Every beauteous flower

Boasteth in my power,

Birds and beasts my laws effect:

Myrrha thy fair mother,

Most of any other,

Did my lovely hests respect.

Be with me delighted,

Thou shalt be requited,

Every Nymph on thee shall tend:

All the Gods shall love thee,
Man shall not reprove thee :

Love himself shall be thy friend'

'Wend thee from me, Venus,
I am not disposed;
Thou wring'st me too hard,

Prithee let me go;
Fie! what a pain it is
Thus to be enclosed,
If love begin in labour,
It will end in woe.'
'Kiss me, I will leave.'
'Here a kiss receive.'
'A short kiss I do it find:
Wilt thou leave me so?
Yet thou shalt not go;

Breathe once more thy balmy wind. It smelleth of the myrrh-tree,

That to the world did bring thee,

Never was perfume so sweet.'

When she had thus spoken,

She gave him a token,

And their naked bosoms meet.

'Now,' he said, 'let's go,

Hark, the hounds are crying,
Grisly Boar is up,

Huntsmen follow fast.'

At the name of Boar,
Venus seemed dying,

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 orped1 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 Exaтоμnabía, or Passionate Centurie of Love, 1582; Amyntæ 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.