[108] See A. H. Bullen’s edition, two vols., 1890-91.  The poems in question will be fonnd in vol. i, pp. 48, 58, 63 and 76.

[109] It is worth noting that in the last stanza all the early editions read ‘Thenot’ instead of ‘Wrenock’; Thenot being the corresponding character in Spenser.

[110] Perhaps Anne Goodere:  but the question is alien to our present discussion.  Some of the allusions in the eclogues are obvious, and probably all the names, except perhaps the speaker’s, conceal real personalities.  In the Muses’ Elizium, on the other hand, most of the names and characters appear to me fictitious.  In connexion with the name ‘Idea,’ in which certain critics have wished to see a deep philosophical meaning, I would suggest that it may be nothing but the feminine of ‘Idaeus,’ that is, a shepherd of Mount Ida, a name found in the second eclogue of Petrarch.  It is, however, true that the word ‘idea’ bore the meaning of ‘an ideal,’ in which sense, no doubt, we occasionally find it applied to England.

[111] Concerning translations of Watson’s Latin poems, I may be allowed to refer to a paper contributed to the Modern Language Quarterly, February, 1904, vi. p. 125.

[112] Cf. the passage from Spenser’s October eclogue, quoted on p. 88.

[113] A certain similarity between this poem and the song in Love’s Labour’s Lost, beginning: 

  On a day—­alack the day!—­
  Love, whose month was ever May;

has caused them to be at times ascribed to Shakespeare.  They are subscribed ‘Ignoto’ in England’s Helicon, but appeared among the poems published with Barnfield’s Lady Pecunia in 1598, a tail of thirty lines of very inferior quality being substituted for the singularly perfect and effective final couplet.  The poem appeared again in the following year in the Passionate Pilgrim, this time with both the couplet and the addition.  The Helicon version is certainly by far the best, and not improbably represents the poem as originally written in imitation of Shakespeare’s.  See J. B. Henneman’s paper in An English Miscellany, Oxford, 1901.

[114] Gascoigne’s Steel Glass is far rather medieval in conception.

[115] Compare with the lines in Rosalynd, beginning ’Phoebe sat, sweet she sat,’ those in Tarlton’s News out of Purgatory, beginning, ’Down I sat, I sat down,’ and see A. H. Bullen’s Poems from Elizabethan Romances, 1890, p. xi.

[116] The copy of Pan’s Pipe in the British Museum wants the Tale, but this will be found by itself marked C. 40. e. 68 (2, 3).

[117] Collier and Hazlitt supposed two William Basses, but the balance of evidence seems against the theory.  See S. L. Lee in Dic.  Nat.  Biog., and the edition by R. W. Bond, 1893.

[118] Fleay (Biographical Chronicle, i. p. 67) identifies Musidore with Lodge, and ‘Hero’s last Musaeus’ with H. Petowe.  The latter identification, which had already been proposed by Collier (Bibliographical Account, i. p. 130), is in all probability correct.