(Lirum, lirum.)

From THOMAS BATESON's _First Set of English Madrigals_, 1604.

Your shining eyes and golden hair,
Your lily-rosed lips so fair;
Your various beauties which excel,
Men cannot choose but like them well:
Yet when for them they say they'll die,
Believe them not,--they do but lie.

NOTES.

_Page_ 3.

Thomas Weelkes was organist of Winchester College in 1600, and of
Chichester Cathedral in 1608. His first collection, "Madrigals to three,
four, five, or six voices," was published in 1597. Here first appeared
the verses (fraudulently ascribed, in "The Passionate Pilgrim," 1599, to
Shakespeare), "My flocks feed not." In 1598 Weelkes published "Ballets
and Madrigals to five voices," which was followed in 1600 by "Madrigals
of five and six parts." Prefixed to the last-named work is the following
dedicatory epistle:--

"To the truly noble, virtuous, and honorable, my very good Lord Henry,
Lord Winsor, Baron of Bradenham.

My Lord, in the College at Winchester, where I live, I have heard
learned men say that some philosophers have mistaken the soul of man for
an harmony: let the precedent of their error be a privilege for mine. I
see not, if souls do not partly consist of music, how it should come to
pass that so noble a spirit as your's, so perfectly tuned to so
perpetual a _tenor_ of excellence as it is, should descend to the notice
of a quality lying single in so low a personage as myself. But in music
the _base_ part is no disgrace to the best ears' attendancy. I confess
my conscience is untoucht with any other arts, and I hope my confession
is unsuspected; many of us musicians think it as much praise to be
somewhat more than musicians as it is for gold to be somewhat more than
gold, and if _Jack Cade_ were alive, yet some of us might live, unless
we should think, as the artisans in the Universities of Poland and
Germany think, that the Latin tongue comes by reflection. I hope your
Lordship will pardon this presumption of mine; the rather, because I
know before Nobility I am to deal sincerely; and this small faculty of
mine, because it is alone in me, and without the assistance of other
more confident sciences, is the more to be favoured and the rather to be
received into your honour's protection; so shall I observe you with as
humble and as true an heart, as he whose knowledge is as large as the
world's creation, and as earnestly pray for you