Unlike the stylistically heteroclite First Set of Peterisms, the songs of the second set seem to belong together in their upbeat cheeriness, though they still do not make up a cycle, as do the songs of The Curlew or Lillygay. Taken together, they suggest Warlock in the making. To verse from Nicholas Udall's 1552 comedy Ralph Roister Doister, the rumbustious vein mined with greater flare in Twelve Oxen, Pretty Ring Time, Jillian of Berry, Maltworms, Away to Twiver, and the like, is essayed for the first time. Brian Collins, in Peter Warlock: The Composer (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), noted, "...Roister Doister is not a very successful song and, in comparison with the energy and abandon of Rutterkin [in the First Set of Peterisms], the relentless 6/8 is perfunctory. Warlock's musical vocabulary was, by this stage"—that is, 1922—"fairly well defined. What he needed to embark upon from this point forward was a process of refinement." Collins had in mind technical refinement, which he painstakingly chronicles, though the titles quoted above show, if not always a technical advance, far greater imaginative expansion and exuberance of the sort that has made Warlock popular. "The predetermined jolliness of "Spring" evokes a similar response," Collins wrote. "What is given represents nothing unheard before; there is no new format, but then the verse is similarly uninspiring and Warlock responded to his texts! One must look at songs such as this and see them as representing the consolidation of a technique rather than pieces remarkable for some other innovatory property. Alongside the best of Warlock's output they sound mundane and lack even the visceral vitality of Captain Stratton's Fancy." One may differ about the quality of Thomas Nashe's verse; both Bernard van Dieren and Constant Lambert found fetching music for it. Though impossible to date, van Dieren's setting of "Spring" (published in 1927, at Warlock's urging, by Oxford University Press), is the composer at his most characteristic—that is, gleefully diffident and wholly fantastic—it is quite possible that Warlock may have been inhibited by it in his own setting. Lusty Juventus, the third and last song, is a first setting of verses from Robert Wever's play of the same name, attributed to 1555. "Lusty Juventus, like Roister Doister before it," Collins wrote, "is too earnest for what is really an expression of trivial sentiments. In an arbour green, another setting of the same words, is more successful for it has greater energy and lighter figurations."

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