The echoes ringing from the rocks his fall,
The trees with tears reporting of his thrall.

And Venus starting at her love-mate's cry
Forcing her birds to haste her chariot on ;
And, full of grief, at last, with piteous eye,

Seen where all pale with death he lay alone
Whose beauty quail'd as wont the lilies droop
When wasteful winter winds do make them stoop.

Her dainty hand addressed to claw her dear,

Her roseal lip allied to his pale cheek,
Her sighs, and then her looks and heavy cheer,
Her bitter threats, and then her passions meek;
How on his senseless corpse she lay a-crying,
As if the boy were then but new a-dying."

Lodge's "Fig for Momus" is often amusing, but the satire is not very pungent. He was much too good-natured a man to be a satirist : he was not capable even of smiling spite, much less of bitter derision. His "Epistles" are entitled to the claim that he makes for them, of being the first productions of the kind in English, and their date disposes at once of Joseph Hall's conceited boast

"I first adventure, follow me who list

And be the second English satirist."

But priority is their chief merit: they are colourless imitations of Horace. Marston is the first real English satirist.

Nor can Lodge be said to have been successful as a dramatist. The "Wounds of Civil War" is a heavy drama. Sylla is drawn with considerable power as a bold rough man with a certain sense of humour in him: ambitious, boastful, treating his enemies with scoffing contempt, making a jest of death and cruelty, rudely repelling compliments, provoking public censure for the pleasure of defying it. He may have supplied some raw material for Shakespeare's "Coriolanus." Sylla talks very much in the vein of Tamburlaine; and it is probable from this that Lodge may fairly get the credit or discredit of the extravagant ramps of Rasni in the "Looking-glass for London," which he wrote in con

junction with Greene. It is a curious thing that men like Lodge and Peele should quite equal, if not surpass, even Marlowe in outrageous heroics. One wonders that the

Herod of the Mysteries should be out-Heroded by one who dwells with such fresh enthusiasm on tender beauties. How different are Sylla's rants from this strain !—

"O shady vale, O fair enriched meads,

O sacred woods, sweet fields, and rising mountains;
O painted flowers, green herbs where Flora treads,
Refreshed by wanton winds and watery fountains."

Perhaps, however, it is not more surprising than that the author of "Tamburlaine" should be the author of "Hero and Leander."

V. THOMAS WATSON (1557 ?-1592?).

We have mentioned incidentally the ''Exarouralía, or Passionate Century of Love,' by Thomas Watson. Watson first appeared as an author in 1581, with a translation into Latin of the Antigone' of Sophocles. The "Passionate Century" (that is, Hundred) was published in 1582. Three years after, he executed a Latin elegiac poem, entitled "Amyntas." He continued the practice of Latin verse alongside of English: in 1590 he published an "Eglogue upon the Death of Sir Francis Walsingham" in Latin and English, adopting in this case the title of "Melibus." In 1593, in which year he was mentioned as if then dead,1 his last work was published-a collection of sixty sonnets, entitled "The Tears of Fancy, or Love Disdained."

Neither the "Century of Love" nor the "Tears of Fancy" belongs to a high order of poetry. The "Century" was avowedly an exercise of skill: the love-passion, he tells us in the Preface, was "but supposed." With this the critic has no quarrel: so far Watson differs from many of his poetical brethren, only in the perhaps superfluous can

1 See the Introduction to Mr Arber's reprint.

dour of the avowal. The misfortune is that the supposition, the imaginative passion, is weak. There is no constructive vitality in his lines; the words and images seem brought together by a process of mechanical accumulation. The "Tears of Fancy" are decidedly superior to the "Lovepassions," but here also there is a fatal lack of spontaneity and freshness: the superiority has every appearance of being due to the author's study of Spenser.

The "Passionate Century" is worth reading as a repertory of commonplace lover's hyperboles. There never was so sweet a lady, never so fond nor so distraught a lover. Hand, foot, lip, eye, brow, and golden locks are all incomparable. The ages never have produced, and never will produce, such another; Apelles could not have painted her, Praxiteles could not have sculptured her, Virgil and Homer could not have expressed her, and Tully would not have ventured to repeat the number of her gifts. She is superior to all the mythological paramours of Jove. The various goddesses have contributed their best endowments, mental and physical, to make her perfect. Her voice excels Arion's harp, Philomela's song, Apollo's lute; yea

"Music herself and all the Muses nine

For skill or voice their titles may resign."

The despair produced in the lover's heart by the disdain of such a paragon is in a corresponding ratio. Vesuvius is nothing to the fire that consumes his heart. The pains of hell would be a comparative relief. He suffers the combined tortures of Tantalus, Ixion, Tityus, and Sisyphus :

"If Tityus, wretched wight, beheld my pains,

He would confess his wounds to be but small:
A vulture worse than his tears all my veins,
Yet never lets me die, nor live at all,
Would God a while I might possess his place,
To judge of both which were in better case."

:

The Tears of Fancy, which, as we have said, are chiefly imitation gems, observe the same form as Daniel's. The

two following quatrains, with their pretty anadiplosis, or doubling in one line upon the last words of the preceding, are an extreme example of the poet's imitation of Spenser. Cupid is the eager fugitive, bent on mischief:

"Then on the sudden fast away he fled,

He fled apace as from pursuing foe:
Ne ever looked he back, ne turned his head,
Until he came whereas he wrought my woe.
Tho casting from his back his bended bow,

He quickly clad himself in strange disguise :
In strange disguise that no man might him know,
So coucht himself within my Lady's eyes."

The two following conceits are in his best manner, and derive a certain interest from their having apparently been imitated in Shakespeare's sonnets 46 and 47:—

My heart imposed this penance on mine eyes,

Eyes the first causers of my heart's lamenting: That they should weep till love and fancy dies, Fond love the last cause of my heart's repenting. Mine eyes upon my heart inflict this pain,

Bold heart that dared to harbour thoughts of love! That it should love and purchase fell disdain,

A grievous penance, which my heart doth prove. Mine eyes did weep as heart had then imposed

My heart did pine as eyes had it constrained:
Eyes in their tears my paled face disclosed,

Heart in his sighs did show it was disdained.
So th' one did weep, th' other sigh'd, both grieved,
For both must live and love, both unrelieved."

My heart accused mine eyes and was offended,
Vowing the cause was in mine eyes' aspiring:
Mine eyes affirmed my heart might well amend it,
If he at first had banished love's desiring.
Heart said that love did enter at the eyes,

And from the eyes descended to the heart:

Eyes said that in the heart did sparks arise,

Which kindled flame that wrought the inward smart.

Heart said eyes' tears might soon have quench'd that flame, Eyes said heart's sighs at first might love excite.

So heart the eyes, and eyes the heart did blame,

Whilst both did pine, for both the pain did feel.
Heart sighed and bled, eyes wept and gazed too much:
Yet must I gaze because I see none such."

These sonnets, with or without the following beginning of Watson's 22d Love-passion

"When wert thou born, sweet Love? who was thy sire?
When Flora first adorn'd Dame Tellus' lap,
Then sprung I forth with wanton Hot Desire.

Who was thy nurse, to feed thee first with pap?
Youth first with tender hand bound up my head,
Then said, with looks alone I should be fed

may have suggested the song in the 'Merchant of Venice,' Act iii. 2, "Tell me, where is Fancy bred."1

VI. MICHAEL DRAYTON (1563-1631).

In Spenser's "Colin Clout's Come Home Again," published in 1595, occur four lines that are commonly supposed to refer to Shakespeare

"And there though last not least is Aetion;

A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found:
Whose muse, full of high thought's invention,
Doth like himself heroically sound."

At least an equal probability may be made out for Drayton. Drayton made his début as a pastoral poet in 1593, with his "Idea: Shepherd's Garland, fashioned in Nine Eclogues;" and followed this up in 1594 with a body of sonnets"Idea's Mirror, Amours in Quatorzains "-and the mytho

1 A writer in the 'Quarterly Review,' No. 267, ascribes the suggestion of this song to a sonnet by Jacopo da Lentino. The sonnet is not known to have been printed before 1661, but the writer supposes Shakespeare to have seen it in MS., and considers it a proof that Shakespeare could read Italian, if not that he had been in Italy! The coincidence is certainly striking, but the birthplace of Love or Fancy in the eyes was a commonplace. I have remarked several English poems of the time quite capable of having given the suggestion.