As You Like It?  But that is a question to which we shall have to return.  It will, however, be contended that in the Sad Shepherd we are introduced to a wholly idealized and artificially refined atmosphere surrounding the shepherds and their hosts, which is yet constantly liable to be broken in upon by beings of the outer world, rude unchastened mortals compounded of our common clay, whose entrance dispels at a stroke the delicate, refined atmosphere of pastoral convention.  This brings us to the second alternative mentioned above, to meet which we shall have to condescend to particulars, and consider the real natures of the various groups of personages with which Jonson crowds his stage.

The question of the incongruity of the various characters in Jonson’s pastoral is one which every reader of taste must decide for himself.  All that the critic can hope to do is to point out how the figures on the stage compare with previous tradition and convention on the one hand, and with the characters of actual life on the other.  But in doing this I hope to be able to vindicate Jonson’s taste, for I believe Mr. Swinburne to be in error in regarding the shepherds of the play as more, and the rustic characters as less, idealized than Jonson intended them, and than they in reality are.  Were the shepherds the pure Arcadians Mr. Homer Smith asserts them to be, and were it necessary with Mr. Swinburne to regard Scathlock and Maudlin as mere parody and burlesque, then indeed Jonson’s taste, as exhibited in the Sad Shepherd, would not be worth defending.  But it is not so.

It is necessary in the first place, however, to make certain admissions.  It is true that in the fragment as we possess it there are certain passages which pass beyond any legitimate idealization of the actual world in which Jonson chose to lay his scene, and which contrast jarringly and irreconcilably with the coarser threads of homespun.  Thus Aeglamour, in so far as it is possible to form an opinion, keeps too much of the artificial Arcadianism of the Italians about him, and is hardly of a piece with the rest of the personae.  The same may be said of the name at least of Earine; of her character it is impossible to judge—­in one passage indeed we find her talking broad dialect, but that doubtless only through an oversight of the author.  Much the same may be censured of individual passages:  the singularly out-of-place catalogue of ‘Lovers Scriptures’ put into the mouth of Clarion, and, in a speech of Aeglamour’s, the collocation of Dean and Erwash, Idle, Snite, and Soar, with the nymphs and Graces that come dancing out of the fourth ode of Horace.  Some have been inclined to add an occasional reminiscence of Sappho or so; but critics appear somewhat dense at understanding that when Amie, for instance, speaks of ’the dear good angel of the spring,’ it is not she but her creator who is exhibiting a familiarity with the classics.  In this and similar cases the fact of borrowing in