erona," for instance--we shall find nothing comparable for
charm and sincerity of sweet and passionate fancy with such enchanting
verses as these:

O happy persecution, I embrace thee
With an unfettered soul! So sweet a thing
It is to sigh upon the rack of love,
Where each calamity is groaning witness
Of the poor martyr's faith. I never heard
Of any true affection, but 'twas nipt
With care, that, like the caterpillar, eats
The leaves off the spring's sweetest book, the rose.
Love, bred on earth, is often nursed in hell:
By rote it reads woe, ere it learn to spell.

Again: the "secure tyrant, but unhappy lover," whose prisoner and rival
has thus expressed his triumphant resignation, is counselled by his
friend to "go laugh and lie down," as not having slept for three nights;
but answers, in words even more delicious than his supplanter's:

Alas, how can I? he that truly loves
Burns out the day in idle fantasies;
And when the lamb bleating doth bid good-night
Unto the closing day, then tears begin
To keep quick time unto the owl, whose voice
Shrieks like the bellman in the lover's ears:
Love's eye the jewel of sleep, O, seldom wears!
The early lark is wakened from her bed,
Being only by love's plaints disquieted;
And, singing in the morning's ear, she weeps,
Being deep in love, at lovers' broken sleeps:
But say a golden slumber chance to tie
With silken strings the cover of love's eye,
Then dreams, magician-like, mocking present
Pleasures, whose fading leaves more discontent.

Perfect in music, faultless in feeling, exquisite in refined simplicity
of expression, this passage is hardly more beautiful and noble than one
or two in the play which follows. "The Phoenix" is a quaint and homely
compound of satirical realism in social studies with Utopian invention
in the figure of an ideal prince, himself a compound of Harun-al-Rashid
and "Albert the Good," who wanders through the play as a detective in
disguise, and appears in his own person at the close to discharge in
full the general and particular claims of justice and philanthropy. The
whole work is slight and sketchy, primitive if not puerile in parts, but
easy and amusing to read; the confidence reposed by the worthy monarch
in noblemen of such unequivocal nomenclature as Lord Proditor,
Lussurioso, and Infesto, is one of the signs that we are here still on
the debatable borderland betwe