Justice, he sees, (as if seduced) still

Conspires with power, whose cause must not be ill.

He sees the face of right t' appear as manifold
As are the passions of uncertain man;

Who puts it in all colours, all attires,

To serve his ends and make his courses hold.
He sees, that let deceit work what it can,
Plot and contrive base ways to high desires,
That the all-guiding Providence doth yet
All disappoint, and mocks this smoke of wit.

Nor is he mov'd with all the thunder cracks
Of tyrants' threats, or with the surly brow
Of Pow'r, that proudly sits on others' crimes,
Charg'd with more crying sins than those he checks.
The storms of sad confusion, that may grow
Up in the present for the coming times,
Appal not him, that hath no side at all
But of himself, and knows the worst can fall.

Although his heart (so near allied to earth)
Cannot but pity the perplexed state
Of troublous and distress'd mortality,
That thus make way unto the ugly birth
Of their own sorrows, and do still beget
Affliction upon imbecility;

Yet seeing thus the course of things must run,
He looks thereon not strange, but as foredone.

And whilst distraught ambition compasses,
And is encompass'd; whilst as craft deceives,
And is deceiv'd; whilst man doth ransack man,
And builds on blood, and rises by distress ;
And th' inheritance of desolation leaves
To great-expecting hopes: he looks thereon
As from the shore of peace, with unwet eye,
And bears no venture in impiety.

FROM HYMEN'S TRIUMPH.'

Ah! I remember well (and how can I
But evermore remember well) when first

Our flame began, when scarce we knew what was
The flame we felt; when as we sat and sighed
And looked upon each other, and conceived
Not what we ail'd,—yet something we did ail;
And yet were well, and yet we were not well,
And what was our disease we could not tell.
Then would we kiss, then sigh, then look: and thus
In that first garden of our simpleness

We spent our childhood. But when years began
To reap the fruit of knowledge, ah, how then
Would she with graver looks, with sweet stern brow
Check my presumption and my forwardness;
Yet still would give me flowers, still would me show
What she would have me, yet not have me know.

RICHARD BARNFIELD.

[BORN at the Manor House of Norbury, Staffordshire, 1574. Died at Dorleston, or Darlaston, in the same county, 1627. His chief poems are— The Affectionate Shepherd, 1594; Cynthia, with certaine Sonnets and the Legende of Cassandra, 1595; The Encomion of Lady Pecunia, 1598. Two poems from this latter source reappeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599.]

Barnfield is a poet whose personality has only of late years emerged into something like distinctness, his best poems having till recently had the honour of bearing Shakespeare's name. The reprint of The Affectionate Shepherd by Mr. Halliwell in 1845, from the almost unique copy in Sion College Library, first made Barnfield known to modern readers; about the same time doubts began to arise concerning the authorship of the poems in The Passionate Pilgrim; and lately, in 1876, Mr. Grosart was able to print for the Roxburghe Club the complete poems, together with a number of facts about Barnfield's family and a few about his life. Of the latter we only learn that he belonged to a good Staffordshire family; that he became a member of Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1589; that on leaving Oxford he passed several years in London, apparently as a member of that literary circle of which Lady Rich, Sidney's 'Stella,' was the centre; and that after 1605 he disappeared, probably retiring like Shakespeare to his country home, but unlike him sending forth no poetic utterance into the world.

The oddity of Barnfield's principal performance, The Affectionate Shepherd, is best explained by the date of its composition. He was not twenty when he wrote it; and we are thus more inclined to tolerate both the sentiment (it is an elaborate expansion of Virgil's second eclogue), and the boyishness and incongruities which mar the execution. It is strange enough that such a poem should be dedicated to a lady (Lady Rich); stranger still that it should open with what must have read like a caricature of that lady's own love-story; strangest of all that Daphnis, after display

ing all his Arcadian blandishments in vain through a hundred stanzas, should turn moralist and flood the obdurate Ganymede with 'lere I learned from a Beldame Trot'-didactic 'lere,' of which these lines are a fair example :

'Be patient in extreame adversitie,

Man's chiefest credit growes by dooing well,

Be not high minded in prosperitie,

Falshood abhorré, no lying fable tell,

Give not thyselfe to sloth, the sinke of shame,
The moath of Time, the enemie to Fame!'

Yet the poem has qualities which mark it out from the mass of Elizabethan pastoral. It has fluency, music, colour. Barnfield combines in it a mastery of euphuistic antithesis with a real knowledge of the country and its sights and sounds; its 'scarletdyed carnation bleeding yet,' its 'fine ruffe-footed Doves,' its 'curds and clowted creme,' the 'lyme-twigs and fine sparrow calles' for the birdcatcher, the 'springes in a frostie night' that take the woodcock. It is to be regretted that this eye for nature, this fine ear and honeyed tongue, were pressed into the service of a design too artificial and too alien from the common feeling of mankind.

There is nothing of this sort to say against the well-known Ode which we here quote, and which is indeed in no respect unworthy of the great name to which it was so long attributed. From its happy union of ethical matter and fanciful form, from its strongly personal note, it ranks among the most interesting of the productions of the lesser Elizabethans.

EDITOR.

SONNET.

[From Cynthia, &c.]

Beauty and Majesty are fallen at odds,

Th' one claims his cheek, the other claims his chin;
Then Virtue comes and puts her title in:
Quoth she, I make him like th' immortal Gods.
Quoth Majesty, I own his looks, his brow;
His lips, quoth Love, his eyes, his fair is mine;
And yet, quoth Majesty, he is not thine,

I mix disdain with Love's congealed snow.
Ay, but, quoth Love, his locks are mine by right.
His stately gait is mine, quoth Majesty ;

And mine, quoth Virtue, is his Modesty.
Thus as they strive about the heavenly wight
At last the other two to Virtue yield

The lists of Love, fought in fair Beauty's field.

SONNET TO HIS FRIEND MAISTER R. L.1

[From Poems in Divers Humors; also printed in The Passionate Pilgrim.]

If music and sweet poetry agree,

As they must needs, the sister and the brother,
Then must the love be great 'twixt thee and me,
Because thou lov'st the one, and I the other.
Dowland to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch
Upon the lute doth ravish human sense;
Spenser to me, whose deep conceit is such
As, passing all conceit, needs no defence.
Thou lov'st to hear the sweet melodious sound
That Phoebus' lute, the queen of music, makes;
And I in deep delight am chiefly drown'd
Whenas himself to singing he betakes.

One god is god of both, as poets feign;

One knight loves both, and both in thee remain.

1 Perhaps Richard Lynch, author of Diella; certaine sonnels (1596).