This amateurish effort is composed for the most part in a strangely unmetrical attempt at blank verse.  It differs from the doggerel of the Fairy Pastoral in making no apparent attempt at scansion at all, and so at least escapes the crabbedness of Percy’s language.  It is not easy to see how the author came to write in this curious compromise between verse and prose, since it is more or less freely interspersed with passages both in blank verse and in couplets, which, while exhibiting no conspicuous poetical qualities, are both metrical and pleasing enough.  Take, for example, the lines from Eglantine’s lament: 

    Since that the gods will not my woe redresse,
    Since men are altogether pittilesse,
    Ye silent ghosts unto my plaints give eare;
    Give ear, I say, ye ghosts, if ghosts can heare,
    And listen to my plaints that doe excell
    The dol’rous tune of ravish’d Philomel. 
    Now let Ixions wheele stand still a while,
    Let Danaus daughters now surcease their toyle,
    Let Sisyphus rest on his restlesse stone,
    Let not the Apples flye from Plotas sonne,
    And let the full gorg’d Vultur cease to teare
    The growing liver of the ravisher;
    Let these behold my sorrows and confesse
    Their paines doe farre come short of my distresse. (II. iii.)

Or take Clematis’ prayer for her mistress Eglantine: 

    Thou gentle goddesse of the woods and mountains,
    That in the woods and mountains art ador’d,
    The Maiden patronesse of chaste desires,
    Who art for chastity renouned most,
    Tresgrand Diana, who hast power to cure
    The rankling wounds of Cupids golden arrowes,
    Thy precious balsome deigne thou to apply
    Unto the heart of wofull Eglantine. (I. iii.)

Or yet again, in lighter mood, Acanthus’ boast: 

    When Sol shall make the Easterne Seas his bed,
    When Wolves and Sheepe shall be together fed,... 
    When Venus shal turn Chast, and Bacchus become sober,
    When fruit in April’s ripe, that blossom’d in October,... 
    When Art shal be esteem’d, and golden pelfe laid down,
    When Fame shal tel all truth, and Fortune cease to frown,
    To Cupids yoke then I my necke will bow;
    Till then, I will not feare loves fatall blow. (I. ii.)

Yet the author of the above passages—­for there is no reason to suppose a second hand, and the play was published under his own direction—­chose to write the main portion of his poem in a measure of this sort: 

    Oh impotent desires, allay the sad consort
    Of a sublime Fortune, whose most ambitious flames
    Disdaine to burne in simple Cottages,
    Loathing a hard unpolish’d bed;
    But Coveting to shine beneath a Canopy
    Of rich Sydonian purple, all imbroider’d
    With purest gold, and orientall Pearles. (I. iii.)

Why he should have so chosen I cannot presume to say; whether from haste and carelessness, or from a deliberate intention of writing a sort of measured prose; but it was certainly from no inability to be metrical.  The occasional lyrics, moreover, are not without merit; the following lines, sung by Eglantine, are perhaps the most pleasing in the play: