Phylida was a fayer mayde,
      And fresh as any flowre: 
    Whom Harpalus the herdman prayed
      To be his paramour.

    Harpalus and eke Corin
      Were herdmen both yfere: 
    And Phillida could twist and spin
      And therto sing full clere.

    But Phillida was all to coy
      For Harpelus to winne. 
    For Corin was her onely joye,
      Who forst her not a pynne.[82]

The relation of the early Italianizers to pastoral is rather strange.  Pastoral names, imagery and conventions are freely scattered throughout their works, yet with the exception of the above there is scarcely a poem to which the term pastoral can be properly applied.  They borrowed from their models a kind of pastoral diction merely, not their partiality for the form:  ‘shepherd’ is with them merely another word for lover or poet, while almost any act of such may be described as ‘folding his sheep’ or the like.  Allegory has reduced itself to a few stock phrases.  In this fashion Surrey complains to his fair Geraldine, and a whole company of unknown lovers celebrate the cruelty and beauty of their ladies.  It is rarely that we catch a note of fresher reminiscence or more spontaneous song as in Wyatt’s: 

      Ah, Robin! 
      Joly Robin! 
    Tell me how thy leman doth!

Happily the seed of Phillida’s coyness bore fruit, and the amorous pastoral ballad or picture, a true idyllion, became a recognized type in English verse.  It certainly owed something to foreign pastoral models, and, like the bulk of Elizabethan lyrics, a good deal to Italian poetry in general; but in its freshness and variety, as in its tendency to narrative form, it asserts its independence of any rigid tradition, and justifies us in regarding it as an outcome of that native impulse which we have already noticed.  Such a poem is Nicholas Breton’s ever charming Phyllida and Corydon, printed above his signature in England’s Helicon.[83] Although we are thereby anticipating, it may be quoted as a representative specimen of its kind: 

    In the merry month of May,
    In a morn by break of day,
    Forth I walk’d by a wood-side,
    When as May was in his pride: 
    There I spied all alone,
    Phyllida and Corydone. 
    Much ado there was, God wot! 
    He would love and she would not. 
    She said, never man was true;
    He said, none was false to you. 
    He said, he had loved her long;
    She said, Love should have no wrong. 
    Corydon would kiss her then;
    She said, maids must kiss no men,
    Till they did for good and all;
    Then she made the shepherd call
    All the heavens to witness truth
    Never loved a truer youth. 
    Thus with many a pretty oath,
    Yea and nay, and faith and troth,
    Such as silly shepherds use
    When they will not Love abuse,
    Love which had been long deluded
    Was with kisses sweet concluded;
    And Phyllida, with garlands gay,
    Was made the lady of the May.