the artificiality of the piece, and to blame the author for not representing the true ‘simplicity’ of pastoral life.  That the pastoral tradition was a wholly impossible, not to say an absurd one, bearing no true relation to nature at all, may be admitted; and it may be lamented by such as love to shed bitter tears because the sandy shore is not a well-swept parquet, or because anything you please is not something else to which it bears not the smallest resemblance.  It may or may not be unfortunate that Randolph should have elected to write more pastorali, but to censure the individual work because it is not of a type to which its author never had the remotest intention of making it conform, and to which except for something like a miracle it was impossible that it should even approach, is the acme of critical fatuity.  Judged in accordance with the intention of the author the Amyntas is no inconsiderable achievement for a young writer, and compared with other works belonging to the same tradition it occupies a highly respectable place.  With Tasso’s Aminta and Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess it cannot, in point of poetic merit, for one moment compare, falling as far below them in this as it surpasses them in complexity and general suitability of dramatic construction.  A fairer comparison may be made between it and the Pastor fido in Italian or Hymen’s Triumph in English, and here again, though certainly with regard to the former and probably with regard to the latter it stands second as poetry, as a play it is decidedly better suited than either for representation on the stage—­at least on a stage with the traditions and conventions which prevailed in this country in the author’s day.

* * * * *

It is then in the matter of the poetical quality of the verse that Randolph’s play appears to least advantage.  Living in a polished and cultured literary circle at Cambridge, and enjoying after his remove to London the congenial fellowship of the tribe of Ben, he naturally attained the ease and skill necessary to maintain a respectable level of composition, but he was sparing of the higher flights.  He seldom strikes the attention by those purple patches which make many of his contemporaries so quotable, yet, while by no means monotonously correct, it is equally seldom that he sinks much below his general level.  The dialogue is on the whole natural and easy, and at the same time crisp and pointed.  A few of the more distinctively poetic and imaginative passages may be quoted, in order to give some idea of the style.  Laurinda thus appoints a choice to her brace of lovers: 

I have protested never to disclose Which ’tis that best I love:  But the first Nymph, As soone as Titan guilds the Easterne hills, And chirping birds, the Saints-bell of the day, Ring in our eares a warning to devotion—­ That lucky damsell what so e’re she be [That first shall meet you from the temple gate][280] Shall be the Goddesse to appoint my love, To say, ‘Laurinda this shall be your choice’:  And both shall sweare to stand to her award! (III. i.)

Another passage of deliberate poetic elaboration is the monologue of Claius on once again treading his native soil: