INBORN ROYALTY.

O THOU goddess,

Thou divine Nature, how thyself thou blazon'st

In these two princely boys! They are as gentle

As zephyrs, blowing below the violet,

Not wagging his sweet head: and yet as rough,

Their royal blood enchafed, as the rud'st wind,

That by the top doth take the mountain pine,

And make him stoop to the vale. 'Tis wonderful

That an invisible instinct should frame them

To royalty unlearned; honor untaught;

Civility not seen from other; valor, That wildly grows in them, but yields a crop

As if it had been sowed!

SHAKSPEARE: Cymbeline.

"Wel can the wise poet of Flor

ence,

That highté Dant, speken of this sentence:

Lo, in such maner rime is Dante's tale.

Ful selde upriseth by his branches

smale

Prowesse of man, for God of his goodnesse

Will that we claime of him our gentillesse:

For of our elders may we nothing claime

But temporal thing, that man may hurt and maime.

"Eke every wight wot this as wel as I,

If gentillesse were planted naturelly

Unto a certain linage down the line, Prive and apart, then wol they never fine

To don of gentillesse the faire office,

They mighten do no vilanie or vice.

66 Take fire and beare it into the derkest hous

Betwixt this and the mount of Caucasus,

And let men shut the dorés, and go

thenne,

Yet wol the fire as faire lie and

brenne

As twenty thousand men might it behold;

His office naturel ay wol it hold,
Up peril of my lif, til that it die.
"Here may ye see wel, how that
genterie

Is not annexed to possession,
Sith folk ne don their operation
Alway, as doth the fire, lo, in his
kind,

For God it wot, men may full often find

A lordé's son do shame and vilanie. And he that wol have prize of his genterie,

For he was boren of a gentil house, And had his elders noble and virtu

Either by chance, against the course of kind,

Or through unaptnesse in the substance found,

Which it assumèd of some stubborne ground,

That will not yield unto her form's direction,

But is perform'd with some foul im

perfection.

ONE day, nigh weary of the irksome way,

From her unhasty beast she did alight;

And on the grass her dainty limbs did lay,

In secret shadow far from all men's sight;

From her fair head her fillet she undight,

And laid her stole aside; her angel's face

As the great eye of heaven shined bright,

And made a sunshine in the shady place;

Did never mortal eye behold such heavenly grace.

It fortunèd, out of the thickest wood A ramping lion rushèd suddenly, Hunting full greedy after savage blood.

Soon as the royal virgin he did spy, With gaping mouth at her ran greedily,