zed by their importunities, this ambiguous character gives an assignation to each of them in a certain cave at midnight, and promises there to grant their wishes. As Zelmane had foreseen, Basilius does not recognise the queen amid the obscurity of the cave, and thus accomplishes the last and most mysterious part of the prediction of the Delphic oracle. Being athirst, he unwarily drinks a philtre, which Gynecia had brought with her to the cave, for the purpose of increasing Zelmane's love. This draught gives him the appearance of being poisoned. While their majesties were engaged in this cave adventure, the imaginary Zelmane embraces the opportunity of visiting Philoclea, in his true character of Pyrocles, prince of Macedon, for the purpose of persuading her to fly with him; but after much discourse on the subject, both faint and fall asleep, so that in the morning the prince is discovered in male attire, in the chamber of Philoclea. Pamela and her lover are equally unsuccessful, and having lost much time in carving sonnets, they are surprised and brought back by soldiers.

The king still continued apparently in a lifeless state, and Gynecia in despair accuses herself as the cause of his death. The utmost confusion now arises in Arcadia. In this posture of affairs, Eu

archus, king of Macedon, accidentally arrives on the coast. Philanax, protector of Arcadia, appoints him umpire in the ensuing trial, and he accordingly sits on the royal throne, thus explaining another Delphic enigma. Gynecia is condemned to be buried alive, along with the body of her husband, whom she confessed having poisoned. The trials of the princes ensue, and long pleadings take place in the viperous style of Sir Edward Coke. Pyrocles is condemned to be thrown from a tower, and his cousin to be beheaded; and these sentences the Macedonian king affirms, though he now discovers that one of the prisoners is his nephew, and the other his son. All are in the uttermost distress, when Basilius, whose corpse was in court, awakes from the effects of the philter, which had been only a sleep potion; and the oracle being thus fully accomplished, the two young princes are united to their mistresses.

Such is the outline of the story of the Arcadia. The heroic part of the romance consists in a detail of the exploits of Pyrocles and Musidorus, previous to their arrival in Arcadia; and in the description of a war carried on against Basilius, by his nephew Amphialus, whose mother had, at one time, craftily seized and confined the princesses. There are also some happy descriptions of jousts and tour

naments. But the work is on the whole extreme

ly tiresome, and its chief interest consists in the stately dignity, and often graceful beauty, of the language. "There is in the revolutions of taste and language," says Bishop Hurd (Dialogues Moral and Political, p. 157, ed. 1760), "a certain point which is more favourable to the purposes of poetry (and it may be added, of stately prose), than any other. It may be difficult to fix this point with exactness. But we shall hardly mistake in supposing it lies somewhere between the rude essays of uncorrected fancy on the one hand, and the refinements of reason and science on the other. And this I take to have been the condition of our language in the age of Elizabeth. It was pure, strong, and perspicuous, without affectation. At the same time the high figurative manner, which fits a language so peculiarly for the uses of the poet, had not yet been controuled by the prosaic genius of philosophy and logic." At the period to which the bishop alludes, the Italians were the objects of imitation, as the French have been since; and, together with the stately majestic step of their productions, the style of Sidney and his contemporaries has a good deal of their turgidity and conceit. I might select a number of beautiful descriptions from the Arcadia, as for example, the

much-admired passage in Book II., of Musidorus managing a steed. We have already seen the skill of the author in drawing characters; and the following is a striking portrait of an envious man. "A man of the most envious disposition that I think ever infected the air with his breath, whose eyes could not look right upon any happy man, nor ears bear the burden of any body's praise; contrary to the nature of all other plagues, plagued with others' well-being: making happiness the ground of his unhappiness, and good news an argument of his sorrow; In sum, a man whose favour no man could win, but by being miserable," (p. 130). This character has been imitated and expanded in the 19th number of the Spectator. The following description of Pamela sewing is a pretty fair specimen of the kind of conceits scattered through the work. "For the flowers she had wrought carried such life in them, that the cunningest painter might have learned of her needle, which, with so pretty a manner, made his careers to and fro through the cloth, as if the needle itself would have been loth to have gone fromward such a mistress, but that it hoped to return thitherward very quickly again, the cloth looking with many eyes upon her, and lovingly embracing the wounds she gave it the shears also were at hand to behead the silk that

was grown too short. And if at any time she put her mouth to bite it off, it seemed that where she had been long in making of a rose with her hands, she would in an instant make roses with her lips; as the lilies seemed to have their whiteness rather of the hand that made them, than of the matter whereof they were made, and that they grew there by the suns of her eyes, and were refreshed by the most comfortable air which an unawares sigh might bestow upon them."

It has already been mentioned, that what is meant as the comic part of this romance, consists in satire upon Dametas, chiefly on account of his love of agriculture, and the absurdities of his wife and daughter. But it is by no means happy; nor has the author been more successful in what is designed as pastoral in his romance. A band of shepherds is introduced at the close of each book, as waiting on Basilius, and singing alternately on amorous and rural subjects. There is not probably in any other work in our language a greater portion of execrable poetry, than may be found in the Arcadia, and this, perhaps, less owing to want of poetical talent in the author, than to his affectation and constant attempts to versify on an impracticable system. At the period in which he lived, it was thought possible to introduce into English