* Thomas of James I. the old poet Thomas Churchyard, who, to the new generation living in the last years of Elizabeth, represented literature as it had been in diebus illis, Churchyard. when the queen was young. We left him in 1579 publishing "Chips." In that year new wealth of thought was rising, and Spenser published his first book. Churchyard liked to alliterate on title-pages with the "Ch" that began his name. If his name had not been Churchyard, he would not have called his pieces "Chips," or set up in 1580 "A pleasaunte Laborinth called Churchyardes Chance,” or, in the same year, entitled a light bundle of lively discourses "Churchyard's Charge; " nor would the collection of pieces, issued in 1593, that included vindication of his right to be regarded as the author of "Shore's Wife," have been entitled "Churchyard's Challenge." Churchyard wrote many occasional pieces, but was most esteemed in his old age for that poem of Shore's wife, which he had contributed in his youth to "The Mirror for Magistrates." + Among his later poems was one published in 1587, in a variety of measures, with some intermixed prose, on "The Worthiness of Wales." It treats of towns, castles, rivers, mountains, and matter of interest in the antiquities of Wales and its marches, not omitting Shropshire, for Churchyard was born in Shrewsbury. To leave that out "were double error plaine. If in thy pen be any poets vayne, Or gifts of grace from skies did drop on thee, Then Shrewsebrie towne thereof first cause must bee." Churchyard's age was was about eighty-three when he published a "Pæan Triumphall upon the King's publick entry from the Tower of London to Westminster," and he published two pieces in the following year-the year "E. W." viii. 249-260. +E. W." viii. 247-251. of his death-one of them containing "sad and heavy verses in the nature of an Epitaphe for the losse of the Archbishop of Canterbury." John Whitgift died in that year at the age of seventy-four, on the twenty-ninth of February. Churchyard survived him but a month, for he was buried in St. Margaret's, Westminster, on the fourth of April. Anthony Anthony Munday, whom we left in the year 1586,* was fifty years old at the end of Elizabeth's reign. He lived beyond the reign of James, into the reign of Charles I., and died in 1638. Munday published in 1588 "A Banqvet of Daintie Conceits; furnished with verie delicate and choice Inventions to delight their Minds who take Pleasure in Musique; and there-withall to sing sweete Ditties, either to the Lute, Bandora, Virginalles, or anie other Instrument." He published also some translations, and in the last years of Elizabeth's reign was active among younger men in endeavour to earn money as a playwright. Two Robin Hood plays, printed in 1691, the "Downfall" and the "Death" of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, may have been written by Munday and Chettle, but have been ascribed also to Heywood. Richard Barnfeild, who lived through the reign of James, and died a country gentleman, at Dorlestone, Richard Staffordshire, in 1627, at the age of fifty-three, produced poems only in his younger days under Elizabeth. He was born in June, 1574, at Norbury, Shropshire, eldest son of a gentleman of the same. name. His mother, whose maiden name had been Maria Skrimsher (Scrimgeour), died when he was six years old. At the age of fifteen, in November, 1589, Barnfeild entered Brasenose College, Oxford, and he took his Bachelor's degree in February, 1592. He came to London, and had friends among the poets when he published, at the age "E. W." ix. 154-162. of twenty, in November, 1594, his first little book of verse, "The Affectionate Shepheard. Containing the Complaint of Daphnis for the loue of Ganymede." He signed himself only Daphnis under the dedication to Lady Rich. But in his next book of poems, published in January, 1595, "Cynthia. With Certaine Sonnets, and the Legend of Cassandra," Richard Barnfeild signed his name to its dedication to the Earl of Derby, and to the epistle "To the curteous Gentlemen Readers," which began by acknowledging that he had written "The Affectionate Shepheard." In 1598, at the age of twenty-five, Barnfeild published "The Encomion of Lady Pecunia: or the Praise of Money. By Richard Barnfeild, Graduate in Oxford." Of this there was a new edition, with alterations and additions, in 1605, including a few stanzas that honoured the new reign. He published nothing more. The fuller title of Barnfeild's first piece is "The Teares of an affectionate Shepheard sicke for Loue; or, The Complaint of Daphnis for the Loue of Ganimede." It is in two parts, the second being called, "The second Dayes Lamentation of the Affectionate Shepheard." Both parts are an expansion by the young poet of Virgil's second eclogue in which Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexim. Alexis becomes Ganymede, and the old man's love for the beautiful boy, whatever Virgil meant by it, becomes, in the first part of Barnfeild's rendering, a musical fancy in stanzas of six-lined common verse, not without some inspiration from the four-lined stanzas of Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd," which it resembles a little in its artificial daintiness of pastoral suggestion. In the second. day's lamentation love grows to good counsel from age to youth, and Virgil's nimium ne crede colori: Alba ligustra cadunt, vaccinia nigra leguntur, is developed at some length into a paradoxical plea for the advantage of black over white, according to the fashion that suggested to Dekker his witty poetical exercise in praise of bald heads in "Satiromastix." The other pieces in Barnfeild's first little venture were "The Shepheard's Content," artificial praise in Chaucer stanzas of a shepherd's life as better than any other; a sonnet ; and, in nine Chaucer stanzas, "The Complaint of Chastitie," briefly touching "the cause of the death of Matilda Fitzwalters, an English Ladie; sometime loued of King Iohn, after poysoned. The Storie is at large written by Michael Dreyton." Then followed the contrasting story of "Hellens Rape. Or A light Lanthorn for light Ladies. Written in English Hexameters." This piece of seventy-five lines served no better than other experiments in the same direction to recommend the Latin measure to our English poets, and it had faults caught from the experimenters. Barnfeild followed. Thus, for example, it began: "Louely a Lasse, so loued a Lasse, and (alas) such a louing Lasse, for a while (but a while) was none such a sweet bonny Love. Till spightfull Fortune from a love-lasse made her a loue-lesse In his next little book Barnfeild rightly described his poem of Cynthia as "the first imitation of the verse of that excellent Poet, Maister Spenser, in his Fayrie Queene.'" The main thought of Barnfeild's "Cynthia is borrowed from George Peele's "Arraignment of Paris." The poet of "Cynthia" dreams that he sees Jupiter among the gods and goddesses seated "down in a dale, hard by a forest side." Juno and Pallas complain against Paris, who has given to Venus the golden ball, inscribed Pulcherrima. All assent to Jupiter's suggestion that there is "in western world amids the ocean main" a maiden queen, pre-eminent in wisdom, beauty, majesty, to whom the ball shall be sent as a present. The twenty sonnets that follow "Cynthia" are of unrequited love, again addressed as by the old shepherd to Ganymede, who may possibly have figured in Barnfeild's verse some noble youth, praised for his innocence and beauty. A following ode transfers the love of the shepherd to a lass: "Her it is, for whom I mourne; Her, for whom my life I scorne; Her, for whom I sigh, and say, Yet shall my true loue remaine." The shepherd's heart broke, and "Eliza" was found written in it. The next poem of this little volume tells in six-lined stanzas the love of Apollo for Cassandra, her winning from him the gift of prophecy, and how then, withholding herself, she came to a sad end. Here there is a small digression of the young poet's to a "divine Eliza" of his own, who lived on the banks of Severn, and of whom, after complaint of the inconstancy of women, he says: "Yet famous Sabrine on thy banks doth rest The fairest Maid that euer world admired: "Queene of my thoughts, but subject of my verse, Whose artlesse pen so rudely doth reherse Thy beauties worth; for want of due respect Pardon my faith, my loue, my zeale, my truth." Barnfeild's last little book of verse, "The Encomion of Lady Pecunia: or the Praise of Money," published in |