composed
of pine-trees, fig-trees, and lemon-trees. "Then, comming into a faire
valley, compassed with mountaines whereon grewe many pleasant shrubbs,
they might descrie where two flocks of sheepe did feede. Then looking
about they might perceive where an old shepheard sat, and with him a
yong swaine, under a covert most pleasantlie scituated. The ground where
they sat was diapred with Floras riches, as if she ment to wrap Tellus
in the glorie of her vestments: round about, in the forme of an
amphitheater were most curiouslie planted pine-trees, interseamed with
limons and citrons, which with the thicknesse of their boughes so
shadowed the place, that Phoebus could not prie into the secret of that
arbour.... Fast by ... was there a fount so christalline and cleere that
it seemed Diana and her Driades and Hemadriades had that spring as the
secret of all their bathings. In this glorious arbour sat these two
shepheards seeing their sheepe feede, playing on their pipes...." It is
like a landscape by Poussin. Alinda and her page find the place very
pleasant, and decide to settle there, especially when they have heard
what a shepherd's life is like. "For a shepheards life, oh! mistresse,
did you but live a while in their content, you would saye the court were
rather a place of sorrowe than of solace ... Envie stirres not us, wee
covet not to climbe, our desires mount not above our degrees, nor our
thoughts above our fortunes. Care cannot harbour in our cottages, nor
doo our homely couches know broken slumbers." Fine assertions, to which
some hundred and fifty years later Prince Rasselas was most solemnly to
give the lie. But his time had not yet come, and both princesses resolve
to settle there, to purchase flocks, and "live quiet, unknowen, and
contented."[158]

Many other pleasant things are to be found in the forest; in fact, the
two ladies meet their lovers there; brave Rosader, the Gamelyn of
Chaucerian times, the Orlando of Shakespeare, and wicked but repentant
and reformed Saladin, who loves Alinda as Rosader loves Rosalind. They
meet, too, the shepherdess Phoebe, "as faire as the wanton that brought
Troy to ruine," but in a different dress; "she in a peticoate of
scarlet, covered with a greene mantle, and to shrowde her from the
sunne, a chaplet of roses;" in a different mood, too, towards shepherds,
thinking nothing of her Paris, poor Montanus whom she disdains while he
is dying for her.

Yet there were even more