And baffle breaking Day, Shew the adoring World thy Eyes Are more surprizing gay; The Gods of Love are smiling round, And lead the Bridegroom on, And Hymen has the Altar crown'd.

The shadowy Marriage-god "Hymen" was a torch and a cry as much as anything more personal.

With mirth and joy and great solemnity We'll finish up these Hymen's rites most pleasantly.

Great is thy name in the rubric, thou venerable Archflamen of Hymen!

The centre was occupied with a gorgeous Temple of Hymen, which seemed to lean for support on the well-known statue of the king, in front of which it was constructed; and which was, as it were, to be carried up to the skies by above three thousand rockets and fire-balls into which it was intended to dissolve.

torch of Hymen, temple of Hymen; hymeneal altar; honeymoon. bridesmaid, bridesman^, best man; bride, bridegroom.

L. Eyrier (E); 3Nov58; R224103. ALPERN, HYMEN.

And love's soft voice had wak'd the sacred blaze Of Hymen's altar; while, with him combin'd, His cherub train prepar'd the torch to raise:

A friend of Mr. Rowe's upon that occasion wrote the following beautiful Epigram, No more proud Gallia, bid the world revere Thy learned pair, Le Fevre and Dacier: Britain may boast, this happy day unites, Two nobler minds, in Hymen's sacred rites.

A disastrous rencontre with Hymen seems to destroy a woman's finer intuitions.

Ce navire là-haut conclut le grand hymen, Il mêle presque à

1605,' and Hymen's Triumph, which formed part of the Queen's 'magnificent intertainement of the Kings most excellent Majestie' on the occasion of the marriage in 1614 of Robert Ker, Earl of Roxburgh, and Mistress Jean Drummond, sister of the Earl of Perth[250].

Instead of being a patchwork of motives and situations borrowed from the Italian, and pieced together with more or less ingenuity, Hymen's Triumph is as a whole an original composition.

The play is preceded by a prologue in which Daniel departs from his models in employing the dialogue form, the speakers being Hymen, Avarice, Envy, and Jealousy.

Taken as a whole, and partly through being unencumbered with the satyric machinery of the Queen's Arcadia, Hymen's Triumph is a distinctly lighter and more pleasing composition.

' Hymen's Triumph contains many more passages of notable merit than its predecessor.

Such passages are more frequent in Hymen's Triumph.

Moreover, in reckoning his qualifications as a dramatist, we must not forget to credit him with the plot of Hymen's Triumph, which is on the whole original, and is happily conceived, firmly constructed, and executed with considerable ability.

Randolph's Amyntas, it is true, renounces the high ideality of its predecessors, of the Aminta and the Pastor fido, of Hymen's Triumph and the Faithful Shepherdess; but it makes up for it by human sanity of feeling and expression, by good humour and by wit.

A fairer comparison may be made between it and the Pastor fido in Italian or Hymen's Triumph in English, and here again, though certainly with regard to the former and probably with regard to the latter it stands second as poetry, as a play it is decidedly better suited than either for representation on the stageat least on a stage with the traditions and conventions which prevailed in this country in the author's day.

So far the most interesting compositions we have had to considerDaniel's Hymen's Triumph, Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, Randolph's Amyntashave been attempts either to transplant the Italian pastoral as it stood, or else so to modify and adapt as to fit it to the very different conditions of the English stage.

Tasso's Silvia and Guarini's Silvio alike are silvan not in name only, but are truly figures of the woods, hunters of the wolf and boar; while the same distinction survives in a modified form in Daniel's Hymen's Triumph, in which the ruder characters, Montanus and the rest, are described as foresters.

In Aeglamour's despair at the supposed loss of his love we have a situation already familiar from at least two English pastorals, Hymen's Triumph and Rutter's Shepherds' Holiday; while in the detention of Earine in the power of the witch we have the material for an exciting and touching development.

And if fruition did the taste impair Of kisses, why should yonder happy pair, Whose joys just Hymen warrants all the night, Consume the day, too, in this less delight? CON.

The wooing has a humorous aspect,this steering of unruly Hymen!