The general wealth of the time in lyric poetry can be better appreciated by taking its miscellaneous collections, whether of pure poetry or of verse written to accompany music, than by a list of the names of writers who may be held to deserve particular mention. Putting aside _Tottel’s Miscellany_ as belonging to an earlier time, though it was repeatedly reprinted under Elizabeth, and _The Mirror of Magistrates_, which stands apart, there were numerous collections of minor pieces made in the queen’s reign. _The Paradise of Dainty Devises_, 1576; _A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions_, 1578; _A Handful of Pleasant Delights_, 1584; _The Phœnix Nest_, 1593; _England’s Helicon_, 1600; _A Poetical Rhapsody_, 1602; _England’s Parnassus_, 1600; and _Belvedere, or the Garden of the Muses_, in the same year, are the names of some of them. To these are to be added the list of song-books collected or written by Byrd, Yonge, Campion, Dowland, Morley, Alison, Wilbye, and others.[65] Some of the poems in these collections have always been known, but they contain many which had fallen entirely into obscurity. There can have been very few readers to whom Mr Bullen’s collection, made from a class of books which in most ages are full of mere insipidities, was not a revelation. The point is that it represents not the exceptional work of the time, but the average production, which we may almost call commercial, or the poets’ corner, and that being this, it maintains such an extraordinarily high level of inspiration and melody. It is not a mere question of that workmanlike dexterity which a great poet, as Scott said half humorously, but not without truth, to Moore, can teach a receptive generation. Spenser himself could never have taught anybody to produce such a piece of genuine lyric poetry as the “Fain would I change that note,” which Mr Bullen quotes from Captain Hume’s _First Part of Airs_. It, and much else only less good, would not have been written without Spenser and Sidney; but it is one thing to be influenced by great models, and another merely to echo them. [SN: _The historical poems._]