Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from English Pastorals
Herrick's Mayday Corinna, adding her arch reproof, maybe, to the poet's chiding of that sweet slug-a-bed. Robin and Makin illustrate with their homely give and take one of the sources of that form of pastoral occupa tion which culminates in more gracious sport with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles of Neaera's hair. The curiously tentative and hesitant note of Spenser's Calender, - the first great experiment of English Pastoralism, - is best appreciated by confronting his colinsoand Cuddies with the blithe west-country rustics Of his devoted but original disciple Drayton, or with the thrice-refined Hellenic Lycidas of a yet greater follower. Not every literary growth lends itself, it is true, so evidently as Pastoralism to the purposes of a summary survey such as is attempted in the present volume. Not all have so definite a beginning, so clearly marked and seemingly irrevocable an end. Pastoralism can now be reviewed as a whole from a distance sufficient to allow of all its parts falling into due proportion. If the Ec logue, its favourite form, still shows vitality, it is only by creating a quite new type of the singing shepherd, - the shepherd of Fleet Street, not of Sussex or Arcady, whose tales are cut short, not by the gloaming r e storm, but by the midnight boom of Paul's. The Masque (to which a later volume will be devoted) is even more clearly the product of an epoch, and had a still more compact history. For it achieved greatness quite suddenly at the outset of the seventeenth century, and perished of sheer inanition a generation later when the Court left Whitehall for the field, scarcely surviving that great master of the robust and masculine, to whose culture, paradoxically enough, almost all its rare and delicate beauty was due. Other branches of literary art, again, such as the Essays and Letters to which. Succeeding volumes will be devoted, have evidently a.
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