I can fancy Gervase Markham “making a night of it” with those rollicking bachelors, Beaumont and Fletcher, at the “Mermaid,” or going with them to the Globe Theatre to see two Warwickshire brothers, Edmund and Will Shakspeare, who are on the boards there,—­the latter taking the part of Old Knowell, in Ben Jonson’s play of “Every Man in his Humour.”  His friends say that this Will has parts.

Then there is the fiery and dashing Sir Philip Sidney, who threatened to thrust a dagger into the heart of poor Molyneux, his father’s steward, for opening private letters (which poor Molyneux never did); and Sir Philip knows all about poetry and the ancients; and in virtue of his knowledges, he writes a terribly magniloquent and tedious “Arcadia,” which, when he comes to die gallantly in battle, is admired and read everywhere:  nowadays it rests mostly on the shelf.  But the memory of his generous and noble spirit is far livelier than his book.  It was through him, and his friendship, probably, that the poet Spenser was gifted by the Queen with a fine farm of three thousand acres among the Bally-Howra hills of Ireland.

And it was here that Sir Walter Raleigh, that “shepherd of the sea,” visited the poet, and found him seated

                    “amongst the coolly shade
    Of the green alders, by the Mulla’s shore.”

Did the gallant privateer possibly talk with the farmer about the introduction of that new esculent, the potato?  Did they talk tobacco?  Did Colin Clout have any observations to make upon the rot in sheep, or upon the probable “clip” of the year?

Nothing of this; but

    “He pip’d, I sung; and when he sung, I pip’d: 
    By chaunge of tunes each making other merry.”

The lines would make a fair argument of the poet’s bucolic life.  I have a strong faith that his farming was of the higgledy-piggledy order; I do not believe that he could have set a plough into the sod, or have made a good “cast” of barley.  It is certain, that, when the Tyrone rebels burned him out of Kilcolman Castle, he took no treasure with him but his Elizabeth and the two babes; and the only treasures he left were the ashes of the dear child whose face shone on him there for the last time,—­

          “bright with many a curl
    That clustered round her head.”

I wish I could love his “Shepherd’s Calendar”; but I cannot.  Abounding art of language, exquisite fancies, delicacies innumerable there may be; but there is no exhilarating air from the mountains, no crisp breezes, no songs that make the welkin ring, no river that champs the bit, no sky-piercing falcon.

And as for the “Faery Queene,” if I must confess it, I can never read far without a sense of suffocation from the affluence of its beauties.  It is a marvellously fair sea and broad,—­with tender winds blowing over it, and all the ripples are iris-hued; but you long for some brave blast that shall scoop great hollows in it, and shake out the briny beads from its lifted waters, and drive wild scuds of spray among the screaming curlew.