FROM THE SAME. CANTO XII. HAPPINESS OF THE SHEPHERD'S LIFE. THRICE, oh, thrice happy, shepherd's life and state! Shuts out proud Fortune, with her scorns and fawns: No Serian worms he knows, that with their thread Instead of music, and base flattering tongues, His certain life, that never can deceive him, The smooth-leav'd beeches in the field receive him With coolest shades, till noon-tide rage is spent: His life is neither toss'd in boist'rous seas Of troublous world, nor lost in slothful ease: Pleas'd, and full blest he lives, when he his God can please. His bed of wool yields safe and quiet sleeps, Never his humble house nor state torment him; HENRY CONSTABLE, BORN, according to Mr. Ellis's conjecture, about 1568, was a noted sonneteer of his time. Dr. Birch, in his Memoirs of Queen Elizabeth, supposes that he was the same Henry Constable, who, for his zeal in the Catholic religion, was long obliged to live in a state of banishment. He returned to England, however, about the beginning of James's reign. The time of his death is unknown. SONNET. LET others sing of knights and paladins, Which well the reach of their high wits records; When yet th' unborn shall say, lo, here she lies! Whose beauty made him speak what else was dumb. These are the arks, the trophies I erect, That fortify thy name against old age, And these thy sacred virtues must protect NICHOLAS BRETON. MR. ELLIS conjectures that this writer was born in 1555, and died in 1624. He is supposed by Mr. Ritson to be the same Capt. Nich. Breton, whose monument is still in the church of Norton, in which parish his family were lords of the manor till within these few years. His happiest vein is in little pastoral pieces. In addition to the long roll of his indifferent works which are enumerated in the Biographia Poetica, the Censura Literaria im VOL. I. Y putes to him a novel of singular absurdity, in which the miseries of the heroine of the story are consummated by having her nose bit off by an aged and angry rival of her husband. FROM ENGLAND'S HELICON. A PASTORAL OF PHILLIS AND CORIDON. On a hill there grows a flower, In that bower there is a chair, Where doth sit the fairest fair Who would not this sight desire, Though he thought to see no more? O fair eyes, yet let me see One good look, and I am gone; Look on me, for I am he, Thou that art the shepherd's queen, A SWEET PASTORAL, FROM THE SAME. GOOD Muse, rock me asleep Sweet love, begone awhile, Beauty is born but to beguile See how my little flock That lov'd to feed on high, Do headlong tumble down the rock, And in the valley die. |