msher, seems to have devoted herself to the care of
the children. In November 1589 Barnfield matriculated at Brasenose College,
Oxford, and took his degree in [v.03 p.0415] February 1592. He "performed
the exercise for his master's gown," but seems to have left the university
abruptly, without proceeding to the M.A. It is conjectured that he came up
to London in 1593, and became acquainted with Watson, Drayton, and perhaps
with Spenser. The death of Sir Philip Sidney had occurred while Barnfield
was still a school-boy, but it seems to have strongly affected his
imagination and to have inspired some of his earliest verses. In November
1594, in his twenty-first year, Barnfield published anonymously his first
work, _The Affectionate Shepherd_, dedicated with familiar devotion to
Penelope, Lady Rich. This was a sort of florid romance, in two books of
six-line stanza, in the manner of Lodge and Shakespeare, dealing at large
with "the complaint of Daphnis for the love of Ganymede." As the author
expressly admitted later, it was an expansion or paraphrase of Virgil's
second eclogue--

"Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexin."

This poem of Barnfield's was the most extraordinary specimen hitherto
produced in England of the licence introduced from Italy at the
Renaissance. Although the poem was successful, it did not pass without
censure from the moral point of view. Into the conventional outlines of
_The Affectionate Shepherd_ the young poet has poured all his fancy, all
his epithets, and all his coloured touches of nature. If we are not
repelled by the absurd subject, we have to admit that none of the immediate
imitators of _Venus and Adonis_ has equalled the juvenile Barnfield in the
picturesqueness of his "fine ruff-footed doves," his "speckled flower
call'd sops-in-wine," or his desire "by the bright glimmering of the starry
light, to catch the long-bill'd woodcock." Two months later, in January
1595, Barnfield published his second volume, _Cynthia, with certain
Sonnets_, and this time signed the preface, which was dedicated, in terms
which imply close personal relations, to William Stanley, the new earl of
Derby. This is a book of extreme interest; it exemplifies the earliest
study both of Spenser and Shakespeare. "Cynthia" itself, a panegyric on
Queen Elizabeth, is written in the Spenserian stanza, of which it is
probably the earliest example extant outside _The Faerie Queene_. This is
followed by a sequence of twenty so