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RICHARD BARNFIELD.

[BORN at the Manor House of Norbury, Staffordshire, 1574. Died at Dorleston, or Darlaston, in the same county, 1627. His chief poems are— The Affectionate Shepherd, 1594; Cynthia, witn certame Sonnets and the Legende of Cassandra, 1595; The Encomion of Lady Pecunia, 1598. Twc poems from this latter source reappeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599.]

Barnfield is a poet whose personality has only of late years emerged into something like distinctness, his best poems having till recently had the honour of bearing Shakespeare's name. The reprint of The Affectionate Shepherd by Mr. Halliwell in 1845, from the almost unique copy in Sion College Library, first made Barnfield known to modern readers; about the same time doubts began to arise concerning the authorship of the poems in The Passionate Pilgrim; and lately, in 1876, Mr. Grosart was able to print for the Roxburghe Club the complete poems, together with a number of facts about Barnfield's family and a few about his life. Of the latter we only learn that he belonged to a good Staffordshire family; that he became a member of Prasenose College, Oxford, in 1589: that on leaving Oxford he passed several years in London, apparently as a member of that literary circle of which Lady Rich, Sidney's 'Stella,' was the centre; and that after 1605 he disappeared, probably retiring like Shakespeare to his country home, but unlike him sending forth no poetic utterance into the world.

The oddity of Barnfield's principal performance, The Affectionate Shepherd, is best explained by the date of its composition. He was not twenty when he wrote it; and we are thus more inclined to tolerate both the sentiment (it is an elaborate expansion of Virgil's second eclogue', and the boyishness and incongruities which mar the execution. It is strange enough that such a poem should be dedicated to a lady (Lady Rich); stranger still that it should open with what must have read like a caricature of that lady's own love-story; strangest of all that Daphnis, after display

ing all his Arcadian blandishments in vain through a hundred stanzas, should turn moralist and flood the obdurate Ganymede with 'lere I learned from a Beldame Trot'-didactic 'lere,' of which these lines are a fair example :

'Be patient in extreame adversitie,

Man's chiefest credit growes by dooing well,

Be not high minded in prosperitie,

Falshood abhorre, no lying fable tell,

Give not thyselfe to sloth, the sinke of shame,
The moath of Time, the enemie to Fame!'

Yet the poem has qualities which mark it out from the mass of Elizabethan pastoral. It has fluency, music, colour. Barnfield combines in it a mastery of euphuistic antithesis with a real knowledge of the country and its sights and sounds; its 'scarletdyed carnation bleeding yet,' its fine ruffe-footed Doves,' its 'curds and clowted creme,' the 'lyme-twigs and fine sparrow calles' for the birdcatcher, the 'springes in a frostie night' that take the woodcock. It is to be regretted that this eye for nature, this fine ear and honeyed tongue, were pressed into the service of a design too artificial and too alien from the common feeling of mankind.

There is nothing of this sort to say against the well-known Ode which we here quote, and which is indeed in no respect unworthy of the great name to which it was so long attributed. From its happy union of ethical matter and fanciful form, from its strongly personal note, it ranks among the most interesting of the productions of the lesser Elizabethans.

EDITOR.

SONNET.

[From Cynthia, &c.]

Beauty and Majesty are fallen at odds,

Th' one claims his cheek, the other claims his chin;
Then Virtue comes and puts her title in:
Quoth she, I make him like th' immortal Gods.
Quoth Majesty, I own his looks, his brow;
His lips, quoth Love, his eyes, his fair is mine;
And yet, quoth Majesty, he is not thine,

I mix disdain with Love's congealed snow.
Ay, but, quoth Love, his locks are mine by right.
His stately gait is mine, quoth Majesty ;

And mine, quoth Virtue, is his Modesty.
Thus as they strive about the heavenly wight

At last the other two to Virtue yield

The lists of Love, fought in fair Beauty's field.

SONNET TO HIS FRIEND MAISTER R. L.1

[From Poems in Divers Humors; also printed in The Passionate Pilgrim.Į

If music and sweet poetry agree,

As they must needs, the sister and the brother,
Then must the love be great 'twixt thee and me.
Because thou lov'st the one, and I the other.
Dowland to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch
Upon the lute doth ravish human sense;
Spenser to me, whose deep conceit is such
As, passing all conceit, needs no defence.
Thou lov'st to hear the sweet melodious sound
That Phoebus' lute, the queen of music, makes;
And I in deep delight am chiefly drown'd

Whenas himself to singing he betakes.

One god is god of both, as poets feign;

One knight loves both, and both in thee remain.

1 Perhaps Richard Lynch, author of Diella; certaine sonnets (1596).

AN ODE

[From the same.]

As it fell upon a day

In the merry month of May,

Sitting in a pleasant shade

Which a grove of myrtles made,

Beasts did leap, and birds did sing,

Trees did grow, and plants did spring;
Everything did banish moan,

Save the nightingale alone:
She, poor bird, as all forlorn,
Lean'd her breast up-till a thorn,
And there sung the dolefull'st ditty,
That to hear it was great pity:
'Fie, fie, fie,' now would she cry;
'Teru, teru!' by and by;
That to hear her so complain,
Scarce I could from tears refrain;
For her griefs, so lively shown,
Made me think upon mine own.
Ah, thought I, thou mourn'st in vain!
None takes pity on thy pain :

Senseless trees they cannot hear thee;
Ruthless beasts they will not cheer thee:

King Pandion he is dead;

All thy friends are lapp'd in lead;
All thy fellow birds do sing,

Careless of thy sorrowing.
[Even so, poor bird, like thee,
None alive will pity me.]

Whilst as fickle Fortune smiled,
Thou and I were both beguiled.
Every one that flatters thee
Is no friend in misery.

Words are easy, like the wind;

Faithful friends are hard to find:

Every man will be thy friend
Whilst thou hast wherewith to spend;
But if store of crowns be scant,
No man will supply thy want.
If that one be prodigal,
Bountiful they will him call,
And with such-like flattering,
'Pity but he were a king;'
If he be addict to vice,
Quickly him they will entice;
If to women he be bent,
They have at commandement:
But if Fortune once do frown,
Then farewell his great renown;
They that fawn'd on him before
Use his company no more.
He that is thy friend indeed,
He will help thee in thy need:
If thou sorrow, he will weep;
If thou wake, he cannot sleep;
Thus of every grief in heart
He with thee doth bear a part.
These are certain signs to know
Faithful friend from flattering for.

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