Coridon, with his bold rout, Hath already been about, For the elder shepherds’ dole, And fetched in the summer pole; Whilst the rest have built a bower To defend them from a shower, Sealed so close, with boughs all green, Titan cannot pry between; Now the dairy-wenches dream Of their strawberries and cream, And each doth herself advance, To be taken in to dance.

What summer thoughts are these to come from a pale prisoner in the hot and putrid Marshalsea!  They are either symptoms of acute nostalgia, or proofs of a cheerfulness that lifts their author above a mortal pitch.  But Willy declines to join the Lady of the May at her high junketings; he also has troubles, and prefers to whisper them through Roget’s iron bars.  There are those who “my Music do contemn,” who will none of the poetry of Master William Browne of the Inner Temple.  It is useless for him to wrestle with brown shepherds for the

  Cups of turned maple-root,
  Whereupon the skilful man
  Hath engraved the Loves of Pan,

or contend for the “fine napkin wrought with blue,” if those base clowns called critics are busy with his detraction.  But Roget instructs him that Verse is its own high reward, that the songs of a true poet will naturally arise like the moon out of and beyond all racks of envious cloud, and that the last thing he should do is to despair.  He rises to his own greatest and best work in this encouragement of a brother-poet, and no one who reads such noble verses as these dare question Wither’s claim to a fauteuil in the Academy of Parnassus: 

If thy Verse do bravely tower As she makes wing, she gets power, Yet the higher she doth soar, She’s affronted still the more; Till she to the highest hath past, Then she rests with Fame at last.  Let nought therefore thee affright, But make forward in thy flight; For if I could match thy rhyme To the very stars I’d climb, There begin again, and fly Till I reached Eternity.

In the fifth “eglogue” Roget and Alexis compare notes about their early happiness in phrases of an odd commixture.  The pastoral character of the poetry has to be carried out, and so we read of how Roget on a great occasion played a match at football, “having scarce twenty Satyrs on his side,” against some of “the best tried Ruffians in the land.”  Great Pan presided at that match by the banks of Thames, and though the satyrs and their laureate leader were worsted, the moral victory, as people call it, remained with the latter.  All this is an allegory; and indeed we walk in the very shadow of innuendo all through The Shepherd’s Hunting.

The moral of the whole thing is that eternal ditty of tuneful youth:  All for Verse and the World well lost.  The enemy is around them on all sides, jailers of the Marshalsea and envious critics, the evil shepherds that preside over grates of steel and noisome beds of straw, but Youth has its mocking answer to all these: