tury are now dead, and these memoirs conserve the
perfume of their lives.

Songs from the Old Dramatists. Collected and Edited by Abby Sage
Richardson, New York: Hurd & Houghton.

Any anthology of old English lyrics is a treasure if one can depend
upon the correctness of printing and punctuating. Mrs. Richardson has
found a quantity of rather recondite ones, and most of the favorites
are given too. Only to read her long index of first lines is to catch
a succession of dainty fancies and of exquisite rhythms, arranged when
the language was crystallizing into beauty under the fanning wings of
song. That some of our pet jewels are omitted was to be expected.
The compiler does not find space for Rochester's most sincere-seeming
stanzas, beginning, "I cannot change as others do"--among the sweetest
and most lyrical utterances which could set the stay-imprisoned hearts
of Charles II.'s beauties to bounding with a touch of emotion. Perhaps
Rochester was not exactly a dramatist, though that point is wisely
strained in other cases. We do not get the "Nay, dearest, think me
not unkind," nor do we get the "To all you ladies now on land," though
sailors' lyrics, among the finest legacies of the time when gallant
England ruled the waves, are not wanting. We have Sir Charles Sedley's

"Love still hath something of the sea
From which his mother rose,"

and the siren's song, fit for the loveliest of Parthenopes, from
Browne's _Masque of the Inner Temple_, beginning,

"Steer, hither steer your winged pines,
All beaten mariners!"--

songs which severally repeat the fatigue of the sea or that daring
energy of its Elizabethan followers which by a false etymology we term
chivalrous. We do not find the superb lunacy of "Mad Tom of Bedlam" in
the catch beginning, "I know more than Apollo," but we have something
almost as spirited, where John Ford sings, in _The Sun's Darling_,

"The dogs have the stag in chase!
'Tis a sport to content a king.
So-ho! ho! through the skies
How the proud bird flies,
And swooping, kills with a grace!
Now the deer falls! hark! how they ring."

For what is pensive and retrospective in tone we are given a song
of "The Aged Courtier," which once in a pageant touched the finer
consciousness of Queen Elizabeth. The unemployed warrior, whose
"helmet now shall make a hive for bees," treats the virgin sovereign
as his saint and divinity, promising,

"And when he saddest