A somewhat more independent writer is Barnabe Googe—­writer, indeed, as original, may be, as the lesser Latin pastoralists of the renaissance.  The fact of his altering the conventional forms to fit the mood of a sturdy protestantism, of a protestantism still bitter from the Marian persecutions, is scarcely to be regarded so much as evidence of his invention as of the stability of literary tradition under the varying forms imposed by external circumstances.  The collection of his poems, ‘imprinted at London’ in 1563,[89] includes eight eclogues written in fourteeners, the majority of which may fairly be said to represent Mantuan adjusted to the conditions of contemporary life in reformation England.  Others show the influence of the author’s visit to Spain in 1561-3.  The best that can be said for the verse and style is that they pursue their ‘middle flight’ on the whole modestly, and that the diction is at times not without a touch of simple dignity.  There are, moreover, moments of genuine feeling when the author recalls the fires of Smithfield, and of generous if naive appreciation when he speaks of his predecessors in English song.  A brief summary of contents will give some idea of the nature of these poems.  The first recounts the pains of love; in the second Dametas rails on the blind boy and ends his song by dying.  The third treats of the vices of the city, not the least of them being religious persecution.  In the next Melibeus relates how Dametas, having as we now learn killed himself for love, appeared to him amid hell-fire.  Eclogue V contains the pitiful tale of Faustus who courted Claudia through the agency of Valerius.  Claudia unfortunately fell in love with the messenger, and finding him faithful to his master slew herself.  This is imitated, in part closely, from the tale of the shepherdess Felismena in the second book of Montemayor’s Diana, the identical story upon which Shakespeare is supposed ultimately to have founded his Two Gentlemen of Verona, though it is difficult at first sight to trace much resemblance between the play and Googe’s poem.  In the sixth eclogue Faustus—­the Don Felix of the Spanish and the Proteus of Shakespeare—­himself appears, for no better reason it would seem than to give his interlocutor an opportunity of enlarging on the delights of country life and introducing the remarks on fowling borrowed from Sannazzaro by way of Garcilaso’s second eclogue.  The next is a discussion somewhat after the manner of the Nut-Brown Maid, again paraphrased from the Diana (Book I); while the eighth, lastly, is a homily on the superiority of Christianity over Roman polytheism, in which under obsolete forms the author no doubt intended an allusion to contemporary controversies.  Thus it will be seen that Googe follows Latin and Spanish traditions almost exclusively:  the only point in which it is possible to see any native inspiration is in his partiality for some sort of narrative ballad motive as the subject of his poems.