed them afar off, and had not directly stood poringly over them, would have sworn they had lived indeed. The walls round about were hedged with olives and palm-trees, and all other odoriferous fruit-bearing plants; which at any solemn entertainment dropped myrrh and frankincense. Other trees, that bare no fruit, were set in just order one against another, and divided the room into a number of shady lanes, leaving but one overspreading pine-tree arbour, where we sate and banquetted. On the well-clothed boughs of this conspiracy of pine trees against the resembled sunbeams, were perched as many sorts of shrill-breasted birds as the summer hath allowed for singing-men in her silvan chapels. Who though there were bodies without souls, and sweet resembled substances without sense, yet by the mathematical experiments of long silver pipes secretly inrinded in the entrails of the boughs whereon they sat, and undiscernably conveyed under their bellies into their small throats sloping, they whistled and freely carolled their natural field note. Neither went those silver pipes straight, but, by many edged unsundered writhings and crankled wanderings aside, strayed from bough to bough into an hundred throats. But into this silver pipe so writhed and wandering aside, if any demand how the wind was breathed; forsooth the tail of the silver pipe stretched itself into the mouth of a great pair of bellows where it was close soldered, and bailed about with iron, it could not stir or have

But

any vent betwixt. Those bellows with the rising and falling of leaden plummets wounde up on a wheel, did beat up and down uncessantly, and so gathered in wind, serving with one blast all the snarled pipes to and fro of one tree at once. so closely were all those organizing implements obscured in the corpulent trunks of the trees, that every man there present renounced conjectures of art, and said it was done by enchantment.

One tree for his fruit bare nothing but enchained chirping birds, whose throats being conduit-piped with squared narrow shells, and charged Siren-wise with searching sweet water driven in by a little wheel for the nonce, that fed it afar off, made a spirting sound, such as chirping is, in bubbling upwards through the rough crannies of their closed bills.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

YORICK

Clown. Here's a skull now, has lain in the earth three and twenty years.

Hamlet. Whose was it.

Clown. A whorson mad fellow's it was; whose do you think

it was.

Ham. Nay, I know not.

Clown. A pestilence on him for a mad rogue, he poured a flagon of rhenish on my head once. This same skull, sir, was Yorick's skull, the King's jester. Ham. This?

Clown. E'en that.

Ham. Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest; of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorred in my imagination it is, my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs?

your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table in a roar? not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.

JOHN WEBSTER

THE ESTATE OF MAN

Duchess. Who am I?

Bosola. Thou art a box of wormseed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What's this flesh? a little crudded milk, fantastical puff paste. Our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep flies in; more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth worms. Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body this world is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o'er our heads like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison.

SIR,

BEN JONSON

CAPTAIN BOBADIL EXTOLS TOBACCO

IR, believe me, upon my relation for what I tell you, the world shall not reprove. I have been in the Indies, where this herb grows, where neither myself, nor a dozen gentlemen more of my knowledge, have received the taste of any other nutriment in the world, for the space of one and twenty weeks, but the fume of this simple only: therefore, it cannot be, but 'tis most divine. Further, take it in the nature, in the true kind; so, it makes an antidote, that, had you taken the most deadly poisonous plant in all Italy, it should expel