Other villages and farms, while just as well-kept and well-to-do, have, so to say, a something romantic about their prosperity, a bounteous, ruddy, golden-age look about them, as though Nature herself had been the farmer and they had ruddied and ripened out of her own unconscious abundancethe difference between a row of modern box beehives and the old thatched-cottage kind.

To censure an exaggeration of the charm of modesty on the threshold of the seicento, or to object a strained sense of chastity against the author of the golden-age chorus, may indeed seem strange; but, as with Fletcher at a later date, the very extravagance of the paradox may supply us with the key to its solution.