xpected turn of events, by which
Elizabeth's crown had passed, without civil war, to the Scottish King,
and thus the revolution that had been foretold as the inevitable
consequence of Elizabeth's demise was happily averted. Cynthia (_i.e._
the moon) was the Queen's recognised poetic appellation. It is thus that
she figures in the verse of Barnfield, Spenser, Fulke Greville, and
Ralegh, and her elegists involuntarily followed the same fashion. 'Fair
Cynthia's dead' sang one.

Luna's extinct; and now beholde the sunne
Whose beames soake up the moysture of all teares,

wrote Henry Petowe in his 'A Fewe Aprill Drops Showered on the Hearse of
Dead Eliza,' 1603. There was hardly a verse-writer who mourned her loss
that did not typify it, moreover, as the eclipse of a heavenly body. One
poet asserted that death 'veiled her glory in a cloud of night.' Another
argued: 'Naught can eclipse her light, but that her star will shine in
darkest night.' A third varied the formula thus:

When winter had cast off her weed
Our sun eclipsed did set. Oh! light most fair. {148a}

At the same time James was constantly said to have entered on his
inheritance 'not with an olive branch in his hand, but with a whole
forest of olives round about him, for he brought not peace to this
kingdom alone' but to all Europe. {148b}

Allusions to Southampton's release from prison.

'The drops of this most balmy time,' in this same sonnet, cvii., is an
echo of another current strain of fancy. James came to England in a
springtide of rarely rivalled clemency, which was reckoned of the
happiest augury. 'All things look fresh,' one poet sang, 'to greet his
excellence.' 'The air, the seasons, and the earth' were represented as
in sympathy with the general joy in 'this sweetest of all sweet springs.'
One source of grief alone was acknowledged: Southampton was still a
prisoner in the Tower, 'supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.' All
men, wrote Manningham, the diarist, on the day following the Queen's
death, wished him at liberty. {149a} The wish was fulfilled quickly. On
April 10, 1603, his prison gates were opened by 'a warrant from the
king.' So bountiful a beginning of the new era, wrote John Chamberlain
to Dudley Carleton two days later, 'raised all men's spirits . . . and
the very poets with their idle pamphlets promised themselves' great
things. {149b} Samuel Daniel and John Davies celebrated Southampton's
re