"What Bird so sings, yet so does wail? O 'tis the ravished Nightingale. Jug, jug, jug, jug, tereu, she cries, And still her woes at Midnight rise. Brave prick song! who is't now we hear? None but the lark so shrill and clear; Now at heaven's gates she claps her wings, The Morn not waking till she sings. Hark, hark, with what a pretty throat Poor Robin-red-breast tunes his note. Hark how the jolly cuckoos sing 'Cuckoo' to welcome in the spring, 'Cuckoo' to welcome in the spring[126]." [126] _Campaspe_, Act V. Sc. I. 32-44. I have modernised the spelling. This delightful song comes from the first of Lyly's dramas, and few even of Shakespeare's lyrics can equal it. Indeed, coming as it does at the dawn of the Elizabethan era, it seems like the cuckoo herself "to welcome in the spring." SECTION III. _Lyly's dramatic Genius and Influence._ Having thus very briefly passed in review the various plays that Lyly bequeathed to posterity[127], we must say a few words in conclusion on their main characteristics, the advance they made upon their predecessors, and their influence on later drama. [127] I have said nothing of the _Mayde's Metamorphosis_, as most critics are agreed in assigning it to some unknown author. In Lyly, it is worth noticing, England has her first professional dramatist. Unlike those who had gone before him he was no amateur, he wrote for his living, and he wrote as one interested in the technical side of the theatre. They had played with drama, producing indeed interesting experiments, but accomplishing only what one would expect from men who merely took a lay interest in the theatre, and who possessed a certain knowledge, scholastic rather than technical, of the methods of the classical playwrights. He, having probably learnt at Oxford all there was to be known concerning the drama of the ancient world, came to London, and, definitely deciding to embark upon the dramatist's career, saw and studied such _moralities_ and plays as were to be seen, aided and directed by the experience and knowledge of his patron: finding in the _moralities_, allegory; in the plays of Udall and Stevenson, farce; in _Damon and Pithias_, a romantic play upon a classical theme; and in Gascoigne's _Supposes_, brilliant prose dialogue. That he was induced to make such a study, and that he was enabled to carry it out so thoroughly, was due partly, I think, to his peculiar financial position. As secretary of de Vere, and later as Vice-master of St Paul's School, he was independent of the actual necessity of bread-winning, which forced even Shakespeare to pander to the garlic-eating multitude he loathed, and wrung from him the cry, "Alas, 'tis true I have been here and there And made myself a motley to the view, Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear" ...