FROM THE SAME. CANTO XII.

HAPPINESS OF THE SHEPHERD'S LIFE.

THRICE, oh, thrice happy, shepherd's life and state!
When courts are happiness, unhappy pawns!
His cottage low and safely humble gate

Shuts out proud Fortune, with her scorns and fawns:
No feared treason breaks his quiet sleep:
Singing all day, his flocks he learns to keep;
Himself as innocent as are his simple sheep.

No Serian worms he knows, that with their thread
Draw out their silken lives: nor, silken pride:
His lambs' warm fleece well fits his little need,
Not in that proud Sidonian tincture dy'd:
No empty hopes, no courtly fears him fright;
Nor begging wants his middle fortune bite :
But sweet content exiles both misery and spite.

Instead of music, and base flattering tongues,
Which wait to first salute my lord's uprise;
The cheerful lark wakes him with early songs,
And birds sweet whistling notes unlock his eyes:
In country plays is all the strife he uses;
Or sing, or dance unto the rural Muses;
And but in music's sports all difference refuses.

His certain life, that never can deceive him,
Is full of thousand sweets, and rich content:

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,
While by his side his faithful spouse hath place;
His little son into his bosom creeps,
The lively picture of his father's face:

Never his humble house nor state torment him;
Less he could like, if less his God had sent him ;
And when he dies, green turfs, with grassy tomb
content 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,
In aged accents and untimely words,
Paint shadows in imaginary lines,

Which well the reach of their high wits records;
But I must sing of thee and those fair eyes,
Authentic shall my verse in time to come,

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
Against the dark, and Time's consuming age;
Though th' error of my youth they shall discover,
Suffice to shew I liv'd, and was thy lover.

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.

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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,
Fair befal the dainty sweet!
By that flower there is a bower,
Where the heavenly Muses meet.

In that bower there is a chair,
Fringed all about with gold,

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,
Thy poor silly Coridon.

Thou that art the shepherd's queen,
Look upon thy silly swain;
By thy comfort have been seen
Dead men brought to life again.

A SWEET PASTORAL,

FROM THE SAME.

GOOD Muse, rock me asleep
With some sweet harmony;
The weary eye is not to keep
Thy wary company.

Sweet love, begone awhile,
Thou know'st my heaviness;

Beauty is born but to beguile
My heart of happiness.

See how my little flock

That lov'd to feed on high,

Do headlong tumble down the rock, And in the valley die.