because of her husband’s death, and plunges her babe’s innocent hands into her own bloody breast for a witness. Sir Guyon and the Palmer, standing over the dead bodies, hold grave discourse upon the incident; then they bury the dead, and seek in vain to cleanse the babe’s hands in a neighboring fountain. The pure water will not be stained, and the child bears the name Ruddymane,—the Red-Handed,—and shall so bear the sign of a vengeance he is yet to execute. It is somewhat difficult to see into the full meaning of Spenser’s allegory, for the reason that the poet breaks through the meshes of his allegoric net and soars into a freer air; but there are certain strong lines running through the poem, and this of the ineradicable nature of sin is one of them. To Spenser, vexed with problems of life, that conception of childhood which knit it closely with the generations was a significant one, and in the bloody hand of the infant, which could not be suffered to stain the chaste fountain, he saw the dread transmission of an inherited guilt and wrong. The poet and the moralist struggle for ascendency, and in this conflict one may see reflected the passion for speculation in divinity which was already making deep marks in English literature. But the Elizabethan era had its share of light-heartedness. The songs of the dramatists and other lyrics exhibit very clearly the influence upon literature of the revival of ancient learning. As the art of Italy showed the old poetic grace risen again under new conditions, so the dominant art of England caught a light from the uncovered glory of Greece and Rome. It was the time of the great translations of Phaer, Golding, North, and Chapman; and as those translations are bold appropriations of antiquity, not timid attempts at satisfying the requisitions of scholarship, so the figures of the old mythology are used freely and ingenuously; they are naturalized in English verse far more positively than afterwards in the _elegantia_ of the Queen Anne and Georgian periods. Ben Jonson’s Venus’ Runaway is an exquisite illustration of this rich, decorative use of the old fable. It was partly through this sportive appropriation of the myth of Amor, so vital in all literature, that the lullabies of the time came to get their sweetness. The poet, in putting songs into the mother’s mouth, is not so much reflecting the Virgin and Child as he is possessed with the spirit of Greek beauty, and his delicate fancy plays about the image of a little Love. Thus may we read the Golden Slumbers of Dekker, in his Patient Grissel. By a pretty conceit George Gascoigne, in his Lullaby of a Lover, captures the sentiment of a mother and babe, to make it tell the story of his own love and content. There is a touching song by Robert Greene in his Menaphon, where Sephestia puts into her lullaby the story of her parting with the child’s father:—