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Each vulgar hand can do as much;
Thine heavenly skill we see
When we behold one arrow touch
Two marks that distant be.

Love always looks for love again,

If ever thou wound man's heart,
Pierce by the way his rib, and then
He'll kiss, not curse thy dart.

LOVE WITHOUT RETURN.

RIEVE not, fond man, nor let one tear
Steal from thine eyes; she'll hear
No more of Cupid's shafts; they fly
For wounding her, so let them die.

For why shouldst thou nourish such flames as burn
Thy easy breast, and not have like return?
Love forces love, as flames expire

If not increased by gentle fire.

Let then her frigid coolness move
Thee to withdraw thy purer love;
And since she is resolved to show
She will not love, do thou so too:
For why should beauty so charm thine eyes,
That if she frown, thou'lt prove her sacrifice?
Love, &c.

CHETTLE AND MUNDAY.

THE DEATH OF ROBERT, EARL OF HUNTINGDON.

WE

THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD.

EEP, weep, ye woodmen wail,
Your hands with sorrow wring;
Your master Robin Hood lies dead,
Therefore sigh as you sing.

Here lie his primer and his beads,
His bent bow and his arrows keen,
His good sword and his holy cross:
Now cast on flowers fresh and green;

And as they fall shed tears and say,
Wella, wella-day, wella, wella-day:
Thus cast ye flowers and sing,

And on to Wakefield take your way.

THOMAS HEYWOOD.

15- 16—.

['HEYWOOD,' says Charles Lamb, 'is a sort of prose Shakespeare, his scenes are to the full as natural and affecting. But we miss the poet, that which in Shakespeare always appears out and above the surface of the nature. Heywood's characters, his country gentlemen, &c., are exactly what we see (but of the best kind of what we see) in life. Shakespeare makes us believe, while we are among his lovely creations, that we see nothing but what we are familiar with, as in dreams new things seem old; but we awake, and sigh for the difference.' The test to which this comparison subjects the writings of Heywood is a severe one; but he comes out of it with credit. Considering how much he wrote, and the circumstances under which he appears to have written, it is no slight merit to have produced scenes as natural and affecting, and characters as true to life as those of Shakespeare, even without the power of idealizing his conceptions. Of all our dramatic writers he was the most voluminous, having been concerned in no less than two hundred and twenty dramatic pieces, besides his Apology for Actors, and other works. It was only by the most persevering and systematic industry such a prodigious quantity of labour could have been accomplished, and Kirkman says that he 'not only acted almost

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every day, but obliged himself to write a sheet every day for several years together.' Many of his plays were written in this way in taverns. As one proof of the rapidity of his composition,' observes the last editor of Dodsley, 'it may be mentioned that at the end of his Nine Books of Various History concerning Women, a folio of 466 pages, printed in 1624, are the following words: Opus excogitatum, inchoatum, explicitum et typographo excusum inter septemdecem septimanas.' We can hardly form a just estimate of the various merits of such a writer from the scanty evidence that has come down to us, twenty-three of his plays being all that are known to exist in print. He seems, indeed, to have written his plays solely for the stage without any view to publication, and he tells us that many of them were lost by the shifting and change of companies, that others were retained in the hands of the actors, who considered it injurious to their profits to suffer them to be printed, that having sold his copies to them he thought he had no right to print them without their consent, and that, even if he had the right to print them, he never had any great ambition to be, in this kind, voluminously read.'

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The earliest notice that has been traced of Thomas Heywood occurs in Henslowe's Diary under the date of 1596, from which it appears that he had at that time written a play for the Lord Admiral's company. In 1598 he entered Henslowe's company as a regular actor and sharer. On the accession of James I., he became one of the theatrical servants of the Earl of Worcester, was afterwards transferred to the service of Queen Anne, and upon her Majesty's death returned to Lord Worcester. Amongst the numerous works he either contemplated or produced was a collection of The Lives of all the Poets, Modern and Foreign, upon the materials for which he was for many years engaged. Few further particulars are known concerning him. We learn from an elegy on Sir George Saint Poole, whom he calls his countryman, that he was born in Lincolnshire; and William Cartwright says that he was a fellow of Peter House, in Cambridge, which is in

some degree confirmed by an allusion of his own to 'the time of his residence at Cambridge.'

The following curious notice of Heywood, in which an allusion is made to the poverty under which he suffered at one period of his life, if not throughout his whole career of labour and struggle, is extracted from a poem on the Times' Poets, published by Mr. Halliwell amongst the miscellaneous papers of the Shakespeare Society. It occurs in a very scarce volume, bearing the date of 1656, and entitled Choyce Drollery, Songs, and Sonnets, being a collection of divers excellent pieces of poetry of several eminent authors, never before printed:

The squibbling Middleton, and Heywood sage,

The apologetic Atlas of the stage;

Well of the Golden Age he could entreat,
But little of the metal he could get;

Threescore sweet babes he fashioned from the lump,

For he was christened in Parnassus' pump,

The Muses gossip to Aurora's bed,

And ever since that time his face was red.]

THE RAPE OF LUCRECE.

Now

WHAT IS LOVE?

what is love I will thee tell,

It is the fountain and the well,

Where pleasure and repentance dwell:

It is perhaps the sansing bell,*

That rings all in to heaven or hell,

And this is love, and this is love, as I hear tell.

Now what is love I will you show:

A thing that creeps and cannot go;
A prize that passeth to and fro;
A thing for me, a thing for mo':
And he that proves shall find it so,

And this is love, and this is love, sweet friend, I trow.

* Sanctus bell, or Saint's bell, that called to prayers.

TAVERN SIGNS.

THE gentry to the King's Head,
The nobles to the Crown,

The knights unto the Golden Fleece,
And to the Plough the clown.
The churchman to the Mitre,
The shepherd to the Star,

The gardener hies him to the Rose,
To the Drum the man of war;

To the Feathers, ladies, you; the Globe
The sea-man doth not scorn:

The usurer to the Devil, and

The townsman to the Horn.

The huntsman to the White Hart,
To the Ship the merchants go,
But you that do the muses love,
The Sign called River Po.

The banquerout to the World's End,
The fool to the Fortune hie,

Unto the Mouth the oyster wife,

The fiddler to the Pie.

The punk unto the Cockatrice,
The drunkard to the Vine,

The beggar to the Bush, then meet,
And with Duke Humphrey dine.

THE DEATH BELL.

COME, list and hark, the bell doth toll
For some but now departing soul.
And was not that some ominous fowl,
The bat, the night-crow, or screech-owl?
To these I hear the wild wolf howl,
In this black night that seems to scowl.
All these my black-book death enroll,
For hark, still, still, the bell doth toll
For some but now departing soul.

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