Or

prove

the gall of love. Now shut ye up

The rills, my swains; the meads have drunk enough.

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And (this appears from the experience of you both, that) whosoever is not afraid of love, (and therefore admits it into his heart,) will find it (one or other of two very opposite things, either) sweet or (else) bitter. (He clearly runs a great risk, and therefore perhaps he had better have nothing to do with it.)

Yet does not this come in very awkwardly, as part of a solemn judgment upon the relative merits of two aspirants for poetic fame, who, however coarse, or worse than coarse, either or both may have been, were plainly very accomplished composers? But even if it were not awkward, surely it is commonplace and weak. After such a trial of extreme skill, it was unsatisfactory enough to be told that the issue of it was a drawn battle; but to receive the further announcement, that love was either honey or gall, must have seemed to them very like trifling with their disappointment.

Virgil is said to have bestowed immense pains upon his Eclogues; so that probably we are quite in the dark as to what he really meant in this place. A difficulty of this kind in the Æneid would be easily got over by the assumption, "bonum Virgilium dormitasse."

Spenser makes Sir Scudamore agree with Palæmon's premises, though not in the implied advice which the above interpretation attributes to him: Faerie Queene, iv. 10, 1:

"True he it sayd, whatever man it sayd,

That love with gall and hony doth abound;
But if the one be with the other wayd,
For every dram of hony, therein found,
A pound of gall doth over it redound:
That I too true by triall have approved ;

For since the day that first with deadly wound

My heart was launcht, and learned to have loved,
I never ioyed howre, but still with care was moved."

Perhaps the emblems of the swains in the Shepheard's Calender, (March,) may throw something of a concentrated light on the obscurity:

"Willye's Embleme.

To be wise, and eke to love,

Is graunted scarce to gods above.

Thomalin's Embleme.

Of hony and of gaule in love there is store;
The hony is much, but the gaule is more."

Shakspeare, too, introduces Venus predicting this heavy curse upon love for the death of her lover:

"Since thou art dead, lo! here I prophesy,

Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend:

It shall be waited on by jealousy,

Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end.
Ne'er settled equally, but high and low;

That all love's pleasure shall not match her woe."

ECLOGUE IV. POLLIO.

SICILIAN Muses, somewhat grander strains
Sing we! Not all do vineyards charm
And lowly tamarisks: if we sing the woods,
May the woods of a Consul worthy prove.
The latest era of Cumæan song

Hath now arrived; afresh the mighty round
Of
ages is commencing. Now returns

The Virgin too, returns the Saturn reign;
Now a new strain is from the lofty heaven
Sent down. Do thou but at his birth the boy,-
'Neath whom the iron race shall first surcease,
And all throughout the world the golden dawn,—

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Lines 6, 7. Derrick tells us that a new star was said to have been seen in the open day about the time of Charles the Second's birth. To this Dryden thus alludes:

8.

"Or one, that bright companion of the sun,

Whose glorious aspect seal'd our new-born king;
And now, a round of greater years begun,

New influence from his walks of light did bring."

Annus Mirabilis, st. xviii.

"That was the righteous Virgin, which of old
Liv'd here on earth, and plenty made abound;
But after Wrong was lov'd, and Justice solde,

She left th' unrighteous world, and was to heaven extold."

See also note on Geo. b. ii. 655.

Spenser, F. Q. vii. 7, 37.

12. The repetition of "race," or an equivalent, is not necessary, un

less Milton is in fault in Beelzebub's speech, P. L. ii. :

"And with iron sceptre rule

Us here, as with his golden those in heaven."

O chaste Lucina, friend: now thine Apollo reigns.
And thou too, Pollio, the consul thou,

This glorious age shall enter [on its course],

And 'gin great months to roll.

With thee our chief,

The traces of our guilt, if any bide,

Shall, cancelled, free the lands from endless dread.
He shall the life of deities receive,

And heroes intermingled with the gods
Behold, and be himself beheld by them,
And with ancestral virtues shall he rule
A world at peace.
But unto thee, O boy,
Her earliest tiny presents with no tilth,
Her gadding ivies every where, with baccaris,
Shall earth unbosom, and Egyptian beans,

Line 13. So Pericles: Shakspeare, Pericles, iii. 1:

"Lucina, O

Divinest patroness and midwife, gentle
To those that cry by night, convey thy deity

Aboard our dancing boat: make swift the pangs
Of my queen's travails!"

15. Strictly, "this pride of time;" for to make the expression refer to puer makes verse 12 come in very awkwardly.

16.

"Henceforth a series of new time began,
The mighty years in long procession ran.”

Dryden, Abs. and Achit. 1028, 29.

26. Spenser makes the earth equally obsequious to Dame Nature:
"But th' Earth herself, of her owne motion,
Out of her fruitfull bosom made to growe
Most dainty trees, that, shooting up anon,

Did seeme to bow their bloosming heads full lowe
For homage unto her, and like a throne did shew.

And all the Earth far underneath her feete
Was dight with flowers, that voluntary grew
Out of the ground, and sent forth odours sweet;
Tenne thousand more of sundry sent and hew,
That might delight the smell, or please the view,
The which the nymphes from all the brooks thereby

With the acacia smiling interspersed.

The she-goats of themselves shall bring back home
Their teats swoln out with milk; nor shall the herds
Huge lions fear. The cradle's self for thee
Shall pour forth charming flowers, and the snake
Shall die, and guileful plant of bane shall die;
Assyrian spikenard shall in common grow.
But soon as e'er the heroes' praises, and
The achievements of thy father how to read
Thou shalt be able, and to know what be
Their virtue, gradually shall the plain
Wax yellow with a downy ear, and hang
The ruddy cluster from untutored thorns,
And churlish oaks shall dewy honies weep.
Yet a few tracks of ancient vice shall bide

Had gathered, they at her footstoole threw ;
That richer seem'd than any tapestry

That princes bowres adorne with painted imagery."

See also note on Geo, ii. 450.

Faerie Queene, vii. 7, 8, 10.

28. Such a primeval state as Milton finely describes: P. L. iv. :

"About them frisking play d

All beasts of the earth, since wild, and of all chase

In wood or wilderness, forest or den.

Sporting the lion ramp'd, and in his paw

Dandled the kid; bears, tigers, ounces, pards,

Gamboll'd before them; the unwieldy elephant,

To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed

His lithe proboscis; close the serpent sly,

Insinuating, wove with Gordian twine

His braided train, and of his fatal guile

Gave proof unheeded. Others on the grass

Couch'd; and now, fill'd with pasture, gazing sat,

Or bedward ruminating: for the sun,

Declined, was hasting now with prone career
To the ocean isles; and in the ascending scale

Of heaven, the stars that usher evening rose."

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