[119] Printed by me in the Modern Language Quarterly, July, 1901, iv. p. 85.

[120] These are missing in most copies of the book; the only one I know containing them is in the Bodleian.

[121] I do not know who started the idea.  It was mentioned in the Retrospective Review (ii. p. 180) in 1820, accepted by Sommer, and elaborated with small success by K. Windscheid.  Masson makes no mention of it in his edition of Milton’s poetical works.  The author of Lycidas was probably a reader and admirer of Browne’s poems, but of Britannia’s Pastorals rather than of the decidedly inferior eclogues.

[122] The Arcadian Princess, translated by Brathwaite from Mariano Silesio, a kind of metaphorical manual of judicial polity, is in no way pastoral.  It may be remarked that in 1627 there appeared as the work of one I. D. B. an ‘Eclogue, ou Chant Pastoral,’ on the marriage (1625) of Charles and Henrietta Maria, in which two Scotch Shepherds, Robin and Jacquet, discourse in French Alexandrines. Taylor’s Pastoral of 1624 again, a fanciful treatise of religious and secular history, does not properly belong to pastoral tradition.

[123] One of these appeared two years previously, entitled The Shepherd’s Oracle.

[124] Appended to the third edition of the Arcadia, 1598.

[125] Appended to the Arcadia in 1613.

[126] Arcadia, 1590, fol. 237 verso.

[127] Opera, Basel, 1553, p. 622.

[128] The song is said to be between ’two nymphs, each answering other line for line’; but the simple alternation adopted by Spenser makes nonsense of the present poem.  The above arrangement seems to distribute the lines best; viz. the first quatrain to Phillis, with interposition of lines 2 and 4 by Amaryllis, the second quatrain to Amaryllis, with interposition of line 2 only by Phillis.

[129] Others in the Passionate Pilgrim, 1599, and Walton’s Complete Angler, 1653.

[130] So, rather than ‘Fair-lined,’ as Bullen prints; but query ‘Fur-lined.’

[131] This is the text of England’s Helicon, which is superior to that in the play, except for the omission of the couplet in brackets, and possibly in the reading ‘hath sworn’ for ‘is sworn,’ in l. 11.

[132] From E. K. Chambers’ English Pastorals, p. 113.  The date is uncertain, but a tune of the name was extant in 1603.  The earliest recorded text is a broadside, of about 1650, in the Roxburghe collection (III. 142).  The conjecture of an ‘original issue, circa 1600,’ is on the whole plausible.  In that case there was, somewhere, a poet capable of anticipating the particular cadences of Sirena and Agincourt, and that poet is more likely to have been Drayton than another.  See Ebsworth’s edition for the Ballad Society (Roxburghe Ballads, vi. p. 460).

[133] Lycidas is almost too familiar, one might suppose, to need comment, but such irreconcilable views have been held by different authorities, from Dr. Johnson onwards, that it may not be idle to attempt to view the work critically in relation to pastoral tradition as a whole.