Corn from Olde Fielder. An Anthology with Notes by Eleanor
M. Brougham. (J. Lane. 7s. 6d. net.)—Mies Brougham has set her- self the pleasant task of selecting pretty trifles by our minor poets between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries, and arranging them under the heads of Religion, Love, Death, and Miscellany, with biographical notes and an index. The result is a charming little book, which shows once more how inexhaustible is the well of English poesy. Miss Brougham begins with some mediaeval carols, and quotes freely from the songs of the Elizabethan dramatists, the madrigals of their contemporaries, like Dowland, and the sonnets of Daniel, Barnabe Barnes, and other lesser men of that great age. As an instance of a poem that is forgotten save for the final couplet, let us quote the epitaph written for himself by Stephen Hawes, Groom of the Chamber to Henry VII. :— " 0 mortal folk, you may behold and see How I lie here, sometime a mighty knight : The end of joy and all prosperitee Is death at last, through his course and might : After the day there oometh the dark night For though the days be never so long At last the bells ringeth to evensong."
Miss Brougham deliberately avoids the oft-quoted masterpieces, but she includes some familiar things like " Greensleeves," Drayton'e " Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part," and the fine verses beginning " Why lost thou shade thy lovely face ? Oh why," which are attributed to Rochester.
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