She sees no tears,

Or

any tone

Of thy deep groan
She hears:

Nor does she mind
Or think on 't now
That ever thou
Wast kind;

But changed above,
She likes not there
As she did here,
Thy love.

Forbear, therefore,
And lull asleep

Thy woes, and weep
No more.

Herrick.

Notes

A part of this selection has been published, in another form and differently arranged, as one of the volumes of Blackie's "Red Letter Poets", where, in order to fit into the limits of a "Sixteenth Century Anthology", and not to overlap the "Seventeenth Century Anthology", already published in the same series, all writers born later than 1570 had to be excluded. Thus I had to do without almost all the Elizabethan dramatists, those great lyrical poets, and without Herrick, Donne, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Browne of Tavistock. The book as now arranged, with the addition of some hundred and twenty or so more poems (four only having been omitted) comes nearer to my original idea of a selection of the best poems of that period which is conveniently known as Elizabethan; a period properly ending with Herrick, after whom come the Cavaliers and the mystics, and a new world. To begin with Spenser and to end with Herrick is to include, I think, everything characteristic of that period, and nothing outside it.

In making my choice among the almost endless anonymous lyrics of the period I have thankfully followed the best of guides, not only a guide but a

pioneer, Mr. A. H. Bullen, to whom we owe the recognition of Campion among English poets, the discovery and printing of many songs still in manuscript, and the almost faultless choice among those songs which, until his time, were but little known and but rarely accessible. I have used, by his kind leave, his texts of Campion, of the "Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age", and of the Lyrics from the Elizabethan Dramatists". Apart from the anonymous song-writers, I have read, I think, almost everything in which I could expect to find poems worthy of being quoted, and not too long to quote, in the literature of the period; and I have gone to the best editions for my texts, and, when possible, corrected them by a reference to original editions. The spelling I have modernized, except in cases where the metre would suffer; such as "prease when it rhymes with a word with which press would not rhyme, or "chapelet" when “chaplet would spoil the rhythm. In one case, "The Bargain of Sir Philip Sidney, I have given a poem as it was first printed; but in every other case I have tried to give the author's latest text; and I have given every poem in full. And I may repeat here what I said in issuing my first anthology, that I have made no attempt to be representative in my choice of poems, but only to choose, as far as I could, the best. I have weighed each poem on its own merits, as poetry, or as what I conceive poetry to be; and I have been absolutely indifferent to the subject, sentiment, or tendency of the poems which I have chosen. "Give beauty all her right", I have tried to say, with Campion; and my pageant has grouped itself together, almost unconsciously, in the following of that single

aim.

66

3. p. 2.-In Campion the art of the song-writers seems to concentrate itself, become individual, become

conscious. He sums up, in a single name, the many

nameless writers of perfect words and airs. It is difficult to distinguish between many of his lyrics and the lyrics of different unknown writers. Only, we must suppose that what is really many-sided in him is in them the whole expression of a temperament or character, which he multiplies, so to speak, in himself, as the man of genius does who is also a versatile artist. Mr. Bullen's edition of Campion should be on every book-shelf which holds a Blake or a Bridges. It is a book to take down, linger over, and read for mere idle pleasure, as one might listen to music played softly on a clavichord.

The unrhymed poem, No. 4, is given in Campion's "Observations on the Art of English Poesy" ("declaring the unaptness of rhyme in poesy") as a specimen of English Sapphics.

5. p. 3.-" Sidney, the siren of this latter age as he is called by Barnefield; "divine Sir Philip as he is called by Drayton; "the godlike Sidney as he is called by Ben Jonson; though realized in his own time to his full value, or beyond it, has never since, except from one here and there, received full recognition as a man of letters. As a person he has remained interesting, and in a book which I notice here because it is a model of learning and the work of one who rightly "speaks with authority", Mr. Sidney Lee's "Great Englishmen of the Seventeenth Century", we see just that unreasonable choice among the elements which make up the complete Sidney, and a singular injustice in consequence.

The account of Sidney's life is interesting; we see

him in all his parts, each played, for its brief space, as if there were no other part to play, and each with the same lovely and familiar gravity". We see him on all his public and private errands over Europe, actually meeting Ronsard in France and Tasso in Italy, bringing back personal gifts from those two great influences in poetry. Three million acres of undiscovered land in America are granted to him; but he has written his "Arcadia ", not founded it, and he is to come no nearer to that dream of a world. All this part of the romance of his life Mr. Lee sees and realizes for us; he writes well on the "Arcadia" and on the "Apology for Poetry". But his fixed idea comes in to hinder him from seeing what was most significant in Sidney's life and in his work: the sonnets of Astrophel to Stella, and the love of Sidney for Penelope Rich.

Mr. Lee's fixed idea is that poets are very prosaic people at heart, and that the Elizabethan poets in particular were persons rather lacking in emotion or imagination, who translated and adapted the poems of French and Italian writers with great ability. He has done good service to literary history by finding out the origins of many sonnets and lyrics, from Sidney to Barnes, which were sometimes translated and sometimes imitated by one after another of the Elizabethan lyrists and sonneteers. He has shown that some whole collections of sonnets (like Daniel's sonnets to Delia) can in no sense be taken as personal confessions. This is valuable, because there were many estimable critics and historians of our literature who could not see for themselves (what to an unbiassed reader seems self-evident) that there was nothing whatever personal in such sonnets, no genuine emotion, no thrill of literal reality. But where Mr.