on winning her.  She in the meantime has relented of her coldness, and is pining for his love.  An opportunity soon offers itself for his purpose.  By mistake or through ignorance she plucks the Hesperian apples in the sacred grove, an offence for which she is condemned to be offered as a sacrifice to a monster who inhabits a cave on the shore, and is known by the name of Maleorchus.  Andromeda-like, she is bound to a rock, and the orc is in the very act of rushing upon its prey, when Thalander interposes and succeeds in slaying the monster.  Meanwhile Cosma—­’a light nymph of Messina,’ who replaces the ’wanton nymph of Corinth’ of the Arcadian cast—­has fallen in love with Perindus, and, determining to get rid at a stroke both of his sister Olinda and his mistress Glaucilla, gives the former a poison under pretence of a love-cure.  Glaucilla hearing of this, and suspecting the supposed philtre, mingles with it an antidote, so that when Olinda drinks it she only falls into a death-like trance.  Hereupon Cosma accuses Glaucilla of substituting a poison for the philtre.  She is condemned to be cast from the cliffs, but Perindus comes forward and claims to die in her place.  He is actually cast from the rocks, but falling into the sea is rescued by two fishermen.  These, we may notice, are borrowed from the twenty-first idyl of Theocritus, and supply, together with Cosma’s page and lovers, a comic under-plot to the play.  Olinda now revives, Thalander discovering her love for him reveals himself, and Perindus’ oracle being fulfilled, all ends happily, the festivities being crowned by the entirely unexpected and uncalled-for return of Tyrinthus, the father of Perindus and Olinda, who had been carried off long before by pirates.

This somewhat complex plot, the dependence of which on the Italian pastoral is evident, is padded with a good deal of farce, but though the construction never evinces any great power on the part of the author, it is not on the whole inadequate.  The verse is in great part rimed in couplets, and there are frequent attempts at epigrammatic effect, which at times lead to some obscurity.  The language betrays, as in the case of the author’s eclogues, a pseudo-archaism, which points, particularly in such phrases as ‘doe ycleape,’ to a perhaps unfortunate study of Spenser.  Occasionally we meet with topical allusions, for instance the thrust at Taylor put into the mouth of the rude Cancrone: 

    Farewell ye rockes and seas, I thinke yee’l shew it
    That Sicelie affords a water-Poet. (II. vi.)

The stealing of the Hesperian apples, and the penalty entailed, appear to be imitated from the breaking of Pan’s tree in Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals, as does also the devotion and rescue of Perindus[324].  The orc probably owes its origin, directly or indirectly, to Ariosto, and the influence of the Metamorphoses is likewise, as so often, present.  The following is perhaps a rather favourable specimen of the verse, but many short passages and phrases of merit might be quoted: