Deadly coloured pale,

Roses overcast.

'Speak,' said she, 'no more,
Of following the Boar,

Thou unfit for such a chase:
Course the fearful Hare,
Venison do not spare,

If thou wilt yield Venus grace.
Shun the Boar, I pray thee,

Else I still will stay thee.'

Herein he vowed to please her mind;

Then her arms enlarged,

Loth she him discharged;

Forth he went as swift as wind.

Thetis Phoebus' steeds

In the West retained, Hunting sport was past; Love her love did seek: Sight of him too soon, Gentle Queen she gained, On the ground he lay,

Blood hath left his cheek.

For an orped swine

Smit him in the groin,

Deadly wound his death did bring:

Which when Venus found,

She fell in a swound,

And awaked, her hands did wring.

Nymphs and Satyrs skipping,

Came together tripping,

Echo every cry expressed:

Venus by her power

Turn'd him to a flower,

Which she weareth in her crest.

SONNET PREFIXED TO SIDNEY'S APOLOGY FOR POETRY, 1595.

Give pardon, blessed soul! to my bold cries,
If they, importune, interrupt thy song,

Which now with joyful notes thou sing'st among
The angel-quiristers of th' heavenly skies.
Give pardon eke, sweet soul! to my slow cries,
That since I saw thee now it is so long;
And yet the tears that unto thee belong,
To thee as yet they did not sacrifice;
I did not know that thou wert dead before,
I did not feel the grief I did sustain ;
The greater stroke astonisheth the more,
Astonishment takes from us sense of pain:

I stood amaz'd when others' tears begun,
And now begin to weep when they have done.

THOMAS WATSON.

[THOMAS WATSON was born about 1557 in London; was educated at Oxford; became a student of law, and died in London, probably in 1592. His principal writings are-a translation into Latin of Sophocles' Antigone, 1581; The 'Exкатоμпalíа, or Pa sionate Centurie of Love, 1582; Amyn!æ Gaudia (in Latin), 1585; Italian Madrigals Englished, 1590; The Teares of Fancy, or Love Disdained, posthumously printed in 1593. Many of his poems were printed in the Miscellanies of the time.]

Thomas Watson is one of the best of the Elizabethan 'amorettists,' or writers of wholly artificial love-poetry, and his Hecatompathia, which Mr. Arber's reprint has put within the reach of every one, may be taken as a type and summary of the whole class. It consists of a hundred so-called sonnets or 'passions,' each of three six-lined stanzas, and each headed with a prose introduction describing the purport and often the literary origin of the poem. A series so furnished tells its own story; and we do not require to go back to Watson's epistle To the frendly Reader to appreciate his 'trauaile in penning these louepassions,' or to learn that his 'paines in suffering them' were 'but supposed.' Watson, in fact, was a purely literary poet. At Oxford, says Antony Wood, he spent his time 'not in logic and philosophy, as he ought to have done, but in the smooth and pleasant studies of poetry and romance.' To these studies, however, his devotion was serious; for he mastered four languages, so that he writes as familiarly of Sophocles and Apollonius Rhodius as of Ovid, of Petrarch and Ariosto as of Ronsard. He translated the Antigone into Latin, and it was one of his Latin poems that gave him the fancy name of Amyntas, under which the poets of the time ranked him with Colin Clout and with Astrophel. But the literature that he affected most was the love-poetry of the Italiansof Petrarch and his followers, of Seraphine and Fiorenzuola, and many others that are quite forgotten now. Sometimes translating,

sometimes paraphrasing, sometimes combining them, he tells the story of his imaginary love, its doubts and fears and hopes, its torments and disappointment and final death, in that melodious Elizabethan English which not even monotony and make-believe can wholly deprive of charm. But still, Watson and his kindred poets have little more than an historical interest. They are but the posthumous children of the Courts of Love; their occupation is to use the scholarship and the ingenuity of the Renascence to dress up the sentiment of the Middle Age-a sentiment no more real to them than it is to ourselves. They make no appeal to us; their note has nothing of the note of passion and of truth that rings in the verse of Sidney and of Shakespeare.

EDITOR.

FROM THE 'HECATOMPATHIA.'

PASSION II.

In this passion the Author describeth in how piteous a case the heart of a lover is, being (as he feigneth here) separated from his own body, and removed into a darksome and solitary wilderness of woes. The conveyance of his invention is plain and pleasant enough of itself, and therefore needeth the less annotation before it.

My heart is set him down twixt hope and fears
Upon the stony bank of high Desire,
To view his own made flood of blubbering tears,
Whose waves are bitter salt, and hot as fire:

There blows no blast of wind but ghostly groans
Nor waves make other noise than piteous moans.
As life were spent he waiteth Charon's boat,
And thinks he dwells on side of Stygian lake:
But black Despair sometimes with open throat,
Or spiteful Jealousy doth cause him quake,

With howling shrieks on him they call and cry
That he as yet shall neither live nor die :
Thus void of help he sits in heavy case,
And wanteth voice to make his just complaint.
No flower but Hyacinth in all the place,
No sun comes there, nor any heav'nly saint,
But only she, which in himself remains,

And joys her ease though he abound in pains.