erefore all the more charming for us who dwell
amid sunsets of intense colouring, who can see nothing but the hectic
splendours of autumn. For the melancholy nightingale the poet has
surprise and admiration, no sympathy:

"What Bird so sings, yet so does wail?
O 'tis the ravished Nightingale.
Jug, jug, jug, jug, tereu, she cries,
And still her woes at Midnight rise.
Brave prick song! who is't now we hear?
None but the lark so shrill and clear;
Now at heaven's gates she claps her wings,
The Morn not waking till she sings.
Hark, hark, with what a pretty throat
Poor Robin-red-breast tunes his note.
Hark how the jolly cuckoos sing
'Cuckoo' to welcome in the spring,
'Cuckoo' to welcome in the spring[126]."

[126] _Campaspe_, Act V. Sc. I. 32-44. I have modernised the spelling.

This delightful song comes from the first of Lyly's dramas, and few even
of Shakespeare's lyrics can equal it. Indeed, coming as it does at the
dawn of the Elizabethan era, it seems like the cuckoo herself "to
welcome in the spring."

SECTION III. _Lyly's dramatic Genius and Influence._

Having thus very briefly passed in review the various plays that Lyly
bequeathed to posterity[127], we must say a few words in conclusion on
their main characteristics, the advance they made upon their
predecessors, and their influence on later drama.

[127] I have said nothing of the _Mayde's Metamorphosis_, as most
critics are agreed in assigning it to some unknown author.

In Lyly, it is worth noticing, England has her first professional
dramatist. Unlike those who had gone before him he was no amateur, he
wrote for his living, and he wrote as one interested in the technical
side of the theatre. They had played with drama, producing indeed
interesting experiments, but accomplishing only what one would expect
from men who merely took a lay interest in the theatre, and who
possessed a certain knowledge, scholastic rather than technical, of the
methods of the classical playwrights. He, having probably learnt at
Oxford all there was to be known concerning the drama of the ancient
world, came to London, and, definitely deciding to embark upon the
dramatist's career, saw and studied such _moralities_ and plays as were
to be seen, aided and directed by the experience and knowledge of his
patron: finding in the _moralities_, allegory; in the plays of Udall and
Stevenson, farce; in _Damon an