the song then breaking off into gamesome anapaests: 

    The gentle winds sally
    Upon every Valley,
    And many times dally
      And wantonly sport,
    About the fields tracing,
    Each other in chasing,
    And often imbracing,
      In amorous sort.

There, again, we listen to the litany of the Muses, with the response: 

    Sweet Muse, perswade our Phoebus to inspire
    Us for his Altars with his holiest fire,
    And let his glorious, ever-shining Rayes
    Give life and growth to our Elizian Bayes;

or else hear the fairy prothalamium, most irrepressible and inimitable of bridal songs—­

    For our Tita is this day
    Married to a noble Fay.

There, lastly, we behold the flutter of tender breasts half veiled when Venus and her wayward archer are abroad, and listen as fair Lelipa reads the decree: 

    To all th’ Elizian Nimphish Nation,
    Thus we make our Proclamation
    Against Venus and her Sonne,
    For the mischeefe they have done: 
    After the next last of May,
    The fixt and peremptory day,
    If she or Cupid shall be found
    Upon our Elizian ground,
    Our Edict mere Rogues shall make them,
    And as such, who ere shall take them,
    Them shall into prison put;
    Cupids wings shall then be cut,
    His Bow broken, and his Arrowes
    Given to Boyes to shoot at Sparrowes;
    And this Vagabond be sent,
    Having had due punishment,
    To mount Cytheron, which first fed him,
    Where his wanton Mother bred him,
    And there, out of her protection,
    Dayly to receive correction. 
    Then her Pasport shall be made,
    And to Cyprus Isle convayd,
    And at Paphos, in her Shryne,
    Where she hath beene held divine,
    For her offences found contrite,
    There to live an Anchorite.

We have here the very essence of whatever most delicately and quaintly exquisite the half sincere and half playful ideal of pastoral had generated since the days of Moschus.

How is it then, we may pause a moment to inquire, that in spite of its crudities of language and even of metre, in spite of its threadbare themes but half repatched with homelier cloth, in spite of its tedious theological controversies, its more or less conventional loves and more or less exaggerated panegyrics—­how is it that in spite of all this we still regard the Shepherd’s Calender as serious literature; while with all its exquisite justness, as of ivory carved and tinted by the hand of a master and encrusted with the sparkle of a thousand gems, the Muses’ Elizium remains a toy?  It is not merely the prestige of the author’s name:  it is not merely that we tend to accept the work of each at his own valuation.  We have to seek the explanation of the phenomenon in the fact that not only has the