the southern drama is comparatively free.  A somewhat ultra-medicinal power of herbs, the introduction of an oracle in the preliminary history and of a wholly superfluous seer in the denoument make up the whole sum so far as the Pastor fido is concerned, while the Aminta cannot even show as much as this.  In the Faithful Shepherdess we find not only the potent herbs, holy water, and magic taper of Clorin’s bower, but the wonder-working well and the actual presence of the river-god, who rises, not to pay courtly compliments in the prologue, but to take an actual part in the plot[265].  Alike in its positive and negative aspects Fletcher’s relation to the Italian masters was conscious and acknowledged.  Far from feigning ignorance, he boldly challenged comparison with his predecessors by imitating the very title of Guarini’s play, or yet closer, had he known it, that of Contarini’s Fida ninfa[266].

A glance at the dramatis personae reveals a curious artificial symmetry which, as we shall shortly see, is significant of the spirit in which Fletcher approached the composition of his play.  In Clorin we have a nymph vowed to perpetual virginity, an anchorite at the tomb of her dead lover; in Thenot a worshipper of her constancy, whose love she cures by feigning a return.  In Perigot and Amoret are represented a pair of ideal lovers—­so Fletcher gives us to understand—­in whose chaste bosoms dwell no looser flames.  Amarillis is genuinely enamoured of Perigot, with a love that bids modesty farewell, and will dare even crime and dishonour for its attainment; Cloe, as already said, is a study in erotic pathology.  She is the female counterpart of the Sullen Shepherd, who inherits the traditional nature of the satyr, that monster having been transformed into the gentle minister of the cloistral Clorin.  So, again, the character of Amarillis finds its counterpart in that of Alexis, whose love for Cloe is at least human; while Daphnis, who meets Cloe’s desperate advances with a shy innocence, is in effect, whatever he may have been in intention, hardly other than a comic character.  The river-god and the satyr, the priest of Pan and his attendant Old Shepherd, who themselves stand outside the circle of amorous intrigue, complete the list of personae.

The action which centres round these characters cannot be regarded as forming a plot in any strict sense of the term, though Fletcher has reaped a little praise here and there for his construction of one.  It is hardly too much to say that the various complications arise and are solved, leaving the situation at the end precisely as it was at the beginning.  Even so may the mailed figures in some ancestral hall start into life at the stroke of midnight, and hold high revel with the fair dames and damsels from out the gilt frames upon the walls, content to range themselves once more and pose in their former attitudes as soon as the first grey light of morning shimmers through