Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/163

Rh stanzas and the strenuous, antithetic declamation of the younger. Fletcher is always ardent; his personifications are far more poetic and impressive than his brother's; the descriptive passages have some of the colour and music of his model's; and his lyrical rendering with variations of Tasso's song of the rose is as fine in its different way as Spenser's. But Fletcher's excessive use of antithesis, the bad taste and extravagance of many of the descriptions (for example, of Christ in the canto on the Temptation, where

"His cheeks as snowie apples sop't in wine,          Had their red roses quencht with lillies white,           And like to garden strawberries did shine           Wash't in a boul of milk")—

these and other features remind a student, more than anything in Donne or his school, of the faults of Italian "secentismo," of the Adone and the Strage degli Innocenti.

If the younger Spenserians showed no taste for romance, they were enthusiastic and unwearied cultivators of the pastoral. Whatever wider circles may have thought,—and Colonel Prideaux believes the pastoral was not generally popular in England, which is perhaps equally true of that other over-cultivated form, the sonnet,—the poets themselves were never weary of listening to each other while they sang of the joys of country life and the pains of love, or moralised their strain and descanted on virtue and pure religion. Their