THE NIGHTINGALE. 135 



nouncing the song of the nightingale a sad one ; 

 yet the oklest of all, again and again, expressed 

 its song by similar epithets, and from Homer 

 downwards, many have told the same tale, or, as 

 our Coleridge would have it, " echoed the conceit." 

 Homer spoke of the tawny nightingale, that com- 

 plains in leafy shades ; and Hesiod and Virgil 

 have similar allusions. Horace calls it the sad, 

 the grief-stricken, the love-lorn bird ; and in later 

 years Petrarch represented it as lamenting, and 

 Tasso as deploring. The Provencal and French 

 poetry, as Hallam has remarked, " became filled 

 with monotonous common-places, among which 

 the tedious descriptions of spring, and the ever- 

 lasting nightingale, are eminently to be reckoned ;" 

 and from the poetry of the Troubadours might be 

 selected abundant passages, in which our bird was 

 singing the saddest of songs. Sir Philip Sydney 

 tells of the nightingale, which 



" Sings out her woes, a thome her song-book making," 



And the whole poem, commonly attributed to Sir 

 Walter llaleigh, but which more probably came 

 from the pen of Eichard Barnfield, describes the 

 poor bird as " all forlorn" and singing the ^' dole- 

 fullest ditty," till, as he says — 



