Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/124

116 and are, perhaps, expecting another Midsummer Night's Dream, to find nothing whatsoever subsequently recorded respecting that pilgrim's progress; and to be obliged to believe that we have merely an allusion to Spenser and his Faerie Queen. How we long, and long in vain, to have some details of the experience of the "lowly sort" amongst whom Gorbo piped:

It is really curious to remark that it was more than thirty years after this before Drayton treated his readers to anything more than most cursory glances at the elves with whom he ended by making them so well acquainted.

But return to the Eclogues. A folk-lore student pricks his ears when in the ninth, and most English of them, the poet begins to speak of the significance of flowers. The time is June.

One of Drayton's contemporaries, whom he did not suffer gladly, wrote: "Louers when they come into a Gardeine, some gather Nettles, some Roses, one Tyme, another Sage, and eueryone that for