“Steer, hither steer your winged pines,
    All beaten mariners!”—­

songs which severally repeat the fatigue of the sea or that daring energy of its Elizabethan followers which by a false etymology we term chivalrous.  We do not find the superb lunacy of “Mad Tom of Bedlam” in the catch beginning, “I know more than Apollo,” but we have something almost as spirited, where John Ford sings, in The Sun’s Darling,

  “The dogs have the stag in chase! 
    ’Tis a sport to content a king. 
    So-ho! ho! through the skies
    How the proud bird flies,
  And swooping, kills with a grace! 
    Now the deer falls! hark! how they ring.”

For what is pensive and retrospective in tone we are given a song of “The Aged Courtier,” which once in a pageant touched the finer consciousness of Queen Elizabeth.  The unemployed warrior, whose “helmet now shall make a hive for bees,” treats the virgin sovereign as his saint and divinity, promising,

  “And when he saddest sits in holy cell,
    He’ll teach his swains this carol for a song: 
  Blest be the hearts that wish my sovereign well! 
    Cursed be the souls that think her any wrong! 
  Goddess! allow this aged man his right
  To be your beadsman now, that was your knight.”

The feudal feeling can hardly be more beautifully expressed.

From the devotion that was low and lifelong we may turn to the devotion that was loud and fleeting.  The love-songs are many and well picked:  one is the madrigal from Thomas Lodge’s Eitphues’ Golden Legacy, which “he wrote,” he says, “on the ocean, when every line was wet with a surge, and every humorous passion counterchecked with a storm;” and which (the madrigal) had the good fortune to suggest and name Shakespeare’s archest character, Rosalind.  We cannot dwell upon this perfumed chaplet of love-ditties.  Mrs. Richardson is here doubtless in her element, but she does not always lighten counsel with the wisdom of her words; for instance, when, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Beauty clear and fair,” she makes an attempted emendation in the lines—­

  “Where to live near,
    And planted there,
  Is still to live and still live new;
    Where to gain a favor is
    More than light perpetual bliss;
  Oh make me live by serving you.”

On this the editress says:  “I have always been inclined to believe that this line should read:  ‘More than life, perpetual bliss.’” The image here, where the whole figure is taken from flowers, is of being planted and growing in the glow of the mistress’s beauty, whose favor is more fructifying than the sun, and to which he immediately begs to be recalled, “back again, to this light.”  To say that living anywhere is “more than life” is a forced bombastic notion not in the way of Beaumont and Fletcher, but coming later, and rather characteristic of Poe, with his rant about