Note 132 — Chapter II · (continued 2)

From E. K. Chambers' English Pastorals, p. 113. The date is uncertain, but a tune of the name was extant in 1603. The earliest recorded text is a broadside, of about 1650, in the Roxburghe collection (III. 142). The conjecture of an 'original issue, circa 1600,' is on the whole plausible. In that case there was, somewhere, a poet capable of anticipating the particular cadences of Sirena and Agincourt, and that poet is more likely to have been Drayton than another. See Ebsworth's edition for the Ballad Society (Roxburghe Ballads, vi. p. 460).