“She was a lady of great dignity,
  And lifted up to honorable place;
  Famous through all the land of Faerie: 
  Though of mean parentage and kindred base,
  Yet decked with wondrous gifts of Nature’s grace.”

  “But she thereof grew proud and insolent,
  And scorned them all that lore unto her meant.”

  “She was born free, not bound to any wight.”

Of Rosalinde we hear in “Colin Clout” that her ambition is

  “So high in thought as she herself in place.”

And that she

  “Loatheth each lowly thing with lofty eye.”

Her beauty, too, is dwelt upon as a “thing celestial,”—­her humble family alluded to,—­the boasted freedom of her heart; and upon Rosalinde and Mirabella an affectation of the demigoddessship, which turned their heads, is equally charged.  In all essential characteristics they are “twin cherries growing on one stalk.”

Of Rose Daniel’s life so little is known, particularly during her unmarried years, that we are unable to fasten upon her the unamiable qualities of the allegorical beauties we assume to be her representatives; but if we can identify her married fortune with theirs,—­then, in addition to the congruities already mentioned, we can have no hesitation in imputing to her the disposition which brought down upon them, so bitterly and relentlessly, the poetic justice of the disappointed shepherd.  We may thus dispose of them in brief.

Mirabella’s lot was severe.  She was married (if we rightly interpret the language of the allegory) to a “fool,”—­that is to say, to a very absurd and ridiculous person, under whose conduct she was exposed to the “whips and scorns,” the disdain and bitter retaliation, natural to the union of a beautiful and accomplished, though vain and haughty woman, with a very eccentric, irritable, and bombastic humorist.

Rosalinde was married—­with no better fate, we fear—­to the vain and treacherous Menalcas.

And Rose Daniel became the wife of the “Resolute John Florio.”

We shall commence with the substantial characters, and see how their histories fall in with the fortunes attributed to the allegorical.  Rose Daniel’s husband, maugre his celebrity and places of dignity and profit, was beset with tempers and oddities which exposed him, more perhaps than any man of his time, to the ridicule of contemporary wits and poets.  He was, at least in his literary career, jealous, envious, irritable, vain, pedantic and bombastical, petulant and quarrelsome,—­ever on the watch for an affront, and always in the attitude of a fretful porcupine with a quill pointed in every direction against real or supposititious enemies.  In such a state of mental alarm and physical vaporing did he live, that he seems to have proclaimed a promiscuous war against all gainsayers,—­ that is, the literary world; and for the better assurance to them of his indomitable valor, and to himself of indemnity from disturbance, he adopted a formidable prefix to his name; and to “any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation,” to every address, prelude, preface, [8] introduction, or farewell, accompanying any of his numerous works, he subscribed himself the Resolute,—­“Resolute John Florio.”