[75] Similar shepherd-scenes are found not only in French but even in Italian miracle plays.  The tendency they indicate, however, is not traceable in later pastoral, as it is with us.  That such representations as those of the Sienese ‘Rozzi’ formed no exception to this general statement I shall have to show later.

[76] For the literary history of the Wakefield cycle, see A. W. Pollard’s admirable introduction to the edition published by the Early English Text Society.

[77] They also criticize the angels’ singing in curiously technical language.

[78] Towneley Plays, XII. l. 377, &c., and l. 386, &c., cf.  Vergil, Bucolics, IV. 6.

[79] It is perhaps necessary to define the above use of ‘idealization’ as that modification of photographie reality observable in all true art.  It is only when the methods of art have become self-conscious that realism can become an end in itself.

[80] An English Garner:  Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse, ed.  A. W. Pollard, 1903, p. 87.  The carol is from a MS. at Balliol College.

[81] The poem will be found in Arber’s edition of the ‘Miscellany,’ p. 138, and in A. H. Bullen’s reprint of England’s Helicon, p. 56.  In dealing with isolated poems I have quoted, wherever possible, from Bullen’s reprints of the song books, &c.

[82] Forst = cared for.

[83] It first appeared as ‘The Ploughman’s Song’ in the ’Entertainment at Elvetham’ in 1591.  This has been recently claimed for Lyly.  Without expressing any opinion in this place as to the likelihood of such an ascription for the bulk of the piece, it may be remarked that the song in question is as like the rest of Breton’s work in style as it is unlike anything to be found in Lyly’s writings.

[84] Of all pedestrian, not to say reptilian, metres, this is perhaps the most intolerable; indeed, it was not until touched to new life by the genius of Blake that it deserved to be called a metre at all.

[85] See R. B. McKerrow’s articles on the Elizabethan ‘classical metres’ in the Modern Language Quarterly for December, 1901, and April, 1902, iv. p. 172, and v. p. 6.

[86] Eclogues i-iv were printed by Pynson, and the fifth by Wynkyn de Worde early in the century; i-iii were twice reprinted about 1550.  Barclay died in 1552.

[87] Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, afterwards Pope Pius II.  I suppose that it is on account of this statement of Barclay’s that English critics have constantly referred to the work as pastoral.  It is nothing but a prose invective against court life.

[88] See Dyce’s Skelton, Introduction, p. xxxvi.

[89] ’Eglogs Epytaphes, and Sonettes.  Newly written by Barnabe Googe:  1563. 15.  Marche.’  Reprinted by Professer Arber from the Huth copy.