Secondly, he has amused the spectators with some excellent fooling until, while Io and Paean are yet resounding, it is possible to crown the whole by the solution of the second oracle, and send the hero and his love to join the others in the festive throng.  The imperfection of plot is there, but the author has been skilful in concealing it, and it may well be that his success would appear all the greater were his play to be put to the real test of dramatic composition by being actually placed on the boards.

But there is yet another point in which the Amyntas differs not only from its Italian model but from its English predecessors likewise.  This is a certain genially humorous conception of the whole, quite apart from and beyond the mere introduction of comedy and farce, which we have never found so marked before, and which has indeed been painfully absent from the pastoral since Tasso penned the final chorus of the Aminta.  This humorous tone is never harshly forced upon the attention, and consists, in a measure, merely in the fact of the comic business constantly elbowing the serious action, and thus saving the latter from the danger of becoming stilted and pretentions—­a fault not less commonly and quite as justly charged against pastoral literature as that of artificiality.  A leaven of humour is the great safeguard against an author taking either himself or his creations too seriously.  Randolph’s Amyntas, it is true, renounces the high ideality of its predecessors, of the Aminta and the Pastor fido, of Hymen’s Triumph and the Faithful Shepherdess; but it makes up for it by human sanity of feeling and expression, by good humour and by wit.  It is, moreover, genuinely diverting.  Here at least we find no endeavour to attain to the importance and solemnity of a classical tragedy as with Guarini, nor a striving after an utterly unreal, unsympathetic and impossible ideal as with Fletcher.  It is, moreover, noticeable and eminently to the credit of the author that the comic scenes, even when somewhat extravagant alike in tone and proportion, seldom clash unpleasantly with the more serious passages, nor derogate from the interest and dignity of the whole.

The play has generally met with a far from deserved neglect, owing in part no doubt to the singular failure on the part of most critics to apprehend correctly the nature and conditions of pastoral poetry.[278] Mr. W. C. Hazlitt, who edited Randolph’s works in 1875, does not so much as mention the play in the perfunctory introduction, in which he chiefly follows the extravagant, pedantic, and utterly worthless article in the sixth volume of the Retrospective Review.[279] The merits of the piece have been somewhat more fully recognized by Dr. Ward and Mr. Homer Smith, but the treatment accorded the play by the former is necessarily scanty, while that of the latter is inaccurate.  Throughout a tendency is manifest to find fault with