“My father oft would speak Your worth and virtue: And as I did grow More and more apprehensive, I did thirst To see the man so praised; but yet all this Was but a maiden longing, to be lost As soon as found; till, sitting in my window Printing my thoughts in lawn, I saw a god I thought (but it was you) enter our gates. My blood flew out, and back again as fast As I had puffed it forth and sucked it in Like breath. Then was I called away in haste To entertain you. Never was a man Heaved from a sheep-cote to a sceptre, raised So high in thoughts as I: I did hear you talk Far above singing! After you were gone, I grew acquainted with my heart, and searched What stirred it so. Alas, I found it Love!” Nothing better in its way can be found in all their plays. One mentioning word, however, should be given to those delightful lyrical aptitudes, by virtue of which the blithe and easy metric felicities of Elizabethan days were overlaid in tendrils of song upon the Carolan times. I wish, too, that I had space for excerpts from that jolly pastoral of _The Faithful Shepherdess_--bewildering in its easy gaieties, and its cumulated classicisms--and which lends somewhat of its deft caroling, and of its arch conceits to the later music of Milton’s “Comus.” Another foretaste of Milton comes to us in these words of Fletcher:-- “Hence, all you vain delights, As short as are the nights Wherein you spend your folly! There’s nought in this life, sweet, If man were wise to see’t, But only melancholy, O sweetest melancholy! Welcome folded arms and fixèd eyes, A sigh that piercing mortifies, A look that’s fastened to the ground, A tongue chain’d up without a sound! Fountain heads and pathless groves, Places which pale passion loves! Moonlight walks, when all the fowls Are warmly hous’d save bats and owls! A midnight bell, a parting groan, These are the sounds we feed upon; Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley; Nothing’s so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.”[31] _King James and Family._ Meanwhile, how are London and England getting on with their ram-shackle dotard of a King? Not well; not proudly. Englishmen were not as boastful of being Englishmen as in the days when the virgin Elizabeth queened it, and shattered the Spanish Armada, and made her will and England’s power respected everywhere. James, indeed, had a son, Prince Henry, who promised far better things for England, and for the Stuart name, than his pedant of a father.