blasted for upward of two centuries the fame or the credit of the poet to whose hand this masque has been hitherto assigned. In it, after a full allowance of rough and ribald jocosity, the presence of a poet becomes manifest with the entrance of an allegoric figure whose declamatory address begins with these words:
Light, I salute thee; I, Obscurity,
The son of Darkness and forgetful Lethe;
I, that envy thy brightness, greet thee now,
Enforced by Fate.
Few readers of these lines will forget the verses with which Envy plays prologue to 'Poetaster; or, his Arraignment':
Light, I salute thee, but with wounded nerves,
Wishing thy golden splendour pitchy darkness.
Whoever may be the author of this masque, there are two or three couplets well worth remembrance in one of the two versions of its text:
It is a life is never ill
To lie and sleep in roses still.
******Who would not hear the nightingale still sing,
Or who grew ever weary of the spring?
The day must have her night, the spring her fall,
All is divided, none is lord of all.
These verses are worthy of a place in any one of Mr. Bullen's beautiful and delightful volumes of
