As it fell upon a day
    In the merry month of May,
    Sitting in a pleasant shade
    Which a group of myrtles made,
    Beasts did leap and birds did sing,
    Trees did grow and plants did spring,
    Everything did banish moan,
    Save the nightingale alone;
    She, poor bird, as all forlorn,
    Lean’d her breast against a thorn,
    And there sung the dolefull’st ditty,
    That to hear it was great pity.... 
    Ah, thought I, thou mourn’st in vain,
    None takes pity on thy pain. 
    Senseless trees, they cannot hear thee;
    Ruthless beasts, they will not cheer thee;
    King Pandion he is dead,
    All thy friends are lapp’d in lead[112];
    All thy fellow birds do sing,
    Careless of thy sorrowing;
    Even so, poor bird, like thee,
    None alive will pity me[113].

No particular interest attaches to the four eclogues included in Thomas Lodge’s Fig for Momus, published in 1595, but they serve to throw light on a kind of pastoral freemasonry that was springing up at this period.  Spenser and Sidney, under the names of Colin and Astrophel, or more rarely Philisides, were firmly fixed in poetic tradition; Barnfield, by coupling them with these, made Watson and Drayton free of the craft in his complaint to Love in the Shepherd’s Content: 

    By thee great Collin lost his libertie,
      By thee sweet Astrophel forwent his joy,
    By thee Amyntas wept incessantly,
      By thee good Rowland liv’d in great annoy.

Now we find Lodge dedicating his four eclogues respectively to Colin, Menalcus, Rowland, and Daniel.  Who Menalcus was is uncertain; not, it would seem, a poet.  The themes are serious, even weighty according to the estimation of the author, and befit the mood of the poet who first sought to acclimatize the classical satire[114].  These eclogues do not, however, testify to any high poetic gift, any more than do the couple in a lighter vein found in the Phillis of 1593.  Lodge was happier in the lyric verses with which he strewed his romances—­such for instance as the lines to Phoebe in Rosalynde, though these did certainly lay themselves open to parody[115].  In the same romance Lodge rose for once to a perfection of delicate conceit unsurpassed from his day to ours: 

    Love in my bosom like a bee
      Doth suck his sweet;
    Now with his wings he plays with me,
      Now with his feet.

    Within mine eyes he makes his nest,
    His bed amidst my tender breast;
    My kisses are his daily feast,
    And yet he robs me of my rest. 
      Ah, wanton, will ye?