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THE PRAISE OF FORTUNE.

[From Old Fortunatus.]

Fortune smiles, cry holiday!
Dimples on her cheek do dwell.
Fortune frowns, cry well-a-day!

Her love is Heaven, her hate is Hell.
Since Heaven and Hell obey her power,
Tremble when her eyes do lower.
Since Heaven and Hell her power obey,
When she smiles cry holiday!

Holiday with joy we cry,

And bend and bend, and merrily
Sing Hymns to Fortune's deity,
Sing Hymns to Fortune's deity.

Chorus.

Let us sing merrily, merrily, merrily,
With our songs let Heaven resound.
Fortune's hands our heads have crowned
Let us sing merrily, merrily, merrily.

RUSTIC SONG.

[From the Sun's Darling.]

Haymakers, rakers, reapers, and mowers,
Wait on your Summer-Queen!

Dress up with musk-rose her eglantine bowers,
Daffodils strew the green!

Sing, dance, and play,

'Tis holiday!

The Sun does bravely shine

On our ears of corn.

Rich as a pearl

Comes every girl.

This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.

Let us die ere away they be borne.

Bow to our Sun, to our Queen, and that fair one Come to behold our sports:

Each bonny lass here is counted a rare one,

As those in princes' courts.
These and we

With country glee,

Will teach the woods to resound,

And the hills with echoes hollow.
Skipping lambs

Their bleating dams

'Mongst kids shall trip it round; For joy thus our wenches we follow.

Wind jolly huntsmen, your neat bugles shrilly,
Hounds make a lusty cry ;

Spring up, you falconers, partridges freely,

Then let your brave hawks fly!
Horses amain,

Over ridge, over plain,

The dogs have the stag in chase:
'Tis a sport to content a king.

So ho ho through the skies
How the proud bird flies,

And sousing, kills with a grace!

Now the deer falls; hark! how they ring.

JOHN FORD.

[JOHN FORD belonged to a Devonshire family. He was born in 1586, and his last work was published in 1639. In his younger days, while practising as a barrister, he took part with professional playmakers, Webster, Dekker, Rowley, in the composition of various occasional stage productions. He first appeared in print as a dramatic author with The Lover's Melancholy, in 1628. His subsequent plays were published at intervals up to 1639.]

Ford was not one of the herd of playwrights, and he lost no opportunity of letting the world know that he 'cared not to please many.' His poetry was the 'fruit of leisure moments'; he wrote for his own satisfaction, and the enjoyment of his equals in condition. Genial expansive sentiment, joyful presentation of the ordinary virtues, the exaltation of common ideals, was not to be expected in plays that bore upon their title-pages such an avowal of proud reserve. Ford would not walk in beaten dramatic paths; his pride lay in searching out strange freaks of tragic passion. The heart is not purified and ennobled by his tragedies; it is surprised, stunned, perplexed. Passion speaks in his verse with overpowering force; but though he shows profound art in tracing the most monstrous aberrations of love, jealousy, and revenge to a natural origin in strangeness of temper, the sense of strangeness is left predominant. In the preface to The Broken Heart the names of the dramatis personae are explained as being 'fitted to their qualities,' and from this one might carelessly rush to the conclusion that the strangeness of Ford's characters is due to their being extravagant personifications of single attributes, and not types of real men and women. But his art was much too profound, his mastery of thought and emotion much too living for any such mechanical superficiality. His creations are not inanimate figures; the pulse of life beats in them. The secret of their strangeness seems to lie in a certain intensity and concentration of nature, a

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hardness and strength of fibre which will not relax where once it has taken hold. The kinship of passion to insanity is strongly suggested by Ford's plays. We seem to have before us men and women with a fixed delusion on some one point, impressed upon them not by the force of overmastering circumstances, but by some vicious warp in their own nature. In Shakespeare's plays men are driven into tragic error by the conspiracy of forces outside themselves; in Ford's plays fatal false steps are made from mere waywardness of character. In the one case, we are struck with the nearness of the victims of misleading passion to our common humanity; in the other their remoteness from common motives is bewildering. The strangeness of the passions which Ford brings into conflict mars the effect of his two great tragedies as artistic wholes; we do not turn from them with awestruck hearts, full of subdued fear and wonder-they leave us dissatisfied, tortured, bewildered. If these plays were all that were left to us by which to judge of the Elizabethan age they would justify all that M. Taine has said about its ferocity of spirit. In the play that bears the harsh and mocking title 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, we feel as if we were present at a hellish carnival of passion. There is no relief to its horrors, except the rapturous exultation of brother and sister in their guilty love. The revolting coarseness of the low-comedy scenes is not a relief but a sickening addition to the chaos.

Ford is not a poet who appears to advantage in quotations. Charles Lamb says truly of him that 'he sought for sublimity, not by parcels, in metaphors or visible images, but directly where she has her full residence in the heart of man.' The sublimity to which his own gloomy austere temper directed him was the sublimity of demoniac resolution, the heroism of unyielding will. Even his heroines are not of the soft and tender type which his contemporaries delighted to paint; they are as firm and resolute in their purposes as the men whom they love. The sorrowful Penthea, though she bends to her brother's will so far as to marry a husband of his choice, resists all the prayers of her discarded lover to prove unfaithful, and with silent and secret determination starves herself to death. Calantha, his 'flower of beauty,' bears stroke after stroke of appalling misfortune without betraying to the vulgar world one sign of the grief which is breaking her heart; she falls dead without a tear, when she has set the affairs of her kingdom in order. It is on the supreme force and patient com

pleteness with which he has displayed such stern and passionate natures, that Ford's title to a high place among poets must rest. There is no great intrinsic charm in his verse: it is an admirable vehicle for the expression of intense restrained passion, word following word with severe clear-cutting emphasis; but without a knowledge of the character and situation one cannot feel the force by which it is animated. Even in his songs, with all the softness of their music, we are conscious of the same severely regulating taste. All his few songs are of a sad strain, but they are not filled with the ecstasy of grief; their music is chastened and subdued.

W. MINTO.

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