Yes, you have made a vow, I know, which is,
    Whilst you are young, you will have all the youth
    To follow you with lies and flatteries. 
    Fool, they’ll deceive you; when this colour fades,
    Which will not always last, and you go crooked,
    As if you sought your beauty, lost i’ th’ ground,
    Then they will laugh at you! (II. v.)

With which he goes off to attend to the shearing of his sheep, one of those wholly unnecessary operations which the less skilful pastoralists make it a virtue to thrust upon our attention.  The scene between Nerina, Daphnis, and Dorinda, a sort of three-cornered love-suit, may possibly have suggested to Cowley the best scene in the play which next claims our attention.

Cowley’s Love’s Riddle, published in 1638, but written two or three years earlier, is the work of a boy of sixteen, and though it serves amply to prove the precocity of its author, it does not therefore follow that it is itself possessed of any conspicuous merit.  To find in it passages of genuine observation and love of nature, as one of Cowley’s critics professes to do, is unpardonably partial; to grumble with another at not finding them is futile; even with a third to see in the piece ’a boy’s conception of Sicilian life’ is, to say the least, unnecessary.  Cowley had, indeed, a great deal too much of ’the precocious humour of the world-wise boy’ to put forward his play as anything of the kind; he was perfectly aware that it was an absolutely unreal fantasy, based entirely on convention and imitation, the sole merit of which was the more or less clever manner in which borrowing, reminiscence, and tradition were interwoven and combined.  The plot is a mixture of the pastoral and courtly, or at least aristocratic, types, not uninfluenced by the rustic or comic, which, like the chivalric, is no doubt of Sidneian origin.

Calidora, the daughter of noble parents in Sicily, retires among the shepherd folk disguised in man’s apparel, in order, as we only learn at the end of the play, to escape from the violence of Aphron, one of her suitors.  Her other suitor, Philistus, as well as her brother Florellus and Philistus’ sister Clariana, all set off in search of her, while Aphron, finding her fled from his pursuit, wanders aimlessly about, having lost his reason.  Thus the courtly characters are all brought in contact with the country swains, among whom Palaemon courts the disdainful Hylace, daughter of the crabbed Melarnus and the old hag Truga.  Other pastoral characters are old Aegon and his supposed daughter Bellula, and Alupis, who fills at once the roles of the ‘merry’ shepherd and the ‘wise.’  On Callidora’s appearance in boy’s attire among the shepherd folk Hylace and Bellula alike fall in love with her, while in his search for his sister Florellus falls in love with Bellula.  This gives occasion for a scene of some merit between Callidora, Bellula, and Florellus, in which, after vainly disputing of