And then she clasped Adonis in her arms!
“Even thus,” quoth she, “the wanton god embraced me!”
As if the boy should use like loving charms.
But he, a wayward boy, refused the offer,
And ran away, the beauteous queen neglecting;
Showing both folly to abuse her proffer,
And all his sex of cowardice detecting.
O that I had my mistress at that bay,
To kiss and clip me till I ran away!
BARTHOLOMEW GRIFFIN.
Cupid, pardon what is past,
And forgive our sins at last!
Then we will be coy no more,
But thy deity adore;
Troths at fifteen will we plight,
And will tread a dance each night
In the fields, or by the fire,
With the youths that have desire.
Given ear-rings will we wear,
Bracelets of our lovers’ hair
Which they on their arms shall twist,
With their names carved, on our wrist,
All the money that we owe
We in tokens shall bestow;
And learn to write that, when ’tis sent,
Only our loves know what is meant;
O, then pardon what is past,
And forgive our sins at last!
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
O for a bowl of fat canary,
Rich Aristippus, sparkling sherry!
Some nectar else from Juno’s dairy;
O these draughts would make us merry!
O for a wench! I deal in faces
And in other daintier things;
Tickled I am with her embraces;
Fine dancing in such fairy rings!
O for a plump, fat leg of mutton!
Veal, lamb, capon, pig and coney!
None is happy but a glutton,
None an ass but who wants money.
Wines, indeed, and girls are good;
But brave victuals feast the blood;
For wenches, wine and lusty cheer
Jove would come down to surfeit here.
THOMAS MIDDLETON.
And who has seen a fair alluring face,
A lusty girl yclad in quaint array,
Whose dainty hand makes music with her lace,
And tempts thy thoughts, and steals thy sense away;
Who has beheld fair Venus in her pride
Of nakedness, all alabaster white,
In ivory bed, strait laid by Mars his side,
And hath not been enchanted by the sight;
To wish to dally and to offer game,
To coy, to court, et cetera to do;
(Forgive me, Chasteness, if in terms of shame,
To thy renown, I paint what ’longs thereto.)
GEORGE PEELE.
Music and poetry is his delight;
Therefore I’ll have Italian masques by night,
Sweet speeches, comedies and pleasing shows.
And in the day, when he shall walk abroad,
Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad;
My men like satyrs, grazing on the lawns,
Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hay;
Sometimes a lovely boy in Dian’s shape,
With hair that gilds the water as it glides,
Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,
And in his sportful hands an olive tree,
To hide those parts which men delight to see,
Shall bathe him in a spring; and there, hard by,
One like Actæon, peeping through the grove,
Shall by the angry goddess be transformed
And, running in the likeness of a hart,
By yelping hounds pulled down shall seem to die.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.
So fair a church as this had Venus none:
The walls were of discoloured jasper-stone,
Wherein was Proteus carved; and overhead
A lively vine of green sea-agate spread,
Where by one hand light-headed Bacchus hung,
And with the other wine from grapes out-wrung.
Of crystal shining fair the pavement was;
The town of Sestos called it Venus’ glass:
There might you see the gods in sundry shapes
Committing heady riots, incest, rapes;
For know that underneath this radiant floor
Was Danae’s statue in a brazen tower;
Jove slily stealing from his sister’s bed
To dally with Idalian Ganymede,
And for his love, Europa, bellowing loud,
And tumbling with the Rainbow in a cloud;
Blood-quaffing Mars heaving the iron net,
Which limping Vulcan and his Cyclops set;
Love kindling fire to burn such towns as Troy;
Silvanus weeping for the lovely boy
That now is turned into a cypress tree,
Under whose shade the wood gods love to be.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.
The Elder Breughel once painted a picture of the Land of Cockayne. Viewed in its purely formal aspects, this picture may be described as a study of three recumbent figures, their heads meeting in the centre of the canvas, their legs splayed out in a star-pattern into three of its corners. Plates, a round table, loaves and pasties are arranged round them in a constellation of variously flattened ellipses. As a composition, curious and interesting. But as a vision of paradise, how unsatisfactory!
Looking at the three gorged and unbuttoned Cockayners, you know that they stink of onions and stale alcohol; that, asleep, they snore, disgustingly; and that when they wake, their conversation will be gross and profoundly tedious. Breughel’s Cockayne is a swinish paradise. But then, after all, refinement and elegance are not exactly the qualities you would expect to find in a Flemish kermesse.
The perfect, the completely acceptable vision of the earthly paradise was seen and beautifully set down by Piero di Cosimo in that enchanting Mars and Venus now at Berlin. Naked, the two immortally young creatures lie—Mars lightly sleeping, Venus just awake enough to be conscious of the perfection of the moment’s happiness—in the foreground of a mythological-Mediterranean landscape of surpassing loveliness. Three putti, in the middle distance, are playing with Mars’ discarded armour; another leans against the naked flank of Venus, gazing up into the sky in an ecstasy, a wide-eyed rapture of sensuous bliss. Near him, beautiful in its rounded, living sleekness, a white rabbit enchants the eye and hints, at the same time, of the warm and silky contact of fur with flesh. And that magnificent tiger-moth that has settled on the goddess’s leg—how gaily pied are its wings! and when it wakes, when at last it moves, the passage of its hurrying, hairy feet will be, for the queen of love, an almost unbearable pleasure like the creep and tingle of a kiss, radiating out from its centre of all but pain to the very extremities of the shuddering body.
The earthly paradise, the earthly paradise! With what longing, between the bars of my temperament, do I peer at its bright landscape, how voluptuously sniff at its perfumes of hay and raspberries, of honeysuckle and roast duck, of sun-warmed flesh and nectarines and the sea! But the bars are solid; the earthly paradise is always on the further side. Self-hindered, I cannot enter and make myself at home. No doubt, the landscape seems all the brighter to me for that inability, the life of the senses all the more paradisiacal. “The mind,” says Milton,
is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
But heaven, alas, is seldom actually experienced. The mind is its own place and its tendency is always to see heaven in some other place.
Enough, enough, ambrosial plumèd Boy!
My bosom is aweary of thy breath.
Thou kissest joy
To death.
Have pity of my clay-conceivèd birth
And maiden’s simple mood,
Which longs for ether and infinitude,
As thou, being God, crav’st littleness and earth!
Thou art immortal, thou canst ever toy,
Nor savour less
The sweets of thine eternal childishness,
And hold thy godhead bright in far employ.
Me, to quite other custom life-inured,
Ah, loose from thy caress!
’Tis not to be endured!
Undo thine arms and let me see the sky,
By this infatuating flame obscured.
Oh, I should feel thee nearer to my heart
If thou and I
Shone each to each respondently apart,
Like stars which one the other trembling spy,
Distinct and lucid in extremes of air.
COVENTRY PATMORE.
Cupid, being a god, craves littleness and earth; the mortal Psyche longs for ether and infinitude. This is all very natural and comprehensible. But, outside the world of mythology, it is not natural that a being endowed with what intellectuals (somewhat complacently perhaps) regard as god-like faculties, should spend his time savouring the sweets of childishness. Cupid in actual life is as mortal as Psyche, as rigidly confined to one place, one time, one body. Neither his appetite nor his childishness is eternal; and it is impossible for him simultaneously to savour childishness and to function as a god in some other psychologically or physically distant sphere. This being so, he finds himself compelled, in spite of all his cravings for littleness and earth, to stick to his godhead, such as it is, and remain aloof, remote, in “far employ.” For Psyche, on the other hand, savouring the sweets of childishness, presents not the slightest difficulty. She may have occasional longings for ether and infinitude—and incidentally one has met many Psyches, masculine as well as feminine, who never seemed to be troubled by such longings;—but her natural place is on earth and she is at home with littleness. The earthly paradise is peopled by Psyches. The intellectual Cupids can only look on from a distance and wish that their poor godheads were of another kind.
Mr. Hastings was an original in our age, or rather the copy of our nobility in ancient days, in hunting and not warlike times. He was low, very strong, and very active, of a reddish flaxen hair, his clothes always green cloth, and never all worth when new five pounds. His house was perfectly of the old fashion, in the midst of a large park well stocked with deer, and near the house rabbits to serve his kitchen, many fish-ponds and great store of wood and timber; a bowling green in it, long but narrow, full of high ridges, it being never levelled since it was ploughed; they used round sand balls and it had a banqueting-house like a stand, a large one built in a tree. He kept all manner of sport-hounds that ran buck, fox, hare, otter and badger, and hawks long and short winged; he had a walk in the New Forest and the manor of Christ Church. This last supplied him with red deer, sea and river fish; and indeed all his neighbours’ grounds and royalties were open to him, who bestowed all his time in such sports, but what he borrowed to caress his neighbours’ wives and daughters, there being not a woman in all his walks of the degree of
