THE SECULAR MASQUE. 1700.

THE SONG OF DIANA.

WITH horns and with hounds, I waken the day,

And hie to the woodland-walks away; I tuck up my robe, and am buskined soon, And tie to my forehead a wexing moon. * I course the fleet stag, unkennel the fox, And chase the wild goats o'er summits of rocks; With shouting and hooting we pierce through the sky, And Echo turns hunter, and doubles the cry.

SIR GEORGE ETHEREGE.

1636

LOVE IN A TUB.

L

BEAUTY NO ARMOUR AGAINST LOVE.

ADIES, though to your conquering eyes
Love owes his chiefest victories,

And borrows those bright arms from you
With which he does the world subdue,

Yet you yourselves are not above
The empire nor the griefs of love.

Then wrack not lovers with disdain,
Lest love on you revenge their pain;
You are not free because y're fair;
The boy did not his mother spare.
Beauty's but an offensive dart;
It is no armour for the heart.

*Wexing, or waxing, as Dryden has elsewhere employed it :-
"Tis Venus' hour, and in the waxing moon,

With chalk I first describe a circle here.'

Tyrannic Love.

× manniss

?

THOMAS SHADWELL.

1640-1692.

[SHADWELL'S plays abound in songs, but the bulk of them are too slovenly, frivolous, or licentious, to deserve preservation in a separate form. His comedies, admirable as pictures of contemporary meanness, supplied an appropriate setting for his coarse and reckless verses; but such pieces will not bear to be exhibited apart from the scenes for which they were designed. The following, however, may be accepted as characteristic of the time and the writer.]

THE

THE WOMAN CAPTAIN.

THE ROARERS.

HE king's most faithful subjects we
In's service are not dull,

We drink, to show our loyalty,

And make his coffers full.

Would all his subjects drink like us,
We'd make him richer far,

More powerful and more prosperous
Than all the Eastern monarchs are.*

THE AMOROUS BIGOT.

LOVE IN YOUTH AND IN AGE.

'HE fire of love in youthful blood,

THE

Like what is kindled in brushwood,
But for a moment burns;

Yet in that moment makes a mighty noise,

It crackles, and to vapour turns,
And soon itself destroys.

But when crept into agèd veins

It slowly burns, and long remains;

* See ante, p. 147. Dryden, in his Vindication of the Duke of Guise, says that the only loyal service Shadwell could render the king was to increase the revenue by drinking.

And with a sullen heat,

Like fire in logs, it glows, and warms 'em long,
And though the flame be not so great,
Yet is the heat as strong.

THE

TIMON OF ATHENS.

DAWN OF MORNING.

'HE fringèd vallance of your eyes advance,
Shake off your canopied and downy trance;
Phoebus already quaffs the morning dew,
Each does his daily lease of life renew.

He darts his beams on the lark's mossy house,
And from his quiet tenement does rouse
The little charming and harmonious fowl,
Which sings its lump of body to a soul:
Swiftly it clambers up in the steep air
With warbling throat, and makes each note a stair.
This the solicitous lover straight alarms,
Who too long slumbered in his Celia's arms:
And now the swelling spunges of the night
With aching heads stagger from their delight:
Slovenly tailors to their needles haste:
Already now the moving shops are placed
By those who crop the treasures of the fields,
And all those gems the ripening summer yields.

SIR CHARLES SEDLEY.

1639-1701.

THE MULBERRY GARDEN.

AB

THE GROWTH OF LOVE.

H Chloris! that I now could sit
As unconcerned, as when

Your infant beauty could beget
No pleasure nor no pain.

When I the dawn used to admire,
And praised the coming day,
I little thought the growing fire
Must take my rest away.

Your charms in harmless childhood lay,
Like metals in the mine:
Age from no face took more away,
Than youth concealed in thine.

But as your charms insensibly
To their perfection pressed,
Fond love as unperceived did fly,
And in my bosom rest.

My passion with your beauty grew,
And Cupid at my heart,
Still, as his mother favoured you,
Threw a new flaming dart.

Each gloried in their wanton part:

To make a lover, he

Employed the utmost of his art—
To make a beauty she.

Though now I slowly bend to love,
Uncertain of my fate,

If your fair self my chains approve,
I shall my freedom hate.

Lovers, like dying men, may well
At first disordered be;

Since none alive can truly tell

What fortune they must see.

251

TOM D'URFEY.

1723.

THE COMICAL HISTORY OF DON QUIXOTE.

STILL WATER.

AMON let a friend advise ye,

DAMO

Follow Clores though she flies ye,
Though her tongue your suit is slighting,
Her kind eyes you'll find inviting:

Women's rage, like shallow water,
Does but show their hurtless nature;
When the stream seems rough and frowning,
There is still least fear of drowning.

Let me tell the adventurous stranger,
In our calmness lies our danger;
Like a river's silent running,

Stillness shows our depth and cunning:
She that rails ye into trembling,

Only shows her fine dissembling;
But the fawner to abuse ye,

Thinks ye fools, and so will use ye.

THE MODERN PROPHETS; OR, NEW WIT FOR A HUSBAND.

I

THE FOP OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

HATE a fop that at his glass sits prinking half the With a sallow, frowsy, olive-coloured face,

And a powdered peruke hanging to his waist;

Who with ogling imagines to possess,
And to show his shape

Does cringe and scrape,

But nothing has to say:

Or if the courtship's fine,

He'll only cant and whine,

[day,

And in confounded poetry, he'll goblins make divine.