say written by Dr. Donne, and some say, written by Sir Harry Wotton." Raleigh and Sir Kenelm Digby have been likewise suggested. The "bold and insolent vein " is not unlike Sir Walter, but there is no real authority for ascribing the poem to him. Cf. with the general tenor of this poem the Passion of my Lord of Essex, p. 94 above and also verses to Master Hugh Holland, published in Dowland's Second Book of Song and Airs, 1600 (Lyr. Eliz. Song Books, p. 31), beginning:

From Fame's desire, from Love's delight retired,

In these sad groves an hermit's life I lead,

And those false pleasures, which I once admired,
With sad remembrance of my fall I dread, etc.

189 9. 189 17.

Alone. In modern English only, no more than.

Unkind. Unnatural, with probably a play upon the more unusual meaning of the word.

189 31. Vie angels with India. Vie, here a technical term from the game of gleek or primero, signifying to wager on a hand of cards. Hence here to wager angel-nobles to an amount such as India, with all her wealth, would not be able to equal or 'cover.' Cf. note on 130 42. 190 52. Affect. Strive after, 'cultivate.'

191 3-4. Ever ruing, etc. Ever pitying those poor hearts, which are still pursuing their loves, i.e., wooing and as yet without requital.

...

192. A Nymph's Passion. Mr. Swinburne remarks that this poem "is not only pretty and ingenious, but in the structure of its peculiar stanza may remind a modern reader of some among the many metrical experiments or inventions of . . . Miss Christina Rossetti." The structure of this stanza of Jonson really exhibits the influence of Donne. Cf. his Witchcraft by a Picture (Riverside ed., p. 292) and his Confined Love (ibid., 283), in both of which the arrangement of rimes is identical with this poem.

192 7.

relative.

A narrow joy is but our own. Note the omission of the

192 10. Jealous mad. Mad with jealousy.

192 20. I doubt he is not known. I fear, suspect his real excellence

is not known, and, on the other hand, fear much more, etc. For this use of the word doubt cf. Mer. Wives, i, 4, 42.

193. The Hour-glass. This song was written for Drummond at his request and sent to him in Scotland. (See Conversations, as above, p. 38.) Whalley refers the suggestion of the subject to a Latin epigram by the Italian poet, Jerome Amaltheus, beginning:

Perspicuo in vitro pulvis qui dividit horas,

Dum vagus angustum saepe recurrit iter.
Olim erat Alcippus, etc.

Herrick, in a poem of the same title (Hesperides, Library of Old Authors,
I, 44), has applied this conceit to "lovers' tears," which

In life-time shed

Do restless run when they are dead.

193. The Dream Mr. Swinburne considers "one of Jonson's most happily inspired and most happily expressed fancies"; not losing even here, however, that tone of eccentric patronage which pervades so much of this rhapsodic and ecstatic criticism, he concludes: "the close of it is for once not less than charming." (A Study, as above, p. 105.) 193 6. Attempt awake. The folio reads attempt t' awake. The

emendation is Gifford's.

194 13. Sleep['s]. The folios and subsequent editions read sleep so guilty.

194 14. As. That.

194. The Sad Shepherd. The date of the composition of The Sad Shepherd is beyond definite settlement. But many have doubted that the play was really written towards the close of Jonson's career. Mr. Fleay identifies it with The May Lord mentioned to Drummond in 1619, and assigns it to 1615. Goffe, who died in 1627, imitated The Sad Shepherd in his Careless Shepherd, performed in 1629. I do not feel sufficiently certain of Mr. Fleay's identification to accept his date; but include this selection in my period without hesitation. (See Fleay, Chron. Biog. Hist. I, 379 f.)

194. Æglamour's Lament. These verses have all the 'notes' of the lyric except rime. It would be hard to draw a line which should exclude them. I am indebted to the suggestion of Professor Winchester that they, as well as several other selections, were not omitted. Another example of the unrimed lyric will be found in the song, All in Naught, p. 148 above. It may be worthy of note that in both of these cases there is a return to rime in the concluding couplets.

194 6.

194 9.

Blow-ball. The downy head of the dandelion.
As she had sowed them, etc. Cf. 12 13.

In a letter to Mr.

194. Since there's no help. This famous sonnet appeared first in the collected folio of Drayton's Works, 1619, p. 273, and is numbered 61 of the sonnets, Idea. "From Anacreon to Moore, I know of no lines on the old subject of lovers' quarrels, distinguished for equal tenderness of sentiment. . . . Especially may be observed the exquisite gracefulness in the transition from the familiar tone in the first part of the sonnet to the deeper feeling and the higher strain of the imagination at the close." (Henry Reed, British Poets, I, 241.) It is interesting to know that this was a favorite sonnet with Rossetti. T. Hall-Caine he writes:- "As for Drayton, his one incomparable sonnet is the Love Parting. That is almost the best in the language, if not quite." (Recollections of D. G. Rossetti, quoted by Mr. Bullen in his Selections from the Poems of Michael Drayton, p. 195.) Cf. the subject of this sonnet with the Canzonet below; the two poems must have been written about the same time; possibly upon the same occurrence. It appears that under the pseudonym of his 'fair Idea, soul-shrin'd Saint' Drayton concealed the identity of his mistress, Anne Goodeere, the daughter of his patron, Sir Henry Goodeere, of Powlesworth Abbey. The lovers were eventually separated, and Drayton never married.

195. The Crier and the Canzonet following appear for the first time in the fol. of 1619. The implication of Mr. Bullen that they are to be found in the undated ed. of 1605 must be a mistake, as I do not find them in that edition, in the edition of 1606, nor in the reprints of these editions by the Spenser Society. (See Bullen's Selections from the Poems of Drayton, p. 8.)

195 5. O yes, O yes, O yes. Hear! hear! the introductory words of a proclamation, here that of the crier, to secure silence.

195 9. Pain.

195 11.

195 16.

Owe.

Pains.

Own. Cf. 123 7, 15.

It was a tame heart (hart) and a dear (deer). Cf. 78 67, 85 14, 130 42, 180 2, 5, 8 for like instances of puns.

195 18. Haunt. Custom, habit. Cf. Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Prologue, 447.

195 19. Hardly. With difficulty. Cf. 90 5.

196 8.

Sterved. Killed with want or privation; partaking here more of the modern signification of the Old English verb, steorfan, to die, Azure riverets branchèd. Drayton uses the same phrase in The Baron's War, cvi, 56, 2: "Whose violet veins in branchèd riverets flow."

196 10.

197. Thomas Vautor. Of Vautor we know no more than that he was Bachelor of Music and author of this book of songs.

197. Sweet Suffolk Owl. Cf. Shakespeare's well known song, p. 43 above and Tennyson's imitation of it: "When cats run home and light is come."

197. Martin Peerson was Bachelor of Music and author of a second book of songs entitled Mottects or Grave Chamber Musique, etc., 1630. This last contains a Mourning Song of six parts for the Death of the late Right Honorable Sir Fulke Greville . . . Lord Brooke, etc., and a dedication to the same nobleman. The work must have been in contemplation at the time of the assassination of Greville, two years earlier and discloses him, a patron and lover of art to the very close of his life. 197. Lullaby. This poem, as Professor Kittredge puts it, is "the ultimate expression of a mother's worship of her baby, her gratitude that it is hers, and her wish that she may be a perfect mother."

198 19-22. Yet as I am, etc. "Yet such as I am and so far as my powers extend, I must and will be thine, though it is true that all I am and can be is too little (too small a gift) in return for the gift that thou hast vouchsafed to make to me—namely, thyself. Vouchsafe carries out the spirit of the first stanza ('my sov'reign,' etc.)."

198 11. Seld-seen. Seldom seen.

199. A woman will have her will. Cf. the quest of the condemned knight in The Wife of Bath's Tale.

199 11. Toys. Trifles. Cf. 4 36, 151 7, 186 23.

199. A Dialogue. This poem and the last selection of this volume were first printed by Mr. Bullen in his More Lyrics from Elizabethan Song Books, 1888, from a MS., I, 5, 49, in the Library of Christ Church College, Oxford. Mr. Bullen gives no dates nor further particulars ; but by inference the MS. belongs to the early seventeenth century and probably falls within the period covered by this book. Cf. note on the poem, guests, 207, below.

200. On his Mistress, Elizabeth. This was the eldest daughter of James, “who, in the Low Countries and some parts of Germany,” writes Howell (Familiar Letters, ed. Jacobs, p. 112), "is called the Queen of Boheme, and for her winning princely comportment the Queen of Hearts." She took great interest in the court entertainments of her father's reign, appearing in Daniel's masque, Tethys' Festival. To the · festivities of her marriage with the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, in

1613, many poets of the day contributed: Chapman, Beaumont, Campion, Heywood, Donne and Wither. Her later life was one of much trial and vicissitude, through which she appears to have preserved the amiability and something of the levity of the Stuarts. This poem was printed "in a vacant page, before the other songs" of Este's collection. (Rimbault, as above, p. 48.)

200 1. You meaner beauties of the night. Cf. Carew's lines To his mistress confined, (ed. 1824, p. 133):

O think not

My wandering eye

Can stoop to common beauties of the sky.

The date of the writing of this poem was assigned by Freeman (Kentish Poets, I, 215).

201. Underneath this sable hearse. This famous epitaph is found in Lansdowne MS. 777, with other epitaphs of Browne's; it also appears "in a middle seventeenth century MS. in Trinity College, Dublin,” there subscribed, 'William Browne.' In Aubrey's Memoirs of Natural Remarks on Wilts (ed. Britton, 1847 p. 90), this epigram is said to have been "made by Mr. William Browne, who wrote the Pastorals," (Notes and Queries, Ser. I, III, 262); and Mr. Goodwin has lately found a passage, in which Browne himself apparently alludes to his authorship of this very epitaph. It is in his Elegy on Charles, Lord Herbert, a grandson of the Countess, and runs :

And since my weak and saddest verse

Was worthy thought to grace thy grandam's hearse,
Accept of this.

Returning to the epitaph, it was first published in Osburne's Traditional Memoirs of the Reign of King James, 1658, p. 78, and also included in the Poems of the Countess' son, William, Earl of Pembroke and Sir Benjamin Rudyerd in 1660, p. 66; but "in neither volume is there any indication of authorship." Ben Jonson's claim to it, although the epitaph must be acknowledged to be much in his manner, rests solely upon Whalley's allegation of tradition, and on the fact that it has usually been included amongst Jonson's works by his editors: first by Whalley. (See his ed. of Jonson.) In both the MSS. above mentioned the second stanza follows. It is so inferior that Mr. W. C. Hazlitt believes it not to be Browne's, but the Earl of Pembroke's. (See Hazlitt's ed. of Browne, II, .373.) But as Mr. Goodwin has put it, "it must be remembered that Browne has occasionally marred his work