lowe at five A. M., the modern reader—if Richardson has a modern reader—is wont to think the hour an unpropitious one; but to Herrick and to the Pléiade it would have seemed rational enough.
Laissons le lit et le sommeil
Ceste journée:
Pour nous, l'Aurore au front vermeil
Est desjà née
sings the French poet beneath his lady's window; adding, to overcome her coyness—or her sleepiness—the old dominant argument:—
Ce vieillard, contraire aus amans,
Des aisles porte,
Et en fuyant, nos meilleurs ans
Bien loing emporte.
Quand ridée un jour tu seras,
Mélancholique, tu diras:
J'estoy peu sage,
Qui n'usoy point de la beauté
Que si tost le temps a osté
De mon visage.
No less striking is the similarity between the reproachful couplets in which the singers of England and of France delight in denouncing their unfaithful fair ones, or in confessing with harmonious sighs the transient nature of
