the Author of AMINTAE Gaudia and WALSINGHAM's MELIBOEUS are the best for Pastoral: so amongst us the best in this kind are Sir PHILIP SIDNEY, Master CHALLONER, SPENSER, STEPHEN GOSSON, ABRAHAM FRAUNCE, and BARNFIELD.

Richard Barnfield's Affectionate Shepherd, imitated, as he frankly confesses, from Vergil's Alexis, appeared in 1594.

Spenser and Sidney, under the names of Colin and Astrophel, or more rarely Philisides, were firmly fixed in poetic tradition; Barnfield, by coupling them with these, made Watson and Drayton free of the craft in his complaint to Love in the Shepherd's Content:

(K. John, IV. i. 16.) One poem, bearing a certain resemblance to verses of Barnfield's already discussed, may be quoted here.

They are subscribed 'Ignoto' in England's Helicon, but appeared among the poems published with Barnfield's Lady Pecunia in 1598, a tail of thirty lines of very inferior quality being substituted for the singularly perfect and effective final couplet.