And mount the sphere of fire to kiss the moon, The idea of "span-long elves," who dance about a carrying each a stolen infant, that must be bigger themselves, is a very capital and fantastic horror. Old burly and strong-sensation-loving Ben (a friend Chapman, or Mr. Bentham, might have him) could show, however, a great deal of delicacy he had a mind to it. He could turn his bluster in zephyr that inspired the young genius of Milton. of his court masques are pastoral; and the followi the style in which he receives the king and q Maia (the goddess of May) says— If all the pleasures were distill'd Of every flower in every field (This kind of return of words was not common the he has since made it) And all that Hybla's hives do yield, Were put therein; and all the dew And honour you vouchsafe the place. In the masque of Oberon, Silenus bids his Satyrs rouse up a couple of sleeping Sylvans, who ought to have been keeping watch; "at which," says the poet's direction, "the Satyrs fell suddenly into this catch”— Musicians know it well: Buz, quoth the blue fly; Hum, quoth the bee; Buz and hum they cry, And so do we. In his ear, in his nose, Thus, do you see! He eat the dormouse, Else it was he. [They tickle them. It is impossible that anything could better express than this, either the wild and practical joking of the Satyrs, or the action of the thing described, or the quaintness and fitness of the images, or the melody and even the harmony, the intercourse, of the musical words, one with another. None but a boon companion with a very musical ear could have written it. It was not for nothing that Ben lived in the time of the fine old English composers, Bull and Ford; or partook his canary with Ferrabosco. We have not yet done with this delightful por of our subject. Fletcher and Milton await us s together with the pastoral poet, William Browne; a few other poets, who, though they wrote no pasto were pastoral men. CHAPTER VIII. ENGLISH PASTORAL-(CONTINUED); AND SCOTCH PASTORAL. OF ITS NON-SUCCESS. 66 REASON "COMUS AND LYCIDAS.". DR. JOHNSON'S "" WORLD. -BURNS AND ALLAN RAMSAY. herdess. This is undoubtedly the chief pastoral play in our language, though, with all its beauties, we can an 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 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 |