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Here be all new delights; cool streams and wells;
Arbours o'ergrown with woodbines; caves and dells;
Choose where thou wilt, while I sit by and sing,

Or gather rushes to make many a ring

For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of love;
How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove,
First saw the boy Endymion,1 from whose eyes
She took eternal fire that never dies;
How she conveyed him softly in a sleep,
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
Head of old Latmos, where she stoops each night,
Gilding the mountain with her brother's2 light,
To kiss her sweetest.

66
FROM THE FALSE ONE."

CESAR'S LAMENTATION OVER POMPEY'S HEAD.
ACT II. SC. 1.

Oh thou Conqueror,

Thou glory of the world once, now the pity;
Thou awe of nations, wherefore didst thou fall thus ?
What poor fate followed thee and plucked thee on
To trust thy sacred life to an Egyptian ?3—
The life and light of Rome to a blind stranger
That honourable war ne'er taught a nobleness,*
Nor worthy circumstance showed what a man was?-
That never heard thy name sung but in banquets
And loose lascivious pleasures ?-to a boy
That had no faith to comprehend thy greatness,
No study of thy life to know thy goodness?-
And leave thy nation, nay, thy noble friend,
Leave him distrusted, that in tears falls with thee—
In soft relenting tears? Hear me, great Pompey,
If thy great spirit can hear, I must task thee,
Thou hast most unnobly robbed me of my victory,
My love and mercy.

Egyptians, dare ye think your highest pyramids,
Built to outdure the sun, as you suppose,
Where your unworthy kings lie raked in ashes,
Are monuments fit for him? No, brood of Nilus,
Nothing can cover his high fame but heaven;

No pyramids set off his memories,

The fable of the loves of Endymion and Diana in the Carian Mount Latmos has always been a favourite with the poets. Cic. Tusc. Quest. i. 38.

Shakespeare s Merchant of Venice, Act. V. Sc. i.

See Keats' Endymion.

? Apollo.

The moon sleeps with Endymion,
And would not be awaked.

Pompey having fled to Egypt after his defeat at Pharsalia, was murdered on the shore by the ministers of Ptolemy Dionysius, then a minor.

Fletcher's verse is very frequently marked by double and triple terminations.-See Introduction to Weber's edition, pp. 90, 91.

But the eternal substance of his greatness,
To which I leave him.1

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Let's think this prison a holy sanctuary
To keep us from corruption of worse men.
We're young and yet desire the ways of honour,
That liberty and common conversation,

The poison of pure spirits, might, like women,
Woo us to wander from. What worthy blessing
Can be, but our imaginations

May make it ours ?3 And here, being thus together,
We are an endless mine to one another;

We're father, friends, acquaintance;

We are, in one another, families;

I am your heir, and you are mine; this place
Is our inheritance; no hard oppressor

May take this from us; here, with a little patience,
We shall live long and loving; no surfeits seek us;
The hand of war hurts none here, nor the seas
Swallow their youth. Were we at liberty,
A wife might part us lawfully, or business;
Quarrels consume us; envy of ill men

Crave our acquaintance; I might sicken, cousin,
Where you should never know it, and so perish
Without your noble hand to close mine eyes,
Or prayers to the gods; a thousand chances,
Were we from hence, would sever us.

JOHN FORD.

(1586-1639.)

FORD is one of the most respectable of the second-class dramatic poets of the reigns of James and Charles I. He was of good birth; he devoted himself to the study of law, but does not appear to have practised at the bar. He was a man of a quiet and contemplative disposition. His tragic yre does not sound the heart-stirring tones of some of his cotemporaries; and he disfigures his plays by the interjection of attempts at comic underplots, for which his genius was totally unfitted. He is, however, elegant and harmo

1 On this passage Hazlitt remarks, "It is something worth living for to write or even read such poetry as this."

2 This drama is founded on Chaucer's Knight's Tale. The first act has been attributed to Shakespeare.

Compare Shakespeare, Rich. II. Act I. Sc. 3. "All places," &c.

Theobald proposes craze; Sympson, carve; Seward, reave; and Mason, cleare. The old text is not, however, inexplicable. Arcita may say-The envious disposition of ill men may crave their acquaintance in order to sow dissensions between them.-Weber.

nious, and powerful in the delineation of the passion of love. He wrote eleven plays; and shared the authorship of several more with Dekker and others.

66
FROM THE LOVER'S MELANCHOLY."

THE RIVAL MUSICIANS.

ACT I. SC. 1.

Menaphon, Amethus.

Men. Passing from Italy to Greece, the tales
Which poets of an elder time have feigned
To glorify their Tempe, bred in me
Desire of visiting that paradise.

To Thessaly I came, and living private,

Without acquaintance of more sweet companions
Than the old inmates of my love, my thoughts,
I day by day frequented silent groves
And solitary walks. One morning early
This accident encountered me: I heard
The sweetest and most ravishing contention
That art and nature ever were at strife in.

Amet. I cannot yet conceive what you infer
By art and nature.

Men. I shall soon resolve you.

A sound of music touched mine ears, or rather,
Indeed, entranced my soul: As I stole nearer,
Invited by the melody, I saw

This youth, this fair-faced youth, upon his lute,
With strains of strange variety and harmony,
Proclaiming, as it seemed, so bold a challenge,
To the clear choristers of the woods, the birds,
That, as they flocked about him, all stood silent,
Wondering at what they heard. I wondered too.
Amet. And so do I; good! on-

Men. A nightingale,

Nature's best skilled musician, undertakes

The challenge; and, for every several strain

The well-shaped youth could touch, she sung her own
He could not run division1 with more art

Upon his quaking instrument, than she,

The nightingale, did with her various notes
Reply to: for a voice, and for a sound,
Amethus, 'tis much easier to believe

That such they were than hope to hear again.
Amet. How did the rivals part?

The dividing of a tone into small notes:

"In your sweet dividing throat."-Carew. See p. 167.

Men. You term them rightly;

For they were rivals, and their mistress, Harmony.
Some minutes thus spent, the young man grew at last
Into a pretty anger, that a bird,

Whom art had never taught clefs, moods, or notes,
Should vie with him for mastery, whose study

Had busied many hours to perfect practice:

To end the controversy, in a rapture

Upon his instrument he plays so swiftly,

So many voluntaries, and so quick,

That there was curiosity and cunning,

Concord and discord, lines of differing method,
Meeting in one full centre of delight.

Amet. Now for the bird.

Men. The bird, ordained to be

Music's first martyr, strove to imitate

These several sounds; which when her warbling throat
Fail'd in, for grief down dropp'd she on his lute,

And brake her heart! It was the quaintest sadness,
To see the conqueror upon her hearse

To weep a funeral elegy of tears;

That, trust me, my Amethus, I could chide
Mine own unmanly weakness that made me
A fellow-mourner with him.

Amet. I believe thee.

Men. He looked upon the trophies of his art,
Then sigh'd, then wip'd his eyes, then sigh'd and cried,
"Alas, poor creature! I will soon revenge

This cruelty upon the author of it;

Henceforth this lute, guilty of innocent blood,
Shall never more betray a harmless peace

To an untimely end." And in that sorrow,
As he was pashing1 it against a tree,
I suddenly stept in.2

GEORGE WITHER.

(1588-1667.)

WITHER was "the descendant of a family that had for many generations possessed the property of Manydowne in Hampshire" (Campbell). Being recalled from a short residence at Oxford University to hold the plough on his native acres, he felt an impulsive repugnance to this "cramping of his genius." The vivacity of his satire in "Abuses Whipt and Stript" procured him a residence in the Marshalsea. The fate of Wither's life was to have the prison for his muse. He is a "weft and stray" in the whirlwind of parties of the middle of the seventeenth century. Favoured by James I.; a 2 This tale, from the Latin of Strada, is a favourite of the poets. It was beautifully translated by Crashaw, who entitles it "Music's Duel."-See Retrospective Review, vol. i. p. 246.

1 Dashing.

royalist in the beginning of the troubles of Charles I.; a military captain in the war against the Scotch Covenanters ; a major-general of Cromwell; saved, by a jest of Denham's, from execution by the royalists during his roundhead career; a monitor of Cromwell; a large profiter from confiscated royalist estates; a congratulator of Richard Cromwell's accession; an angry remonstrator against the disgorging of his spoils after the Restoration; a prisoner for just remonstrances against the illegal manner in which he was deprived of his fortune; a penman not to be silenced by age or prison-fetters :-these features constitute the physiognomy of Wither's varied life. A vein of honesty, or at least earnestness in present conviction, seems to run through his inconsistencies. He died in misery and obscurity at the age of seventy-nine. His literary life extends over about forty years of that period. His writings are, or rather if collected would be, voluminous. Wither's early pieces display the freshness and animation of truly poetical feeling; "but," says Campbell," as he mixed with the turbulent times, his fancy grew muddy with the stream." His diction is remarkable for its purely English character. Wither has, like many of his cotemporaries and predecessors, been comparatively lately excavated from the oblivion into which the eaprice of national taste had thrown him. For an excellent estimate of Wither, see Charles Lamb's Essays.

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-Alas! my Muse is slow:
For thy page1 she flags too low:
Yes, the more's her hapless fate,
Her short wings were clipt of late.2
And poor I, her fortune rueing,
Am myself put up a mewing.
But if I my cage can rid,
I'll fly where I never did.

And though for her sake I'm crost,

Though my best hopes I have lost,

And knew she would make my trouble

Ten times more than ten times double:

I would love and keep her too,

Spite of all the world could do.

For, though, banish'd from my flocks,

And confin'd within these rocks,

Here I waste away the light,

And consume the sullen night,
She doth for my comfort stay,

And keeps many cares away.

The eclogue is inscribed to his "truly beloved and loving friend, Mr William Browne, of the Inner Temple."-For Browne, see p. 168.

2 The "Shepherd's Hunting" was published while he was confined in the Marshalsea for the publication of "Abuses Whipt and Stript."

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