sits in holy cell,
He'll teach his swains this carol for a song:
Blest be the hearts that wish my sovereign well!
Cursed be the souls that think her any wrong!
Goddess! allow this aged man his right
To be your beadsman now, that was your knight."

The feudal feeling can hardly be more beautifully expressed.

From the devotion that was low and lifelong we may turn to the
devotion that was loud and fleeting. The love-songs are many and well
picked: one is the madrigal from Thomas Lodge's _Eitphues' Golden
Legacy,_ which "he wrote," he says, "on the ocean, when every line
was wet with a surge, and every humorous passion counterchecked with
a storm;" and which (the madrigal) had the good fortune to suggest and
name Shakespeare's archest character, Rosalind. We cannot dwell
upon this perfumed chaplet of love-ditties. Mrs. Richardson is here
doubtless in her element, but she does not always lighten counsel
with the wisdom of her words; for instance, when, in Beaumont and
Fletcher's "Beauty clear and fair," she makes an attempted emendation
in the lines--

"Where to live near,
And planted there,
Is still to live and still live new;
Where to gain a favor is
More than light perpetual bliss;
Oh make me live by serving you."

On this the editress says: "I have always been inclined to believe
that this line should read: 'More than _life_, perpetual bliss.'" The
image here, where the whole figure is taken from flowers, is of being
planted and growing in the glow of the mistress's beauty, whose favor
is more fructifying than the sun, and to which he immediately begs
to be recalled, "back again, to this _light_." To say that living
anywhere is "more than life" is a forced bombastic notion not in
the way of Beaumont and Fletcher, but coming later, and rather
characteristic of Poe, with his rant about

"that infinity with which my wife
Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life."

Mrs. Richardson's notes, in fact, contradict the impression of
thoroughness which her selecting, we are glad to say, leaves on the
mind. She is aware that the "Ode to Melancholy" in _The Nice Valour_
begins in the same way as Milton's "Pensieroso," but she does not seem
to know that the latter is also closely imitated from Burton's poem in
his _Anatomy of Melancholy_. And she quotes John Still's "Jolly Good
Ale and Old" as a "panegyric on old sack," sack being sweet wine.

The publishers have done their pa