Here, too, are the love-songs of a race of Poets who had known the glories of Whitehall before its desecration. Here are the courtly praises of such beauties as the Lady Elizabeth Dormer, 1st Countess of Carnarvon, who, while she held her infant in her arms, in 1642, was no less fascinating than she had been in her virgin bloom. The airy trifling, dallying with conceits in verse, that spoke of a refinement and graceful idlesse more than passionate warmth, gave us these relics of such men as Thomas Carew, who died in 1638, before the Court dissolved into a Camp. Some of them recal the strains of dramatists, whose only actresses had been Ladies of high birth, condescending to adorn the Masques in palaces, winning applause from royal hands and voices. These, moreover, were “Songs and Sonnets” which the best musicians had laboured skilfully to clothe anew with melody: Poems already breathing their own music, as they do still, when lutes and virginals are broken, and the composer’s score has long been turned into gun-wadding. What sweetness and true pathos are found among them, readers can study once more. The opening poem, by Davenant, is especially beautiful, where a Lover comforts himself with a thought of dying in his Lady’s presence, and being mourned thereafter by her, so that she shall deck his grave with tears, and, loving it, must come and join him there:— “Yet we hereafter shall be found By Destiny’s right placing, Making, like Flowers, Love under ground, Whose roots are still embracing.”[4] Seeing, alongside of these tender pleadings from the worshipper of Beauty, some few pieces where the taint of foulness now awakens our disgust, we might feel wonder at the contrast in the same volume, and the taste of the original collector, were not such feeling of wonder long ago exhausted. Queen Elizabeth sate out the performance of _Love’s Labour’s Lost_ (if tradition is to be believed), and was not shocked at some free expressions in that otherwise delightful play;—words and inuendoes, let us own, which were a little unsuited to a Virgin Queen. Again, if another tradition be trustworthy, she herself commissioned the comedy of _Merry Wives of Windsor_ to be written and acted, in order that she might see Falstaffe in love: but after that Eastcheap Boar’s-Head Tavern scene, with rollicking Doll Tear-sheet, in the Second Part of _Henry IV._, surely her sedate Majesty might have been prepared to look for something very different from the proprieties of “Religious Courtship” or the refinements of Platonic affection in the Knight, who, having “more flesh than other men,” pleads this as an excuse for his also having more frailty.