Let nought therefore thee affright,
But make forward in thy flight;
For if I could match thy rhyme
To the very stars I'd climb,
There begin again, and fly
Till I reached Eternity_.

In the fifth "eglogue" Roget and Alexis compare notes about their
early happiness in phrases of an odd commixture. The pastoral
character of the poetry has to be carried out, and so we read of how
Roget on a great occasion played a match at football, "having scarce
twenty Satyrs on his side," against some of "the best tried Ruffians
in the land." Great Pan presided at that match by the banks of Thames,
and though the satyrs and their laureate leader were worsted, the
moral victory, as people call it, remained with the latter. All this
is an allegory; and indeed we walk in the very shadow of innuendo all
through _The Shepherd's Hunting_.

The moral of the whole thing is that eternal ditty of tuneful youth:
All for Verse and the World well lost. The enemy is around them on
all sides, jailers of the Marshalsea and envious critics, the evil
shepherds that preside over grates of steel and noisome beds of straw,
but Youth has its mocking answer to all these:

_Let them disdain and fret till they are weary!
We in ourselves have that shall make us merry;
Which he that wants and had the power to know it,
Would give his life that he might die a poet_.

It was no small thing to be suffering for Apollo's sake in 1614.