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AMORET.

FAIR Amoret is gone astray:

Pursue and seek her, every lover!
I'll tell the signs by which you may
The wandering shepherdess discover.

Coquet and coy at once her air,

Both studied, though both seem neglected; Careless she is, with artful care,

Affecting to seem unaffected.

With skill her eyes dart every glance,

Yet change so soon you'd ne'er suspect them; For she'd persuade they wound by chance, Though certain aim and art direct them.

She likes herself, yet others hates

For that which in herself she prizes;

And while she laughs at them, forgets
She is the thing that she despises.

JOHN DRYDEN, The Secular Masque,
1700.

HUNTING SONG.

Diana.

WITH horns and hounds, I waken the day,
And hie to the woodland walks away;
I tuck up my robe, and am buskined soon,
And tie to my forehead a wexing moon;

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I course the fleet stag, and unkennel the fox,
And chase the wild goats o'er the summits of rocks;
With shouting and hooting we pierce through the sky,
And Echo turns hunter and doubles the cry.

Chorus.

With shouting and hooting we pierce through the sky,
And Echo turns hunter and doubles the cry.

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NOTES.

1. Pan's Anniversary. The title of this masque, as printed in the folio of 1631-1641, bears: "As it was presented at Court before King James, 1625." James died in March of that year, and as this masque is more appropriate to summer, Nichols has assigned it to the summer of 1624, Mr. Fleay to June 19, 1623. This was one of the masques in which Inigo Jones, the famous architect, assisted Jonson. As to Jonson, see the editor's Elizabethan Lyrics, Athenæum Press Series, pp. xxxi, lxvi, and 259.

1. The Shepherds' Holiday. In the original the three stanzas are assigned to successive "nymphs," young women of marriageable age. 11. Rites Are due. Note the omission of the relative. See Abbott's Shakespeare Grammar, § 244, and cf. below, pp. 4 3, 9 2, 18 5, 94 9, 107 4.

19. Primrose-drop. Appropriately so called from the appearance of the blossoms as placed on separate peduncles.

1 10. Day's-eyes and the lips of cows. Daisies and cowslips. Garden-star. Probably the flower popularly known as the

1 11.

star-of-Bethlehem.

2. Hymn, To Pan. Here, too, the stanzas in the original are assigned to successive nymphs, the refrain being in chorus.

2 3.

Can. Knows, is able to perform. Cf. 99 20.

2 7. Hermes would appropriately lead the dance, from the lightness of his winged feet.

2 18.

Rebound. Echo back, resound, a not uncommon meaning. Cf. Child, Ballads, ed. 1871, III, 340, and, especially, The Spanish Tragedy, i. I. 30:

2.

Both raising dreadful clamors to the sky,

That valleys, hills and rivers made rebound.

Thomas Dekker.

See Elizabethan Lyrics, p. 232.

2. The Sun's Darling is described as "a moral masque," and is the work of Dekker and Ford. These two vigorous songs are assur edly Dekker's.

2. Country Glee. The title is Mr. Bullen's.

27. Bravely. Finely, beautifully.

3 16. Princes' courts. Mr. Bullen, on I know not what authority, reads a prince's courts. The ed. of Ford, 1840, and the reprint of

Dekker read as in the text.

3 20. Echo's holloa. Ed. 1870 reads echo's hollow. 3 27. Spring up . . . the partridges. Start, raise.

3 35. Sousing. Swooping down, a term in falconry.

4. Cast away Care. This lively drinking song is put into the mouth of the character Folly.

4 6. Play it off. A term in the old jargon of boon-companionship. Cf. 1 Henry IV, ii. 4. 18.

4 9. Cf. Falstaff's praise of sack, 2 Henry IV, iv. 3. 92.

4. Christ Church MS. This poem was first printed by Mr. Bullen in his More Lyrics from Elizabethan Song Books, 1888, p. 125.

4 6. Years Are yet untold. Note the omission of the relative and cf. 1 2.

5. Thomas May, the historian of the Long Parliament, wrote several plays in his youth. Mr. Fleay places the composition of The Old Couple before The Heir, which was acted in 1620. The poem in the text appears also in Porter's Madrigals and Airs, 1632.

5. Love's Prime. Mr. Bullen (More Lyrics, p. 153) doubts whether May wrote this song. The title is that given in Wit's Recreations, ed. 1641 (not 1640, if I read the Preface to Park's reprint of that interesting work, p. ix, aright). This poem was also printed in John Cotgrave's Wit's Interpreter, 1655, and in Stafford Smith's Musica Antiqua, of about the same date. Both of these versions exhibit several variant readings of minor importance.

5 5. Flaming beams. This is the reading of Wit's Recreations; Bullen reads inflaming beams, etc.

5 9. Still young. Ever young. Cf. 33 12.

59 10.

These lines are omitted in the version of Wit's Recreations. 5. Edmund Waller, in the Biographica Britannica, ed. 1766, startlingly described as "the most celebrated lyric poet that England ever produced," has of late been almost as perversely dignified by Mr. Gosse (in his From Shakespeare to Pope) as the absolute founder of the classic school of poetry. I would commend a consideration of this little lyric of Waller's (which his first editor, Fenton, assigns to the year 1627, and which is wholly in the old, free manner) to those who believe that Waller's "earliest verses ... possess the formal character, the precise prosody without irregularity or overflow, which we find in

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