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FROM THE 'HECATOMPATHIA.'

PASSION II.

In this passion the Author describeth in how piteous a case the heart of a lover is, being (as he feigneth here) separated from his own body, and removed into a darksome and solitary wilderness of woes. The conveyance of his invention is plain and pleasant enough of itself, and therefore needeth the less annotation before it.

My heart is set him down twixt hope and fears
Upon the stony bank of high Desire,
To view his own made flood of blubbering tears,
Whose waves are bitter salt, and hot as fire:

There blows no blast of wind but ghostly groans
Nor waves make other noise than piteous moans.
As life were spent he waiteth Charon's boat,
And thinks he dwells on side of Stygian lake:
But black Despair sometimes with open throat,
Or spiteful Jealousy doth cause him quake,

With howling shrieks on him they call and cry
That he as yet shall neither live nor die :
Thus void of help he sits in heavy case,
And wanteth voice to make his just complaint.
No flower but Hyacinth in all the place,
No sun comes there, nor any heav'nly saint,

But only she, which in himself remains,

And joys her ease though he abound in pa ns.

PASSION XL.

The sense contained in this Sonnet will seem strange to such as never have acquainted themselves with Love and his Laws, because of the contraieties mentioned therein. But to such, as Love at any time hath had under his banner, all and every part of it will appear to be a familiar truth. It is almost word for word taken out of Petrarch (where he beginneth, ·

'Pace non truono, e non ho da far guerra;

E temo, espero, etc.?')

Parte prima
Sonet. 105.

All, except three verses, which this Author hath necessarily added, for perfecting the number, which he hath determined to use in every one of these his passions.

I joy not peace, where yet no war is found;
I fear, and hope; I burn, yet freeze withal;

I mount to heav'n, yet lie but on the ground;
I compass nought, and yet I compass all:

I live her bond, which neither is my foe,

Nor friend; nor holds me fast, nor lets me go;

Love will not that I live, nor lets me die;
Nor locks me fast, nor suffers me to scape;

I want both eyes and tongue, yet see and cry;

I wish for death, yet after help I gape;

I hate myself, but love another wight;
And feed on grief, in lieu of sweet delight;
At selfsame time I both lament and joy;
I still am pleas'd, and yet displeased still;
Love sometimes seems a God, sometimes a Boy;
Sometimes I sink, sometimes I swim at will;

Twixt death and life, small difference I make ;
All this dear Dame befalls me for thy sake.

PASSION LXV.

In the first and second part of this passion, the Author proveth by exam ples, or rather by manner of argument, A majori ad minus, that he may with good reason yield himself to the empery of Love, whom the gods themselves obey; as Jupiter in heaven, Neptune in the seas, and Pluto in hell. In the last staff he imitateth certain ltalian verses of M. Giro. lamo Parabosco; which are as followeth :

'Occhi tuoi, anzi stelle alme, et fatali

Que ha prescritto il ciel mio mal, mio br
Mie lagrime, e sospir, mio riso, e canto;
Mia speme, mio timor; mio foco e giaccio:
Mia noia mio piacer; mia vita e morte.'

Who knoweth not, how often Venus' son
Hath forced Jupiter to leave his seat?
Or else, how often Neptune he hath won
From seas to sands, to play some wanton feat?

Selua Seconda

Or, how he hath constrained the Lord of Styx
To come on earth, to practise loving tricks?
If heav'n, if seas, if hell must needs obey,
And all therein be subject unto Love;
What shall it then avail, if I gainsay,
And to my double hurt his pow'r do prove?
No, no, I yield myself, as is but meet:

For hitherto with sour he yields me sweet.
From out my mistress' eyes, two lightsome stars,
He destinates estate of double kind,

My tears, my smiling cheer; my peace, ny wars:
My sighs, my songs; my fear, my hoping mind;

My fire, my frost; my joy, my sorrow's gall;
My curse, my praise; my death, but life with all.

JOHN LYLY.

[LITTLE is known of Lyly's life. He was born in Kent in 1554, studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, was patronised by Lord Burghley, and wrote plays for the Child players at the Chapel Royal,—the 'aery of children,' alluded to in Hamlet, 'little eyases, that cry out on the top of the question and are most tyrannically clapped for 't.' He died in 1606. His Euphues was published, first part in 1579, second part in 1580.]

The airy mirthful plays and pretty little songs of the 'witty, comical, facetiously quick and unparalleled John Lyly,' as his publisher described him, are a standing refutation of M. Taine's picture of England in the Elizabethan age as a sort of den of wild beasts. No Frenchman in any age was ever more light and gay than Queen Elizabeth's favourite writer of comedies, and the inventor or perfecter of a fashionable style of sentimental speech among her courtiers.

The epithet 'unparalleled' applied to Lyly was more exact than puffs generally are. Though he is said to have set a fashion of talk among the ladies of the Court and their admirers, he found no imitator in letters; his peculiar style perished from literature with himself. Scott's Sir Percie Shafton is called a Euphuist, and is supposed to be an attempt at historical reproduction, but the caricature has hardly any point of likeness with the supposed original as we see it in the language which Lyly puts into the mouth of Euphues himself. Shafton is much more like Sidney's Rhombus or Shakespeare's Holofernes, a fantastic pedant at whom the real Euphuists would have mocked with as genuine contempt as plain people of the present time. The dainty courtier Boyet, in Love's Labour's Lost, who, according to the sarcastic Biron, 'picks up wit as pigeons pease,' is perhaps the nearest approach to a Euphuist such as was modelled upon Lyly that we have in literature. The essence of Lyly's Euphuism is its avoidance of

cumbrous and clumsy circumlocution; his style is neat, precise, quick, balanced; full of puns and pretty conceits

'Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies,
Playing with words and idle similes,'

as a satirist of the time describes it--but never verbose and heavy as the Euphuists' style is sometimes represented.

Lyly wrote more comedies than any writer that preceded him, but he had no influence that can be traced upon our literature. We seem to find the key to their character in the fact that they were written to be played by children and heard and seen by ladies. Their pretty love-scenes, joyous pranks, and fantastically worded moralisings, were too light and insubstantial as fare for the common stage, and they were superseded as Court entertainments after Elizabeth's death by masques in which ingenious scenic effects were the chief attraction, and plays with an ampler allowance of blood and muscle. Lyly's childlike comedies, with their pigmy fun and pretty sentiment, were brushed aside by plays that appealed more seriously to the senses and the imagination; but it seems almost a pity that the example of his neatness and finish in construction did not take root. Perhaps the daintiness in his manipulation of his materials would have been impossible if the materials had been coarser or more solid.

Only one of Lyly's undoubted comedies, The Woman in the Moon, was written in verse, and the verse differs little from his prose. It shows the same neat, ingenious workmanship. The reader is not conscious of any inward pressure of heightened feeling upon Lyly's verse; he probably chose this instrument ir preference to prose because it had become fashionable.

W MINTO.

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