and the plays.  To this lyrical tradition belong Breton’s songs, of which one has already been quoted; there was hardly a poet of note at the end of the sixteenth century who did not contribute his quota.  We find it once more, intermingling with a certain formal strain, in Drayton’s Shepherds’ Sirena containing the delightful song, with its subtle interchange of dactylic and iambic rhythms, so admirably characteristic of the author of the Agincourt ballad: 

    Neare to the Silver Trent
      Sirena dwelleth,
    Shee to whom Nature lent
      All that excelleth;
    By which the Muses late
      And the neate Graces,
    Have for their greater state
      Taken their places: 
    Twisting an Anadem
      Wherewith to Crowne her,
    As it belong’d to them
      Most to renowne her. 
        On thy Bancke,
          In a Rancke
            Let thy Swanes sing her
        And with their Musick
            along let them bring her.

In this pervading impulse of pure and spontaneous pastoral the soul of what is sweet and winning in things common and familiar as our household fairies blends with the fresh glamour of early love and the dainty delights of an ideal world, where despair is only less sweet than fruition, and love only less divine than chastity, where, as Drayton frankly tells us,

The winter here a Summer is,
No waste is made by time,
Nor doth the Autumne ever misse
The blossomes of the Prime;

    The flower that July forth doth bring,
      In Aprill here is seene,
    The Primrose, that puts on the Spring,
      In July decks each Greene,

a world, in short, in which the nymphs may strew the laureate hearse, not only with all the flowers and fruits of earth, but with the Amaranth of paradise and the stars of heaven if the fancy takes them.  Of a spirit compounded of these elements and of its quintessence are the ‘Nymphals’ of the Muses Elizium.  There are portions of the work, it is true, in which the more vulgar strains of the conventional pastoral make themselves heard, as in the satires of the fourth and tenth Nymphals; but for the most part we are allowed to wander undisturbed among the woods and pastures of an earthly paradise, and revel in the fairy laureate’s most imaginative work.  There we meet Lirope, of whom

    Some said a God did her beget,
      But much deceiv’d were they,
    Her Father was a Rivelet,
      Her Mother was a Fay. 
    Her Lineaments so fine that were
      She from the Fayrie tooke,
    Her Beauties and Complection cleere
      By nature from the Brooke.

There Naiis sings, roguishly enough, in the martial metre of Agincourt: 

    ’Cloe, I scorne my Rime
    Should observe feet or time,
    Now I fall, then I clime,
      What is’t I dare not?’

    ’Give thy Invention wing,
      And let her flert and fling,
    Till downe the Rocks she ding,
      For that I care not’;