parts of the States, where the payment of game-licences, as also the employment of local guides, is exacted only from non-residents. Another principle, which will be new to European sportsmen, but which has been found generally necessary and salutary in the West, is the official limitation of the gun-bore. Only shoulder-guns are, as a rule, allowed, and the largest calibre permitted in most of the States is the 10-bore. The close-times established in the various States for such sporting-fish as the black-bass are no less divergent than those which apply to shooting. It is not unusual, indeed, to find different close-times for the same fish in two counties of a State. While Maine protects the black-bass from April 1 to July 1, Delaware protects it from November 1 to June 1. In Connecticut its closetime covers the months of May and June; in Pennsylvania, it extends from January 1 to May 30. Even if we make all possible allowance for differences in the spawning season, due to climatic or other influences, and remember that the ice may lie thick on the waters of one State for weeks after those of another are open, these closeseasons cover an extraordinary range, the true explanation of which must perhaps be sought in the afore-mentioned proclivity to experiment. One other law particularly applying to anglers is, we think, most salutary, and might with advantage be introduced in some European countries where sportsmen and naturalists show an unrestrained passion for introducing all manner of fishes, suitable or otherwise; we allude to the law which, in some States, forbids the introduction of any carnivorous fish without previous permission from the Government fish-culturist. We have now glanced at the leading game-laws of many lands. Here and there a European country has been passed over as affording no evidence of sufficient importance; nor has account been taken of big-game protection in the East, or of the increasing importance of New Zealand as a country for sportsmen, the deer and trout of which, both introduced from Europe, are strictly protected by the Government. Yet our survey of other sporting-laws will perhaps have sufficed to confirm a preference for our own. Here and there perhaps, as in the afore-mentioned case of the shifting close-seasons in vogue elsewhere, we have frankly owned ourselves at a disadvantage, but in the vast majority of cases the British game-laws of to-day may without fear stand the test of comparison. As a mean between the extreme feudal rigour still enforced in some Germanic states and the democratic licence of most Latin communities, our game-laws are preferable. With those who would abolish them unconditionally we have no parley. Game, whether feathered, furred or finned, should, in these days, be counted private property as much as dogs or horses, ; it costs its proprietor, as a rule, far more than its sale could produce. From the point of view of proprietary rights, it would be hard to distinguish the pheasants that haunt the coverts from the trees in which they shelter, or the minerals that lie beneath. To abolish the laws which protect game would not only destroy those rights, but would speedily wipe the game itself out of existence. Gunlicences are an incidental part of the system of protection, and, without inflicting an exorbitant tax on those who are otherwise qualified to use them, contribute an appreciable sum to the resources of the State. Yet it is important to differentiate the two principles involvedthe making of revenue and the protection of the game. In continental countries, and in America, where the payment of the one licence entitles the holder not merely to kill game, but to kill it on vast territories open to the public, these objects are apt to be confused. In these islands, however, where even the higher game-licence is worthless unless held in conjunction with the right or the permission to shoot in preserved grounds, the principles are distinct. The only case in which British authorities impose a game-licence with the object of protecting game rather than for revenue purposes is that of the abovementioned Sudan territories. Art. IV. THE ELIZABETHAN LYRIC. 1. An English Garner. Edited by E. Arber, 1877-1883. New edition. London: Constable, 1896. 2. England's Helicon. Edited by A. H. Bullen. London: Nimmo, 1887. 3. Davison's Poetical Rhapsody. Two vols. Edited by the same. London: Bell, 1890-1891. 4. Lyrics from the Song-books of the Elizabethan Age; More Lyrics from the Song-books of the Elizabethan Age; and Poems from Romances and Prose Tracts of the Elizabethan Age. Edited by the same. London: Nimmo, 1887-1890. 5. Lyrics from the Dramatists. Edited by the same. London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1891. 6. The Works of Dr Thomas Campion. Edited by the same. Privately printed. London: Chiswick Press, 1889. 7. The Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics. Edited by F. T. Palgrave. New edition. London: Macmillan, 1891. 8. A Paradise of English Poetry. Arranged by H. C. Beeching. London: Rivingtons, 1893. 9. The Golden Pomp, a Procession of English Lyrics. Arranged by A. T. Quiller-Couch. London: Methuen, 1895. 10. The Muses' Garden for Delights. Edited by W. B. Squire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1901. IN the year 1600 there issued from the press an anthology called 'England's Helicon,' which may be taken as inaugurating, not only a new century, but also a new epoch in English literature. It was put together by a certain A. B., who is not identified, but must have been a person of remarkable taste in letters; and it was dedicated to a certain John Bodenham, of whom all that is known is that he was the projector of various volumes of elegant extracts. Tottel's Miscellany, published in 1557, the book of 'Songs and Sonnets,' by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Lord Surrey-which, as we learn from the Merry Wives of Windsor,' still represented poetry to the country gentleman at the end of the sixteenth century-had been followed after two decades of silence by a cluster of anthologies: 'The Paradise of Dainty Devices' (1576); 'A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions' (1578); 'A Handful of Pleasant Delights' (1584); 'The Phoenix Nest' (1593). But though each of these contained some singable songs and readable verse, and the last of them, 'The Phoenix Nest,' displayed a few symptoms of the new era that was approaching, on the whole their names were the best thing about them. England's Helicon' marks a complete change of style. To open 'England's Helicon' is to pass for the first time into the Arcadia of pastoral poetry. How had this remarkable change come about? It was due, not to any general renaissance of taste or learning, but to the initiative and genius of two men, Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. This becomes clear if we recollect that the Italian models, upon which this new literature was, to a certain extent, based, had been as accessible to Englishmen in the period of Wyatt and Surrey, who wrote while Henry VIII was on the throne, as in that of Spenser and Sidney. Petrarch wrote Latin eclogues as well as Italian sonnets. He was followed by Baptista of Mantua-the Mantuan whose praises are chanted by Shakespeare's pedant Holofernes. Then Poliziano wrote pastorals in Italian, and was followed by a crowd of poets; and in 1504 Sanazzaro, following a model set by Boccaccio in his 'Ameto,' published an 'Arcadia' in mixed prose and verse, which, together with its imitation, the 'Diana' of the Portuguese George de Montemayor, formed the prototype of Sidney's romance threequarters of a century later (1580). Moreover, a very industrious verse-writer, George Gascoigne, who dominates the dreary interval between Tottel's Miscellany and 'England's Helicon,' was as 'Italianate' as Sidney. Gascoigne describes himself as 'Chaucer's boy and Petrarch's journeyman,' a style better fitted for Surrey, and entitles one of his books A hundred sundry flowers bound up in one small posy, gathered partly by translation in the fine outlandish gardens of Euripides, Ovid, Petrarch, Ariosto, and others, and partly by invention out of our own fruitful orchards in England.' It is all very well therefore to ascribe the credit for the rise of pastoral poetry in England to the 'hotter spirits' of the South, and the direct inspiration of Sanazzaro; but the reason why that particular outlandish importation had not come earlier lay in differences of temperament and circumstance between the two men of genius, in many respects so much akin and alike in the unhappin their fate, to whom it fell to mediate the Italian influence. The Earl of Surrey followed Wyatt in his preference for the sonnet; that was the direction in which he Petrarchised. Sir Philip Sidney also wrote sonnets; but the greater facility possible to him in this measure, on account of the pioneer's work already accomplished by Surrey, left him at liberty to subdue new provinces to the kingdom of English letters; while the closing to him, by the circumstances of his life as an Elizabethan courtier, of an active and adventurous career in the New World, gave him leisure and awakened a strong desire to find a braver world elsewhere. It is interesting to remark that there is one pastoral song even in Tottel's Miscellany; and this is reprinted in 'England's Helicon,' and attributed there to Lord T. Howard, Earl of Surrey. Lord Thomas Howard, afterwards Duke of Norfolk, was the son of the poet, and, if the song be by him, it is his only known achievement in poetry. It is more likely that the T. in the ascription is a misprint. The poem is in many ways remarkable. It is written in the common ballad metre-a metre not known to have been used elsewhere by Surrey; but it is written with grace and skill, and with both odd and even lines rhymed. The pastoral names, too, are interesting. The nymph bears, probably for the first time in pastoral poetry, the name, afterwards so popular, of Phyllida; the lover's name, Harpalus, also an invention of the poet's, does not seem to have been borrowed by later writers, except by Sir David Murray in his 'Complaint of the Shepherd Harpalus' (1611), and by Anthony Munday, who wrote a reply to Surrey's piece, which stands next after it in England's Helicon.' The poem opens as follows: 6 'Phyllida was a fair maid, Whom Harpalus the herdsman pray'd To be his paramour. Harpalus and eke Corin Were herdsmen both yfere; And Phyllida could twist and spin And thereto sing full clear. But Phyllida was all too coy For Corin was her only joy, |