prise, he spoke his thoughts, not in his own name, nor as his
contemporaries ten years later did, through the mouth of characters in a
tragic or comic drama, but through imaginary rustics, to whom every one
else in the world was a rustic, and lived among the sheep-folds, with a
background of downs or vales or fields, and the open sky above. His
shepherds and goatherds bear the homely names of native English clowns,
Diggon Davie, Willye, and Piers; Colin Clout, adopted from Skelton,
stands for Spenser himself; Hobbinol, for Gabriel Harvey; Cuddie,
perhaps for Edward Kirke; names revived by Ambrose Phillips, and laughed
at by Pope, when pastorals again came into vogue with the wits of Queen
Anne.[42:1] With them are mingled classical ones like Menalcas, French
ones from Marot, anagrams like Algrind for Grindal, significant ones
like Palinode, plain ones like Lettice, and romantic ones like Rosalind;
and no incongruity seems to be found in matching a beautiful shepherdess
named Dido with a Great Shepherd called Lobbin, or when the verse
requires it, Lobb. And not merely the speakers in the dialogue are
shepherds; every one is in their view a shepherd. Chaucer is the "god of
shepherds," and Orpheus is a--

"Shepherd that did fetch his dame
From Plutoe's baleful bower withouten leave."

The "fair Elisa," is the Queen of shepherds all; her great father is
Pan, the shepherds' god, and Anne Boleyn is Syrinx. It is not unnatural
that when the clergy are spoken of, as they are in three of the poems,
the figure should be kept up. But it is curious to find that the
shepherd's god, the great Pan, who stands in one connexion for Henry
VIII., should in another represent in sober earnest the Redeemer and
Judge of the world.[42:2]

The poems framed in this grotesque setting, are on many themes, and of
various merit, and probably of different dates. Some are simply amatory
effusions of an ordinary character, full of a lover's despair and
complaint. Three or four are translations or imitations; translations
from Marot, imitations from Theocritus, Bion, or Virgil. Two of them
contain fables told with great force and humour. The story of the Oak
and the Briar, related as his friendly commentator, Kirke, says, "so
lively and so feelingly, as if the thing were set forth in some picture
before our eyes," for the warning of "disdainful younkers," is a first
fruit, and promise of Spenser's skill in vivid narrative. The fable