Lo, here we come a-sowing, a-sowing,
And sow sweet fruits of love;

In your sweet hearts well may it prove.

Whenas the rye reach to the chin,

And chop-cherry, chop-cherry ripe within,
Strawberries swimming in the cream,
And schoolboys playing in the stream;
Then O, then O, then O my true-love said,
Till that time come again

She could not live a maid.'

Of the more obviously artistic songs the first of Shakespeare's in order of time is 'Who is Silvia?' in 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' a very subtle piece of metrical writing, the lines being alternately trochaic and iambic. 'Who is Sílvia? what is shé

That all our swáins comménd her?'

In the Merchant of Venice' this same fundamental contrast is used in an equally brilliant way, the question, 'Tell me where is fancy bred,' being in rising rhythm, and the reply, 'It is engender'd in the eyes,' in falling rhythm, a perfectly natural as well as artistic arrangement. Both the songs in 'Twelfth-Night' are interesting metrically as well as in other ways. In 'O mistress mine' it is curious to note the subtlety with which the poet gives entire newness to a very familiar measure by the introductory interjection, just as he does to Full fathom five' by the extra syllable at the beginning; and to the dirge in Cymbeline,'' Fear no more the heat o' the sun,' by the substitution of a dactylic for a trochaic foot in the third place of the opening line, making, as it were, a descant upon the plain-song.

The other song in Twelfth-Night' deserves even more patient study for its rhythmical perfection. The opening line, sometimes carelessly read as dactylic, contains what metricians call a sectional pause, the scansion being' Come away, come away | death,' as the other stanza shows; and the second quatrain, forsaking the anapæstic movement of the first, diversifies its iambics with trochees, but variously in the two stanzas. This song has the unusual interest of being discussed in the play itself. Orsino characterises it as 'old and plain,' and as 'dallying with the innocence of love, like the old age.' The Cam

bridge editor is of opinion that this description must refer to some other song for which 'Come away, death' has been substituted, but there seems no need of such an extreme conjecture. The song we have is in keeping with Orsino's melancholy, and it is its downright talk about 'black coffins' that takes his fancy. By the 'innocence of love' he means the simple-heartedness of a lover like himself, who is killed at once by his mistress's unkindness, as in the old age of chivalry. There is no doubt some irony intended by the dramatist in making the Duke at the same time point out that the song is a favourite with people whose hearts are quite fancy-free. But this is by the way. Shakespeare set out to write a sentimental ditty, and he has written a masterpiece.

One characteristic of all Shakespeare's songs is that they are made for their place. If Come away, death chimes with Orsino's sentimental melancholy, 'Under the greenwood tree' is as plainly in the cheerful and resigned mood of the exiles in the forest of Arden. The two songs could not be interchanged. This canon enables us to determine, on other than purely æsthetic grounds, the authorship of the song, 'Take, O take those lips away,' which is found, not only in 'Measure for Measure,' but in Fletcher's 'Rollo Duke of Normandy,' where it has a second verse. In 'Rollo' the song has no relevancy to its context, whereas in Shakespeare's play it exactly hits the mood of poor deserted Mariana in her moated grange. It is further obvious that the second verse could not have been written at the same time as the first, as it is in an entirely different key.

Of the other song-writers among the dramatists, Fletcher, as we should expect, takes the next highest place after Shakespeare. Without reckoning Roses, their sharp spines being gone,' and 'Orpheus with his lute,' which some critics attribute, on insufficient grounds, to the master himself, Fletcher has written not a few songs, chiefly in a sad vein, that charm us by their musical cadence. The simplest and most beautiful is the song in 'The Queen of Corinth :

'Weep no more nor sigh nor groan,
Sorrow calls no time that's gone;

Violets plucked the sweetest rain

Makes not fresh nor grow again;

Trim thy locks, look cheerfully,
Fate's hid ends eyes cannot see:
Joys as wingéd dreams fly fast;
Why should sadness longer last?
Grief is but a wound to woe;

Gentlest fair, mourn, mourn no mo.'

'Hence all you vain delights,' to which, as Mr Bullen points out, 'Il Penseroso' is under obligations, and 'Carecharming sleep, thou easer of all woes,' are other examples of the same exquisite and melancholy music. It is indeed for the most part in dirges and epitaphs that his fellowdramatists come nearest to Shakespeare's perfection. Charles Lamb compared the dirge for Marcello in Webster's 'White Devil' with Full fathom five,' saying that, 'as that is of the water watery, so this is of the earth earthy'; and Webster has another dirge in 'The Devil's Law-case' which, if a little too sententious for a song, contains some memorable lines on the vanity of ambition. That indeed is a theme that we meet in many of these dramatic songs. We have it in Beaumont's fine lines on Westminster Abbey, and in Shirley's 'The glories of our blood and state'; and wherever it comes it avails to lift the verse above its author's wonted level. In a sweeter form we have it in Dekker's praise of content, Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers,' one of the lyrics which, coming straight from the experience of that poor but contented singer, has reached the common heart in every succeeding generation.

Of Ben Jonson and of Donne it may seem unpardonable not to have spoken earlier in any account of the Elizabethan lyrical poets, but the fact is that both Donne and Jonson fall outside the true Elizabethan tradition. Both were rebels as much against the pastoral vogue, with its smooth, long-winded Italian stanzas, as against the supposed artlessness of the Shakespearian song; and they sought their effects, the one by a Horatian brevity and choiceness of phrase, the other in the utmost realism of poetic imagery. What vexed Ben Jonson in the writing of the earlier Elizabethans was its apparent amateurishness, its preference of ornament to proportion, its sins against the canons of antiquity. And like other adherents of a school, Jonson had the defects of his quality, and could not see that the instinct of Shake

speare was surer than his own trained judgment, so that he committed himself on more than one occasion to the dictum that 'Shakespeare wanted art We, with less prejudiced judgments, can see that, well written as Jonson's lyrics are, and not only well written, but spirited and gay and expressive, they yet do not bear comparison with Shakespeare's, or even with Fletcher's, because of their lack of that wood-note wild,' to use Milton's admirable phrase, which was the especial grace of the Elizabethan song. The best of Jonson's pieces is one of his earliest, Queen and huntress, chaste and fair'; and the making of the poem is the slight irregularity in the extra metrical syllable which his instinct and not his canon allowed him in the final stanza. Donne is represented in Davison's Poetical Rhapsody' by a single poem, that by which he has at last taken his place in the Golden Treasury'; and it is a characteristic poem, being an address to Absence.' Donne's best lyrics are about his absences and partings from his wife; and the startling directness of his style gives them a poignancy of pathos above all other poems on the same theme in the language. The famous comparison of the souls of the two lovers to the limbs of a compass, at once joined and divided, in itself grotesque enough, takes under his handling a sincerity that brings tears to the eyes:

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

To move, but doth if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

And grows erect as that comes home.'

In such writing as this we are far enough from the pastoral Arcadia, far enough also from such romantic songs as 'Who is Silvia ?' or 'Come away, death,' or 'It was a lover and his lass.' Donne is, in fact, a changeling among Elizabethans.

Art. V.-THE EVOLUTION OF HARLEQUIN.

1. The Theatre, its Development in France and England. By Charles Hastings. Translated from the French by F. A. Welby. London: Duckworth & Co., 1901.

2. Geschichte des Dramas. By J. L. Klein. Thirteen vols. Leipzig: Weigel, 1865-1886.

3. Histoire du Théâtre François. By C. and F. Parfaict. Fifteen vols. Amsterdam and Paris, 1735-1749.

4. Masques et Bouffons.

By Maurice Sand (Dudevant).

Two vols. Paris: Lèvy Frères, 1860.

And other works.

THERE are not many more fascinating occupations than the hunting and tracking down of some elusive word which for any reason has challenged our attention, through its manifold windings, doublings, and mazes, till we run it triumphantly to earth in some distant land in the remote or even prehistoric past. Some practical philosophers, indeed, like the poet, confess to having but an imperfect sympathy with the enthusiasm of

'Learn'd philologists who chase

A panting syllable through time and space,
Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark,
To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's ark.'

And yet nothing is more conducive to sound reasoning than an accurate use of words, and an intelligent appreciation of their provenance and significance. Even our lightest and most trivial words have a history stretching back into the most distant past. Who, for instance, without the help of the etymologist, could have suspected that a term so essentially modern as our 'gas' was suggested by the primeval 'chaos' of the old Greek cosmography? In the present article we invite the reader to accompany us over a stretch of country not less wide than that indicated by Cowper, with what he no doubt considered humorous exaggeration, while we engage in the etymological pursuit of one particular vocable, and endeavour to trace it back to its ultimate lair, beyond the ken, it may be, of even such redoubtable chasseurs as Professor Skeat and Dr Murray. In our research we may perhaps gain some curious information by the way about the