“Where silver sands and pebbles sing Eternal ditties with the Spring.” Or this?: “Ten thousand glow−worms shall attend. And all their sparkling lights shall spend.” For parallels with the first of these couplets take the following: “Silver stream.” Much Ado, iii, 1. “Sing no more ditties.” Ibid, ii, 1. “Silver currents.” K. John, ii, 1. “The murmuring surge That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes.” Ibid, iv, 6. For a single parallel with the second couplet take this: “Twenty glow−worms shall our lanterns be.” M. W. Windsor, v, 5. Similar parallels may be found with other lines of the song. Now are we to believe that Marlowe wrote the first song, and Raleigh the other two signed “Ignoto”? Is it not far more rational and consistent to believe that all three were written by the same pen? Again, Barnfield has two pieces in the “Helicon,” and the editor ascribes to him another signed “Ignoto”—No. xxi, “As it fell upon a day”—while Allibone, in his Dictionary of Authors, makes him the [41] author not only of xxi, but of xx—“Come live with me and be my love”—and says that Raleigh’s authorship of “The Nymph’s Reply” is questioned. Thus Marlowe is robbed of the only piece ascribed to him in the “Helicon,” and Raleigh is left out of it entirely, unless he wrote some other poem signed “Ignoto.” And by the way, poor neglected Shakspere has but a single specimen there—“On a day, alack a day”— taken from “Love’s Labor Lost.” But the confusion about “Ignoto” is still more confounded. On page 112 of the “Helicon” is a song entitled “The Shepherd’s Dump,” subscribed “S. E. D.,” supposed to mean Sir Edward Dyer, and on page 224 the same identical song reappears entitled “Thirsis, the Shepherd, to his pipe,” and signed “Ignoto.” The editor of 1812 supposes it was reprinted to make a few corrections in the last stanza; but as the verbal variations in that stanza make it positively worse, it is more likely that the compiler did not notice the repetition, but inadvertently put both in as he found them. But even this is not all. In Ellis’s “Specimens of the early English Poets,” 5th edition, 1845, among the pieces credited to Fulke Greville (Lord Brooke) is a “Song,” with these words in brackets: “To be found in ‘England’s Helicon,’ where it is signed Ignoto.” On turning to the edition of 1614 we find that song entitled “Another, of his Cynthia.” It is preceded by two, evidently by the same pen, entitled, “To his Flocks,” and “To his Love” and is followed by still “Another to his Cynthia.” But all these are anonymous [42] in the edition of 1614, and the editor appends to the last one the following remark: “These three [or four?] ditties were taken out of Maister John Dowland’s Book of Tableture for the Lute. The authors’ names not there set down, and therefore left to their owners.”