f his
constancy, or suddenly renounces it for a day. The situation has
variants, but no surprise or ending. The lover's convention is explicit
enough, but it might puzzle a reader to account for the lady's. Pride in
her beauty, at any rate, is hers--pride so great that she cannot bring
herself to perceive the shortness of her day. She is so unobservant as
to need to be told that life is brief, and youth briefer than life; that
the rose fades, and so forth.

Now we need not assume that the lady of the lyrics ever lived. But
taking her as the perfectly unanimous conception of the lyrists, how is
it she did not discover these things unaided? Why does the lover
invariably imagine her with a mind intensely irritable under his own
praise and poetry? Obviously we cannot have her explanation of any of
these matters. Why do the poets so much lament the absence of truth in
one whose truth would be of little moment? And why was the convention so
pleasant, among all others, as to occupy a whole age--nay, two great
ages--of literature?

Music seems to be principally answerable. For the lyrics of the lady are
"words for music" by a great majority. There is hardly a single poem in
the Elizabethan Song-books, properly so named, that has what would in our
day be called a tone of sentiment. Music had not then the tone herself;
she was ingenious, and so must the words be. She had the air of epigram,
and an accurately definite limit. So, too, the lady of the lyrics, who
might be called the lady of the stanzas, so strictly does she go by
measure. When she is quarrelsome, it is but fuguishness; when she
dances, she does it by a canon. She could not but be perverse, merrily
sung to such grave notes.

So fixed was the law of this perversity that none in the song-books is
allowed to be kind enough for a "melody," except one lady only. She may
thus derogate, for the exceedingly Elizabethan reason that she is
"brown." She is brown and kind, and a "sad flower," but the song made
for her would have been too insipid, apparently, without an antithesis.
The fair one is warned that her disdain makes her even less lovely than
the brown.

Fair as a lily, hard to please, easily angry, ungrateful for innumerable
verses, uncertain with the regularity of the madrigal, and inconstant
with the punctuality of a stanza, she has gone with the arts of that day;
and neither verse nor music will ever make such another lady. She
refused to obs