Turtles and twins, court’s brood, a heavenly pair—
Happy the heart that thinks of no removes!
Of no removes!
Note 1. From John Dowland’s Second Book of Songs or Airs, 1600. “Dowland … had the distinction,” says Mr. Erskine (Study of The Elizabethan Lyric, ed. 1905, pp. 229–30), “of presenting here one of the famous pedlar-songs of Elizabethan poetry…. The great antiquity of mercers’ songs in England has already been noticed. (Ibid. Chap, ii.) The character of the roving pedlar, especially if he were wittily impudent, seems to have appealed strongly to the Elizabethan imagination. In its normal presentation, Shakespeare’s Autolycus (see below Nos. 418 and 419) sums up the type. Dowland’s pedlar, however, is idealized into a second-hand philosopher; every line of his speech, in phrase and thought, is a burlesque echo of the moral verses in the miscellanies.” [back]
