'Charles Lamb, as I need not remind you,' says Swinburne in his dedicatory epistle to the collected edition of his poems, 'wrote for antiquity: nor need you be assured that when I write plays it is with a view to their being acted at the Globe, the Red Bull, or the Black Friars.' In another part of the same epistle, he says: 'My first if not my strongest ambition was to do something worth doing, and not utterly unworthy of a young countryman of Marlowe the teacher and Webster the pupil of Shakespeare, in the line of work which those three poets had left as a possibly unattainable example for ambitious Englishmen. And my first book, written while yet under academic or tutoral authority, bore evidence of that ambition in every line.' And indeed we need not turn four pages to come upon a mimicry of the style of Shakespeare so close as this: We are so more than poor, The dear'st of all our spoil would profit you Less than mere losing; so most more than weak It were but shame for one to smite us, who Could but weep louder. A Shakespearean trick is copied in such lines as: All other women's praise Makes part of my blame, and things of least account In them are all my praises. And there is a jester who talks in a metre that might have come straight out of Beaumont and Fletcher, as here: I am considering of that apple still; It hangs in the mouth yet sorely; I would fain know too Why nettles are not good to eat raw. Come, children, Come, my sweet scraps; come, painted pieces; come. Touches of the early Browning come into this Elizabethan work, come and go there, as in these lines: What are you made God's friend for but to have His hand over your head to keep it well And warm the rainy weather through, when snow Spoils half the world's work? And does one not hear Beddoes in the grim line, spoken of the earth: Naked as brown feet of unburied men? An influence still more closely contemporary seems to be felt in _Fair Rosamond_, the influence of that extraordinarily individual blank verse which William Morris had made his first and last experiment in, two years earlier, in _Sir Peter Harpdon's End_.