:'v>(li' m ^ UTTT a Bl re w w^i P y ^ Michael Drayton A Critical Study With a Bibliography By Oliver Elton, M.A ProfessoJ- of English Literature in the University of Liverpool London Archibald Constable and Company Limited . 1905 This book is an enlarged and fully revised edition, with a fresh Bibliography, of the monograph published in 1895 by the Spenser Society together with their Limited Reprint of part of Drayton's works. 'f Frontisi'Ieck to I III.: Tokms, 1619. TO M. E. SADLER IN RECOLLECTION OF DRAYTON'S COUNTRYSIDE 292659 PREFACE This monograph was produced ten years ago for the Spenser Society of Manchester. After issuing many useful reprints of Drayton's and other EHzabethan poetry, the Society dissolved : but An Introduction to Michael Drayton appeared as its last issue, and was soon out of print. Owing to this obscure method of publication, the new biographical and other matter escaped the notice of some of the historians of literature, including Mr. Courthope and the writer in Chambers's new Cyclopcedia of English Literature. I regret that Mr. Courthope was not saved some of the labour of his independent inquiries, and hope that my reasons may relieve him of some serious doubts he has expressed in regard to 2fr2(^r^Q viii MICHAEL DRAYTON Drayton's behaviour. If Drayton acted as Mr. Courthope thinks, he was the less a gentleman : but if the charge is not true, no other is left against his personal char- acter. I also find more poetry in Drayton than Mr. Courthope can concede ; and there are signs that the old poet is now coming to his rights. Mr. A. R. Waller has now in hand, fortunately, a variorum text of his poems ; and a selection and criticism are promised by Mr. A. Symons, whose encouragement has quickened my wish to rescue this Introduction. I have largely rewritten it, have added more quo- tation and remark than the limited space of the Spenser Society permitted, and have noticed the stray fresh lights that have been cast on Drayton during the last ten years. Not much has been done, but Mr. Beeching s selection, whilst all too short, must have overcome the shyness of many readers to encounter a dim, voluminous poet who, they had vaguely felt, was well worth avoid- ing. To save mere duplication of labour, I PREFACE ix have dropped some of the tabular matter which the variorum edition of the text will supersede. Drayton's life, like that of most Eliza- bethan writers, has sown the pages of scholars with controversies, often tiny enough. I have touched on these chiefly in footnotes, the less to interrupt the text. Nearly everything as yet known about this poet ought to be found in this brief volume ; * there is some charm in the experiment of collecting the whole wreckage, which is hardly possible with more modern writers. I have been obliged to many helpers in local and genealogical researches: among them to my friend Mr. E. K. Chambers, of the Educa- tion Office, especially for information on the Goodere families and Rainsford ; to Mr. J. Challenor Smith, of the Probate Registry, Somerset House ; and to Mrs. and Miss Annesley, of Clifford Chambers. If the professors of bibliography had not been proved as generous of trouble and advice as their craft is severe, I should X MICHAEL DRAYTON hardly, as a layman in that craft and work- ing far from the large libraries, have ven- tured in their province. But the reader, wandering through the maze of Drayton's editions and revisions, often feels the need of a bibliography, and none of any completeness yet exists. My friends Mr. John Sampson, University Librarian in Liverpool, and Mr. Charles Sayle at Cambridge, have spared no pains in suggestion and emenda- tion ; neither has Mr. Jenkinson, the Cam- bridge University Librarian. None of these experts must be held to answer for any errors, and the entries of the modern re- prints are probably incomplete. The titles and descriptions of all editions in the British Museum have been carefully checked and often transcribed by Miss P. Osier, and those of works peculiar to the Bodleian by Mr. F. C. Wellstood. Thanks are also offered for help of various kinds to the authorities of the libraries of Trinity College, Dublin, of the University and the Advocates' Libraries in Edinburgh, of the By lands PREFACE xi Library in Manchester ; to the owner of a private library containing some unique early copies ; to Mr. G. Gregory Smith, to Mr. A. E. Waller, and to Mr. Gordon Duff. I hope the bibliography may be right as far as it goes, and save some work to any professional hand that may perfect it hereafter. I am also indebted to the authorities of the Dul- wich Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and the British Museum, for leave to re- produce pictures. Drayton's signature is also from the Henslowe MS. at Dulwich. The modern works that do most to shorten the way to the original authorities are Collier's rare Roxburghe edition of some of Drayton's poems : the article in the Diet. Nat. Biog. by Mr. A. H. Bullen, and his Selections, now long out of print ; and the rash yet useful and instructive pages of Mr. Fleay in his Biographical History of the English Drama. The first renewal of in- terest in Drayton came in 1748, after a century of silence. The second was in the time of Charles Lamb, and the labours of the xii MICHAEL DRAYTON three scholars I have named are a worthy late aftermath of that enthusiasm. There seems to be a third revival now : there are hopes that the true rank of Drayton may be clearly discerned and admitted, and his whole works made accessible. Sunt aliquid manes ; and the living fame, that he pro- mised to his own verses, should not alto- gether fail him. O. E. Liverpool, May 1905. CONTENTS PREFACE CHAP. I. EARLIER YEARS II. AN ELIZABETHAN POET . III. SATIRES, ODES, AND POLY-OLBION IV. THE RENEWAL OF DRAYTON : WORKS . . V. CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY APPENDICES LATER INDEX 1 26 94 120 148 157 206 211 xiii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FRONTISPIECE TO THE POEMS, 1619 . . Frontispiece PAGE MICHAEL DRAYTON, AGED 36 .... 80 {From the National Portrait Oallery) DRAYTON'S SIGNATURE IN FACSIMILE . . 86 MICHAEL DRAYTON, AGED 50 . . . .107 {Hole's engraved Portrait in the Poems o/"1619) TITLE-PAGE OF THE POEMS, 1637 . . .133 MICHAEL DRAYTON, AGED 65 . . . .144 {From the Dtclwich Gallery) MICHAEL DRAYTON CHAPTEE I EARLIER YEARS My native country then, which so brave spirits hast bred, If there be virtue yet remaining in thy earth, Or any good of thine thou breath'd'st into my birth, Accept it as thine own, whilst now I sing of thee. Of all thy later brood th' unworthiest though I be. Poly-Olbion, Song 13. Michael Drayton, or Draiton, was born at Hartshill/ near Atherstone, Warwickshire, in 1563. The time and place are first re- corded on the frontispiece to poems,^ which he reprinted in 1619 with his own correc- tions. If we can trust to the legend that surrounds the portrait on the title-page, in 1613 he was in his fiftieth year.^ There 1 Not at Atherstone, as stated by Fuller, Worthies, iii. 285 (ed. 1840), and by Aubrey. 2 Bibliography, § xv. 5. 3 Effigies Michaelis Drayton, armigeri, looetm clariss. cetat. sure L, A. Chr. GIODCXIII. The inscription runs : — A 2 MICHAEL DRAYTON is no other proof of his age. The register of the Hartshill births is still at the parent village of Mancetter, where they were always entered at that date. It does not begin till 1576, but offers circum- stantial evidence for the descent of the poet. Of his kindred nothing is certainly estab- lished but that he had a brother, Edmund,^ who after his death administered his estate. There is but one Edmund Drayton in the Mancetter list : he was the son of William Drayton. The name of Elizabeth, daughter of William, and born in 1576, is the first entry in all the register. These were not improbably the brother, father, and sister of Michael Drayton. The objection is that Michael is much older than Elizabeth. His father would have died at a very ripe age. The testament of William, who died in 1622, has not been found. ^ But a Lux Hareshulla tihi Warwici villa, tenehris Ante tuas cunas ohsita prima fuit. Arma, viros, veneres, patriam, modulamine, dixti ; Te patriae resonant arma, viri, veneres. 1 See letters of administration quoted post. 2 Either in the Somerset House, Lichfield, or Worcester indexes. EARLIER YEARS 3 table ^ extracting a part of his pedigree will show that he had five brothers living at Atherstone, Hartshill, and Mancetter, late in the sixteenth century. The Man- cetter entries are much occupied with the names of their offspring. Their father, Christopher, was a butcher, and their mother's name was Margerie. Aubrey'^ was derided for saying that the poet was a butcher's son ; he was, perhaps, one genera- tion out. If the two Edmunds are the same, we have an inkling of Drayton's birth and quality. His family would be of the well-to-do trading class, who overran from ^ Conjectural family tree of Michael Drayton : Christopher Drayton, of= Margerie. (Will, 1559.) Atherstone, butcher. I (Will proved 155i3.) | \ II I I I I John, Christopher, Thomas. William, Edward. Hugh, I t 1624. I t ltJ:^2. I t 1629. Margt. Bridget, Sarah, Annas, | Edw. Hugh, b. 157i3. b. 157S. b. 1595. b. 1597. I b. 1570. b. 1578. [? Michael, Eliz. Edw. Edmund, = Dorothy, Susannali, ? Ralph, 15(53-1031.] 1570- b. 1580. 1579-1044.1 t 1025. t 1580. t 1643. leis. Dorothy, t 1625. This table is made from information, for which I am indebted to Mr, J. Challenor Smith, of Somerset House, and the Rev. G. F. Mathews, Vicar of Mancetter. 2 Lives, ii. 335 (ed 1813). 4 MICHAEL DRAYTON Atherstone with their crowd of children and settled at Hartshill. They may have gone back to some stray bough of the noble house of Drayton, said to be extinct in the fifteenth century/ It is better to believe with Burton^ that his neighbours family originally brought their name from Fenny Drayton in Leicestershire, one of the many villages that show the compound form. They had relatives at Atherstone who verged on gentility and left a pedigree.^ 1 Halstead's Succinct Genealogies, p. 73. The Harleian Society's genealogies also mark the extinction of the male line. 2 Burton, Description of Leicestershire, ed. 1777, p. 85. ' This place [Fenny Drayton] gave the name to the pro- genitors of that ingenious Poet, Michael Drayton, Esq., my near countryman and old acquaintance ; who, though those Transalpines account us Transmontani, rude and barbar- ous . . . yet may compare either with their old Dante, Petrarch, or Boccace, or their Neoterick Marinella. . . . But why should I go about to commend him whose own works and worthiness have sufficiently proved to the world V 3 The College of Heralds tells us nothing of Michael, not even recording any grant of the arms (see p. 95) which he assumed at some unknown date. In the Visitation of Warwickshire, 1683, preserved there in MS., a pedigree is given oi another WiWiiim Drayton, of Atherstone (died 1G42), who had among his descendants two Harrington Draytons, father and son. Michael was a client of the house of Har(r)- ington (see p. 14). Now this William Drayton of Atherstone married a Mary or Alice Grey. Hunter MS., Chorus Vatum, vol. i., s.v. 'Grey,' names a rare book Panthea, an elegy on I EARLIER YEA'RS 5 By some chance, or through the brightness of his parts, Michael Drayton, while yet a little boy, was picked out and made a man of by a house of gentlefolk in the same countryside. To his rearing by the Gooderes he refers in The Owl (1604), if it is himself he calls ' nobly bred and well allied ' ; and not, as some have argued, to any high descent. Drayton's country (as a fantast might say) befits his utterance — rather pedestrian, seldom of the rarest, but often coming near it — and lies a httle off the most enchanted parts of Warwickshire, away from the dells and waters of Shakespeare ; it stands at a certain height, but near the plain. The quarry village of Hartshill, on the north- eastern edge of the shire, climbs the last and steepest ripple of the quietly rolling land, before it drops into the Leicestershire levels. Behind, up to the crest of the Elizabeth Grey, who is in it said 'by her sister Mrs. Mary Drayton to be allied to the prince of English poets, Michael Drayton, Esq.' This only shows, what the name would show by itself, that William of Atherstone and William of Hartshill were kin, but it brings us no nearer to Michael, To name all this may save others from straying up the same blind alleys. 6 MICHAEL DRAYTON ridge, hangs a profound wood, damasked in July with splashes of foxglove-bloom ; and on the top is Oldbury, part of the old Manduessedum of the Romans, and en- trenched by them with the circle of ditch that now encompasses a Georgian house. Downwards on the east is a wide flat, with Charnwood in the distance; and south- easterly is the road to Nuneaton and Coventry, whose patroness Godiva was to Drayton a ' type' of Anne Goodere, born in that city. In Hartshill itself, which is high enough to be saved from any pollution by the pillared smoke of factories, is still pointed out, by old inhabitants, ' Drayton's cottage.' It rests amidst a plot of roses and lilies, clean and trimly kept. The tale connecting it with the poet can be traced back some fifty years. In the middle of the last century it was used as a tiny meeting- house, and in a map of 1748 it is marked as a chapel. Polesworth, then usually spelt Powls- worth, the only other spot known to have witnessed Drayton's youth, lies some miles off in the valley beyond Atherstone. It now EARLIER YEARS 7 consists chiefly of a street of ruddy-roofed black-and-white cottagfes, with the church and adjoining vicarage. Under the bridge crawls Drayton's river, the Ancor, as if in its sleep, like one of his own sluggish alex- andrines. It is navigable by boats upwards and downwards for some distance, and winds among thick reeds, meadow-sweet, and willows, into the Tame : His Tarn worth at the last, he in his way doth win : There playing him awhile, till Ancor should come in, Which, trifling 'twixt her banks, observing state, so slow. As though into her arms she scorn'd herself to throw. The vicarage of Poles worth, formerly owned by the Chetwynd family, stands on the ground of the old nunnery, which on being dissolved in 1545 was sold to the family of the Gooderes. The auditorium, or as some say the refectory, of the nuns, was turned into the great hall, and is now the large room of the vicarage, spaciously lit and panelled, with the ancient tracery on the fireplace fined away but still visible. It must have been by this hearthstone that Drayton sat and listened to the harper. Long after, he 8 MICHAEL DRAYTON says of his own odes, addressing the younger Sir Henry Goodere : They may become John Hcwes his lyre, Which oft at Polesworth by the fire Hath made us gravely merry. ^ Who knows but that this Mr. Hewes, or Hughes, hummed to his own accompaniment those rough dactyls of the old folk- ballad Agincourt, Agincourt, which gallop through Drayton's own monumental war-chant ? He may, from his name, have been one of *my friends, the Camber-Britons, with their harp/ to whom it is addressed. Polesworth Hall must have been Dray- ton's headquarters during boyhood and early youth. There is a charming passage in the Epistle to Reynolds (1627) relating his boyish bent : For from my cradle you must know that I Was still inclin'd to noble poesy. And when that once Pueriles I had read And newly had my Cato construed, In my small self I greatly marvell'd then Amongst all other, what strange kind of men These poets were ; and, pleased with the name, To my mild tutor merrily I came Dedication in ed. 1619 of collected poems. EARLIER YEARS 9 (For I was then a proper goodly page, Much like a pigmy, scarce ten years of age) Clasping my slender arms about his thigh : ' 0, my dear master ! cannot you,' quoth I, * Make me a poet ? Do it if you can, And you shall see I '11 quickly be a man.' Who me thus answered, smiling, 'Boy,' quoth he, ' If you '11 not play the wag, but I may see You ply your learning, I will shortly read Some poets to you.' Besides Virgil's Eclogues, they read ' honest Mantuan/ the Carmelite Baptista of Man- tua, whose railing Latin ' pastorals ' were still in fashion, in part perhaps as a text-book against hireling shepherds.^ We hear no- thing more of Drayton's childhood or book- learning. The usual outfit in Horace, Ovid, and Seneca^ may be imagined. It is little proof of his knowing Greek that in the pre- face to the Odes he talks of Anacreon and Pindar with a certain familiarity. But, as his first book will show, he studied the songs of the Old Testament. We cannot put a date to any of these studies, nor to 1 O moral Mantuan ! live thy verses long ! Honour attend thee and thy reverend song. The Owl, 1604. 2 Are you the man that studied Seneca, Pliny's most learned letters ? Epistle to the Lady L. S., 1627. 10 MICHAEL DRAYTON the limits of his dependence on Polesworth Hall ; but he tells us himself what he owed to its masters. The head of the household, when Drayton was a child, was Sir Henry Goodere the elder/ His elder daughter, Frances, married her first cousin. Sir Henry Goodere the younger, Donne's intimate correspondent ; the younger daughter was Anne. Of all Sir Francis Goodere of Polesworth. I Ann G. Thomas G. Sir Henry G. = Frances Lowther. William G. the elder, I I d. 1595. I I I Sir Henry AnL„ j^ ^ the younger, (m. 1595). I (1577-1G22). the younger. I I Frances = Sir Henry Anne = Sir Henry Rainsford Sir Henry I I I William. Henry. Francis. From Visitatio7i of Warwickshire, 1619, Harleian Soc. Puhl. V. 67. (which however wrongly makes Anne the elder sister), corrected by Dugdale's Warivickshire, ed. 1765 (copy of 1656 ed.), p. 159, and by Dray ton's own statement inEclogue 8 (1606) : see p. 20 2^ost The elder Sir Henry's will was proved in 1595 : copy in Somerset House, Prerogative Court of Canter- bury, ' Book Scott, fol. 29.' To Anne was bequeathed ^1500, and she was an executor. Frances received the rents accruing from Polesworth, and lived on there. Dugdale explains that the testator, failing of male issue, and ' desiring that his lands might continue unto his posterity and name, married Fraunces, his elder daughter, unto his own brother's son.' See 2)ost, p. 128, on the relations of Drayton and Eainsford, and Hunter MS., Chorus Vahim, vol. iii., s.v. 'Eainsford.' — These dates and residences will throw light on Drayton's biography. EARLIER YEARS 11 these we hear afterwards through Drayton. In 1595 the elder Sir Henry died, and Drayton was a witness to his will, of which only a copy is extant. In 1597, dedicating one of the Heroical Epistles (Isabel to Eichard) to the Earl of Bedford, the poet paid his thanks to the memory of his patron 'that learn'd and accomplished gentleman. Sir Henry Goodere, not long since deceased, whose I was whilst he w^as, whose patience pleased to bear with the imperfections of my heedless and unstayed youth. That excellent and matchless gentleman w^as the first cherisher of my muse, which had been by his death left a poor orphan to the world, had he not before bequeathed it to that lady' (the Countess of Bedford). In the same volume is a dedication (of the Epistle of Lady Jane Grey) to Lady Frances Goodere ; • the love and duty I bare unto your father whilst he lived, now after his decease is to you hereditary.' He adds that he has wit- nessed the education of this lady, ' ever from your cradle.' Lastly, the Epistle of Mary to Suffolk is dedicated to Sir Henry the younger : and another tribute is paid ' to 12 MICHAEL DRAYTON the happy and generous family of the Gooderes, to which I confess myself behold- ing to for the best part of my education.' It may be seen from this that Drayton was taken quite young by the Gooderes to be civilised. He never forgot them ; and to one of them he came to bear something more than gratitude. The inmate of Poles- worth Hall whom he never names in any of his dedications is Anne Goodere, the younger daughter, who married Sir Henry Ptainsford in the year of her father's death, or the next year. The proof that she is the ' Idea,' whom he celebrated, will appear later. Drayton, if his word is to be taken, did not ' lose his wit ' on her account till 1591 or 1593, perhaps because they had been brought up together.^ All these early years of his life are obscure. It is unknown how long he was at Poles- worth, or whether he went to a university. A couplet printed by Sir Aston Cokain ^ ' 'Tis nine years now since first I lost my wit.' This line occurs in the sonnet ' To Lunacie,' first printed in 1602 ed. of the Heroical Epistles (Bibl. § ix. 5) : unless it was in the 1 600 ed,, which I have failed to see. The sonnet is numbered ninth in the 1605 ed. EARLIER YEARS 13 twenty years after Drayton's death cannot, despite the versifier's pious regard, and his connection with Pooley Hall at Poles- worth, outweigh the silence of all other records ; ^ and what knowledge of the classics is shown by the poet of Endimion and Phoebe he might well have got for him- self. It is equally uncertain when he went to London ; but he was there by Feb. 1591.^ Something may be gleaned about his means of support near the time of his first arrival. His career, like that of so many poets, was to be a series of honourable dependences. The Gooderes, the Haring- tons, the Astons, the Rainsfords, and the ^ Small Poems of Divers Sorts, 1658, p. 11 : Oxford, our other academy . . . Here smooth-tongu'd Drayton was inspired by Mnemosyne's manifold progeny. Cokain, ib., p. 66, laments Drayton's death. Mr Fleay, Biog. Chron., i. 145, states, without furnishing any evidence, that Drayton was ' sent to a university, most likely to Cambridge, at Sir Henry Goodere's expense.' 2 Dedication of The Harmony of the Church, 1591, to Lady Jane Devereux, sister-in law of the Earl of Essex. On this letter Mr. Collier built a figment that Michael might have been a page in the Earl's service. It does not serve or hinder his hypothesis to find that a poem in the Camden Miscellany shows Essex to have been popularly called ' Kobin,' and that in the third eclogue of 1594 Robin is said to have ' gene to his roost.' 14 MICHAEL DRAYTON Cliffords, fostered him in turn ; and now, before passing to his writings, may be told what is known of his alliance with the houses of Harlngton and Russell. Sir Henry Goodere must have seen that Drayton would not dream always by the Ancor, but was sure to drift to London, and that once there he must have a patron. But to a patron's eye his poverty, his high temper, and a genius as yet latent, would be feeble testimonials. Goodere might not command in London the needful position ; but he left his young friend to the care of a family which gave him subsistence, courage, and repute, during the galliDg years when he was forced to climb. In those days the protector could throw out a rope and let down provisions, while the poet cut his foot- hold up the rock. Some perplexities have gathered about Drayton's subsequent dealings with the house of Russell ; his loyalty, and even his decency, have been put in question ; but a little bibliography will, I think, clear his character. The detail may appear less tedious, if we remember that it cancels EARLIER YEARS 15 the one aspersion ever cast upon Drayton. In 1593 he pubHshed the first version of his pastorals, Idea, the Shepherd's Gar- land ; where in the fifth eclogue, without disclosing who is meant, he offers con- ceited compliments to 'Idea.' Next year Matilda was dedicated to Lucy Haring- ton ; and he also published his first sonnets, called Amours; or, Idea's Mirror, with no dedication at all. Idea is an abstract title, possibly conveyed from an obscure poet, De Pontoux. There is no sign who is intended. Neither Anne Goodere nor Lucy Harington is named in the book. The poems range from icy fantasy to delicate devotion. In 1595 Drayton produced Endimion and Phoebe. Lucy Harington had married the Earl of Bedford in Decem- ber 1594, and to her is addressed a prefatory sonnet : To THE Excellent and Most Accomplished Lady, Lucy, Countess of Bedford Great Lady, essence of my chiefest good, Of the most pure and finest temper'd spirit, Adorn'd with gifts, ennobled by thy blood. Which by descent true virtue dost inherit ; 16 MICHAEL DRAYTON That virtue which no fortune can deprive, Which thou by birth tak'st from thy gracious mother, Whose royal minds with equal motion strive Which most in honour shall excel the other : Unto thy fame my Muse herself shall task, Which rain'st upon me thy sweet golden showers. And, but thy self, no subject will I ask, Upon whose praise my soul shall spend her powers. Sweet Lady, then, grace this poor Muse of mine. Whose faith, whose zeal, whose life, whose all is thine. Your Honour's humbly devoted Michael Drayton. An unknown admirer, ' E. P.', next accosts Drayton in a sonnet by his shepherd-name of Rowland, and tells him that even when he had merely tuned his pastoral pipe unto the river Ancor, the fame of the chaste Idea had thus been made immortal. At the end of Endimion and Phoebe, after making excuse to Spenser, Daniel, and Lodge, Drayton continues : And if, ^weet maid, thou deign'st to read this story, Wherein thine eyes may view thy virtues' glory, Thou purest spark of Vesta's kindled fire, Sweet nymph of Ancor, crown of my desire. . . . EARLIER YEARS 17 Where thou dost live, there let the graces be, Which want their grace, if only wanting thee. Not even thus is Idea discovered. It would have been natural to praise the same person at the end of the poem, as in its inscription. But these are not the terms in which Drayton could have addressed the lately married noble lady, whom he had thanked by name as the Countess of Bedford, and to whom doubtless this poem was his wedding-gift. It is true that Combe Abbey, on the Ancor, was one of Sir John Harington's abodes. But Poles- worth, the home of Anne Goodere, is also on Ancor. The sonnet, ' Great Lady/ was steadily reprinted. It appears in the second edition of the sonnets, called Idea, 1599, and in the changed editions of 1602 (reprinted 1603) and 1605. On the last four occasions the sonnets accompanied England's Heroical Epistles. He reprinted the sonnet in 1608, 1610, 1613, and 1631. Between 1596 and 1599 three other poems of Drayton were in- scribed to Lady Bedford. Before Mortimeri- ados (1596) comes a long series of stanzas in B 18 MICHAEL DRAYTON her honour, and next year the Legend of Robert has a compliment to her in prose. In 1597 the first edition of the Heroical Epistles, Drayton s most popular book, is addressed to her as a whole, while separate epistles are prefaced by words to her mother, Lady Anne Harington, and to her husband, the Earl of Bedford. Thus Drayton had recited his gratitude to his patroness during almost every year from 1594 to 1605, except in 1601, when he published nothing. Mean- while there is no fresh allusion to Idea, no fresh clue to her identity. The Epistles contain dedications to several of the Gooderes, but not to Anne. The sonnets, even if we take a fanatical view of their literary and artificial nature, would not be addressed to Lady Bedford without ab- surdity or impertinence. They profess, at least, the tones of passion, remonstrance, and regret. The reasonable deduction thus far is that Drayton's devotion and promises of fame to his patroness lasted without inter- ruption for twelve years ; and that he also sang of a different person. Idea, who was unmarried in the year after Lucy Harington was married. EARLIER YEARS 19 In 1603 Mortimeriados was rewritten' throughout in another metre, pubhshed as the Barond Wars, and dedicated to Sir Wilham Aston. Every allusion in it to Lady Bedford is erased, both the opening stanzas and passage in the body of the poem. But in the same vokime comes Idea^ and the familiar sonnet to the great lady who rains sweet golden showers. In 1605 this work was reprinted with Idea and the sonnet. It is not possible that the extirpa- tion of her name should be due to any quarrel, when this sonnet was twice re- printed with the same work. Why Drayton made the change of patron in his dedication has never been known, but the poem was in effect a new poem, and the benefactor a new benefactor. The last enigma is found in the rewritten pastorals of 1606. There, in eclogue the eighth, is a tirade against one Selena, a capricious patroness who had baulked the writer's ambition. These lines were afterwards withdrawn. Viciously he imprecates a swift old age and ugliness upon her brow. And in the same eclogue Idea is named anew, but this time with clearer 20 MICHAEL DRAYTON features. Of two sisters, one, Panape, keeps her flock by Ancor : The younger than her sister not less good, Bred where the other lastly doth abide, Modest Idea, flower of womanhood That Eowland hath so highly deified. Idea is now Driving her flocks unto the fruitful Meen Which daily looks upon the lovely Stour, Near to that vale, which of all vales is queen, Lastly forsaking of her former bower ; And of all places holdeth Cotswold dear, Which now is proud, because she lives it near. This is decisive. Anne Goodere had married Sir Henry Eainsford in 1595 or 1596. She now lived at Clifford Chambers, near Strat- ford - on - Avon, in Evesham Yale, on the Stour, and north of Meon Hill, an out- lying spur of Cotswold. Her sister Frances married her cousin and stayed at Poles- worth. Now, in 1606, for the first time we learn who was Idea. It is natural to suppose that the same person had always borne that name in Drayton's verse. Some strong reason to show the contrary would be needful. In Tlte Barouii Mars, 1603 EARLIER YEARS 21 (ii. 68), Drayton says that, but for the hor- rors of these wars, My lays had been still to Idea's bower, Of my dear Ancor, or her lov^d Stour. The passage is not in the version of 1596. To complete the evidence, which was first noted by Mr. Fleay,^ there is the thirteenth song of PoIif-OIbion: Anne is not there termed Idea, but Coventry is honoured as her birthplace : ' An-cor prophesies her Christian name and God-iv^ half her sur- name.' And in the Hymn to his Ladys Birthplace, later, it appears that Anne was born in the street of Coventry called Mich Park [Great Park] on a fourth of August. Before taking up the tale of Drayton's poetical and personal ties with Anne Rains- ford, a different explanation of these obscuri- ties and allusions must be cited. It is said that the praise of Idea in the eclogues of 1593 was 'merely a pastoral translation' of the dedication to Endimion and Phoebe ; 1 Biog. Chron.,\. 14G. Mr. Fleay's indepeudent inquiries were partially forestalled by Hunter, Chorus Vatnm, MS. 24, 489, s.v. ' Sir Henry Rainsford.' 22 MICHAEL DRAYTON that the praise of Idea at the end of the latter poem must refer, like the dedication, to Lady Bedford, since 'to suppose that Drayton meant to flatter two ladies at once is to conclude him wanting equally in poeti- cal ingenuity and in knowledge of human nature ' ; and that the presence of Combe Abbey on the banks of Ancor serves further to show that the ' sweet nymph ' was Lady Bedford. On this original error, which has been exposed already, is based a heavy charge, which can, I think, be disabled. It is that Drayton's excision of the Countess's name in The Barons Wars was due to a pique caused by the withdrawal of patron- age. But in the same book the sonnet commending her munificence is kept. If, then, there was a rupture, it must have been between the issue of the volume of 1 GO 5 and that of the volume of IGOG, entered in April. It is suggested that in the lines on Selena Drayton dealt a low buflet in verse to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, whom he had honoured consistently for twelve years, graiide spatmm mortalis aevi. It is scarcely credible, and it is unproved. Of his other friendships he EARLIER YEARS 23 is known to have been tenacious. No one knows who Selena was, but the burden of proof lies with the prosecution. The theory I have referred to has further to account for Anne Goodere being ad- mittedly afterwards praised under the style of Idea. The explanation given deprives Drayton of character. It is said that in pure spite he transferred the name, Idea, from Lady Bedford to Anne Goodere, now Lady Rainsford : but, ' by a very subtle stroke of art, she was transformed into the younger sister of Panape (Lady Bedfdrd being the elder of Lord Harington's two daughters), and had her abode in Gloucestershire in- stead of in Warwickshire.' The 'mingled spite and ingenuity of Drayton's revenge' is compared to that of Pope. But we have seen the lack of any reason for supposing that Drayton had ever entitled Lady Bed- ford Idea. We must therefore dismiss the only accusation that has ever been brought against his behaviour as unproven and improbable.^ * W. J. Courthope, History of English Poetry, vol. iii. pp. 22-46. The wide vogue of this History, whose philosophical 24 MICHAEL DRAYTON The later history of Drayton's friendship with Anne Goodere and her husband may be deferred. And before passing to his true poetry, his first publication, which is only an experiment, may be mentioned. The Harmony of the Chirch does not suggest the work of a man of twenty-eight who was presently to be a poet. It falls into the crowd of paraphrases. The songs of Deborah, Judith, and others, are metrified into the jogging distich of fourteen syllables which the band of Tottel had invented, Warner had improved, but Chapman had not yet redeemed. Truthfulness to the text warms the transcript of the Song of Songs quality I may be allowed to say I have recognised elsewhere, makes it the more needful to rectify the unnecessary slur on Drayton. To do full justice to the hypothesis, two minor heads may be dealt with. Mr, Courthope thinks that 'Dray- ton recast Endimion and Phoehe as The Man in the Moon, taking from it all those allusions personal to Idea which ouce assocTatfed it"c1ugBiy with Lady Bedford.' But if Idea was not Lady Bedford, the changes have no such force as is im- plied. Secondly, ' the pastorals were reissued with a pre- fatory discourse on bucolic poetry, thus suggesting to the reader that they were merely a literary exercise,' But this discourse (first printed 1019) says that though the subject and language of pastorals ' ought to be poor, silly, and of the coarsest woof in appearance, nevertheless the niost high and most noble matters of the world may be shadowed in them, and for certain sometimes are.' EARLIER YEARS 25 into somewhat more fervid colour than the rest. This, it has been thought, was the quality scented by the puritan inquisitors ; and there is little else to account for the doom of a book so innocent and so tedious. In the Stationers' Registers for 1591 Mr. Collier found an entry proving that the edi- tion was seized by order, ^ and given over to a Mr. Bishop for destruction ; although forty copies were saved by express rule of Whit- gift, and kept in Lambeth. None survive there now, and only one copy of the first edition, preserved in the British Museum, seems to be known. Why the seizure was made, and why Whitgifb interposed, and why, in IGIO, the author thought his paraphrase worth reprinting,^ is now obscure. 1 ' Whereas all the seised books, mentioned in the last ac- coumpte before this, were sould this yere to Mr. Byshop. Be it remembered that fortye of them, being Harmonies of the Churche, rated at ij^ le peece, were had from him by warrante of my lordes grace of Canterburie, and remayne at Lambithe with Mr. Doctor cosen ; and for some other of the saide bookes, the said Mr. Bishop hath paid iij^', as appeareth in the charge of this accoumpte, and the residue remayne in the Hall to th' use of Yarrette James.' (Quoted by Collier, pp. xi-xii.) 2 For full titles here and elsewhere see Bibliograpliy. CHAPTER II AN ELIZABETHAN POET Moke than the masters, the explorers of unknown forms, the original breakers -up of the wilderness, Drayton has the title of an Elizabethan poet, of a representative. He tells of the current achievements and aims of his age in poetic art. What others lend him, he appropriates with power and rede- livers, and he comes honestly by the pleasure that his work gives him. The rarer part of a truly originative mind like Spenser's — his nicety of colour or his sense of the terror of the sea — only isolates him from contem- porary feeling : it is usually best felt by far posterity, and it offers no hold to discipleship. Drayton was no such weaver of new hues and stories upon the arras of dreams ; his delight is to utter sincerely the ruling Elizabethan thoughts and ardours, 20 AN ELIZABETHAN POET 27 though he too, as will appear, struck, after a while, on some fortunate inventions, and heard rhythms of his own. He tried nearly every kind of verse that was the mode during the last ten years of the queen's reign, except moral allegory. He wrote pastoral, sonnet, paraphrase, vidian fable, narrative chronicle, legend, and panegyric. If no other poetry were left but his, we could discover from it many of the imaginative interests of those years. The assurance of i fame, the praise of queen and patroness, the j passion for the past of England, and the *' curiosity for the world of the west ; the feeling for the beauty of youth, the cordial extravagance in friendship, the fashion of loving; the conventions, too, of handling accepted for all these themes ; are found irl Drayton. ^ They are treated, doubtless, with imperfect and fitful power, but poetry is never far off. From those ten years, to us foreshortened and so populous, a kind of part-song upon all these motives seems to arise, voice repeating and overlapping voice. The darker and wearier strain is only casu- ally present, and then chiefly in the Faerie 28 MICHAEL DRAYTON Queene ; it is better heard in the reign of James, from the lips of Timon or of Donne, of De Flores or of Webster. The common mood is unreserved and even exultant ; the very conceits, which are everywhere, come from high vitahty and critical inexperience ; the moods of sadness are seldom due to the conscious and dreary ebb of hopeful passion ; and the enigmatic, questioning element in poetic thought has seldom to be counted with. The rougher and untruer use of the term ' Elizabethan ' for early seventeenth- century verse has concealed these distinc- tions from us. And the temper of the earlier time is well seen in Drayton, who treads at high noon upon the frequented roads of poetry, shunning twilight and the woven shadows of the forest. His inequality is that which besets almost all of his genera- tion except Spenser. Like others, he seldom writes a perfect poem, or one without perfect lines. Some of the species he attempted proved unresourceful in his hands, like the legend, the chronicle, and the satire ; others, like the ode and pastoral, prospered ; and in one style, that of the AN ELIZABETHAN POET 29 Heroical Epistles, he found an unborrowed tune. He frankly submits to the sway exercised by Sidney, by Spenser, and by Daniel, upon the last verse written under the Tudors, but his artistic tie with each of them is different, and tells upon different parts of his poetry. The praise of Spenser is found in the verse of Drayton at intervals over five-and- thirty years, and if the influence fades, admiration remains. The younger poet was ever revising, and knew of the knots and obstacles in his own talent, naturally level and sturdy rather than gracious or dexterous, and he was put to shame by the sure hand of the always poetical Spenser. In E^idimioit and Phoebe, 1595, he cries: Dear Colin, let our Muse excused be, Which rudely thus presumes to sing by thee ; Although the strains be harsh, untuned, and ill, Nor can attain to thy divinest skill. And writing in the reign of Charles he still honours ' Colin ' On his shawm so clear Many a high-pitched note that had. And to the last ho regarded 'grave, moral 30 MICHAEL DRAYTON Spenser' as 'in all high knowledge surely excellent/ and awarded him a kind of Homeric scope for the bravery of his invention : I am persuaded there was none Since the blind bard his Iliads up did make, Fitter a task like that to undertake. ^ And this loyalty, filial, not servile, had its reward when Drayton began himself to be called ' golden-mouthed,' or to be com- mended for the * purity and preciousness of his phrase ' : epithets that we can still apply to him at his best. Spenser, it will be seen, served Drayton most in the fields of the pastoral and the sonnet ; the debt extends to subject and to cadence as well as to many a strain of sentiment, whether pessimistic, defiant, or Platonic. And he also infected Drayton with his lofty and proud concep- tion of what the poet's calling really is, when it is confronted with the brute and bastard ambitions of the world. Drayton often exhales this feeling, and it became the cry of a kind of caste numbering men so different * Epistle to Reynolds^ 1627. AN ELIZABETHAN POET 31 as Jonson, Chapman, and Marston. Poets, he says in The Oivl, are Those rare Promethei, fetching fire from heaven, To whom the functions of the gods are given, Kaising frail dust with their redoubled flame, Mounted with hymns upon the wings of fame. It should be remembered that in such deliverances the word poetry, though its first application might be to verse, meant all imaginative writing, all Dichtung : and we trace in them the spirit of challenge that animated Drayton's other master, Sidney, and his companion Daniel, who found that poetry, in such a sense, required defending, like a newcomer with doubtful introductions. By one of the chances of history, the pastoral eclogue, arranged in a cycle of months, had served, rather than any larger form, to announce in 1579 the coming of the new poetry. The Shepherd's Calendar, with the variety of its adventures in rhythm, and its flashes of the nobler style, had at once caught attention, and found imitators. Of Thomas Watson little can be said ; but, fourteen years after, Drayton was the first worthy pastoral follower of Spenser, and 32 MICHAEL DRAYTON began his true poetical life as Spenser's student. Idea, the Shepherd's Garland, fashioned in nine Eglogs ; Rowland's Sacrifice to the Nine Muses, was published in 1593. Drayton here turns away from the shepherd dialect that, to speak the truth, makes the Calendar tiresome, as well as from that habit of prudently obscure invective against Church or State, which is traceable at last to the Latin pastorals of Petrarch. But, like Spenser, he uses the eclogue in one of its most primitive extensions, for eulogy. The third number contains an ode to Elizabeth, which may well compare with the earlier April. Splendour and onset are not want- ing here, and the lengthy lines, which Dray- ton always favoured, have the weight of a broad and tumbling wave. Trim up her golden tresses with Apollo's sacred tree : O happy sight unto all those that love and honour thee! The blessed angels have prepared A glorious crown for thy reward ; Not such a golden crown as haughty Ciesar wears, But such a glittering starry crown as Ariadne bears. Make her a goodly chapilet of azur'd columbine, And wreathe about her coronet with sweetest eglantine; AN ELIZABETHAN POET 83 Bedeck our Beta all with lilies, And the dainty dafFadillies, With roses damask, white, and red, and fairest flower- de-lice, With cowslips of Jerusalem, and cloves of paradise. O, thou fair torch of heaven, the day's most dearest light, And thou, bright-shining Cynthia, the glory of the night; You stars the eye of heaven. And thou, the gliding leven,i And thou, O gorgeous Iris ! with all strange colours dyed, When she streams forth her rays, then dashed is all your pride. The other conventions of this kind of verse are also accepted. Drayton, like Spenser, uses the mask of a shepherd for himself — whom he calls Eowland ^ — and his friends, and is slighted by the world, and by a harsh lady, but meditates a higher strain in consolation, like Colin in the October eclogue of the Calendar : My simple reed Shall with a far more glorious rage infuse. And if the boast was borne out by the 1 Lightning. 2 Barnfield, in his Affectionate She2)herd, 1594, couples ' Rowland ' with Colin and Astrophel as ' suflfering great annoy ' from the ' peevishness ' (perverse folly) of Cupid. Collier, p. xix. C 34 MICHAEL DRAYTON Faerie Queene and the Hymn to Beauty, it was borne out also by the Heroical Bpistles, by parts of the Poly-Olhion, and by the Ballad of Agincourt. Drayton also copes with other familiar themes, such as the rustic singing-match, a pleasant manner of duet that strikes back to the Sicihan roots of the pastoral ; and another ancient contest that he versifies is that of youth and age. He prefers to use the ten- syllabled line, and he does his part with Spenser in beating it out into shape and loveliness, preferably in stanzas of five lines or six. And in these measures he not only commands the strenu- ous style : No fatal dreads, nor fruitless vain desires, Low caps and court'sies to a painted wall, Nor heaping rotten sticks on needless fires, Ambitious ways to climb, or fears to fall, Nor things so base do I affect at all : but his verse also springs into tenderness and colour : Shepherd, farewell, the skies begin to lower : Yon pitchy cloud that hangeth in the west Shows us ere long that we shall have a shower : Come, let us home, for so I think it best, For to their cotes our flocks are gone to rest. AN ELIZABETHAN POET 85 It is here also, in the eighth eclogue, that Drayton first uses the jingle of the old rhymed romances in a sportive way to which he afterwards — thirty and more years after- wards — gave his fullest finish in Nymphidia and the Shepherds Sirena. This echo of Chaucer's Sir Thopas may have come to him through Spenser; and he finds just the right, flat sheep-bell tinkle, and the right, faded-archaic diction, miniveer, Dowsahel, Ghanteclere, that is the far echo of a bur- lesque of something itself long perished. Otherwise there is, one may fear, some commonness and extravagance in The Shep- herd's Garland ; in the celebrations of Sidney under the name of Elphin,^ and of his sister under that of Pandora, and in many other places. But thirteen years ^ In Notes and Queries^ Fourth Series, vol. xii. p. 442, Mr. Brinsley Nicholson quoted two lines from N[athanier?] B[axter'?]'3 Sir Philip Sidney's Ourania, 1606 : noble Drayton ! well didst thou rehearse Our damages in dryrie sable verse. This certainly refers to Drayton's eclogue, since the name Elfin is quoted later in the piece. But the inference of Mr. Nicholson and others, that his eclogue was written about 1587, does not follow. It may well be later. Spenser's A ttrophel, for instance, came out long after Sidney's death. — There is also a reference in Ourania to Drayton's Oiol. 36 MICHAEL DRAYTON later, in 1606, Drayton re-edited these pastorals thoroughly, and did them good, although he inserted new enigmas. Quarrels have meanwhile arisen with persons who cannot now be identified under their classi- cal costume of Olcon and Selena, the one an ungrateful friend and the other a capricious patroness. We care the less to fathom these disputes, as they did not lead to excellent poetry. The friendly lady Sylvia, who once lived by the Trent, but is now in a Kentish home, may be a member of the house of Sir William Aston of Tixall, who by 1606 was Drayton's protector.^ Frances and Anne Goodere are, we saw, called Panape and Idea. The improvements in this version show the unabated sway of Spenser and his perennial power to ennoble Drayton's language. In the renewed praises of Sir Philip Sidney, whose worth and honour, we are told, some have been rashly censuring, * Many unsubstantial theories have been woven out of the fancy dresses assumed in the two editions of the eclogues. They are one of the amusements of this kind of bal masqve. Mr. Fleay thinks that Mirtilla and her brothers were ' cer- tainly ' Elizabeth, John, and Francis Beaumont the poet. Mr. Fleay's inferences may be found in his Biog. Chron., i. 143-9 ; they deserve and need sifting. AN ELIZABETHAN POET 37 a few lines have the plangeiicy of their original, the Ruins of Time : And, learned shepherd, thou to time shalt live When their great names are utterly forgotten, And fame to thee eternity shall give When with their bones their sepulchres are rotten. Nor mournful cypress nor sad widowing yew About thy tomb to prosper shall be seen, But bay and myrtle which be ever new, In spite of winter flourishing and green. Drayton shows also more of that power of pure singing, which came to him late and slow. He could not learn it from Spenser who hardly practised in short lyric measures. More than once we have a presentiment of the music that the long-living Drayton was to discover in himself twenty years later still ; the riches of lyrical sound, the magic of Carew and the age of Charles. To the pastoral, of a lighter and more lovely shape, he was to return in his old age, as The Muses Elizium testifies. It is likely ^ that Spenser soon requited his chief lieutenant in pastoral with a famous * I accept the view, though not all the reasons, of Todd, Minto, and Fleay, for identifying .^tion with Droyton. See 38 MICHAEL DRAYTON verse. In 1595 he published Colin Clout's come Home agcdn, and among the poets in repute mentions one, ' ^tion ' ; And there, though last, not least, is ^tion : A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found, Whose Muse, full of high thoughts' invention, Doth like himself heroically sound. ^tion [aiTLov] means an eaglet, and in 1594, working nobly in an ancient convention,^ Drayton had built a sonnet upon the com- parison of his thoughts to ' eaglet-birds of love.' These he sent forth from their nest to prove if they could gaze upon the sun : But now their plumes, full summed with sweet desire, To show their kind began to climb the skies : Do what I could, my eaglets would aspire. Straight mounting up to thy celestial eyes : Fleay, Guide to Chaucer and Spenser, 1877, pp. 93-95. The references fit Drayton better than Shukespeiire, who had made no pastorals. Mr. Fleay adds some curious but inconclusive evidence that ^tion is aXnov, and has in Eliza- bethan dictionaries the sense of cause, beginning, being thus the philosophic equivalent of the word Idea, tSe'a. ' *The sonnet was probably suggested by Watson's 'KKaTo^naOia (No. xcix.), which is itself an imitation of Serafino (1550 ed., Sonnetto Primo) ; but the tradition of the genuine eagle's visual capacity was quite as accessible, in the shape that Drayton handled it, in French and Latin verse as in Italian and English,' (Lee, Mizabethqn Sonnets, i. xc.^ This is an instance of a good sonnet being little the worse for a fair pedigree. AN ELIZABETHAN POET 89 And thus, my fair ! my thoughts away be flown, And from my breast into thine eyes be gone. Spenser might also well praise the author of the Gaiiand as the gentlest of shepherds, the nearest to himself of his own band. The masque-name of Rowland (Orlando) was full of * heroical ' associations ; and the same word well fitted the patriot verse that Drayton had already published. Certainly those eclogues, like much that Drayton did in these years, are helpless enough at times in their broken grammar and halting melody ; and this is true, too, of the Legends to which he next betook himself For he assisted in prolonging a mediaeval form that might well be thought to have had its day. Monks and preachers had turned to account the dreary images, truly classical in origin, but harped on out of all measure when the great body of thought into which they fitted was for- gotten, of the whims of Fortune's wheel and the falls of the mighty. But the poets, in their inveterately secular way, had made a kind of bastard epic, exemplified in Lyd- gate's enormous Falls of Princes, and in a 40 MICHAEL DRAYTON later day by the Mirror for Magistrates ; the first edition of which had come in 1559, but a new and enlarged one as late as 1587. Long before, Chaucer had twice begun something of the sort ; but, both in the Monk's Tale and in the Legend of Good Women t he had, what with his humour, what with his artist's horror of an impos- sible task, wearied of the plan ; seeing, doubtless, what two centuries later his floundering successors were still failing to see, that a chain-gang of illustrious victims, united only by scevitia Fortimce, was a subject capable of impressive passages, but, being without change, end, or beginning, unfit for art. Yet this was the subject that the penmen who accumulated the Mirror were reviving in the public service, at a season when the new patriotism assured them readers, and the new chronicle — not yet history proper — gave them matter. And the fashion was still fresh when the last decade of the century began ; so that Daniel, and Drayton after him, fell to mak- ing solemn compositions in this style, often a little abortive. Warner's Albion s Eng- AN ELIZABETHAN POET 41 land, 1586, is an earlier, plainer, equally patriotic treatment of history, largely mythi- cal. But Warner wrote more for the people, and had no literary ' regrets,' though he also made Legends : and the term Legend usually implied a pathetic or tragical treatment of a subject drawn from English history since the Conquest. It is clear ^ that the Legends form a kind of little affluent to the Mirror and the chronicle play ; and the whole body of historic narrative verse must be regarded as a defeated rival of the chronicle play, equally popular perhaps for a while, but in true achievement far behind it. Daniel's Complaint of Rosamond, the first poem of this kind possessing any savour since Sack- ville's, was entered in 1592. Drayton's Legend of Piers Gaveston appeared in 1593. In Marlowe's Edward the Second, entered July of the same year, the tale of Isabel, Mortimer, Gaveston, and Edward, was cast once for all into clear and enduring form. Yet Drayton returned to the subject with ^ See the striking list in Fleay, Biog. Ghron., i. 141-2, of the kindred poems and plays written about this time on subjects drawn from the Chronicles. 42 MICHAEL DRAYTON blind fascination both in his Mortimeriados and his Heroical Epistles. The rivalry was idle ; and the incident figures the whole destiny of the historic * epic ' in its race for life with the historic play. Yet the Legeiids give more than promise of a poet. Gaveston's ghost, prosing in sextains after the approved fashion, may be too circumstantial ; and the catastrophe is absurdly hurried over. In Matilda, whose narrative is told with pathos, there are lines that recall the Shakespeare of the opening sonnets, where he cries out to his friend the Elizabethan text of the obligation that beautiful persons are under not to die without leaving children. But the most poetical of the Legends (not excluding the later and tamer one on Cromtvell, Earl of Essex ^) is that o^ Robert, Duke of Normandy, 1596. The story runs obscure and sluggish as a canal ; but no verse written afterwards ^ See Bibliography, § xvii., for dates and titles. The second edition is much altered. There is a curious introduc- tion in it of Pierce the Plowman, and of a passage from the Vidon. Langland had been revived, as is well known, by the reformers as an early authority against corrupt Papists. Selden quotes him in his illustrations to the Foly-Olbion. AN ELIZABETHAN POET 43 in English is so mediseval as the preliminary * flyting ' between the two great personifica- tions, Fame and Fortune, who had spread their dark wings over much poetic homilis- ing. Drayton, as this passage alone would prove, had his momentary share of the melancholy of Du Bellay and Spenser, so deep, in spite of being a literary heirloom. Some lines, which follow closely a passage in the House of Fame, are among the latest ^ traced upon the walls of that abode before it came into the hands of Pope, the eminent eighteenth-century restorer. In the year 1594 it was hard not to be inditing sonnets, and Drayton happily was drawn into the vogue. He was led by his ' ever kind Maecenas,' Anthony Cooke, after- wards knighted, to make a first garland public, which had already, it seems, been some time composed. Vouchsafe to grace these rude uiipolish'd rhymes, Which long, dear friend, have slept in sable night. The second line was altered in the issue of 1599 to Which but for you had slept in sable night. * See Milton, In Q^iintuni Novembris ; Samson^ 971. 44 MICHAEL DRAYTON » Besides this dedication there are fifty-one numbers oi Ideas Mirror, Amours in Quator- zains. Long after the mode had begun to pass, Drayton continued to send out changed editions under the name of Idea. There are four such recensions, in 1599, 1602, 1605, and 1619, not to speak of reprints. In each of these there was much addition, rejection, and reburnishing, not always to the best advantage,^ and in the end Drayton had added some fifty more sonnets. He has thus left more than a century of these poems, written in many moods, and at many stages of his skill, during some four-and-twenty years. 1 See Bibliography, ^i v. By the edition of 1605, Dray- ton's selection from his own works, there remain twenty-five Amours^ often more or less rewritten, and forty-five new sonnets have been added, including dedications. By the vol. of 1619, there remain twenty Amours ; seventeen sonnets which first appeared in 1599 ; eight that first appeared in 1602 (reprinted 1603) ; seven that first ajjpeared in 1605 (reprinted in 1608, 1610, and 1613). Seven were printed in 1619 for the first time. Some of these figures are given in Mr. Sidney Lee's Elizabethan Sonnets (re-edition of An English Garner^ 1904), vol. ii. p. 180. See also the notes in Collier, and those in Fleay, Biog. Chron., i. 153. Mr. Waller's variorum edition may be expected to give the full gathering and collations for the first time. Some of these details, as will be seen, have their artistic bearing. A table is printed at p. 207 below of first lines of all the sonnets, and of the editions where they occur. AN ELIZABETHAN POET 45 But in 1594 the first flush of the sonneteers was unabated. Astrophel and Stella had been three years an example ; and Delia ^ by Daniel, Drayton's nearest companion in poetry, had thrice been issued. Lodge and Constable and others had hastened to publish in their wake. This old Southern art-form, which had been revived in the Italian and then in the French Renaissance, was now used to the English climate, though its prime was not for very long. It was still entangled in the phase of translation and adjustment ; and its unique transmissive power was amply proven. A thought or theme, a verbal modelling, an emotion, that had once found sure expression in sonnet- shape, above all from Petrarch's hand, ac- quired a lease of poetic life, now in poorer, now in richer embodiment, but apparently without limit. We talk of the debts of this man to that ; but in such a case the creditor is a messenger rather than a giver. And every such debt is a challenge to original power of treatment, and is cancelled if that be forthcoming. Treatment is all ; but then the power to treat depends on the poet's soul 46 MICHAEL DRAYTON and experience. When Drayton first wrote, the studious and formal practice of the sonnet was at its height. Mr. Sidney Lee, for whose learned material and lucid order- ing I am grateful, though we draw different inferences therefrom, has shown, for the first time, that the sonnet was the chief medium through which French poetry influenced ours during the last ten years of the century. To this even the Italian influence was second. Many of the Amours and their successors are exercises, now in chill con- ceits, now in the plastic beauty of word and rhyme. In the dedication Drayton exclaims that he does not ' filch from Portes' or from Petrarch's pen,' and he echoes Sidney's denial : I am no pickpurse of another's wit. He did, however, handle and pass the current coin of sonneteering fancy which Desportes and many more had sent into England. The actual translations or borrow- ings are less obvious than the origin of Drayton's title. There is not much Platon- ism in his composition; once, in his later eclogues, he poises gracefully on the fancy AN ELIZABETHAN POET 47 that love is the chain linking all things' in the universe together ; but his nature was alien to covert and subtle meanings, and this side of Spenser's thought he did not try to appropriate.^ But the Platonic keyword, Idea, tSea, the type of perfection and beauty, of which all other things are shadows and faint gustations, was familiar in our meta- physical verse from Lodge to Drummond, who aptly gives its sense : My mind me told, that in some other place I elsewhere saw the Idea of that face, And loved a love of heavenly pure delight. 2 Drayton does not make much of this thought, but his title, as Mr. Lee has dis- covered, had its precedent in a sonnet-series, published in 1579, by a doctor of Chalons, Claude de Pontoux, and entitled L'Idee. There is thus the usual immigrant element in his verses. But, not to go too hastily, we ^ See J. S. Harrison, Platonism in English Foetry of the xvi"' and xvii^^ Centuries. Columbia University Press, 1903, p. 125. The lines are in eclogue seven of the edition of 1606, not in that of 1593. ^ See Fleay, Guide to Chaucer and Spenser, p. 95, for this and other examples ; and the amplest exposition in Wynd- ham, Foems of Shakespeare, introduction. 48 MICHAEL DRAYTON find that even in the Amours, and even in those numbers of them that Drayton too diffidently cast away in later issues, there is noble movement and cadence. Were the following sonnets translations, their beauty would be the same. But often — and this is the truth about the Tudor and Stuart sonnet-writing at large — they are neither borrowings, nor yet need they transcribe direct experience. They are plastic experi- ments where the original impulse of love or compliment is transfigured in the joy of the fashioning : much as when a man should begin to paint his mistress's face upon a fan, but should find that it did not suit the spaces and design, and then should alter it into some happy pattern, perhaps inspired by another artist ; but should still send her the offering as his handiwork in her honour. This kind of mood will be undreamed of, if we forget that a shy gift may hide itself in a line of translation, or in what seems purely scholar's practice ; that the presence of a common theme in many artists, per- haps influencing one other, is a poor proof of the insincerity of any of them ; and AN ELIZABETHAN POET 49 that the existence of weaker work on the same theme elsewhere or by the same hand does not prejudice the quality of a noble or graceful poem. Two sonnets, only once, I believe, reprinted since 1594, may illus- trate these points, and may vindicate the Amours ; Spenserian here and there, they cannot be called echoes of the Amoretti, which were not published. The glorious sun went blushing to his bed, When my soul's sun from her fair cabinet, Her golden beams had now discovered, Lightening the world eclipsed by his set. Some mused to see the earth envy the air, Which from her lips exhaled refined sweet : A world to see ! yet, how he joy'd to hear The dainty grass make music with her feet ! But my most marvel was when from the skies So comet-like each star advanc'd her light, As though the heaven had now awak'd her eyes And summon'd angels to this blessed sight ; No cloud was seen, but crystalline the air, Laughing for joy upon my lovely fair. If chaste and pure devotion of my youth. Or glory of my April-springing years. Unfeigned love in naked simple truth, A thousand vows, a thousand sighs and tears : D 50 MICHAEL DRAYTON Or if a world of faithful service done, Words, thoughts, and deeds devoted to her honour, Or eyes that have beheld her as their sun, With admiration ever looking on her : A life that never joy'd but in her love, A soul that ever hath ador'd her name, A faith that time and fortune could not move, A Muse that unto heaven hath rais'd her fame : Though these, nor these, deserved to be embrac'd, Yet, fair unkind ! too good to be disgrac'd. The sonnets that Drayton added to this series from time to time range from vain conceit to gallant inspiration. So do Shake- speare's, and so do the sonnets of all their contemporaries. An artist, unlike a chain, is to be judged by his strongest part ; and out of such a test Drayton comes with some- thing like triumph, though no poet of merit has ever been less equal, and like AVords- worth he lies at the mercy of the wind of the spirit. Only once, throughout a sonnet, which first appears in the garland of 1619, does he attain full power and felicity. There are races like the old Greeks or the Highlanders who can weep without shame and without detriment to their sorrow ; but AN ELIZABETHAN POET 51 this wonderful dry-eyed poem comes from another stock. The emotion of the sovereign and sudden return, after the full accept- ance of despair, of a fluttering hope, which cannot believe in itself, must have been something experienced ; or, if not in fact experienced, it could only be imagined, with a half-dramatic conviction, after some deep schooling. Here, then, Drayton comes to his highest fortune in passionate expression ; in the sonnet" ' Since there 's no help, come let us kiss and part.'!' I cannot agree with one good critic who would withhold this poem from Drayton on the ground of its excellence. The external evidence is uncon- tested : one such thought, one such hour of poetical felicity in a lifetime, is not too much to concede to a man even of slighter gift ; and there are many seams and veins of the same metal in Drayton. There are lines and phrases elsewhere sealed with the same assured style, the same hravura now so long lost and mocking the literary mimicry of studious versifiers : Love in an humour play'd the prodigal, And bids my senses to a solemn feast. 0^1 MICHAEL DRAYTON Ov:— An evil spirit your beauty haunts me still, Wherewith, alas, I have been long possessed, Which ceaseth not to tempt me unto ill, Nor gives me once but one pure minute's rest. Ill another sonnet, where the pride of style is upheld throughout, is heard that Shake- spearean sound, which has been supposed to reflect on the author's originality : Whilst thus my pen strives to eternise thee. Age rules my lines with wrinkles in my face. Where, in the map of all my misery, Is modelled out the world of my disgrace ; Whilst, in despite of tyrannising times, Medea-like, I make thee young again. Proudly thou scorn'st my world-outwearing rhymes. And murderest virtue with thy coy disdain : And though in youth my youth untimely perish. To keep thee from oblivion and the grave, Ensuing ages yet my rhymes shall cherish. Where I, entomb'd, my better part shall save : And though this earthly body fade and die. My soul shall mount unto eternity. This was first printed in 1599, when Drayton published a revision of Amours. He had his share in settling the high Tudor tradition of the sonnet ; and it is unnecessary to show at length how the AN ELIZABETHAN POET 5?? Italian stanza, so carefully poised just after its rigid octave, and shrinking from the clang of the final couplet, had passed, through the various intervening forms of Sidney and Spenser,^ into the measure with claims of its own so magnificent, where the couplet crowns three quatrains of independ- ent rhyme : so that the whole poem, with its centre now shifted far forward, is tuned as under no other metrical scheme it could be to the loud Elizabethan chord of pride or desire or defiance or desperation. Then, sweet Despair, awhile hold up thy head, Or all my hope for sorrow shall be dead. Drayton wrote that ; and in spite of all his sinkings into flatness, it is never safe to say that he will not suddenly write likewise when he speaks of his own fame, or of his poetic sincerity, or when he gives utterance to the pride of the rejected, or to the old Catullan counsel to his mistress to enjoy before Time has encroached. The original power, as well as the adap- ^ One such form Drayton at times uses himself, '' in his earlier sonnets ; abba cddc tfft gg, fnot the usual ah«b cdcd efef gg. Fleay, Biog. Chron., i. 153. 54 MICHAEL DRAYTON tive craft of Drayton, is shown by his relation to the sonneteers around him. He catches, but he blends, rays from them all ; from Spenser, from Daniel, from Sidney, and probably from Shakespeare. Canon Beeching, in his edition of Shakespeare's sonnets, has pointed out that the style of Daniel — and I would add that of Spenser — is apparent in the sonnets of 1594, while those of 1599 betray the study of Astrophel and Stella. ' Sidney,' he well puts it, * employs a line of swift simplicity, with little orna- ment, while Daniel's line is slow, sometimes a little sluggish, often precieuxJ Yes, and Sidney's higher mood is passionate, while Daniel's is meditative. The same writer notes that Drayton's first sonnet of 1594, ' Read here, sweet maid, the story of my woe,' is founded upon Daniel's * Read in my face a volume of despair.' But if it begins with the servility of a pencil tracing, it rises to a lofty heat of adoration that was almost beyond Daniel, when Drayton swears By my strong faith ascending to thy fame, My zeal, my hope, my vows, my praise, my prayer, My soul's oblations to thy sacred name. AN ELIZABETHAN POET 55 As a rule, Drayton does not echo the best of Sidney ; but ' Since there 's no help,' while Sidney never rose so high for so long, has Sidney's direct and lifelike tone, as of a declaration flung out face to face with the person addressed. How far the two Warwickshire poets were acquainted is unknown. Drayton is heard of as a part-author of the curious play Sir John Oldcastle, which was provoked by the success of Henry IV. ; and as sharing in the probably mythical orgy said to have shortened the life of Shakespeare. In his Legend of Matilda he had inserted, but later dropped, an allusion to Lucrece. He has been guessed to follow a passage of the same poem in his sixth sonnet (first printed 1592), to Harmony, where his heart is the treble that makes the air, while his sighs bear the base, or ' diapason ' ; a piece of wit he afterwards withdrew. But this and other likenesses, which have been carefully mustered by critics, show little, except that both poets dipped their hand in the poetical currency of the hour. Sometimes, as in the poems quoted already, they promise that their 56 MICHAEL DRAYTON verse will outbrave time, a topic that has been treated as a conceit, but is a sincere thought and an immemorial hope, of far classical ancestry.^ Others turn on the metaphysical identity between lover and beloved, others on the strife of blood and judgment, others on the wakeful or dream-beleaguered nights of the poet. On the whole there is more likeness between Drayton and Shakespeare as sonneteers than between either of them and any other writer. This cannot be wholly chance ; but if not, the question which of the two was the lender is insoluble, so long as we only know that some of Shake- speare's sonnets were in private circulation in 1598, while two were printed by^tTaggard in 1599, and the rest not till ten years later. The passages in Drayton with that deeper sound, which we have learnt to call Shakespearean, hardly begin till his editions of 1599 or 1602.^ The evidence is only * For an elaboration of this see a paper on Poetic Fame, A Renaissance Study, in Otia Merseiana, Transactions of of the Arts Faculty, Liverpool University, 1904, by the present writer. 2 See T. Tyler, ShakesjJcare's Sonnets, 1890, pp. 38-43. The resemblances cited, however, are more in the rhyme endings and general complexion than in the actual ideas. AN ELIZABETHAN POET 57 cumulative, and how uncertain may be gauged from one example. In Shakespeare's 116th sonnet he says of his own love for his friend : no ! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests, and is never shaken ; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth 's unknown, although his height be taken. Drayton's 43rd sonnet, first found in 1605, runs : So doth the plowman gaze the wandering star, And only rests contented with the light, That never learned what constellations are, Beyond the bent of his unknowing sight.^ Still, as there is some tie between the two poets, it is natural to think that Drayton, glancing round after his assimilative fashion, early caught some deep accents and noble 1 For this and other suggestions of the kind, see Wyndham, Poems of Shakesijeare, pp. cv, 255-8, 319. (The inference that the sonnet To nothing better can I thee compare Than to the son of some rich pennyfather, must have been written to a man, is hazardous.) The point is further vexed in Fleay, Biog. Chron., ii. 226 ; and Lee {Liff, of Shalcespeare, pp. 110 sq.\ iind Eliz. Sonnets^ Ic, is controverted, I think, happily by Beeching {Sonnets, pp. 132-140), who pleads for Shakespeare's influence. 58 MICHAEL DRAYTON rhythms from Shakespeare's poems, which he, like others, may have seen unprinted. His interesting allusion to his own work in the theatre (Son. 47, first out in 1605), which has been adduced as a parallel, may quite well be due to his experience ; the thought is not Shakespearean at all, and the whole may be given as a last example of his grave sentiment and powerful handicraft, now and then only just above prose, but showing how Drayton can put his own stamp even on what Shakespeare may have lent him. In pride of wit, when high desire of fame Gave life and courage to my labouring pen, And first the sound and virtue of my name Won grace and credit in the ears of men : With those the thronged theaters that press, I in the circuit for the laurel strove, Where the full praise, I freely must confess, In heat of blood and modest mind might move : With shouts and claps at every little pause, When the proud round on either side hath rung, Sadly I sit unmoved with the applause. As though to me it nothing did belong : No public glory vainly I pursue, The praise I strive, is to eternise you. In all the eight sonnets first printed in AN ELIZABETHAN POET 59 1619 Drayton stands essentially free from his masters ; he is hot and earnest and does not spare a reckless but manly irony, as in his scoif at the Paltry, foolish, painted things. That now in coaches trouble every street. Such a poet, however reminiscent, is never at the last a slave to models. The excellence of these poems, and also the veracity of their emotion, have both been questioned ; but the two points must be distinguished. As poetry, the best of them speak for themselves ; who cannot hear it, would not be convinced were it proved that Drayton had never read another man's verses in his life. It is nothing that some of them, good or bad, are adaptations, or at times half-translated. The presence of De Pontoux in the shadowy background does not make the lines other than they are. As to the veracity, let the style also speak ; there is no other canon available. But the progress of creation in our Renaissance poets is often ill-understood, even by those who are best acquainted with its historic roots. The 60 MICHAEL DRAYTON study of the past of poetry may as easily dull us to its essential beauty and to the nature of artistic appropriation as the study of the past of dress. How far dress is a part of the person, is another metaphysical question, and one not to be asked. It is the same with the fashion of poetical loving, which at any moment is partly traditional and codified, and partly due to the individual. To find traces of the same costume of feeling in the thirteenth century, or in Italy, shows the long continuance and the wide extension of the fashion. By such modes a true and heartfelt experience may become transfigured in presentment. Once more, no one who has written verses, however mean, is ignorant that their impelling occasion does not always remain their theme. What I am suffering, and wish to record, becomes clay in my hands ; it may not prove a subject, as it stands, for verse ; but it leads me to find a subject, in which the motive is changed, while the force of the original passion is yet manifested. And one or other of the thoughts, worn smooth by greater predecessors, may prove the easiest AN ELIZABETHAN POET 61 mould. The Kenaissance sonnet has lent itself to such vicissitudes more than any other form of verse. Drayton, fitful as his inspiratio*hs are, writes at his best with a proud mastery that enforces our question to the sceptics — How then would he have written, had he been sincerely moved ? The authentic poetry and warmth of the best of these sonnets have been obscured by another cause : by Drayton's habit, in which he followed the mode, of binding under one abstract title poems of various mood and occa- sion. They are not all love-lyrics. He tried to save what he thought were his best sonnets upon any subject. Some are of the grotesque-satiric tone, so familiar in Donne, and easily toppling over to the monstrous. In one he says that his remedy for his love shall be compounded of the powdered heart of a woman who was in life impassive ' to gold or honour,' and of other ingredients that could never exist, since women are what they are.^ Elsewhere Drayton, returning ^ It is hard to concur with Mr. Lee's view that this is ' clearly intended to apply to the simples out of which the conventional type of sonnet was for the most part exclusively compounded.' It is apiece of strained and cracked misogj'ny. 62 MICHAEL DRAYTON on his trail, warns the reader that he is not always to expect passion and sincerity ; and more than once, honestly, invites him to expect changefulness and even caprice : And in all humours sportively I range ; My active Muse is of the world's right strain That cannot long one fashion entertain. And again : My wanton verse ne'er keeps one certain stay : . . . Madding, jocund, and irregular.^ This is the spirit in which to read him, and he will bide the touch. Before ploughing further that stubborn glebe, the verse -chronicle, by the side of Daniel, Drayton, open of taste and appre- hensive as ever, turned aside to decorative poetry. Hero and Leauder, not published till 1598, had been entered after the murder of its author in 1593, and it must have been known in manuscript. Venus and Adoiiis » ^ Were we sure that Drayton had read Shakespeare's lOoth sonnet^ Therefore my verse, to constancy confin'd, One thing expressing, leaves out difference. Fair, kind, and true, is all my argument — we might think he was playfully disclaiming any likeness in Ills own muse. AN ELIZABETHAN POET 63 came out in the same year, and it was long common for the young poets, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and others, to introduce them- selves by studies of the kind. Usually the work bore a double mythological title ; it was founded on Ovid, and was in the Italian taste. Often it echoed those cadences of Marlowe, which he first had bestowed upon the couplet, or it was touched with his deli- cate tracery of image. But seldom did others attain to the lucid glow, as of a burning ala- baster lamp of Greek design, that fills Hero cmd Leander ; there alone was the secret of satisfying form, pure amid its richness. Seldom did they escape the dalliance with phrase and the blurring of colour, then so nearly universal, but fatal to a love -tale drawn from the clear, ancient fountains. Yet in these pieces, as in the second and third books of the Faerie Queene, can best be studied the great early school of plastic ornament and colouring in the poetry of our Renaissance. Harmony, beauty, grouping, posture, are sought for rather than life and passion ; this, at least, is the spirit in which I read Venus and Adonis and also Drayton's 64 MICHAEL DRAYTON experiment, though in Marlowe Hfe and passion are by miracle superadded. Endi- mion and Phoebe, Idea's Latonus, entered in 1595, probably came out soon afterwards, though it bears no date. It is alluded to in Lodge's Fig for Monius, of that year, which contains both an eclogue and an epistle inscribed to Drayton — * Pieria's Michael.' ^ The two poets were well enough acquainted for Drayton to refer to Lodge, under an anagram, as Goldey, which in summer days Hast feasted us with merry roundelays, And, when my Muse was able scarce to fly, Didst imp her wings with thy sweet poesy. But Endimio7i and Phoebe shows the un- acknowledged influence of Marlowe, crossing the more familiar one of Spenser. It is well worthy of being rescued by some enthusiast from the darkness of very rare editions. It is a bright and silvery love-story, or rather a row of pictures or panels, not unmarred by pedantry and misplaced philosophising, ^ ' I have perused thy learned nines and threes ' ; refer- rincj to some jargonish verse in Endimion and Phoebe on the nine hierarchies and the like, drawn ultimately from the pseudo-Dionysius. See Collier, p. 236. AN ELIZABETHAN POET 65 but showing a livelier motion towards pure beauty than anything else written by Dray- ton. As in the case of his continuator, Chapman, Marlowe could for a moment sway and clear a gift that was distant from his own, and much more uncertain. She laid Endimion on a grassy bed, With summer's arras richly overspread, Where, from her sacred mansion next above, She might descend and sport her with her love, Which thirty years the shepherd safely kept. Who in her bosom soft and soundly slept. Yet as a dream he thought the time not long, Remaining ever beautiful and young, And what in vision there to him befell, My weary Muse some other time shall tell. This is nearer the manner of the dead shepherd than much of the Endymion of Keats. The poem is not always so pure in diction, but its verse keeps up the tune. It is of historical as well as artistic note, as an early piece in which one of the perfect varieties of the English couplet is sustained. For the metre ripples easily, yet is firmly embanked and swift of current ; far alike from the rough, interrupted, snaggy measure found in Donne and the satirists and often 66 MICHAEL DRAYTON in Ben Jonson, and from the balanced oratory of the classic rhymers like Dryden — oratory which Drayton also forecasts, as we shall see, in the Heroical Epistles. It avoids that sweet and slothful overflow of line into line which Keats learned in youth from Leigh Hunt, and he from the Jacobean Browne : He cannot love, and yet forsooth he will ; He sees her not, and yet he sees her still ! He goes unto the place she stood upon And asks the poor soil whither she was gone. Fain would he follow her, yet makes delay ; Fain would he go, and yet fain would he stay ; He kissed the flowers depressed with her feet, And swears from her they borrow'd all their sweet. Fain would he cast aside this troublous thought ; But still, like poison, more and more it wrought ; And to himself thus often would he say, ' Here my love sat, in this place did she play, Here in this fountain hath my goddess been, And with her presence hath she grac'd this green.' That is good verse-craft, and would be so at any date. We seem to see Drayton in his studio, ranging attentively from pattern to pattern, and doing his very best, often trying to eke out by care what might fail him in natural gift, and repeatedly shaping AN ELIZABETHAN POET 67 the same stuff, sometimes for the better. Endimion and Phoebe is tapestry- work ; he would use and vary a design or tint of Spenser's, laying in plenty of orient pearl and vermeil. He promised to pursue the story, but kept his promise less than happily. Endimion and Phoebe Drayton never reissued ; it was doubtless quenched in popularity by Venus and Adonis ; but in 1606 he wove many lines of it into a non- descript poem called The Man in the Moon, which is full of ill-cohering fancies, and rightly falls amongst his adventures in satire. The close of Endimion and Phoebe shows the writer's continued admiration for Daniel, by whose side, a little in the rear, he had been pacing as a verse-historian. It is the respect of a consciously harsh writer for one who had without effort won to height and ease ; And then, the sweet Musseus of these times, Pardon my rugged and unfiled rhymes, Whose scarce invention is too mean and base When Delia's glorious Muse doth come in place. Drayton had not much to fear even in the neighbourhood of Daniel. In old age. L^ 68 MICHAEL DRAYTON writing the Upistle to Reynolds, he has moved away from old models and idolatries, and thinks with some others that Daniel's ' manner better fitted prose ' ; so approach- ing Coleridge's more just and pertinent description of that author as a 'model of the middle style.' On the same page the dwelling of Idea by the Ancor, which we saw was Poles- worth, is bravely celebrated : Let stormy winter never touch the clime, But let it flourish as in April's prime : Let sullen earth that soil ne'er overcloud, But in thy presence let the earth be proud. It has been shown that under the abstract, borrowed, and unrhythmical name of Idea, Anne Goodere was signified ; and it is pleasing to find that something further is known of Anne personally. On the testi- mony of her own doctor, the son-in-law of Shakespeare,^ she was ' beautiful, and of a ^ John Hall, Select Observations of English Bodies, tr. 1657 by Cooke, Obs. 48, p. 203. This was Hall's case-book, with list of cures, written in Latin. He cured her, then Lady Eainsford, of some pains after childbirth. This notice proves that she was married before the age of twenty-seven. John Hall, ^6., p. 26, at some date unnientioned, also cured Drayton himself, ' an excellent English poet, labouring of a tertian.' AN ELIZABETHAN POET 69 gallant structure of body,' when in the twenty-eighth year of her age. As we have seen, Drayton, if the arithmetic of a sonnet can be trusted, dates his devotion to her from about 1592, when he had already left for London ; and in the eclogues of the following year he celebrates her. Had he said no more, his gallantry might be purely literary : for a counterpart, real or manufactured, to Spenser's Rosalind was a necessity in a pastoral book of the kind ; and there is no note of passion in it. But, in the sonnets of-15£L4^and after, though much, as in Astrophel and Stella, is merely verbal, the fancy, like Sidney's, has become serious. Many of the poems, though they lack the strength of some of those he added later, show Drayton singing in earnest. (Re- jected, he is galled and wrung as no mere book-amorist could be. About a year later, in 1595, after her father's death, Anne Goodere married, as we saw, Sir Henry Rainsford,^ of Clifford Chambers, who was ^ See references on pp. 128-9. The monument to Sir Henry in Ciitford Church states explicitly that Rainsford was born in 1576, and died in 1622. I can find no record of the age of Anne, her death not being in the Clifford 70 MICHAEL DRAYTON afterwards to be Drayton's cherished and hospitable friend. The history of this regard can be not unfairly conjectured. For nearly a quarter of a century after the marriage of the lady, sonnets, some of them merely gallant, some fervent, were written and published by Drayton to ' Idea.' The evi- dence given above, especially the passage from the Poly-Olhion, forbids us to suppose that ' Idea ' became a mere label for offer- ings really intended to many loves. ^ In 1605^ the wooer repeats his vow: 'I am registers ; but she was married to Sir Henry twenty-seven years, and as she plainly outlived him, this would put the date of the marriage about 1595 or 1596. The Polesworth registers are only extant from 1635 ; those at Coventry also begin too late. The young Sir Henry Goodere, her brother-in-law and cousin, who put up the monument, was the correspondent of Donne, and subject of Jonson's Forest, Nos. 85 and 86. ^ As Canon Beeching, op. cit., p. 133, has detected, a sonnet inscribed in 1603 'to the Lady L. S. ' (whom it would be satisfactory to identify), had by 1619 slipped in among the sonnets to Idea. 'A bachelor poet,' he pleasantly says, ' may be excused for an occasional shifting of his ideal, especially after the marriage of its first incarnation.' He may ; but to bind under one title many high and fervent poems really addressed to diflerent women would have been a kind of spiritual promiscuity little in character. I now agree with Canon Beeching that the poem ' Since there 's no help ' is not likely to have been written early. 2 In a sonnet (51, repeated 1619), which was composed after 1603, as it names the death of Elizabeth. AN ELIZABETHAN POET 71 still inviolate to you ' ; and the sonnet of 1599, 'An evil spirit, your beauty haunts me still,' had its startlingly Shakespearean ring of sincerity. It might therefore be that Drayton kept, for long after her marriage, a regard, sometimes passionate, for Lady Hainsford. But the feeling, we may judge from other poems, finally weakened, or rose, into a friendship, which spoke often in terms of mere compliment, but lasted none the less. The ' Hymn to his Lady's Birthplace,' first published in 1627, though undated, bears the stamp of his later, nicer, and more ingenious handiwork ; it may well be as late as the age of Charles. The ' elegies ' ' On his Lady's not coming to Town,' and on her husband, are in the same spirit. There is no record of Drayton ever having married.^ I now return to his early writings. In 1594 the Contention of the Two Houses of York and Lancaster was acted. Daniel's 1 Gayton, Pleasant Notes on Don Quixote^ 1654, p. 150, says, indeed : ' Our nation also hath had its poets and they their wives. To pass the bards . . . My father Ben begat sons and daughters ; so did Spenser, Drayton, Shakspere, and more might be reckoned.' As Mr. BuUen, to whom this reference is due, remarks, Gayton is 'no very sure guide.' 72 MICHAEL DRAYTON History of the Civil Wars was entered in the same year, and bears traces of being written in rivalry with the play. Drayton, once more a zealous follower of Daniel, ac- complished also a long epic founded on the chronicles. Mortimeriados, published in 1596, was first written in the seven-line stanza of Chaucer's Troilus and Spenser's Hymns. No poem of Drayton's was more sedulously filed. In 1603 it appeared wholly remodelled as The Barons' Wars. The sub- stitution of compliments to Sir W. Aston for those to the Countess of Bedford has been noticed already. But, besides a mass of textual alterations, the measure of seven lines (abahhcc) is expanded into the ottava rima (ahabahcc) by the addition of a line after the fourth.^ The preface on the various stanzas available for heroic story, and their several powers and faults, is as full and sound a piece of metrical criticism as we find in English for generations. Of the seven-line stave : 1 For a valuable table of Drayton's metres see Fleay, Biog. Chron., i. 7-9, though it is going far to find in them a chronological test. AN ELIZABETHAN POET 73 The often harmony softened the verse more than the majesty of the subject would permit, unless they had all been Geminels, or couplets. Therefore (but not without fashioning the whole frame) I chose Ariosto's stanza, of all other the most complete and best proportioned, consisting of eight — six interwoven, and a couplet in base. The Quadrin [abab] doth never double, or to use a word of heraldry, never bringeth forth Gemells : the Quinzain [ababb], too soon. The Sestin [ababcc] hath twins in the base, but they detain not the music or the close (as musicians term it) long enough for an epic poem. The stanza of seven is touched before. This of eight both holds the tune clean through to the base of the coluran (which is the couplet, the foot, or bottom) and closeth not but with a full satisfaction to the ear for so long detention. Briefly, this sort of stanza hath in it majesty, perfection, and solidity, resembling the pillar which in architecture is called the Tuscan, whose shaft is of six diameters, and bases of two. The other reasons this place will not bear, but generally in my opinion all stanzas are but tyrants and tor- turers, when they make invention obey their number, which sometime would otherwise scantle itself. We would have given much for a dis- course of this kind from Spenser : but no- thing better could be said of the measures which all the poets had been exploring, in 74 MICHAEL DRAYTON their dream of finding one that should be perfect for the long poem, the heroic narra- tive, itself supreme, as they believed, above all other forms as a canvas for heroic char- acter. Of blank verse for such a purpose, and outside the drama, no one yet dreamed. Spenser's stanza and the couplet chiefly sur- vived in the struggle for life among the metres. We see Drayton haunted with the sense, which underlay the practice of a century later, that the true satisfaction to the ear must come in a rhymed couplet, but he felt that some prelude in the way of an interlinked stave of due and dignified length was wanted to give the couplet value. In his Poly-Olhion he tried the couplet, but the lines were too long. He speaks nobly of the Italian octave, and its ' majesty, perfec- tion, and solidity,' though not of its room for irony and caprice — its capacity for being as nobly modelled, and as swift of change, as a cloud. The Barons' Wars attains more dignity than its predecessor. Most of the classical tags and crude strokes disappear. But the writer has already left some of his youth behind him : he has AN ELIZABETHAN POET 75 passed from the land of Marlowe and Spenser^ into that of Daniel and the his- tories of Shakespeare : which indeed he must carefully have read.^ And he seems to feel that the staple of an historical poem should be grave, gnomic, perhaps a little dull ; and one of the few and fortunate remnants of his earlier freshness is visible in the final interview, full of perfume and misty colour, of luxury and invading bloodshed, between Mortimer and Isabel. Here Drayton once more turns to mural decoration, forcing his usually not too supple hand to Renaissance ^ He ouiits these Spenserian lines : Tiie cheerful morning clears her cloudy brows, The vapoury mists are all dispersed and spread ; Now sleepy time his lazy limbs doth rouse, And once beginneth to hold up his head ; Hope bloometh fair whose root was well near dead, The clue of sorrow to the end is run ; The bow appears to tell the flood is done. 2 See MorL, ed. Collier, p. 254 : 'As when we see the spring-begetting sun In heaven's black night-gown covered from the night.' In The Barons' TVars, 1603, not only is the night-gown [dressing-gown] omitted, but the lines are re- modelled with what is, to my ear, a reminiscence of Prince Henry's famous speech in Henry IV., i. ii. end (1598). There is also the allusion to Lucrece in the earlier edition of Matilda ; and for recollections of Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night's Dream, see Nymphidia. The parallels in the sonnets have been noted. 76 MICHAEL DRAYTON broiderers' work. Behind the tapestry of the room — The naked nymphs, some up and down descending, Small scattering flowers at one another flung, With nimble turns their limber bodies bending, Cropping the blooming branches lately sprung (Upon the briars their coloured mantles rending) Which on the rocks grew here and there among. Some comb the hair, some making garlands by As with delight might satisfy the eye. Drayton's Edward the Second, like Shake- speare's Clarence, had bad dreams : And still aff'righted in his fearful dreams With raging fiends and goblins that he meets, Of falling down from steep rocks into streams, Of tombs, of burials, and of winding sheets, Of wandering helpless in far foreign realms. Of strong temptation, by seducing sprites : Wherewith awak'd, and calling out for aid. His hollow voice doth make himself afraid. Such a verse, as so often with Drayton, shows the right kind of power ; but it is un- wrought, and is spoilt by his worst technical fault, want of clear construction, which hurts many a good poem of his making. Drayton does not tell a tale clearly, or make it move. He produces a number of set pictures, and moralises between the slides. And he AN ELIZABETHAN POET 77 can invoke, adjure, commemorate ; and he has energy and loftiness. But this is to anticipate; for by the time he wrote The Barons' Wars, he had long carried to their height his powers of lyrical monologue in the most popular of all his poems. Eng- land's Heroical Bpistles came out in 1597, but may have been circulated some years earlier.^ They were more sounding, more telling, better adjusted to his public than anything Drayton had written ; they fixed his popularity, and deserved to fix it. With their many editions, they were the Macaulay's Lays of that period, lacking power to last as a whole, sometimes un- deniably flashing into reality, ever fluent and adroit, and now and then splendid in their versification. Drayton, who ' professed himself a pupil ' of the poet of the Heroides, enlarged and reproduced his model, for a patriotic purpose, with variations. The characters, both heroine and companion hero, are drawn from the same field as the Legends and the Mirror and the 1 The Address to the Reader begins, 'Seeing these Epistles are now to the world made public' 78 MICHAEL DRAYTON History plays ; and of this whole school of verse the Epistles are certainly the fairest fruit. The long-drawn pathetic argument, with its opportunities for lyrical declamation, suited Drayton well ; and it was here that he made his most skilful and prophetic use of the couplet. In Endimion and Phoebe it had been Marlowesque ; it is here the equi- valent of Ovid's elegiac, and is used for a reasoned lament, with an epigram lurking in each pair of lines, which is complete in itself like the Latin hexameter and pentameter. Such a model as the Heroides can only have sharpened that isolation of the individual couplets from one another, which we mark with wonder in so early a writer as Dray- ton. Not Marlowe, nor Spenser save here and there, had gone so far in this practice, though we hear something like it in the early histories of Shakespeare, where they are rhymed. But in diction, as in cadence, we are ever reminded by these poems of Dray- ton, not so much of his own contemporaries, as of the stentorian but gallant senti- ment of Dryden ; — the Dryden, however, AN ELIZABETHAN POET 79 of the heroic plays, not the Dryden of The Medal The depth of woe with words we hardly sound ; Sorrow is so insensibly profound. The placing and cadence of the word insensibly, longer and louder than the words about it, are absolute Dryden : but the lines come from the Epistle of the Lady Jane Grey to Lord Gilford Dudley. Indeed a feature of the Epistles is the modernness of hundreds of their couplets. * Waller was smooth ' ; ^ but Drayton was smooth earlier ; and who does not hear, in such verse as the following, the overture to the rhetoric that was to rule a whole province of our poetry, from Tyrannic Love, and from the Elegy to an Unfortunate Lady, down to the last years of Crabbe ? And is one beauty thought so great a thing To mitigate the sorrows of a king ? ^ This is put in the eighteenth-century way, in reference to the Shepherd's Sirena, etc., by the unknown writer of the Historical Essay prefixed to the 1748 edition of Drayton. These poems ' fully refute the notion that the harmony of numbers in English poesy was unknown till Waller stole the secret from Fairfax.' 80 MICHAEL DRAYTON Barred of that choice the vulgar often prove, Have we than they less privilege in love ? Is it a king, the woful widow hears ? Is it a king dries up the orphan's tears ? Is it a king regards the client's cry ? Gives life by law to him condemned to die 1 In other places, where Drayton speaks of spring, youth, and the reappearance of flowers, he is more of his own time, and some of his Hnes might serve as a text for the new Tudor poetry itself, which had come up as sudden and cordial as the spring in Russia. Thy presence hath repaired in one day What many years and fortunes did decay, And made fresh beauties' fairest branches spring From wrinkled furrows of Time's ruining. Even as the hungry winter-starved earth. When she by nature labours towards her birth, Still as the day upon the dark world creeps, One blossom forth after another peeps, Till the small flower whose root is now unbound, Gets from the frosty prison of the ground, Spreading the leaves unto the powerful noon, Deck'd in fresh colours, smiles upon the sun. Not many Elizabethans besides Marlowe and Shakespeare write in this measure more easily or changefully. And the quality was noticed by admirers. 'The author is termed in Mil H\Ki. Drayton, aged 36. I''ror,i the Xatioiial Forty ait Gallciy. AN ELIZABETHAN POET 81 FitzgeofFrey's Drakey Golden-mouthed/ for the purity and preciousness of his phrase.' Meres, who thus speaks in his Palladis Tamia of 1598, is the fullest witness to Drayton's reputation. He names him in f the best of company as one ' by whom the English tongue is mightily enriched,' and praises him for his histories, epistles, lyrics, and love-poems. He is also the chief but by no means the only witness to his char- acter. 'As Aulus Persius Flaccus was reported among all writers to be of an honest disposition and upright conversation, so Michael Drayton, quern toties honoris causa nomino, among scholars, soldiers, poets, and all sorts of people, is held for a man of virtues and well-governed carriage, which is almost miraculous among good wits of this declining and corrupt time.' In the same year Barnfield, in his Lady Pecunia, names him beside Spenser, Daniel, and Shakespeare for his ' well- written tragedies ^ In that ungainly work, Guilpin's Shialetheia, 1598, it is stated : Drayton 's condemned of some for imitation, But others say, 'tis the best poets' fashion . . . Drayton's justly surnamed ' golden-mouth'd.' F 82 MICHAEL DRAYTON and sweet Epistles/ and for his * stately numbers.' ^ So Fuller says, long after : ' He was a pious poet, his conscience having always the command of his fancy, very temperate in his life, slow of speech, and inoffensive in company.' Equally well known is the testimony in the Return from Parnassus (1600), that he 'wants one true note of a poet of our times, and it is this : he cannot swagger it well at a tavern, or domineer at a hot-house ' (brothel). We also hear of what his letters and works confirm, his humanity and good nature. The young Charles Fitzgeofirey, in the Latin lines pre- ceding his AffanicB (1601), records that his master did not only not deride his efforts, but even condescended to polish them, limd sua : and, in the poem on Sir Francis Drake (1596), which is written on the model of the Legends, he speaks of ' golden-mouthed Dfayton musical' as a disciple of Sidney. Lastly, in the poetical commonplace book called England's Parnassus (1604), edited by R. Allot, Drayton's verses, especially the Epistles, are quoted, often wrong, but nearly two hundred times. Upon the publica- ^ Collier, p. xxxix. AN ELIZABETHAN POET 83 tion of these Epistles, he was probably at the height of his vogue, his luck, and his popularity. His * purity and preciousness of phrase ' was the flower of a severe life and a fortunate temper, not yet crossed with uncouth rhetorical rancour against society, or overtasked by the Poly-Olhion. The career of Drayton to the end of the reign was divided between the revision of his works and his novel industry of play- writing. He was a theatre hack, and often a partner with fourth-rate men. Plays were then written on the sand as much as a modern review or leader, and saved for print by happy chance. Often the titles only remain by an accident. In 1598, when he was most active, he is named by Meres as one of those who are ' best for tragedy.' An anonymous work, of the same year. Poems of Divers Humours, speaks of his ' well - written tragedies.' Of all the twenty pieces (ex- cluding separate parts) in which Drayton's name figures, only one remains in which he took a share, but the names tell us of his dramatic bent. He had exhausted the chances of the chronicle poem, and to the chronicle drama, which had largely beaten 84 MICHAEL DRAYTON it out of the field under the leading of Marlowe and Shakespeare, he turned by instinct. His earlier legends boded ill for his dramatic power, but we can hardly judge how far he possessed any. He wrought almost always in partnership, and we should expect him to contribute the tirades, mono- logues, and sententious parts rather than the living scenes. Henry I., Earl Godtvin, Piers of Exton, Richard Cordelions Funeral, Piers of Winchester, The Civil Wars in France (in three parts), William Long sword, Sir John Oldcastle, Owen Tudor, and the Rising of Cardinal Wolsey, were all ' histories ' ; that is, they handled some reign or episode of an English reign later than the Norman Con- quest. In the first six of these, and in four other pieces, Drayton took his share during the years 1598. The rest, and three other pieces to which his name is attached, are sprinkled over the years 1599 to (May) 1602. The table ^ will show that during the first two 1 The list of titles may be summarised from Henslowe ; and see Fleay, Biog. Chron., I 157. The fire coadjutors are denoted by initials ; Dekker by D. ; Munday by M. ; Wilson by W. ; Middleton and Webster by name. 1597, December. Mother Redcap, M. 1598. Famous Wars of Henry I. and the Prince of Wales, AN ELIZABETHAN POET 85 years and a half he was partner of Chettle, Dekker, Hathway, Munday, and Wilson, and once of one Smith ; but in the later period the very different names of Middleton and Webster are also associated with his. Of the earlier group, only Dekker was a poet worthy to be his companion, and the play- writing of Dekker is often scrapwork. The main witness for this dreary episode is Henslowe, in whose diary are set down the names of the plays, the authors, and the sums ' paid in full,' paid in parts, ' or lent in earnest ' of the work not yet finished or not delivered. Drayton, about Christmas 1597, seems to have drifted among the needy syndicates that were dependent upon C. D. Earl of Godwin and his three sons, two parts, C. D. W. Piers of Exton, same. Black Batman of the North, part i.,same. Richard Cordeliori's Funeral, C. M. W. The Madman's Morris, J). W. Hannibal and Hermes, Worse Feared than Hurt, perhaps two plays, D. W. Piers of Winchester, D. W. Chance Medley, M. D. W. Civil Wars in France, three parts, D. Connan (corrected by Fleay Corin, cf. Poly-Olbion, Song I.), Prince of Cornwall, D. 1599. William Longsword, receipt signed by Drayton, no partner named. Sir John Oldcastle, two parts, first part extant, M. H. W. 1600. Owen Tudor, H. M. W. June 3rd, Fair Constance of Rome, part 1., D. H. M. 1601, Oct. 10. Rising of Cardinal Wolsey, C. M., Smith. 1602, May 29. Ccesar's Fall, M., Webster, Middleton, and others. Two Harp[i]es, D. M., Webster, Middleton. 86 MICHAEL DRAYTON c o •4-> "^ a Ci l-H ^ o r — 1 c3 CO r~~-^ ^ 1-5 .2 VT^^ £ © »+H *s .&* r^ o in! O -1-3 -5 ft ^ •r-» n :si J-l 5^ a 02 •5 i5 <-)-i 'oG — , o c CO Go i» o o !^ k:] &^ ^ 03 % ^ ^ "^ a> ® CO r*^ 1 ^ 2 ^ CJ ^ » O p- o g ^ o (M s o ^ ^ fi^ ^ ^ ,£3 1 1 AN ELIZABETHAN POET 87 Henslowe. Each play or part of a play usually cost Henslowe about £6, and it has been reckoned that Drayton had from first to last about £52 from this source. About £40 of this came in his year of hardest piecework, 1598. Taking the buying power of money to be seven times what it is at present, this would give a total of £300, of which £280 came in 1598. It was a barren chapter, both materially and for Drayton's fame. Half a century later he was for- gotten as a playwright. In The Great Assizes holden at Parnassus, 1645, he is coupled with Sandys and Sylvester, and discriminated from Beaumont and others, as a poet who did not write dramas. He toiled in haste with others to satisfy the vogue for chronicle plays while it lasted. Kepeatedly moneys are entered to his sole name, or to his name in conjunction with one or two more, as ' lent in earnest ' : once the loan was as little as ten shillings. The only signature of his that is known to survive, and which is given opposite in facsimile, shows him receiving an advance on the one play he is known to have written unaided, 88 MICHAEL DRAYTON Longsivord} Once he shared in a nameless ' comedy of the court ' ; ' Mr Drayton hath given his word for the work to be done within one fortnight ' is a significant entry, and may imply that he was a kind of leader among his group ; indeed, he often had the largest share, and doubtless earned it, of the pittance that was the market-price. It is a sorry record, which it is idle to fill out by fine conjecture. Once the heart of Henslowe was glad, and he presented ten shillings — it is entered * as a gift ' — for division amongst four authors, Munday, Hathway, Wilson, and Drayton. This was for the successful part of Sir John Oldcastle, which is preserved. Drayton received nearly half of the total earnings for the two parts of this play, and we may assume the sum answered to his share in the composition. The first part was probably played in the first week of November, 1599. An edition was entered August 11, 1600, * He did not also write a play Longheard, as Collier sug- gests (Henslowe's Diary, 1845, p. 142). Mr. Stretton, the librarian at Dulwich, wrote me that Malone was correct in reading this entry Longsword ; the name in the other entry of our facsimile (see ib., p. 95). AN ELIZABETHAN POET 89 and published that year, giving no author's name, but stating that the play was printed ' as it hath been lately acted ' by the Admiral's Servants. Either earlier or later in that year came another issue, differing by the addition of the impudent words, 'Written by William Shakespeare.' We must not charge Drayton with this piratical proceeding. In fact the play, as Mr Wynd- ham has pointed out, was a curious counter- blast, written part in theatrical rivalry, part in Protestant resentment, to Shakespeare's Henry IV.,^ the two parts of which had pros- pered during the years 1598-9. Falstaff, and Hotspur in part, had made their fortune. The First Fart had already run through two editions, having been first entered 25th February 1598. It is well known that the name of Falstaff was substituted for the original one of the Lollard victim of Henry v., Sir John Oldcastle, whom Shakespeare may have inadvertently taken over from the old play, the Famous Histories of Henry V. The printed text retains a jest founded on this name, when the Prince calls Falstaff ^ Poems of Shakespeare, pp. 1, li. 90 MICHAEL DRAYTON ^ my old lad of the castle/ and it also retains the word Old. in a stage direction. The descendants of Oldcastle had protested, and Shakespeare proceeded to borrow the name of a different person, Sir John Fastolfe. But in 1600 the feeling still smouldered against his original mistake, and it broke out in the extant play of which Drayton was part- author. This, as Mr. Wyndham says, was written 'specifically in reply to Shakespeare's abuse of Oldcastle's name ' : It is no pampered glutton we present, Nor aged Counsellor to youthful sin ; But one, whose virtue shone above the rest, A valiant martyr and a virtuous Peer. . . . Let fair truth be grac'd. Since forg'd invention former time defac'd. Twelve days later (August 23rd) the Second Part of King Henry IV. was entered, and in the epilogue of the printed quarto, after the advice, which was a natural finale, to ' kneel to the queen,' came an addition containing the sentences where ' our humble author ' promises to continue the story, and to cause Falstaff to ' die of a sweat ' ; 'for Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the AN ELIZABETHAN POET 01 man.' This addition may have been made when the new name finally supplanted the old one. And the change may have been quickened by the appearances of Oldcastle at the rival house. The play is a flat one ; full of echoes and allusions to the First Part of Henry IV., with an obvious attempt to make an impartial hero of Henry V., as Shakespeare was promising to do. Cobham is glorified in a way that Holinshed, and still more modern history, does not authorise, as a pattern of loyalty. The conspiracy of Scroope and Grey is detected and disclosed by him rather meanly, and is told at length. Perhaps this was why Shake- speare discharges the same story so abruptly at us in Henry V., where the plot is full-blown and already discovered, and where nothing is said of its inception, which was still so familiar on the rival stage. Oldcastle seems to have kept a certain market value, for in 1626 the widow of the printer Pavier trans- ferred the copyright of it together with that of Henry V.^ ^ I am indebted for some points to an article, Michael Drayton as a Dramatist^ by Dr. Lemuel Whitaker, in the 92 MICHAEL DRAYTON Publications of the Modern Language Association of America^ vol. xviii. No. 3. Dr. Whitaker disputes some views of Mr. Fleay, and also some remarks in my former edition of this work : not, however, without ascribing to me far more agree- ment with Mr. Fleay than was the case. His main doubt, whether Drayton was really poor and struggling during this period, his own analysis of Henslowe's entries seems to set at rest, but unfavourably. It was not my opinion that Drayton's 'dramatic career was consequent upon the failure of his patron's promises,' for I argued that the evidence for his rupture with the Eussells was not valid. It is, however, un- likely that he would have served Henslowe without necessity. Dr. Whitaker saddles me with sundry other references, and I do not see how the ' whole record presents a picture of a talented, hard-working, and prosperous man.' Mr. Fleay says : 'In the four years, 1599-1603, during which Drayton continued to write for the stage, he only assisted in producing six plays for Henslowe. It seems probable that during this time he must have been writing also for another company ; he had to live, and had lost his patronage from the Bedford family, and certainly produced nothing for the press. Is there any trace left of what he produced for the theatre ? ' {Biog. Chron., i. 151.) Mr. Fleay states the problem clearly, but his answer is unconvincing. He suggests that Drayton assisted in writing for Shakespeare's company at the Globe, and reasons thus : Oldcastle was, in some of the first issues, published as by Shakespeare ; Drayton was one of its four authors. The Life and Death of Cromwell, published 1602, and The London Prodigal, 1605, were also printed as by Shakespeare. The Merry Devil of Edmonton was traditionally given to Shake- speare, and resembles parts of Oldcastle in style. Drayton must have done something from 1599-1602 besides his work for Henslowe. All this is true, but it makes very poor evi- dence for Drayton's authorship of any but the plays named by Henslowe. The fact that he was one oi four authors of Old- castle makes every inference highly doubtful. The passage quoted (Biog. Chron., i. 161) from Robert of Normandy, 'So many years,' etc., in comparison with 3 Henry VI., ii, v. 31- 40, merely shows imitation by Drayton, for which cf. our AN ELIZABETHAN POET 93 quotations, p. 75. The list, on the contrary, in Biog. Chron., p. 142, throws great light on the whole movement of what may be called historical heUes lettres, and claims study. Mr. Fleay's unfounded assumption throughout his previous Life of Shaksjjere, that Drayton wrote the Merry Devil of Edmonton, rests partly on the assertion of Coxeter that he had once seen an old MS. in which the work is said to be Drayton's, and partly on the resemblance in some comic scenes between this play and Oldcastle. Drayton's share in this is unknowable. But comedy was probably not his gift. CHAPTER III SATIRES, ODES, AND ' POLY-OLBION Drayton did not write for the theatre after the accession of James, but came back for good to his proper work. Meres tells us in 1598 that * Michael Drayton is now penning in English verse a poem called Poly-Olhion ' : and he can have spared little enough time to write or travel or buy the books requisite for what he calls his ' strange Herculean toil.' But by 1603 he had found a new patron in an old friend, Walter Aston of Tixall in Staffordshire, whose 'generous and noble disposition ' he had praised six years earlier. The tie was now to be closer ; for Aston, on being invested by James with the Knight- hood of the Bath, made Drayton one of his ' esquires,' ^ a style which henceforth appears on his title-pages. ^ Douglas, Peerage of Scotland, i. 147. As was said before, there is no record in the College of Heralds of any grant of 94 SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 95 Between 1602 and 1607 no less than five works ^ are dedicated to Sir Walter Aston ; and in the twelfth song of Poly-Olhion, 1612 he speaks of Tixall, ' which oft the Muse hath found her safe and sweet retreat.' The pre- face to the poem is yet plainer, and says, memorably enough : ' Whatever is hercrn that tastes of a free spirit I thankfully con- fess it to proceed from the continual bounty of my truly noble friend Sir Walter Aston ; which hath given me the best of those hours whose leisure hath effected this which I now publish.' But Aston had to console his friend for the loss of richer hopes, incurred by joining too soon in the stampede for front places which attended the advent of the literary arms to the poet. There is a drawiog in a book of grants of arms, Harl. MS. 6140, fol. 45 back : ' On a field azure, gutty d'eau, a winged horse argent, with the crest on the sun in his glory or a cap of Mercury vert, winged argent.' Above is written ' Michaell Drayton of Warwickshire Esq.' Authori- tative or not, this is a pleasant and apt symbol of Drayton's muse. 1 See Bibliography. Collier notes that two of these last are addressed ' to the deserving memory of my esteemed patron,' who lived till 1639 ; and suspects some angry irony inspired by a suspension of funds. But the words only promise fame to Aston. Compare Tixall Poetry^ edited by A. Clifford, Edinb. 1813, appendix. / 96 MICHAEL DRAYTON king. After ' the quiet end of that long- living queen/ Drayton, who had not, so far as we know, had a farthing from her or a word of encouragement, omitted to cry La reine est morte, and confined his lament almost to a single line of verse. But at such times there is supposed to be a threnody, and also a fair interval before the compli- ments begin to the living. According to Chettle, his Gratulamy Poem (1603), and his Pcean Triumphal, made for the entry into London, were ignored for this reason. Think, 'twas a fault to have thy verses seen Praising the king, ere they had mourned the queen. At the reception of his eulogies (which may be sufficiently described by a line in one of them, ' Panting for breath flies our elaborate song ') Drayton was deeply hurt. ' I in- stantly saw all my long-nourished hopes buried alive before my face. ' Nearly a quarter of a century later, in the Epistle to George Sandys (1627), he confirms Chettle's explana- tion of his failure. It was my fault before all other men To suffer shipwreck by my fonvard jjcn When King James entered. . . . / SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 97 When cowardice had tied up every tongue, And all stood silent, yet for him I sung ; And when before by danger I was dar'd, I kick'd her from me, nor a jot I spar'd ; Yet had not my clear spirit in fortune's scorn Me above earth and my afflictions borne. He, next my God on whom I built my trust. Had left me trodden lower than the dust. Thus, while Jonson and Daniel and so many others were accepted, he was put aside. The poem called The Owl (1604) he asserts in its preface ^ to have been written before this event ; but it is full of strain and obscure allegory, behind which we seem to divine a rage ineffectually smouldering. Mother HuhhardJs Tale and the Parliament of Birds are in some measure his models. The Eagle is the monarch ; the Owl, sharp- sighted in the darkness, is the satiric observer of the evils of court and society, and is therefore spurned and ignored. Attacked by various ohscence volucres, she pleads her case to the Eagle in a long tirade 1 'A year is almost past since this small poem was lastly finished ; at which time it gave place by my enforcement, undertaking then in the general joy ... to write a poem gratulatory.' In Beaumont and Fletcher, The Scornful Lady, ii. 2, there is an allusion to the poem, as hard for a lover to ' expound,' and also to the Heroical Epistles. G 98 MICHAEL DRAYTON against the lust and jobbing of courts. The poet himself may or may not be figured by the ragged and wretched Crane, who laments : Weary at length, and trusting to my worth, I took my flight into the happy North ; Where, nobly bred as I was well allied, I hoped to have my fortune there supplied ; But, there arrived, disgrace was all my gain. . . . Other had got for which I long did serve. Still fed with words, while I with wants did sterve. This is the only evidence for the figment, which has passed into some biographies, and seems to be first named and refuted by Oldys (1750), that Drayton was introduced by Aston to James, and sent to Scotland on some unsuccessful public mission. No fresh light has been cast on the allusion, except that he did actually go northwards before 1606 : one of the best of his odes being written from the Peak, and praising ' Buxton's delicious baths.' In 1605 Drayton published the first anthology of all his hitherto published poetry that seemed worth reclaiming. To atone for his facility, he had the sound habit of thrusting much hastily begotten verse SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 99 into silence. Little of any worth but Endimion and Phoebe was sacrificed. Our Bibliography (§ xv. 1) will show what this volume contained, and what reprints of it were speedily called for. His wholly new lyrics he included in a separate book, the Poemes Lyrick and Pastorall; Odes and Eglogs, 1606. Of the revised 'Eglogs' something has been said ; but nothing he wrote is more his own than the Odes. His lyric gift had come late, he was forty-three ; but it grew finer and lighter as he lived, for at the age of fifty-six, in the volume of 1619, he added seven more odes, including the amended version of the Ballad of Agincourt. After the Heroical Epistles, the Odes are the first poems in which Drayton forbore to lean upon an English model, and they are, of their species, the earliest in our tongue. Some of them are among the best odes we have. If our pleasure is checked by a rude inversion and an obscure build of sentence, those are the obstacles of any poet who uses measures of four or six syllables. Short is the roll of our English masters of the curt, heroic, and harping metres. Cowper 100 MICHAEL DRAYTON and Campbell and Tennyson have few fit predecessors except Drayton. The ode was a classical, and therefore a E-enaissance form : it had been lifted by Ronsard and his companions into sonority and splendour. Drayton's preface of 1606 warns us that he .desires to follow 'the inimitable Pindarus,' as well as the odes of Anacreon, ' the very delicacies of the Grecian Erato, which Muse seemed to have been the minion of that Teian old man which composed them.' His own odes are to be mixed, the ' arguments being amorous, moral, or what else the muse pleaseth.' He left it, however, to Ben Jonson to initiate the regular or irregular Pindaric ode. Horace and the pseudo-Anac- reon are Drayton's nearest models. Once he lapses into ' Skelton's rhyme.' But he was chiefly haunted by the loud and sharp accompaniment of the Irish or British harp ; and its twangle, its decisive note, passed into the loudest of his verses : And why not I, as he That 's greatest, if as free, In sundry strains that strive (Since there so many be) Th' old lyric kind revive 1 SATIRES, ODES"/ ETC lOl I will, yea, and I may : Who shall oppose my way ? For what is he alone, That of himself can say He 's heir of Helicon 1 Apollo and the Nine Forbid no man their shrine That Cometh with hands pure ; Else they be so divine, They will not him endure. There is a struggling melody in all this, and in other cases it is achieved : in the ode To the New Year, in that To the Virginian Voyage, in his Ballad of Agincourt. In the first of these there is one stanza that makes us think of the sure and silken web of Mr. Swinburne's falling rhymes. It might have come out of the Poems and Ballads of the year 1866 : Give her th' Eoan brightness Wing'd with that subtle lightness That doth transpierce the air : The roses of the morning The rising heaven adorning To mesh with flames of hair. Drayton speaks of his ' ode, or, if thou wilt, ballad ' ; but the cadence of his pieces is as far from the march of the nobler folk-ballad, 102 MIGKAEL DRAYTON as it is from the slouch of the inferior. Often it has the true music, as of the harp speeding a vessel that is launched with colours flying to win some new continent of odorous tropic fruits and illimitable gold. The Virginian Voyage has some wonderful words, sassafras, Hachluit, that make the fortune of their rhymes, and the relief is heightened by the subtle — not really prosaic — soberness of their epithets: indus- trious Hackluit, tiseful sassafras, like words almost in the ordinary pitch interjected in a chant. This ode runs more easily than the others in spite of the lacework of its rhymes : You brave heroic minds, Worthy your country's name, That honour still pursue, Go, and subdue, Whilst loitering hinds Lurk here at home for shame. The oars plash to the loud and hopeful thrumming of the player, as he faces out- ward to where beyond the Pillars a far world awaits him, one day to be populous with poets and heroes, the descendants of the high-hearted voyagers. In the odes of SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 103 love or compliment we are in a later day, far from Sidneian flights, nearer the dexterous and delicate that we associate with the verse of Carew or Suckling. In 1619, when most of these pieces were in- serted, the strain is lessened, and there is something like gaiety, as in the ode His Rival, or the lovely canzonet To his coy Love. Then also came The Heart, which is one of Drayton's few dealings in metaphysical fancy ; is there one heart or two ? and if but one, where is it ? Then also the poem To his Valentine, which Donne might have written on a day when all his demons except the rarest were in attendance. But lo, in happy hour, The place wherein she lies, In yonder climbing tower, Gilt by the glimmering rise : Jove, that in a shower, As once that thund'rer did, When he in drops lay hid, That I could her surprise. If this was written, as it was published, after the age of fifty, few poets are so late susceptible to so alien a genius. The mark of the best metaphysical verse of that period 104 MICHAEL DRAYTON is the irregular and inconstant feeling of shock, which does not amount to jar or dis- cord, but wins the imagination over by the sense of beauty, the poet bringing out his remote image suddenly, from his pocket, as a sailor might his sea-borne occidental treasure. But this was in 1619 ; in 1606 the style is still Elizabethan. It was not many years since the great theatrical suc- cess of Henry V. ; and the most famous of Drayton's odes may be taken as a lyrical epilogue, or rather intermezzo, by Shake- speare's countryman. It has been so arranged by Mr. Henley in his Lyra Heroica, Usually known as the Ballad of Agincourt, it was first entitled ' To my Friends the Camber-Britons and their Harp.' The old popular ditty, Agioicourt, Agincourt, was in the writer's ears. He liked his poem, if we may judge by his nice and numerous improvements. The earlier version suffers from ungainliness or elliptical grammar ; a few remaining traces of them in the later one are the only interruption to its felicity. There is also a tendency to multiply the spondees, the better to hear SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 105 the thud of the marching army — left, right. A few lines can show the change. (1) 1606 ' 1619 Fair stood the wind for Fair stood the wind for France France When we our sails advance When we our sails advance And now to prove our Nw now to prove our chance chance Longer not tarry : Longer will tarry : But j9ii/ unto the main But putting to the main At Kaux the mouth of At Kaux the mouth of Seine Seine With all his warlike train With all his martial train Landed King Harry. Landed King Harry. (2) And now preparing were Lord, how hot they were Fm- the false Frenchmen. On the false Frenchmen. ^hen now that noble king This, while our noble king His broadsword brandish- His broadsword brandish- ing iug Into the host did fling Down the French host did As to o'erwhelm it. As to o'erwhelm it. This poem, the fine flower of old patriot lyric, shows a happier and more sensitive use of proper names than the play of Henry V. Shakespeare, in his list of those who fell at Agincourt, uses names for purely memorial reasons, copying Holinshed like an inscrip- / 106 MICHAEL DRAYTON tioii ; and ' Sir E,ichard Ketley, Davy Gam, esquire/ is the worst line in his works. * Ferrers and Fanhope ' in the ballad have a different value to the ear. After 1606 Drayton was almost silent for six years, only producing the last and flattest of his Legends, that of The Great Cromwell, Earl of Essex. He was labouring at Poly-Olhion, but how much he wandered over England in order to write it is un- certain. He was enabled to keep to his task not only by Aston's bounty, but by assistance from high quarters. The first instalment of the poem (1612) is offered to the prince who within a year was to be cut off. Drayton writes to Henry in a strain of proud gratitude, of a man escaping from the sickness of discouragement : ' My soul, which hath seen the extremity of Time and Fortune, cannot yet despair. The influence of so glorious and fortunate a star may also reflect upon me : which hath power to give me new life, or leave me to die more willingly and contented. My poem is genuine, and first in this kind. It cannot want envy: for, even in the birth, it already finds that. Your gracious accept- ance, mighty prince, will lessen it.' 10 V '^ i*i t ^i ■iij..^.' ^'i^i{i<''' U^anvici VI fui.fr m(^ri%, f^- ■i/ortyait in iltc rociiis ()/ 1619. SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 107 By the dedication of 1622 it appears that Charles I. had continued the bounty of Prince Henry, which ' gave me much en- couragement to go on with this second part.' What obstacles he met with in publishing the whole poem, will be seen in his letters to William Drummond. But meanwhile the gift of Henry was more than timely. To a man of Drayton's temper, sensitive to the manner of a gift, and justly taking it more as a pension for merit than as alms, Henry's usage, ever considerate to poets, must have counted for more than the money fee. But this annuity of £10, whenever it was begun, together with the help of Aston, made him more independent of the stage. It was continued after Henry's death, though it does not appear for how long.^ In 1613 we see Drayton's features. He ^ P. Cunningham, Accounts of Bevels, p. xvii. Among 'Anuyties and Pencons' is noted by Sir D. Murray 'Mr. Drayton a poett for one yeare x^V The heads of the House- hold, after the Prince's death in 1612, recommended to the Chancellor of the Exchequer persons ' whoe by the co- maundement of the late prince w^'^out anie graunte in wrytinge were allowed yerely somes by way of Anuyties or Pencons out of the privie purse of the said late prince : viz. Joshua Silvester a poett xx^'. Mr. Drayton a poett x^*, etc' (p. xviii.). 108 MICHAEL DRAYTON was now fifty ; and his portrait, engraved by Hole, is in the volume of 1605. It shows the * swarth and melancholy face ' of which he speaks himself.^ A harassed, half-sub- merged but unbeaten doggedness, a mal- content energy, a temper with which life has gone hard, speak from its lines. The picture in the National Portrait Gallery, dated 1598, of less sure date and origin, is more youthful and buoyant ; it figures the hopeful Eliza- bethan poet, with laurels still fresh. It formerly belonged to Lady Mary Thompson, of Sheriff Sutton Park in Yorkshire, a daughter of the fifth Earl Fitzwilliam. The Dulwich portrait was taken fifteen years later, being dated 1628, when he was sixty -three ; it is mellower, and has more of prosperous dignity. The face in both is wide, the forehead well modelled, crowned with laurel ^ in the engraving. The Abbey bust is vacant of expression. 1 Legend of Robert, 1596, stanza ix. '^ The Dulwich picture, dated 1628, and marked cet. 65. was given by Cartwright the actor ; the artist is unknown. A reproduction may be seen as our frontispiece. Oldys, Biog. Brit, 1750, names some other pictures, which are lost : one, ' a delicate portrait of him in miniature,' said to have been painted by Peter Oliver. SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 109 The first eighteen Songs of the Poly- Olhion appeared in 1612: the other twelve were not out till 1622, though they were finished before 1619/ The great poem was brought to the birth with as much ceremony as an heir- apparent. Only the stately reprint by the Spenser Society can do full justice to the frontispiece with its attendant verses, representing Albion with the symbols of power and plenty, framed in an archway whose background is the sail-clad ocean : and on the pillars beside her are her princes, from Brutus to Csesar, and Caesar to the Normans. The title-page consists of one hundred words. There are more verses, besides the prose dedication, opposite the noble full-length engraving by Hole of Prince Henry, who stands with his lance in rest. There is a ' table ' of the chief passages : epistles by the author of the poem *to the general reader,' and ' to my friends, the Cambro-Britons ' ; and another from the author of the * illustrations,' John Selden, whose notes bristle after each of the ^ See p. 124, second letter to Drummond. no MICHAEL DRAYTON first eighteen Songs. It is plain in what temper the poem was written. Into^Dray- ton^ English as he was, had sunk the Ilenais- sance feeling of the wreck and destruction accomjpjished„.bj JTime upon beauty, and power ,_aiid-Jiiihla_jrisiHe_.inon^ a ,n d %^^JJ. 9l^l^^^^^' From the Triumphs of Petrarch down to the Ruins of Du Bellay and Spenser, that sense of the mingled loss and salvage from antiquity, itself so newly rediscovered, had inspired many a lament oyer the passing of oldand splendid things; and sometimes over newer potentates_^nd lordly families, which_ had. gone, they -also, the way of the others. The same spirit had T)een carried into English history and legend by the school of Sackville, which Drayton had already followed. He now turns, in the wake of Camden, to the huge task of collecting the memories and sagas of Great Britain. He will fight with Time to save L, Antiquity, which men are disregarding: ^ and it is his affair, by 'world-outwearing j^ rhymes,' to stay the oblivion that endangers ^J^ the 'delicacies, delights and rarities' of k ws England and Wales. *^' I .-t -X ^ '/X/yi' SATIRES, ODES, ETC. Ill O Time, what earthly thing with thee itself can trust, When thou in thine own course art to thyself unjust 1 Dost thou contract with Death, and to oblivion give Thy glories, after them yet shamefully dar'st live 1 (Song 21.) Again : So, when injurious Time such monuments doth lose (As, what so great a work by Time that is not wrackt "?), We utterly forgo that memorable act : But, when we lay it up within the minds of men. They leave it their next age ; that leaves it hers again. (Song 10.) Alas ! the great poem, like an over- freighted galleon, has foundered. It has become an antiquity underseas, and is left to the divers, the antiquaries and antho- logists, who bring up fragments for the glass-cases of museums. Drayton did not invent his geographical scheme, nor was he the first to watch the natural scenery and monuments of England in anxiety for their preservation. It has been thought that the Itinerary of Leland offered him his plan, but there is little in those arid entries that could serve him. Nor could he with Leland say that ' there is almost neither cape nor bay, haven, creek, or pier, river or confluence of rivers, 112 MICHAEL DRAYTON breaches, washes, lakes, meres, fenny waters, mountains, valleys, moors, heaths, forests, woods, cities, boroughs, castles, principal manor places, monasteries, colleges, but I have seen them, and in so doing noted a whole world of things very memorable/ Drayton shows no signs of having travelled thus; perhaps he was too light of pocket. Warwickshire, Staffordshire, Gloucestershire, Kent, and London, these places and more he knew himself : but derives much of the animating spirit of his poem, and his actual route, from Camden s Britannia. ' I would restore Antiquity to Britain, and Britain to his Antiquity. Who is so skilful, that, struggling with Time in the foggy dark sea of Antiquity, may not run upon rocks ? ' The Latin original of this passage, here cited from the noble translation (1616) of Philemon Holland, was printed in 1586, long before Drayton had begun. The traditional opening in praise of the tempered climate of England is taken from Camden, whose journey ' The Muse ' of Poly-Olhion painfully follows for several of the Songs, beginning with Cornwall, and SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 113 working through ' Devon, Dorset, Hamp, Wilt, Somerset.' After this she pursues the main river-systems, and draws now much and now little from Britannia, whilst in Wales she discovers, from her book, many such curiosities as the one-eyed fish in the Snowdon tarns. But the greater part of the Songs of Wales are concerned with the chronicle or the personifications, both of which are foreign to Camden. Then comes the most unborrowed portion of the poem, from the tenth Song to the eighteenth, as the way lies from Cheshire to the Western midlands towards London, on the upward road. The Cambridge dikes, the Lincoln fens, the Derbyshire mines, and the journey through Yorks, are described chiefly from the book ; but the close of the Poly-Olbion, where the Muse stumbles to her rest among the hills of Westmorland, is from some other authority. Drayton has no constant poetical vision for the face of nature, and it is often un- certain if he saw what he writes of, or is adapting it from a book. The list of the plants of his own shire, Warwick, might H 114 MICHAEL DRAYTON have come from a herbal, with its receipts for sauces and purges. In observing, his manner is likely to be hard and docu- mentary ; spirited without illumination. Shakespeare's wrongly praised specification of the horse in Venus and Adonis is near to the habitual manner of his countryman ; but Drayton never came to hear the tunable bay of the Spartan hounds of Theseus, or even the Dauphin's boast over his charger on the eve of Agincourt. And, much as he uses Camden, he often misses his vividness. Camden, crossing the Wharfe upon his cob, stumbles on the slippery stones, and adds : 'he runneth with a swift speedy stream, making a great noise as he goeth, as if he were froward, turbid, and angry ; and is made more full and testy with the number of stones lying in his channel' : and this gives the essential raging life of the swollen river better than Poly-Olbion with all its personifying. But the glitter of a crowded, civilised river suited Drayton better. His view of London from the water is full of change and motion. He does not allow himself to wait SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 115 long; and thus he can paint instead of merely counting. The passage well shows the pitch oi PoJy-Olhion in its braver mood. Drayton is parenthetical, he never seems to be out of sight either of prose or of poetry, and his curious middle style soon pleases. But now this mighty Flood, upon his voyage prest (That found how, with his strength, his beauties still increas'd From where brave Windsor stood in tiptoe to behold The fair and goodly Thames, so far as ere he could, With kingly houses crowned, of more than earthly pride, Upon his either banks, as he along doth glide) With wonderful delight, doth his long course pursue, Where Otlands, Hampton Court, and Richmond he doth view. Then Westminster the next great Thames doth enter- tain : That vaunts her palace large, and her most sumptuous fane : The land's tribunal seat, that challengeth for hers, The crowning of our kin^-: their famous sepulchres. Then goes he on along by that most beauteous Strand, Expressing both the wealth and bravery of the land (So many sumptuous bowers, within so little space, The all-beholding Sun scarce sees in all his race). And on by London leads, which like a crescent lies. Whose windows seem to mock the star-befreckled Besides her rising spires so thick themselves that shov/- As do the bristling reeds within his banks that grow : 116 MICHAEL DRAYTON There sees his crowded wharfs, and people-pestered shores, His bosom over-spread with shoals of labouring oars : With that most costly bridge, that doth him most renown, With which he clearly puts all other rivers down. The river then pronounces a catalogue of the kings and queens since the Norman con- quest. Personification and legend beguile the long journey of the poet. Matter is inwrought from Geoffrey of Monmouth, Matthew of Paris, Higden, Holinshed, and other annalists. There are dreary rolls of sovereigns and battles : the legends, indeed, furnish better poetry than the chronicles. There is no line between legend and fact; both are matter for the Muse, both have to be saved from forgetfulness. There is not much humour ; but one of the few glimpses of it is to be found in Selden's erudite notes, when he applies a gentle and sympathetic cautery to the figment that the English monarchy is descended from Brutus the Trojan. For this belief the poet pleaded not without generous heat. Were such tales, forsooth, spurious because Julius Caesar had known nothing of them ? Drayton is at SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 117 his best when he works up this kind of legend, or history with a film of legend. The songs of Wales ring of Merlin, the Cornish of Corineus ; who suggests at once a picture of the local style of wrestling. The Danes recall the tale of Guy of Warwick, which is excellently told. In Sherwood there are Robin Hood and his men, of whom Drayton knew in the best of the English ballads. All these things were part of the native record, not different in essence from the tale of our naval heroes or of the English saints. It is not clear if Drayton took his trick of personifying river and hill from the map- makers, whose moonstruck tutelar nymphs and Pans agreeably answer to his text. It is needless to suppose this, for the literary fancy wrought up, for instance, by Geoffrey of Monmouth had long peopled Thames or Severn with mythic figures. The poet of Comus took leave to reassociate the Severn- goddess, Sabrina, with her legendary scene. Drayton doggedly works in the same device through thirty chapters. To hill and stream he applies the same half-humanising, half- 118 MICHAEL DRAYTON abstracting process, made by Spenser delight- ful in variety, but becoming a little worn in the hands of the masque-makers and their stage artists. Once more Spenser asserts his influence : the meeting of Thames and Isis in the fifteenth Song oi Poly-Olhion is a lavish imitation of the marriage of the Thames and Medway in the Faerie Queene. The address of the North Wind to the vale of Cluyd (Song 10) has a gorgeous tasteless- ness that is delightful. It was indeed hard deliberately to go back to this more primi- tive state of thought, which was once, long ago, in the ' angel infancy ' of the world's imagination, taken seriously. In the old age of a literary period the desire of great things outlives the perform- ance. Hence arise works like the Poly- Olhion and The Purple Island. In the reign of James the drama came to its full power, but outside the drama the strength of our poetry was lyrical. Eoly -Olhion owes i^s incej)tion to the spirit. q£ the- reign, before, but_was carried out when that inspiration was fading down.. It is written in the alex- andrine, or rhyming couplet of twelve SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 119 syllables, with a uniform break in the midst. Drayton, it is likely, brings out of this lumbering measure most of the effects of which it is capable under such terms. It is often apt for long bravura passages, it has a kind of heavy dignity, like a Lord Mayor's coach. To the huge poem as a whole — often bare and dry, never mean — if we treat it as an antique itself, the lines well apply, which show both Drayton's tender zeal for what is old, and his natural spaciousness of style : Even in the aged'st face, where beauty once did dwell, And nature in the least but seemed to excel, Time cannot make such waste, but something will appear, To show some little tract of delicacy there. CHAPTER lY THE RENEWAL OF DRAYTON ! LATER WORKS The Poly-Olhion was hard to publish, and the first instalment fell flat. ' Some of the stationers, that had the selling of the first part of this poem, because it went not so fast away in the sale as some of their beastly and abominable trash . . . have either despitefully left out, or at least care- lessly neglected, the Epistles to the readers, and so have cozened the buyers with un- perfected books/ So writes the author in his letter 'To any that will read it,' 1622. He did not find a London publisher for the last twelve Songs without much trouble, and at one time made an eflbrt to bring the book out in Edinburgh. The history of this affair and of this chief literary friendship is found in the correspondence exchanged with Drummond of Hawthornden from 1618 120 LATER WORKS 121 onwards. For a nearly full text of all the letters, and a commentary, should be con- sulted Dr. Masson's Life of Drummond} The four letters written by Drayton (the only ones, exclusive of dedications and the like, that have been saved) deserve quoting in full. Written to one whom he had never met, they testify to his hearty, generous temper, in terms that are special not so much to himself as to the high language of friendship in that age. Drummond had long studied and admired the author of the Epistles and Poly-Olhio7i, and in his Characters of Several Poets, written about 1614, is loud in his praise. Correspondence did not begin till 1618, when Drummond composed a long and weary compliment to the king on his Scot- tish progress. It may have been the Forth Feasting that drew the notice of Drayton in London. More probably, the tie began 1 Pp. 78 seqq., 112 seqq., 180 seqq. Drayton's letters are originally given in the 1711 ed. of Drummond's Works, pp. 154, 233 ; and copied in the Transactions, 1828 to 1836, of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (Arch(eologia Scotica), vol. iv. pp. 90 seqq. ; the extracts were ruade by Laing. The MSS. of them seem to be now lost, not surviving among the Drummond papers in the hands of the Society. 122 MICHAEL DRAYTON through a common friend, Sir William Alexander of Menstrie, who passed to and fro between North and South, and whose name comes constantly in the letters. Whatever the cause, Drayton seized the occasion of a certain Joseph Davies visiting Scotland to send to Hawthornden a message of friendly encouragement, the terms of which are lost. Drummond replied with grateful, slightly mannered cordiality, reveal- ing himself an admirer of long standing, whom ' your most happy Albion \_Poly- Olbion] put into a new trance ' ; and, like others, observes upon Drayton's ' great love, courtesy, and generous disposition/ Two other notes in a similar strain follow, before the first reply was received from Drayton. It runs thus : To Tny Honourable friend, Mr. William Drummond of Hawthornden. My Dear Noble Drummond, — Your letters were as welcome to me as if they had come from my mistress, which I think is one of the worthiest living. Little did you think how oft that noble friend of yours, Sir William Alexander, that man of men, and I, had remembered you before we LATER WORKS 123 trafficked in friendship. Love me as much as you can, and so I will you. I can never hear of you too often, and I will ever mention you with much respect of your deserved worth. I enclosed this letter in a letter of mine to Mr. Andrew Hart of Edinburgh, about some business I have with him, which he may impart to you. Fare- well, noble Sir, and think me ever to be your faithful friend, Michael Drayton. London, 9 Nov. 1618. Joseph Davis is in love with you.^ As Dr. Masson suggests, the work about which Drayton wrote to Hart was almost certainly the Poly-Olhion. On 20th Decem- ber 1618 Drummond replies: *I have been earnest with him in that particular. How I would be over-joyed to see our North once honoured with your works as before it was with Sidney's ' (an edition of the Arcadia). The next letter from Drayton rages at his further embarrassments. It may be recalled that Ben Jonson's famous walk to Scotland and visit to Hawthornden occurred in the interval, at the Christmas of 1618. ^ Works of Drummond, 1711, p. 153. 124 MICHAEL DRAYTON To my noble friend Mr. William Drummond of Hawthornden in Scotland. My Noble Friend, — I have at last received both your letters, and the last in a letter of Sir William Alexander's enclosed sent to me into the country, where I have been all this winter, and came up to London not above four days before the date of this my letter to you. I thank you, my dear sweet Drummond, for your good opinion oi Poly-Olhion. I have done twelve books more, that is from the eighteenth book, which was Kent, if you note it ; all the East part and North to the river Tweed ; but it lies by me ; for the book- sellers and I are in terms [bargaining] ; they are a company of base knaves, whom I both scorn and kick at. Your love, worthy friend, I do heartily embrace and cherish, and the oftener your letters come the better they shall be wel- come. And so, wishing you all happiness, I commit you to God's tuition, and rest ever your assured friend, Michael Drayton. I have written to Mr. Hart a letter which comes with him. London, 14 Ajpril 1619.^ The business with Hart came to nothing, and Drummond did not, it would seem, answer this letter. The next is dated more than two years afterwards. ^ Works of Drummond^ 1711, p. 153. LATER WORKS 125 To Tny dear Noble friend Mr. WilliaTn Drwmniond of Hawthornden in Scotland. Noble Mr. Drummond, — I am often thinking whether this long silence proceeds from you or from me, whether I know not ; but I would have you take it upon you to excuse me ; and then I would have you lay it upon me, and excuse your- self; but you will, if you think it our fault as I do, let us divide ; and both, as we may, amend it. My long being in the country this summer, from whence I had no means to send my letter, shall partly speak for me; for believe me, worthy William, I am more than a fortnight's friend. Where I love, I love for years, which I hope you shall find. When I wrote this letter, our general friend, Sir William Alexander, was at court at Newmarket; but my lady promises me to have this letter sent to you. Let me hear how you do so soon as you can; I know that I am and will be ever your faithful friend, Michael Drayton. London, 22 November, 1621, in haste. ^ The letter travelled at leisure, for Drum- mond did not receive it till 20th April in the next year. He replies in his high- pitched strain : 'Of our long silence let us both excuse our- selves, and as our first parents did, lay the fault 1 Works of Drummond, p. 154. 126 MICHAEL DRAYTON upon some Third . . . and [I] testify that neither years nor fortune can ever so affect me, but that I shall ever reverence your worth and esteem your friendship as one of the best conquests of my life, which I would have extended if possible, and enjoy even after death; that, as this time, so the coming after, might know that I am and shall ever be your loving [friend].' ^ In a further letter,""^ of uncertain date, but appearing to refer to the expected poems of 1627, the same language is kept up. But nothing comes back from Drayton until the year before his death, and this, the last of his extant letters, is one of the best. To my worthy and ever honoured friend Mr. William Drummond of Hawthornden in Scotland. Sir, — It was my chance to meet with this bearer Mr. Wilson at a knight's house in Gloucestershire, to which place I yearly use to come in the summer-time to recreate myself, and to spend some two or three months in the country; and, understanding by him that he was your countryman, and after a time inquiring of some few things, I asked him, if he had heard of such a gentleman, meaning yourself; who told me he was your inward acquaintance, and spake 1 Arch. Scot.j vol. iv. p. 90. ^ ji^^,^ ^ 91 LATER AVORKS 127 much good to me of you. My happiness of having so convenient a messenger gave me the means to write to you and to assure you that I am your perfect faithful friend in spite of destiny and time. Not above three days before I came from London (and I would have been there above four days) I was with your noble friend and mine Sir William Alexander, when we talked of you. I left him, his lady, and family, in good health. This messenger is going from hence, and I am called upon to do an earnest business for a friend of mine. And so I leave you to God's protection, and remain ever your faithful servant, Michael Drayton. Clifford in Gloucestershire, 14 July 1631, in haste. Next year, writing to Sir William Alex- ander, Drummond had to pour out his lament for the old friend whom he had never seen. No other letters by Drayton remain ; but in these four his character is shown answering to the high language which he instinctively uses : a language with its serious, invincible bravado, which only a few old poets like himself remem- bered, the language of a man nurtured upon a day which had passed for England. His perfect faithful Jrieiidship in spite of destiny or time, and / commit you to God's 128 MICHAEL DRAYTON tuitio7i, are phrases Elizabethan in the true sense. These letters furnish some other notices of his later life. ' Where I love, I love for years.' Unless the sonnets printed for the first time in 1619 were all written much earlier, the cult of ' Idea ' was tenacious. Anne, now for more than twenty years past Lady Rainsford, was doubtless the mistress praised in the letter of 1619 as * one of the worthiest living.' But by this time such utterances were tokens of gallantry, with friendship behind it. The Epistle Of his Ladys not coming to Toivn, published 1627, and written in the defter and later style, is ingenious, but sincere in its note. Certainly Drayton's intercourse with the E-ainsfords was kept up for many years before his death. The letter of 1631 speaks of his yearly resort in summer to their seat of Clifford Hall, and the country visits named in the second and third letters were probably to the same place. In Poly-Olhion, he says that Clifford hath ^been many a time the Muses' quiet port.' And, in Sir Henry Rainsford, he found a friend of whom he writes with LATER WORKS 129 a flash of the spirit of Hamlet praising Horatio/ Could there be words found to express my loss, There were some hope that thus my heavy cross Might be sustained, and that wretched I Might once find comfort ; but to have him die Past all degrees that was so dear to me ! As, but comparing him with others, he Was such a thing, as if some Power should say, ' I '11 take man on me to show Man the way What a friend should be.' But words come so short Of him, that when I thus would him report, I am undone, and having nought to say. Mad at myself, I throw my pen away, And beat my breast, that there should be a woe So high, that words cannot attain thereto, 'Tis strange that I, from my abundant breast, Who others' sorrows have so well exprest. Yet I by this in little time am grown So poor, that I want to express my own. I think the Fates, perceiving me to bear My worldly crosses without wit or fear. Nay, with what scorn I ever have derided Those plagues, that for me they have oft provided, Drew them to council ; nay, conspired rather. And in this business laid their heads together ^ Neither this elegy nor three others (see Bibl. § xix.) seem to have been reprinted since the earliest editions. There is a fine image in that to Mr. JeflFrey. Virtue cannot get into kings' cabinets : For Ignorance against her stands in state Like some proud porter at a palace gate. I 180 MICHAEL DRAYTON To find some one plague that might me subvert And at an instant break my stubborn heart : They did indeed, and only to this end They took from me this more than man or friend. . . . . . . Methinks that man, unhappy though he be. Is now thrice happy in respect of me. Who hath no friend ; for that, in having none, He is not stirred, as I am to bemoan My miserable loss, who but in vain May ever look to friend the like again : — This more than mine own self ; that, who had seen His care of me wherever I have been, And had not known his active spirit before Upon some brave thing working evermore, He would have sworn, that to no other end He had been born, but only for my friend. These lines, in which the lapidary notes a want of gloss, and the grammarian a harsh- ness of construction, have a plain Jonsonian manliness and faithfulness in their regret, and rise once or twice to the high imaginative style that our time has lost. To Drayton, a man of reserved and retentive heart, words are a metal that is but slowly hammered into a glow — into a noble if not a consummate outline. They are hard to say, but once said he will never take them back, their sincerity enduring, to re-quote his phrase, ' in spite of destiny and time.' Sir Henry died on LATER WORKS 131 27th Jan. 1622; and Drayton continued, as appears, his visits to the family. The * knight,' whose house in 1631 he had ' yearly visited,' was the younger Sir Henry Rains- ford, now long since grown up.^ It is not clear when Anne died.-^ Drayton's last eight years (1623-31) were productive; even Poly- Olhion did not leave him effete. Before referring to his other friendships and his latter days, there is more verse to notice. In 1619 he had published a revised selection, what would now be called a definitive edition, of all that he had written up to that time, apart from his great work (see Bibl. § xv. 5). A book of wholly fresh matter followed in 1627, and yet another in 1630. The first of these con- tains The Battle of Agincourt, The Miseries of Queen Margaret, Nymphidia, The Quest of Cynthia, The Shepherd's Sirena, The ^ Anne's son and heir wrote lines before Sandys' Fara- phrase of Job, etc., 1638, and seems to have belonged to the set of Falkland. He was a strong royalist; his estates were sequestered in the war, and he compounded for £900. See Rudder, New History of Gloucestershire^ 1779, p. 375, under ' Clifford Chambers.' Also The Genealogist, first series, ii. 105- 108, for a full pedigree of the Rainsford family. '-^ Doubtless after 1627, when the Epistle on her * not coming to town ' was published. (See p. 70.) 132 MICHAEL DRAYTON Mooncalf, and the Elegies. The volume of 1630 contains The Muses' Elizium, and the three biblical paraphrases, Noah's Flood, Moses his Birth and Miracles, and David and Goliah. In these volumes, if certain faculties have faded, new ones have been born. The torch of the old man's passion is low, he has begun to forget what once he felt ; the high oratorical tones of the Epistles are gone for ever. Over some of the longer compositions, excepting the Epistle to Reynolds and some other ' elegies,' lies the burden of that dullness, which in Poly- Olhion had been frequent. The most spirited of them — for the Miseries of Margaret is an exercise of the old kind — is the Battle of Agincourt. But the energy, which in the Ballad is heated to a glow, is here frittered over pages. Of the Ballad, not the Battle, Jonson should have written : I hear again thy drum to beat A better cause, and strike the bravest heat That ever yet did fire an English blood. The Mooncalf is Drayton's contribution to the censorious school of Hall and Marston, TllLK-rAGE Ul JllE I'UKMS, lOj/. LATER WORKS 133 with its affectation, its distorted bloodshot vision of society. It is a rank satire of the conventional stamp, containing amidst its splutter against avarice and luxury some quaint documents of frivolous or corrupt manners. The Mooncalf, a bastard son of the world and the devil, represents the ignorant sot, who in youth is a wanton, but who rises on the strength of his vices to place and consideration above the good. He is to be seen In his caroche, with four white Frieslands drawn, And he is pied and garish as the Pawn, With a set face, in which, as in a book, He thinks the world for grounds of state should look. . . . Eats capons cooked at fifteen crowns apiece With their fat bellies stufF'd with ambergris ; And, being to travel, he sticks not on to lay His post-caroches still upon his way ; And, in some six days' journey, doth consume Ten pounds of suckets and the Indian fume. For his attire, when foreign parts are sought. He holds all vile in England that is wrought, And into Flanders sendeth for the nonce. Twelve dozen of shirts providing him at once, Laid in the seams with costly lace, that be Of the smock fashion, whole below the knee. . . . With the ball of 's foot the ground he may not feel, But he must tread upon his toe and heel ; 134 MICHAEL DRAYTON Doublet and cloak with plush and velvet lined ; Only his headpiece, that is filled with wind. Rags, running horses, dogs, drabs, drinks, and dice The only things that he doth hold in price. The whip is heartily used, but the fables that fill the poem are turbid. Of the scriptural poems, the history of Moses (the work of 1604 altered) is stolidly enough expanded from the original, but has a touch of Drayton's human and compassionate temper. The joy of the mother of Moses when the princess unwittingly calls on her to tend her own child, like the scene of the parting of kindred in the Battle ofAgincourt, refreshes the wastes of narrative. Of David and Goliah there is little to say : but the overture to Noah's Flood deserves to be known for its dignity, its presentiment of a greater sacred diction : let thy glorious angel which since kept That gorgeous Eden, where once Adam slept. When tempting Eve was taken from his side. Let him, great God, not only be my guide. But with his fiery fauchion still be nigh, To keep affliction far from me, that I With a free soul thy wondrous works may show. Then like that deluge shall my numbers flow, Telling the state wherein the earth then stood, The giant race, the universal flood. LATER WORKS 135 In these final poems such music is rare enough ; but one class of them discovers not so much a renewal of youthful grace as an unsealing in the old poet's spirit of fresh, sweet, and unsuspected sources. Certain late lyrics of Landor and Tennyson, and the Sad Shepherd of Ben Jonson, come to our memory. The fragment of Jonson is the closest of all ; for it was now the second age of pastoral, when the direct influence of Spenser was beginning to confine itself to a caste or school, and was losing that wide predominance which had marked it for thirty years after the Calendar. The pastoral dramas of Italy, which had lain on the desks of Jonson and of Fletcher, had inspired, not merely a preference for the theatrical form, but a change of the ruling motives in pastoral ; or rather, a kind of even and pure elegance, with a marked ab- sence of those allusions to the poet's loyalty, assurance of immortality, and personal pride, which had marked the earlier eclogues, and Drayton's, as we have seen, among them. We do not know that Drayton had read Tasso or Guarini ; neither did he pass be- 136 MICHAEL DRAYTON yond the simple and familiar form of dia- logue in song. But to compare the Shep- herd's Ga7iand with The Muses' Elizium is to feel that the first is an Elizabethan poem, while the second is a Caroline poem, written under the same class of influences, with the same flow and glory of rhythm, as the verse of Carew. O let not those life-lightening eyes In this sad veil be shrouded, Which into mourning puts the skies To see them overclouded. my Mertilla, do not praise These lamps so dimly burning : Such sad and sullen lights as these Were only made for mourning ! Much of The Shepherd's Sirena, The Quest of Cynthia, and The Muses Elizium, is in this style. Over Drayton's pastoral has come a light playfulness and a fancy for tripping rhyme. The real shepherd life, with its pasture-craft and country fare, is noted far more than in his earlier Ga^iand, although there is once a kid mentioned that will follow its master for a whole furlong on its hind feet. The eighth eclogue, like the LATER WORKS 137 lyrical part of a masque, describes a fairy wedding, and links the whole collection with the finest of all seventeenth-century fantasies, Nymphidia. To conceive common things wholly in miniature, fitted to the needs of an elf ; to plant the faintest sting of satire in a gay parody of the well-nigh forgotten chivalrous ballads ; to carry the vein of Sir Thopas into the world of Oberon ; it is all done, and yet without one touch of the sufiusing imagination of Shakespeare's Dream, which Drayton had before him. The Nymphidia does not move in the land of dreams at all, their wings do not brush it. The smallest things described are in clear daylight. But the verses are kept fresh by the nicety of their cutting. This poem was a favourite in the mid-seven- teenth century, unlike most of Drayton's works, and was often reprinted later. A loan is gracefully levied on it, not only by Herrick, but perhaps by Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, in her Poems and Fancies, 1653, on the Pastime and Recreation of the Queen of Fairies. The Elegies are complimentary letters, 138 MICHAEL DRAYTON or conversational satires, or reminiscence. Their couplets no longer glide as in En- dimion or the Heroical Epistles. They are sudden, rugged, familiar, sometimes high - inspired : they are not unlike the epistles of Ben Jonson. Traces of the angry old platitude remain when Dray- ton harps on the ill-treatment of poets and the vileness of the world. But it was also the age of queerness in verse, and the elegy on the Lady Penelope Clifton might have furnished Dr. Johnson with further illustrations at the cost of ' metaphysical poetry.' Others are ad- dressed to Drayton's Jacobean friends, for so we may call them ; to William Browne, and to the travelling poet George Sandys on his departure for Virginia. The elegy on Sir Henry Kainsford has been heard already. Another, To my most dearly loved friend, Heiiry Reynolds, Esquire, of Poets and Poesy, is none the less genial for being addressed to a warm admirer. Henry Reynolds, in 1628, produced a translation of Tasso's Aminta, and later an Ovidian poem on the tale of Narcissus. LATER WORKS 139 In an epilogue to this work, My thorny stes,^ Eeynolds, after praising Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, and Daniel, proceeds : ' We have among us a late- writ Poly-Olhioii also, and an Agincourt, wherein I will only blame their honest author's ill fate, in not having laid him out some happier clime, to have given honour and life to, in some happier language.' Drayton was in a good vein when he wrote his review of the English poets from Chaucer to Sir William Alex- ander. It is the evening talk of a whole- some, strenuous old man, who knows better than to burden us with reasons, even for his prejudices, and who rhymes out his tastes and distastes, stopping now and then for the right epithet, which will give the impres- sion that long years have formed. Some of the names are those of his masters — part of his own poetical life ; some of those he praises, more tepidly than posterity, are the greatest ; but therein lies the interest. To see the change of taste, of estimates, when ^ This poem, and prose extracts, have been edited by Mr. James Starkey of Dublin from Dr. Grosart's transcript, and are to be published in Englische IStudien. 140 MICHAEL DRAYTON we read the judgment of a contemporary, ought not to make us modest in judging our own time ; rather it should make us franker, if we can write as well as Drayton : for then we shall be interesting. The praise of Chaucer only echoes that uttered by all the great Elizabethans like Spenser and Daniel; but, like them, Drayton is under the illusion that Chaucer wrought in a rugged and imperfect tongue : As much as then The English language could express to men He made it do. The patronage of John Gower by later critics was also foreshadowed by Drayton. The ' princely ' Surrey, the ' reverence ' borne to Wyatt, and the ' dainty passages ' of their wit — we feel the old poet has hit the right words. Spenser, as we saw, is praised for his epic enterprise rather than for the kinds that Drayton himself had imitated. It is curious to hear of Sidney only as the redeemer of English prose from the euphu- ism of Lyly ; Drayton does not say that Sidney's own prose was wrought in a differ- LATER WORKS 141 ent artifice. Three famous judgments may- be quoted, to illustrate the manner of the elegy : Next 1 Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs, Had in him those brave translunary things That the first poets had ; his raptures were All air and fire, which made his verses clear ; For that fine madness still he did retain Which rightly should possess a poet's brain. And surely Nash, though he a proser were, A branch of laurel yet deserves to bear. Sharply satiric was he, and that way He went, since that his being to this day Few have attempted, and I surely think Those words shall hardly be set down with ink Shall scorch and blast so as his could, where he Would inflict vengeance ; and be it said of thee, Shakespeare, thou hadst as smooth a comic vein Fitting the sock, and in thy natural brain As strong conception and as clear a rage. As any one that traflicked with the stage. This praise has been considered, wrongly, feeble ; the incommensurable part of Shake- speare was after all little seen by contempo- raries, who honoured those gifts akin to their own, which he was seen to have in greater measure than they, not the gifts that only came in sight on the eve of the nineteenth ' ^ The original text has ' Neat Marlowe.' 142 MICHAEL DRAYTON century. The praise is as great as could be hoped for. ' As strong conception and as clear a rage ' ; — ' clear ' is noble, illustrious, and ' rage ' is the power that possesses the poet : ' conception ' applies to plotting and to hold on character ; so that Drayton spoke highly here. Jonson is distinguished, in perfectly apt and even modern terms, for his ^ knowledge,' for being ' lord of the theatre,' and as one who 'made our learned'st to stick,' or halt behind, both in comedy and tragedy. The last great name is Chapman's, and he is celebrated as a translator of Homer and Hesiod, and of Musseus, that is, as the poet of Hero and Leander ; he was, along with Drayton himself, the disciple of Marlowe. The rest of the elegy is on the writer's friends. In these verses there is much of Drayton's own life, of his own admirations : it is a curious and beautiful study in distances and values, to see his admiration of Sandys' ' un- usual grace ' and * neatness ' — which are exactly his qualities. The couplets of Sandys may well have been balanced and cleared and smoothed by the example of Drayton's earlier ones. Perhaps the con- LATER WORKS 143 eluding lines, concerning those who send their poems ^ by transcription daintily ' and ' through private chambers,' glance at Donne. Drayton cares not for such ; and certainly he had himself never shown any fastidious- ness in facing the printer. Drummond also receives his tribute ; but three other poets, * my dear companions whom I freely chose my bosom friends,' are particularly named, who must, unlike Drummond, have been personal associates. One was Francis Beau- mont ; the second was Sir John Beaumont, whose death in 1627 led Drayton to offer desolately, in the prefatory verses to Bos- luorth Field, ' this poor branch of my wither- ing bays ' ; the third was William Browne,^ by whom Drayton is often mentioned with regard. We know little else about his dealings with other men of letters. With the dictator, Jonson, who survived him six years, his relations were cordial. His stilted, but essentially hearty epistle, pre- fixed in 1627 to Drayton's folio, may be 1 See Poems of W. Browne, ed. Gordon Goodwin (Lawrence and Bullen ; reissued by Koutledge), London, 1894, index to vol. ii., s,v. 'Drayton.' 144 MICHAEL DRAYTON taken to efface his remark (thrown out years before over Drummond's table, and sedulously chronicled) that ' Drayton feared him, and he [Jonson] esteemed not of him/ Energy, hatred of sham, a tendency to shout too loud, some lack of the finer vision, and a manly, almost heroic, acceptance of for- tune, were qualities common to both poets, and stayed with both to the end. Drayton was latterly assisted by the Earl and Countess of Dorset (born Mary Clifford). We do not know when they began to favour him ; but in the dedication to the Earl, pre- fixed to The Muses Elizium, he states that * the durableness of your favours hath now made me one of the family.' The ' Divine Poems ' in the same volume are addressed to 'your religious Countess.' There is reason to suppose that whatever support could thus be given was needed, and that Drayton died in poor circumstances. Not only the deed of administration quoted below, but a curi- ous independent notice, confirms this tradi- tion. According to Peacham, a contemporary writer, ' Honest Mr. Michael Drayton had about some five pounds lying by him at his Michael Draviox, a(;ki) 05. J''ro!i: tlic Duiivick Callcry. LATER WORKS 145 death, which was satis viatici ad ccelum.' ^ With friends to bury him, this or a little more was enough for a bachelor. Drayton died at the end of 1631 ; there is no evidence for the month or day,^ even in the registers of the Abbey, where he was buried. Our only account of his end is from Aubrey, who says : * He lived at the bay window next the east end of St. Dunstan's Church in Fleet St. Sepult. in north of Westminster Abbey. The Countess of Dorset (Clifford) gave his monument. Mr. Marshall the stone-cutter who made it told it me.' Aubrey then quotes the inscription, * Do, pious Marble, etc.,' commonly put down to Jonson,^ and states, on the authority of the same Mr. Marshall, that the verses were 'made by Mr. Francis Quarles.'* There is ^ H. Peacham, Truth of our Times, 1638, p. 37, quoted in Grosart's Introduction to the Foems of Sylvester, vol. i. p. xix. 2 Though 23rd December is named, I know not on what authority, by Laing, Arch. Scot, I.e. supra, iv. 93. I have seen this date quoted in almanacs. See Appendix B for the MS. verses supposed to be written 'the nyght before he dyed.' They are metaphysical in fantasy, and Drayton some- times fell into that strain. 3 Printed as Underwoods, No. 17. * Lives of Eminent Men, reprint of 1813, London, vol. ii. p. 335. K 146 MICHAEL DRAYTON a corroboration of Aubrey's statement that Drayton was not buried in Poets' Corner, where his bust, by an unknown hand, stands crowned with laurel and inscribed with the tributary verses. The Apjjeal of Injured Innocence, 1639, printed at the end of Fuller's Church History, is cast in the form of a dialogue between Heylin and Fuller. Fuller names the resting-place of the poet ; and Heylin then answers that ' Drayton is not buried in the south aisle of that [West- minster] Church, but under the North wall and in the main body of it, not far from the little door that opens into one of the prebend's houses . . . though, since, his Statue hath been set up in another place.' Heylin adds that he is sure of this, because he happened to be bidden to the funeral. Fuller asks, ' Have then stones learnt to lie, and must there needs be a fiction in the epitaph of a poet ? ' ^ The burial, in the case of a person so^ not- able, may well have been semi-public and fully attended. Drayton did not leave a 1 This reference is named in Collier's preface, last page. Church History, ed. 1659, ii. 42. LATER WORKS 147 will. In default of it, his brother Edmund,^ who lived on till 1644, took out letters of administration which were granted 17th January 1632.^ They are to the effect that the poet died, as Aubrey implies, in St. Dunstan's parish ; that administration was granted to his lawful brother Edmund ; that the final formalities were to be completed next Ascension ; and that his effects were valued at a little under £25. 1 Dorothy, the daughter of Edmund, was buried 26th March 1625, and Dorothy his wife on 4th April 1625, both at Mancetter. 2 This was first, I believe, noted in Mr. Goodwin's ed. of William Browne, 1894, ii. 32. The full document is here extracted from the principal Registry of the Probate Division, in the Commissary Court of London. 'Mense Januarii, 1631 [1632 N.S.]. Michael Drayton. Decimo septimo die p[er] m[agist]rum Willmum lames legum D[o]c[t]orem Surrogatum &c. Em[an]- avi[t] Com[m]issio Edmundo Drayton fr[atr]i natural[i] et l[egi]timo Michael Drayton nup[er] p[ar]o[chia]e S[anct]i Dunstan in occiden[te] London ab intestato Defunct[o] Ad administrand[a] bona, &c., de bene, &c., ac de pleno, &c., necnon de vero, &c., Jurat., &c., Salvo iure, &c. Civit. London. Ascen[sione] In[ventorium] ex[pedituni]. 24'' 2^ 8'^' / CHAPTER V CRITICAL / In aweary satire, printed in 1645, and im- puted to George Wither, The Great Assizes liolden in Parnassus by Apollo and his Assessors, the weekly Mercuries and casual press of that hour are accused of slandering literature. The judges, with Apollo presid- ing, range from Erasmus and Pico della Mirandula to Bacon and Grotius. The jurors are Jacobean and Caroline poets, from Shakespeare to May, and include Drayton. They are challenged in turn by the accused ; Drayton on the score of his Poly-Olhion, that 'rude embryon of wit.' Apollo then utters his eulogy at length ; praises his * sonnets sweet of love heroic,' his ' illustrious poem,' Agincourt, and even his earlier 'Tragic legends' and their * pathetic fancies.' 148 CRITICAL 149 Thus spake Apollo ; and old Drayton smil'd To see him curb'd that had him thus revil'd. Such a scrap of driftwood shows a current of opinion. Drayton was not yet merely one of the lesser Elizabethans famous in their day. But there remain few allusions to him for another hundred years, and it was not till 1748 that his works were reprinted. This anonymous edition was a fruit of that requickened love of our poetry which was working in Gray and Tyrwhitt and Hurd and Percy. Goldsmith's Chinaman, walking in Westminster Abbey,^ was pointed by his guide * to a particular part of the temple. " There," says the gentleman, pointing with his finger, " there is the poets' corner ; there you see the monuments of Shakespeare, and Milton, and Prior, and Drayton." — " Drayton 1 " I replied, " I never heard of him before ; but I have been told of one Pope — is he there ? " " It is time enough," replied my guide, " these hundred years ; he is not long dead ; people have not done hating him yet." ' The Chinaman, like Goldsmith, had formed his taste in the classical age. It was the 1 The Citizen of the World, 1760, Letter xiii. 150 MICHAEL DRAYTON new spirit, whose backward view was not blocked by Pope and Prior, that had begun to recognise Shakespeare's companions. But there were reasons why Drayton should suffer eclipse during the day of Dryden and Pope ; for he had begun to be obscured even earlier. He had overlived the bitter end of the great patriotic age of which he tried to be the voice ; he had produced much that died at once ; and his instinct to absorb and copy, though he is far too strong to be called a mimic, did not always enable him to shape his materials. In his big work he attempted so much that it is hard to rescue attention for its noble episodes. He left no school, though he had created some original forms like the Heroi- cal Epistles, the Odes, and the Nymphidia. The last of these leaves a tiny wake behind it in the history of our poetry. But the change of poetical taste also un- duly marred his fame. He and not Milton is the last Elizabethan in the truer sense. He had sounded the bugle -calls of the older generation ; he had sung his fervent and chivalrous love and his hope of enduring CRITICAL 151 verse, and his love for the land and all its ancient things. In the middle of the seven- teenth century the themes of Milton and those around him were different, and Dray- ton's somewhat fitful executive talent failed to buoy up his reputation. But with Mar- lowe and Chapman to share his oblivion he was in good society. If Drayton left no school, he had never been vowed to any. He touched and studied poets, from Spenser to Carew, who were of different worlds. During his first twenty years we can tell from his verse what kinds of non-dramatic poetry were in acceptance, and how a gallant and cap- able craftsman could realise them. He was justified in his courage, but it is curious to see the frequent struggle of his strong and stiff-grained spirit with subjects that call for a sure and supple hand. Often he seems to prevail, in the English way, by pure force of toil and character. But the variety of his successes is imposing. He wrote hardly anything that is not luminous here and there, that fails of articulate and beautiful passages, and he wrote much that is 152 MICHAEL DRAYTON sustained. If we are to name his most in- superable flaw, apart from his bluntness, it can be seen by any pedagogue ; it is that want of clear and right grammar, which raises smoke and friction in the axles of his chariot. But in youth and age he was often a master of the eclogue and its en- chanting artifice. As sonneteer he could step into the circle of Shakespearean splen- dour and intensity, and once he leapt full into the centre, having murmured the right incantation. He had his days of decorative felicity, when he made Endimion and Phoebe, and not then only. He moved easily in the Ovidian declamatory style, harping on love and desiderium. Even in satire and religious verse, his least fortunate field, he struck out flashes. No man tried in so many forms to utter the passion for England, the passion of England for itself In some he failed, but he v\^ent on undismayed to others not less exacting. He is least impeded and bravest and most musical in several of his odes. Age brought him a lighter hand ; he achieves the pitch of good-natured and manly gaiety in his epistles on himself and CRITICAL 158 his friends. But he is latterly happiest in lyric of the gallant, faintly mannered, not too vehement kind, where he is think- ing of his cadence and enjoying it. His- torians have begun to talk as if they were ashamed of Drayton, but theirs is the sacrifice. His importance in the musical, and not only in the mechanic, evolution of our verse is real and distinct. He gave an accent of his own to nearly every measure that he practised ; and he practised sextain, rhyme royal, sonnet, Italian octave, heroic couplet, short-lined ode, octosyllabic couplet, dithy- rambic stanza, and alexandrines. There is not one of these that he did not sometimes write as well as any poet of the English Renaissance. It was in the ode and the couplet that his tunes, if not very subtle or abstrusely harmonised, were most his own, and most fertile as examples. The angel of rhythm visits him forgetfully and capriciously, and like Wordsworth he goes on doggedly in its absence. But he has notes at first of the shawm and trumpet, and latterly of the flute as well. 154 MICHAEL DRAYTON Near to the silver Trent Siren a dwelleth, She to whom nature lent All that excelleth : By which the Muses late, And the neat Graces Have for their greater state Taken their places ; Twisting an anadem Wherewith to crown her, As it belonged to them Most to renown her. The slight ruggedness in these verses is not unpleasing, and saves their nerve. And else- where Drayton is among the first to strike out the tune that is heard all through the seventeenth century in Cowley, in Rochester, in Dryden, down to the darker days of lyric : I pray thee, love, love me no more, Call home the heart you gave me, I but in vain that saint adore That can, but will not save me ; These poor half-kisses kill me quite ; Was ever man thus served. Amidst an ocean of delight For pleasure to be starved ? To learn to write this after sixty shows a great vitality of assimilation or invention ; how far Drayton has travelled in his musical CRITICAL 155 art from his Spenserian days, or from the style of 1597, — from this ! — When heaven would strive to do the best it can, And put an angel's spirit into man, The utmost power it hath, it then doth spend, When to the world a Poet it doth intend. . . . When Time shall turn those amber locks to grey. My verse again shall gild and make them gay. And trick them up in knotted curls anew. And to thy autumn give a summer's hue : That sacred power, that in my ink remains. Shall put fresh blood into thy withered veins, And on thy red decayed, thy whiteness dead, Shall set a white more white, a red more red. And yet, as we have seen, this earlier oratory has its own line of descendants, and will startle those who think that it began with Sandys or with Waller. We cannot say of Drayton, in the pedigree of literature, as we must of so many poets, ohiit sine prole. Nor is his interest at all purely of the damn- ing historical kind, which is only another name for a second death, unless it be rein- forced by absolute excellence : for to this excellence he often attains, and in the register of the poets he is himself, not simply one of our ancestors who made experiments. If he does not rank without question among the 156 MICHAEL DRAYTON highest, he is an athlete, suspected of half- Olympian and half-terrestrial blood, who is of commanding stature and can lift many weighty burdens ; with a sturdy, dignified beauty of his own, and a soft, musical grace ; and speaking now and then with something of the divine accent. BIBLIOGRAPHY^ I. THE HARMONY OF THE CHURCH 1 1591. The I Harmonie | of the Church. \ Containing, | The Spirituall Songes and I holy Hymnes, of godly men, Patriarkes and I Prophetes : all, sweetly sounding, to the praise | and glory of the highest. | Now (newlie) reduced into sundrie kinds of I English Meeter : meete to be read or sung, I for the solace and comfort of the godly. I By M. D. | [Device.] | London. | Printed by Richard Ihones, | at the Rose and Crowne, neere Holborne | Bridge. 1591. I Quarto : pp. 48, blk. lett. (no pagination). Dedica- tion : ' To the Godly and vertuoiis Lady, the Lady lane Deuoreux, of Meriuale,' dated from London by Drayton, 10 February 1590 (1591), and letter ' To the curteous Reader.' Entered 1 February 1591, as ' The Triumphes of the Churche.' Copy in Brit. Mus. 2 1610. A I Heauenly Har- | monie of Spirituall | * The University Library, Cambridge, is here denoted by U.L.C. ; that of Trinity College, Cambridge, by T.C.C. ; and that of Trinity College, Dublin, by T.C.D. 167 158 MICHAEL DRAYTON Songes, and holy Himnes, of | godly Men, Patriarkes, and Prophets. | Imprinted at London. | 1610. | Quarto : pp. 46, blk. lett. Reissue of 1 -with a new title-page and without the leaf of dedication. Copy in a private library. 3 1843. In Percy Society Publications, vol. vii. Reprint edited by Dyce. 4 1856. In Works (§ xv. 13). 5 1876. In Works (§ xv. 14). II. IDEA, THE SHEPHERD'S GARLAND 1593. Idea | The | Shepheards | Garland, | Fashioned in nine Eglogs. | Rowlands Sacrifice | to the nine Muses. | EfFugiunt auidos Carmina sola rogos. | [Device with garland] By Peace Plenty. By Wisdome Peace. T. 0. | Imprinted at London for Thomas Woodcocke, dwelling in Pauls | Churchyarde, at the signe of the black Beare. 1593. | Quarto : 70 pages. Dedication to Kobert Dudley. Entered 23 April 1593. Copy in Brit. Mus. [1606]. In Poemes Lyrick And Pastoral (§ XVI. 1) as Eglogs. Each of the 9 eclogues is much revised, and one new one, the 9th in 2, is added. The BIBLIOGRAPHY 159 numbering of four is changed : No. 4 in 1 becomes No. 6 in 2, No. 6 becomes No. 8, No. 8 becomes No. 4, and No. 9 becomes No. 10. In the new No. 8 is the passage (see p. 19 ante) about Selena, Cerberon, Idea, Panape, etc. 3 1619. In Poems (§ xv. 5). This is 2 with some further changes, such as omission of the passage about Selena, and under title of Pastorals Containing Eglogues. 4 1620. In Poems (§ xv. 6). As in No. 3. 5 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9), Appendix; as in No. 3. 6 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10). The same; as in No. 3. 7 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11). As in No. 3. 8 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12). As in No. 3. 9 1856. In Poems (Collier, § xv. 13). The first and only full reprint of 1 (1593). 10 [?1870]. Idea | [surrounded by garland, and musicians with various musical instru- ments on either side] The | Shepheards I Garland, | Fashioned in nine Eglogs. | Rowlands Sacrifice | to the nine Muses. | Effugiunt auidos Carmina sola rogos. | [Device : By Peace Plenty ; by Wis- dome Peace. T. 0.] Imprinted at London for Thomas Woodcocke, dwelling in Pauls 160 MICHAEL DRAYTON I Churchyarde, at the signe of the black Beare. 1593. Edited by John Payne Collier. Quarto : 4 pp. and 70 pp. [In Introduction : ' The following tract is a typo- graphical facsimile of Michael Drayton's second publication. ... In reprinting these Pastorals we have not merely imitated the types, but we have followed the pagination, the spelling, and even the corrupt punctuation.'] Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl. 11 1891. In Poemes, | Lyrick and Pastoral! | By I Michaell Drayton, Esquire. | Printed For The Spenser Society. | 1891. | 4 pp. blank ; title as above and 1 p. : then reprint page by page of 2 (1606) ; with original pagination at foot (pp. 1-120) as noted under 2 : total pp. 126. 12 1896. In An English Garner . . . edited by Edward Arber . . . vol. viii. . . . 1896. III. LEGEND OF GAVESTON I [1593 or 1594]. Peirs Gaueston | Earle Of Corn- wall. I His life, death, and fortune. | Effu- giunt auidos carmina sola rogos. [Device.] At London, | Printed by I. R. for N. L. and John | Busby, and are to be sold at the West | doore of Paules. Quarto : pp. 78 (no pagination). Dedicated to ' Maister Henry Cauendish, Esquire.' Entered 3 Dec. 1593, and named in Preface to Matilda (§ iv. 1., 1594) as * already successful.' Copy in a private library. BIBLIOGRAPHY 161 2 [1595]. [Peirs, etc.] A second, faulty and surreptitious edition, named in preface to Legend of Kobert (§ viii. 1) according to Heber. 3 1596. In § VIII. 1, ' newly corrected and aug- mented ' : q.v. for later editions. IV. LEGEND OF MATILDA 1 1594. Matilda. | The faire and chaste | Daughter of the Lord Robert | Fitzwater. | The Trve Glorie Of The | Noble Hovse Of | Svssex. | Phoebus erit nostri princeps, et carminis author. | At London, | Printed by lames Roberts, for N. L. and | lohn Busby. 1594. Quarto : pp. 64 (no pagination). Dedicated to ' Mistres Lucie Harrington ' ; pre- fatory address 'To the Honourable Gentlemen of England, and true fauorers of Poesie.' Not entered in Stationers' Registers. Copy in a private library. 2 1594. Matilda . . . author. Printed by Valen- tine Simmes for N. L. and John Busby 1594. This is 1, with a different title-page. 3 1596. In § VIII. 1 ; q.v. for later editions. ' Much altered ' according to Heber. V. SONNETS : IDEA I 1594. Ideas | Mirrovr. | Amovrs | In Qvator- zains. | Che serue e tace assai domanda. | L 162 MICHAEL DRAYTON [Device] At London, | Printed by lames Roberts, for Nicholas | Linge. Anno. 1594. I Quarto : pp. 56 (no pagination). Dedicatory sonnet to Anthony Cooke by Drayton ; sonnet by ' Gorbo il fidele,' unidentified, but named also in the Eclogues. Contains 51 sonnets, entitled * Amour 1, Amour 2,' etc. Description from Collier, § xv. 13. Entered 30 May 1594. Copy in a private library. For index of first lines of all Drayton's sonnets and their numbering in Nos. 1, 2, 4, 6, 10 (the only five really difi'erent editions), see Appendix B, and note on p. 44. 2 1599. In England's Heroical Epistles . . . with Idea (§ IX. 3), q.v. Here there are 59 sonnets, no longer labelled Amours ; the original Amours are sometimes re- tained, sometimes altered, sometimes omitted; and new sonnets are added. 3 1600. In Englands Heroical . . . with Idea (§ IX. 4). Probably 2 reprinted. 4 1602. With Englands Heroicall Epistles (§ IX. 5) Here there are 67 sonnets, including some fresh ones. The third real edition. 5 1603. With The Barrens Wars (§ vii. 3). Here there are 67 sonnets, including alterations and additions. No. 4 repeated. BIBLIOGRAPHY 163 6 1605. In [Collected] Poems (§ xv. 1). Here there are 3 prefatory sonnets, 62 to Idea, and 5 more, called Certaine other Sonnets to great and worthy Personages. The fourth real edition, which Nos. 7-9 repeat. 7 1608. In Poems (§ xv. 2). 8 1610. In Poems (§ xv. 3). 9 1613. In Poems (§ xv. 4). 10 1619. In Poems (§ xv. 5). Here there are 63 sonnets, including more altera- ' tions and additions. The fifth and last real edition. 1 1 1620. In Poems (§ xv. 6). 12 1630. In Poems (§ xv. 7). 1 2a 1631. In Poems (§ xv. 7a). 13 1637. In Poems (§ xv. 8). 14 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9). 15 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10). 16 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11). 17 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12). Nos. 11-16 reprint the 1619 edition of the Sonnets. 18 1856. In Works (§ xv. 13). Collier reprints Ideas Mirrovr (1) on pp. 145-175, for the first time since 1594, with notes. Also, under the heading Sonnets Under the Title of Idea (pp. 439-465), he gives 'all those sonnets which were not originally inserted 164 MICHAEL DRAYTON in "Ideas Mirrour/" with notes. 'Our text,' he adds, ' has usually been that of the impression of Drayton's Poems in 1605'; and in the notes ' the most material varia- tions ' are pointed out. Thus Collier's edition is at present the only work in which every one of Drayton's sonnets, in one of its forms, can be read. For a full collation we must await the complete variorum text. 19 1883. An English Garner . . . edited by Edward Arber . . . vol. vi. pp. 289-322. A reprint of 10, the 1619 edition. 20 1887. In The Barons' Wars . . . with an introduction by Henry Morley . . . 1887. The 1619 edition once more, in pp. 216-247. 21 1888. In Poems . . . 1605. Printed for the Spenser Society. 1888. (§ xv. 15.) Keprint of No. 6 of this section. 22 1897. In Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles. Edited by M. F. Crow . . . 1897. No. 10 ; in the vol. containing also sonnets by Griffin and Smith. 23 1904 In An English Garner . . . Elizabethan Sonnets newly arranged and edited by Sidney Lee . . . Westminster. Archibald Constable & Co. 1904. In 2 vols. No. 10 reprinted with notes in vol. ii. pp. 179-212. BIBLIOGRAPHY 165 VI. ENDIMION AND PHOEBE 1 [1595]. Endimion | and Phoebe. | Ideas Latmvs. | Phoebus erit nostri princeps, et | carminis Author. I At London, | Printed by lames Roberts, for | lohn Busbie. | Quarto. Dedicatory sonnet signed by Drayton to Lucy, Countess of Bedford : Verses by E. P. and S. G. Entered 12 April 1595. Description of title-page from Collier, § xv. 13. 2 1606. Portion inserted with changes in The Man in the Moon (§ xvi. 1) : q.v. for later editions. 3 1856. In Works (§ xv. 13) = 1 reprinted. 4 Endimion | and Phoebe. | Ideas Latmvs. | Phoebus erit nostri princeps, et | carminis Author. I At London, | Printed by James Roberts for | John Busbie. | Edited by John Payne Collier. London. 1870 1 Reprint of 1. In Introduction : ' Only 2 copies of " Endimion and Phoebe" are extant, and of one of them (the only perfect exemplar) the following pages are a typographical facsimile, with all its peculiarities. We were fortunate enough to have procured the imperfect copy before 1837; until then the poem had never been heard of : the perfect copy is also in a private collection.— J. P. C Copy in Brit. Mus., Bodl. 166 MICHAEL DRAYTON VII. MORTIMERIADOS, afterwards THE BARONS' WARS 1 1596. Mortimeriados. | The Lamen- | table ciuell wanes of | Edward the Second and the I Barrens. | At London, | Printed by I. R. for Mathew Lownes, | and are to bee solde at his shop in S. Dunstons | Church- yard. 1596. I Quarto : 136 pages (no pagination). Stanzas of dedication by Drayton to Lucy, Countess of Bedford. Sonnet to the same by E. B. There are no books or cantos marked in this version of the poem, except by spacings in the printing. Entered 15 April 1596. Copies in Brit. Mus., T.C.C. 2 [1596 ?]. Mortimeriados . . . Printed by I. R. for Humfrey Lownes . . . Churchyard. Another issue of 1 ; ' only differs in the imprint ' (Collier). * No doubt the two Lownes, Mathew and Henry, had a joint interest in the publication' (Collier). Copy in Bodleian. 3 1603. The | Barrons Wars | in the raigne of Edward | the second, | with Englands | Heroicall Epistles. | By Michaell Drayton. ] [Device.] At London, | Printed by I. R. for N. Ling. I 1603. Octavo. Barons' Wars, pp. 169. Epistles, 103 leaves. Idea, not paged. Dedication to Master Walter Aston ; Sonnets by Thomas Greene and J. Beaumont ; and address BIBLIOGRAPHY 167 To the Keader, explaining the reasons of the very great changes made in the poem and its metre (see supra, p. 72). Drayton also now divides the work into six 'books' or 'cantos,' with an 'argument' heading each. The Barons' Wars is reprinted in the following, Nos. 4-12. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodleian (imperfect). 4 1605. In (Collected) Poems (§ xv. 1). 5 1608. In Poems (§ xv. 2). 6 1610. In Poems (§ xv. 3). 7 1613. In Poems (§ xv. 4). 8 1619. In Poems (§ xv. 5). 9 1620. In Poems (§ xv. 6). 9a 1631. In Poems (§ xv. 7a). 10 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9). 11 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10). 12 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11). 13 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12). 14 1856. In Poems, ed. Collier (§ xv. 13). The first and only reprint of 1, Mortimeriados, with valuable notes, pp. 241-376. 1 5 1887. In The Barons' Wars, etc. H. Morley's Selections (§ xxi. 2). 16 1888. In Poems . . . printed for the Spenser Society. 1888. A reprint of 4, the Poems of 1605 (§ xv. 15). 168 MICHAEL DRAYTON VIII. LEGENDS OF ROBERT, MATILDA, AND GAVESTON 1 1596. The | Tragicall Legend of Ro | bert, Duke of Normandy, surna | med Short- thigh, eldest Sonne to | William Conqueror. I With the Legend of Matilda the | chast, daughter to the Lord Robert Fitzwa | ter, poysoned by King | lohn. | And the Legend of Piers Gaueston, the | great Earle of Cornwall : and mighty fauorite | of king Edward the second. | By Michaell Drayton. I The latter two, by him newly corrected and I augmented. | At London, | Printed by la. Roberts for N. L. and | are to be soldo at his shop at the West | doore of Paules. I 1596. | 8vo : 222 pages (no pagination). Dedication to Lucy Countess of Bedford in prose and to the Lady Anne Harington in verse. Verses by H. G., R. L., * Mirocinius.' Entered 21 November. Copy in Brit. Mus. 2 1605. In (Collected) Poems (§ xv. 1). 3 1608. In Poems (§ xv. 2). 4 1610. In Poems (§ xv. 3). 5 1613. In Poems (§ xv. 4). 6 1619. In Poems (§ xv. 5). 7 1620. In Poems (§ xv. 6). BIBLIOGRAPHY 169 8 1630. In Poems (§ xv. 7). 8a 1631. In Poems (§ xv. 7a). 9 1637. In Poems (§ xv. 8). 10 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9). 11 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10). 12 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11). 13 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12). 14 1888. In Spenser Society's reprint (§ xv. 15) of Poems of 1605. IX. ENGLAND'S HEROICAL EPISTLES 1 1597. Englands | Heroicall | Epistles. | By Michael Drayton. | [Device] At London, | printed by I. R. for N. Ling, and are to be I sold at his shop at the West doore of | Poules. 1597. | Octavo : 164 pp. ; 8 unpaged, 77 fols. + 1 fol. blank. Dedication to Countess of Bedford. Verses by E. Sc, Gent. Dedicatory Epistles to The Keader, Lord Mount- eagle, Lady Anne Harrington, Earl of Bedford, Lord Henry Howard, Mistress Elizabeth Tanfield, Sir T. Mounson, Sir H. Goodere, and Lady F. Goodere. Entered 12 October 1597. Copies in Bodleian. 2 1598. Englands | Heroicall | Epistles. | Newly enlarged, | by Michaell Drayton. | At London, | Printed by P. S. for N. Ling, 170 MICHAEL DRAYTON and are to be | sold at his shop at the West doore of | Poules. 1598. | Octavo : 208 pp. ; 4 unpaged, 99 fols. + 1 fol. blank. Dedicated to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and verses by Thos. Hassall, and address to Reader. The ' new enlargements ' consist of Epistles be- tween Edward the Black Prince and Countess of Salisbury. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodleian. 3. 1599. Englands | Heroicall | Epistles. | Newly Enlarged. | With Idea. | By Michaell Drayton. | [Device.] At London, | Printed by I. K for N. L. and are to be sold | at his shop at the West doore of | Poules. 1599. I Octavo : 121 fols. ; paged up to fol. 105. Dedication to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and verses by E. Sc. and T. Hassall. Address to Reader. New : Epistles between Elinor Cobham and Duke Humfrey, and Epistle of H. Howard, Earl of Surrey, to Geraldine (not Geraldine's to Surrey). Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodleian. 4 1600. Englands Heroicall Epistles newly cor- rected with Idea. Not in Brit. Mus., etc. Hazlitt : 'only one copy known.' 5 1602. Englands | Heroicall | Epistles | newly corrected with Idea. | By Michaell Drayton. | At London | Printed by I. R. for N. L. and are to be sold | at his shop in Fleetstreete, neere Saint | Dunstones Church. 1602. Octavo : 124 fols. (unpaged). BIBLIOGRAPHY 171 Dedication to Lady Bedford. Verses as before. New : dedication (of Elinor's Ep.) to James Huish, and Epistle of Geraldine to Surrey. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodleian, T.C.C. 6 1603. In the Barrons Wars (§ vii. 3). 7 1605. In Poems (§ xv. 1). New : dedication (of Ep. of Katharine) to Sir John Swinerton. 8 1608. In Poems (§ xv. 2). 9 1610. In Poems (§ xv. 3). 10 1613. In Poems (§ xv 4). 11 1619. In Poems (§ xv. 5). 12 1620. In Poems (§ xv. 6). 13 1630. In Poems (§ xv. 7). 13a 1631. In Poems (§ xv. 7a). 14 1637. In Poems (§ xv. 8). 15 [169-]. England's | Heroical Epistles, | written | In Imitation of the Stile and Manner | of | Ovid's Epistles : | with | An- notations I of I The Chronicle History. | By Michael Drayton Esq.; | Newly Cor- rected and Amended. | Licensed according to Order. | London, | Printed for S. Smeth- wick, in Dean's Court, and | R. Gilford, without Bishops-Gate. Octavo : 225 pp. (paginated). No dedications. Prose address to reader, verses by J. W. and B. C, Sir E. Sadleyr, and T. B. Copy in Brit. Mus. 172 MICHAEL DRAYTON i6 1697. England's Heroical Epistles, | Written | In Imitation of the Stile and Manner | of [ Ovid's Epistles : | with | Annotations | of | The Chronicle History. | By M. Drayton Esq. ; newly corrected and Amended. | Licensed according to Order. | London, | Printed for J. Conyers, at the Bible and Anchor | in Cornhil, 1697. | Octavo : 225 pp. (paginated) pastoral illustration. Address to Keader. Verses by Sir E. Sadleyr, T. B., J. W., and B. 0. Copies in Brit. Mus., Advocates. Same ed. as 15, with varied title. 17 1737. England's | Heroical Epistles, | written | In Imitation of the Stile and Manner | of | Ovid's Epistles. | with | annotations. | By Michael Drayton, Esq.; j London: | Printed in the Year m.dcc.xxxvii. Duodecimo : 272 pages (paginated). Dedication by R. Dodsley to H.R.H. the Princess of Wales. With a pastoral illustration. Author's Preface. Verses by Thos. Hassall, E. St., and Wm. Alexander. Copies in Brit. Mus., T.0.0. 18 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9). 19 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10). 20 1788. Corser names an 8° edition ' with Notes and Illustrations by Rev. James Hurdis, D.D.' : not found under either Hurdis or Drayton in B. M. Catalogue. 21 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11). BIBLIOGRAPHY 173 22 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12). 23 1888. In Spenser Society's reprint (§ xv. 14) of Poems of 1605. Selections : 24 1653. The Epistles of Henry and Rosamond, and also a rendering of them into Latin verse are in : Amanda ... by N. H[ookes] . . . 1653. 25 1658. The Epistle of Henry to Rosamond is in Deliciae Poetarum Anglicanorum, which is published in Birkhead's Otium Literatum, etc., by H. Stubbe, according to Hazlitt. Otium Literatum is not in Brit. Mus. 26 The Epistle of Rosamond to Henry is in The I Unfortunate Royal Mistresses, | Rosa- mund Clifford, I and | Jane Shore, | Con- cubines I to King Henry the Second, | and | Edward the Fourth, | with | Historical and Metrical Memoirs | of those | Celebrated Persons. | by Sir Thomas More, Michael Drayton, | Thomas Hearne, &c. | London: | Printed by and for William Cole, | 10, Newgate-Street. | For other selections see § xxii. 1, 2, 3. X. SIR JOHN OLDCASTLE I 1600. The first part | Of the true and bono | r- able historic, of the life of Sir | John Old- castle, the good | Lord Cobham. | As it 174 MICHAEL DRAYTON hath been lately acted by the right honor- able the Earle of Notingham | Lord high Admirall of England | his seruants. | [Device.] London | Printed by V. S. for Thomas Pauier, and are to be solde at | his shop at the signe of the Catte and Parrots | neere the Exchange. | 1600. Octavo : 40 leaves (no pagination). Entered 11 August 1600. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl. 2 [1600]. The first part | Of the true and bono- I rable history, of the Life of | Sir John Old-castle, the good | Lord Cobham. | As it hath bene lately acted by the Right | honorable the Earle of Notingham | Lord High Admirall of England, | his Seruants. | Written by William Shakespeare. | [Device Heb Ddiev Heb ddim] | London printed for T. P. I 1600. I 40 leaves (no pagination). Slight differences in text and directions. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl. The device is Welsh : ' Without God, without all.' 3 1780. In Supplement | to the Edition of | Shakspeare's Plays | published in 1778 | by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens | . . . London . . . mdcclxxx. 2 vols. This play is in vol. ii. pp. 265-370. 4 1810. In The Ancient British Drama [called ' a drama ... by A. Munday? M.D. ? and others ' in Cat. of B. M.] Vol. i. pp. 318-349. BIBLIOGRAPHY 175 5 1848. In I A Supplement To The Plays | Of | William Shakspeare . . . Comprising The Seven Dramas | ... Sir John Oldcastle | [&c.] . . . Edited By William GiUmore Simms | . . . New York | . . . 1848. | Pp. 87-115. 6 1852. In The | Supplementary Works | Of | William Shakspeare | Comprising | His Poems And Doubtful Plays | . . . A New Edition, | By William Hazlitt, Esq. | London | . . . 1852. | Pp. 105-164. 7 1887. In The Doubtful Plays | Of | Wilham Shakspeare | . . . by | William HazHtt. London | George Routledge And Sons | . . . 1887. I Pp. 105-164. 8 1894. In Shakespeare's Doubtful Plays | The First Part | Of | Sir John Oldcastle | Edited With An Introduction | By | A. F. Hopkinson | London | M. E. Simms and Co. I . . . 1894. Octavo : pp. 4 (unpaged) + xxiii -i- 97. The only separate edition, apparently, of this play ; the editor's introduction attempts, on slender evidence, to distinguish Drayton's share in the work. XI. TO KING JAMES I 1603. To the Ma | iestie of King | James. | A gratulatorie Poem | by Michaell Drayton. | 176 MICHAEL DRAYTON At London | Printed by lames Roberts, for T. M. I and H. L. 1603. | Quarto : seven leaves (unpaginated) ; To the Reader, and plate are at end of the book. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl. XII. THE OWL 1 1604. The | Ovvle. | by Michaell Drayton | Esquire. | Noctuas Athenas. | [Illustration: owl on a tree and birds flying; device, suspended from tree, Prvdens non Loqvax.] | London | Printed by E. A. for E. White and N. Ling: | and are to | be soldo neere the litle north doore of S. Paules Church, j at the signe of the Gun. 1604. I Quarto : 27 leaves. Dedication to Sir W. Aston, and address to the Reader. Latin lines by A. Greneway. Entered 8 Feb. 1604. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., Rylands. 2 1619. In Poems (§ xv. 5). 3 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9), Appendix. 4 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10). 5 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11). 6 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12). XIII. A P^AN TRIUMPHAL I 1604. A Pa3an Trivmphall | composed for the Societie of I the Goldsmiths of London : BIBLIOGRAPHY 177 congratulating his High- ] nes magnificent entring the citie. | To the Maiestie of the King. I By Michael Drayton. | Dicite io psean, io bis dicite psean. London | printed for lohn Flasket, and are to be sold at his shop in I Pauls Churchyard at the signe of the black Beare. 1604. Octavo : 8 leaves (first and last blank), no pagina- tion. Entered 20 March 1604. Copy in Bodl, T.C.D. 2 1828. In The | Progresses, | Processions, and Magnificent Festivities, | of | King James the First, | his royal consort, family and Court, I collected from | Original Manu- scripts . . &c. . . . I By John Nichols, F.S.A. Lond. Edinb. and Perth. | Volume i. | London . . . 1828. Vol. i. pp. 402-407. XIV. MOSES 1 1604. Moyses | in a Map of | his Miracles. \ By Michael Drayton | Esqvire. | [Device.] At London | Printed by Humfrey Lownes, and are to be sold by | Thomas Man the Younger. | 1604. | Quarto : 90 pages (paginated), 5 pages unpaginated. Dedication in verse to Sir W. Aston ; letter to the Keader. Lines by (Sir) J. Beaumont ; to Drayton and Aston by Beale Sapperton, lines by T. Andrewe Entered 25 June 1604. Copy in Brit. Mus., Bodl. 2 1630. Altered as Moses, his Birth and Miracles, in § XXI. 1. M 178 MICHAEL DRAYTON 3 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9), Appendix. 4 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10). 5 1795. In Works (§ xvi. 11). 6 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12). 7 1892. § xxi. 6. XV. COLLECTED POEMS 1 1605. Poems: | ByMichaellDraiton | Esquire. | [Device] London, | Printed for N. Ling. | 1605. Octavo : 500 pp. Arguments, verse to Sir W. Aston, Address to Reader, verses by T. Greene and J. Beaumont on unnumbered pp. Barons Wars pp. 1-159. Another address to Reader, verses by E. St. [not E. Sc, as in earlier edd.], &c., on unnumbered pp. Englands H. Epistles (with new dedication to Sir J. Swinerton added in midst), 104 pages, commencing paging again ; Sonnets, and 3 Legends on unnumbered pp. Coi^ies in Brit. Mus., Bodl. 2 1608. Poems : | by Michael Drayton | Esquire. Newly corrected by the | Author. | London | Printed for lohn Smethwicke, and | are to be sold at his Shop in | Saint Dunstones Church- I yard, vnder the Diall. | 1608. | Octavo : pp. 500. Same contents as 1. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl, Edin. Univ. 3 1610. Poems ... by | Michael Drayton | Es- qvire. | Newly Corrected by the | Author. | London | Printed for John Smethwicke, and to bee | sold at his Shop in Saint BIBLIOGRAPHY 179 Dunstanes | Church-yard, vnder the Diall. I 1610. Octavo : paging as No. 1. Same contents, with additional sonnets by John Selden, and by E. Heyward 'To his friend the Author.' Copies in Brit. Mus. 4 1613. Poems : | by I Michael Drayton | Esqvire, | Newly Corrected by the | Author. | [De- vice.] I London | Printed by W. Stansby for John Smethwicke, | and are to bee sold at his Shop in Saint Dunstanes Church- yard, vnder | the Diall. 1613. | Octavo : paged in part ; contents as in No. 3. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., T.C.C., Chatsworth. 5 1619. Poems : ( by | Michael | Drayton | Es- qvire I Viz. I The Barons Warres, | Eng- lands Heroicall Epistles, | Idea, | Odes, | The Legends | of Kobert, Duke of Nor- mandie, | Matilda, | Pierce Gaveston ! And, Great Cromwell, | The Owle, | Pastorals, Contayning Eglogues, | With the Man in the Moone. | [Device] Peto I.S. Non Altum. London, | Printed by W. Stansby for lohn Smethwicke, and are to be sold | at his Shop in Saint Dunstanes Church-yard in | Fleet-streete vnder the Diall. [No date.] The titles are in a vertical list on the title-page. There is alscP a frontispiece with title : Poems I by | Michael Drayton | Esquyer. | Collected into | one Volume | With | sondry Peeces i inserted I neuer before Im- 180 MICHAEL DRAYTON printed. | London | printed for | John | Smethwick. | Fresh title-page for each section : Englands | Heroicall \ Epistles. | By | Michael Drayton, | Esquire. | With | Some short Annotations of the Chronicle | Historie to the same: To which, the | Reader is directed, by this Marke * | in the begin- ning of euery Line, to | which the Annota- tions I are pertinent. | London, | Printed for lohn Smethvvicke. | 1619. Address to Keader. Idea. I In | Sixtie three | Sonnets. | By Michael Drayton, | Esquire. | London, | Printed for lohn Smethvvicke. | 1619. | Address in verse to Keader. Odes. I With | Other Lyrick | Poesies. | By | Michael Drayton, | Esquire. | London, j Printed for lohn Smethvvicke. | 1619. Verses to Sir Henry Goodere — Address to Keader. The I Legends | of | Robert, Duke of Nor- mandie. ] Matilda the Faire. | Pierce Gaveston, Earle of Cornwall. ] Thomas Cromwell, Earle of Essex. | By | Michael • Drayton, | Esquire. | London, | Printed for lohn Smethvvicke. | 1619. Verses to Sir W. Aston — Address to Keader. BIBLIOGRAPHY 181 The I Owle. | By 1 Michael Drayton, | Es- quire. I Noctuas Athenas. | London, | Printed for lohn Smethvvicke. | 1619. Verse to Sir W. Aston— Address to Keader— Latin Verse In Noctuani Draytoni by A. Grenewai. Pastorals. | Contayning | Eglogves, | With the I Man in the Moone. | By | Michael Drayton, | Esqvire. | London, [ Printed for John Smethvvicke. | 1619. Dedicated to Sir W. Aston — Address to Keader. The whole work is 487 pages folio. Dedication to Sir W. Aston. Address to Headers of Barons' Wars. Lines by T. Greene, J. Beaumont, E. Heyward, J. Selden, Thos. Hassell, W. Alexander and E. Scory. Copies in Brit. Miis., Bodl, T.C.C., Advocates. With portrait of Drayton engraved by William Hole, garland stating his age (see p. 1 supra), and Latin lines Lux Hareshulla, &c. It is not known why this portrait, dated 1613, only appeared in 1619. We are not to be misled by the pasted copy named under § xviii. 1. 1620. Poems .... 1620. Identical with 4 and 5 but for date and spacing of words at bottom of page. Imprint here as follows : London, | Printed by William Stansby for lohn | Smethwicke, and are to be sold at his Shop | in Saint Dunstans Church-yard in | Fleetstreete. 1620. 1630. Poems | by | Michael | Drayton | Es- quyer. | Newly Corrected | & Augmented | London | Printed title-page on illustrated leS2 MICHAEL DRAYTON plate I by Willi : | Stansby | for John | SmetliAvick. Octavo : 496 pp. (pagination). Prose dedication to Sir W. Aston, and address to the Keader : the lines by T. Greene, J. Beaumont, Heyward, Selden. Contains The Barons Warres, England's Heroicall Epistles, with separate title, the four Legends, with separate title, and Idea (ed. 1619). Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl, U.L.C. (wants general title-page). Separate title-page: — Englands | Heroicall Epistles. I By | Michael Drayton, | Esqvire. | With I Some short Annotations of the | Chronicle Historie to the same : | To which the Reader is directed, | by this Marke * in the beginning | of euery Line, to which the I Annotations are pertinent. | [Device.] | London, | Printed for lohn Smethwicke, 1630. I Separate title-page: — The | Legends | of | Robert, Duke of Normanclie | Matilda, the Faire. | Pierce Gaveston, Earle of Corn- wall. I Thomas Cromwel, Earle of Essex. | By I Michael Drayton, | Esqvire. | [Device.] | London, | Printed for lohn Smethwicke. | 1630. I 7a [? 1631]. Poems: | by | Michael Drayton | Esqvire, | Newly Corrected by the | Avthor. | [De- vice.] I London, | Printed by William BIBLIOGRAPHY 183 Stansby, for lohn Smethwicke, and | are to be sold at his Shop in Saint Dunstanes | Church-yard, vnder the Dyall. | Octavo. Dedication in verse to Sir W, Aston, Epistle to Eeader, Verses by J. Selden, E. Heyward, J. Beau- mont, and Greene. Contains The Barons Warres, Englands Heroicall Epistles, Idea, Legends of Robert, Matilde and Pierce Gaveston. Before Epp. is another Epistle to Reader, and verses by E. St., W. Alexander, Dedication to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and Sonnet to the same. Copy in Brit. Mus. [catalogue dates ? 1631], Bodl. 8 1637. Poems | by | Michael Dray ton | Esquyer. | Collected into | one Volume. | Newly Corrected | mdc.xxxvil | London | Printed for I John Smethwick. Duodecimo : 487 pp. Title-page with wreathed head of Drayton (not half-length as in Hole's, of whose portrait this head looks like a partial copy) on pedestal, with female figures either side, and male figures below, and a dog. The title is on a slab in the middle : ' William Marshall sculp: '. The last new edition of Drayton's collected works for over a century. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., Advocates (no title- page). 9 1748. The | Works | Of | Michael Drayton, Esq. ; I A Celebrated Poet in the Reigns of | Queen Elizabeth, King James i. and Charles i. | Containing | I. The Battle of Agincourt. | II. The Barons [sic] Wars. | III. England's Heroical Epistles. | IV. The Miseries of Queen Margaret, the | Un- fortunate Wife of the most Unfor I tunate 184 MICHAEL DRAYTON King Henry vi. | V. Nymphidia: or the Court of I Fairy. | VI. The Moon-Calf. | YII. The Legends of Robert Duke of | Normandy, Matilda the Fair, Pierce j Gaveston, and Tho. Cromwell E. of Essex. | VIII. The Quest of Cynthia. | IX. The Shepherd's Sirena. | X. Poly-Olbion, with the Annotations of j the learned Selden. | XL Elegies on several Occasions. | XIL Ideas [sic]. Being all the Writings of that celebrated Author, | Now first collected into One Volume. | [Device.] | London: Printed by J. Hughs, near Lincoln's-Inn- Fields, I And Sold by R. Dodsley, at TuUy's- Head, Pall-Mall : J. JollifFe in St. James's |- Street: and W. Reeve in Fleet-Street. MDCCXLVIII. Folio : pp. 400 ; pp. 3-12 contain An Historical Essay On The Life and Writings of Michael Drayton, Esq. : This anonymous biograj)hy is the first attempt of the kind after the casual notices of Fuller, Phillips, and Winstanley. Oldys, in Biogra- phia Britannica, 1750, s.v. 'Drayton,' controverts it and increases the material. There are separate title- pages (not the old ones) for most of the poems, and engravings heading each principal poem. In some copies, without mention of date, the pagination is contmued to page 490 by the addition of an ap- pendix with the following title-page : Appendix | to the | Works j Of Michael Drayton, Esq. I Containing \ The Owl. | The Man in the Moon. I Odes, with other Lyrick Poems. | Eclogues. | The Muses [sic] Elysium, &c. | Since the Publication of Mr. Drayton's Works by Subscription | in 1748, the Publisher has been favoured with the follow- ing I Pieces of that Author, extracted from the BIBLIOGRAPHY 185 Cabinets of the | Curious, which did not come to hand in time to be inserted in | the former Collection. The Odes are the recension of 1619. The ' Pas- torals containing Eclogues' are those of 1606 [§ xvi. 1]. The ' &c. ' means Noah's Flood, Moses His Birth and Miracles, and David and Goliah. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., etc. 10 1753. The | Works | of | Michael Drayton Esq.; I A Celebrated JPoet in the Reigns of I Queen Elizabeth, King James i. and Charles i. | Containing [&c.] . . . London : Printed for W. Reeve, at Shakespear's Head in Fleet-street, mdccliii. Octavo : 4 vols. A reprint of the folio 1748 edition and its Appendix. Illustrated plate repre- senting tomb, with bust. Copy in Brit. Mus. 11 1795. The | Works | of the | British Poets. | With Prefaces, | Biographical And Criti- cal, I by Robert Anderson, M.D. | Volume Third : | Containing | Drayton, Carew, and Suckling. I London | . . . 1795. | With a separate title-page : — The I Poetical Works j of | Michael Drayton, Esq. I Containing his Poly-Olbion, Barons Wars, England's Heroical Epistles, Battle of Agincourt, Elegies, &c. &c. &c i Legends, Ideas, [sic] Nymphidia, Quest of Cynthia, Sonnets, 186 MICHAEL DRAYTON To which is prefixed | The Life Of The Author. I [Verses from Kirkpatrick's Sea- Piece.] I Edinburgh : | Printed By Mundell and Son, Royal Bank Close, | Anno 1793. Octavo : pp. vi. 1-670 occupied with Drayton. The ' &c.' inchides The Miseries of Queen Margaret, The Mooncalf, The Owl, The Man in the Moon, Odes, 'Pastorals containing Eclogues,' The Muses [sic] Elysium, Noah's Flood, Moses' Birth and Miracles, David and Goliah. The ' Life ' is meag-re, inexact, and of no value. 12 1810. The Works of the English Poets The Additional Lives by Alexander Chalmers. . . . Vol. IV. . . . 1810. Same contents in same order, plus some more of the dedications by and to Drayton. Another but equally bad Life. 13 1856. Poems | By | Michael Drayton, | From The I Earliest And Rarest Editions, | Or From unique Copies. | Edited By | J. Payne Collier, Esq. | Printed For The | Roxburghe Club. | London : | J. B. Nichols And Sons, 25 Parliament Street. | MDCCCLVI. I With a frontispiece page also : — Poems by Michael Drayton | [Engraving.] | Roxburghe Club. Quarto : Ten pages unnumbered ; then Introduc- tion, pp. i-li and one blank ; and pp. 1-173 and one blank ; and 2 pp. blank. Contains Collier's valuable Introduction ; The Harmony of the Church ; Idea, The Shepherd's Garland ; Idea's Mirror ; Endimion and Phoebe : BIBLIOGRAPHY 187 Mortimeriados, The Lamentable Civil Wars, &c. ; Poems Lyric And Pastoral ; Idea, Sonnets by- Michael Drayton (from the editions of 1599 and 1613). With the original title-pages copied of all these works except the last, and Collier's notes after each poem. This volume contains nearly all of the important works that are not reprinted in any other number of this section. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., U.L.C. 14 1876. The complete works of | Michael Drayton, | now first collected. | With introductions and notes by | the Rev. Richard Hooper, M.A. | Vicar of Upton and Aston Upthorpe, Berks, | and editor of Chapman's Homer, Sandys' Poetical Works, etc. | London, | John Russell Smith, I Soho Square, | 1876. 3 vols. 8vo, published in the Library of Old Authors, and containing : Hole's portrait, introduc- tion, reprint in modern spelling of 1622 edition of Poly-Olbion, and of The Harmony of the Church. No more of this edition of Drayton has appeared. 15 1888. Poems: | By Michael Draiton, Esquire. | Printed for the Spenser Society. | 1888. Quarto : 2 pp. blank, 4 pp. containing above title, then pp. 1-500. Bound in Two Parts (Part i. is pp. 1-256) + 2 pp. blank. Title-page of 1605 edition and its separate pagination given. XVI. POEMS LYRIC AND PASTORAL I [1606?]. Poemes | Lyrick and pastorall. | Odes, | Eglogs, I The man in the Moone. | By 188 MICHAEL DRAYTON Michaell Drayton, | Esquier. | At London, | Printed by R. B. for N. L. and I. Flasket, | Octavo : 119 pages (no pagination). Prose address to Reader. No date. Dedication : ' To the deseriiing memory of my | most esteemed Patron and friend, | Sir Walter Aston, . . .' Entered 19 April 1606. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., Edin. Univ. 2 1856. In Poems, ed. Collier (§ xv. 13). 3 1891. Poemes, | Lyrick and Pas tor all. | By Michaell Drayton, Esquire. | Printed for the Spenser Society. | 1891. | Quarto : 2 pp. with above title and printer's mark ; then reprint of 1, with title-page, pp. 1-120. For reprints of Eclogues see under § ii. Other reprints of Odes and The Man in the Moon : — 4 1619. In Poems (§ xv. 5). 5 1620. In Poems (§ xv. 6). 6 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9), Appendix. 7 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10). 8 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11). 9 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12). lo 1896. In An English Garner . . . edited by Edward Arber . . . Vol. viii. . . . 1896. (The Odes and Eclogues.) BIBLIOGRAPHY 189 II 1903. In An English Garner. Some Longer Eliza- bethan Poems, with An Introduction by A. H. Bullen . . . 1903. Odes of 1606 and 1619. XVII. LEGEND OF CROMWELL 1 1607. The | Legend | Of Great Cromwel. | By Michael Drayton | Esquier. [Device.] At London | Printed by Felix Kyngston, and are to be sold by I. Flasket, | dwelling in Paules Churchyard at the signe of | the black Beare. 1607. Quarto, pp. 50, no pagination. Dedicated ' to the deseruing memorie of Sir W. Aston.' Entered 12 October 1607. Copy in a private library. 2 1609. The | Historic | of the Life | and Death of the I Lord Cromwell, sometimes | Earle of Essex, and Lord Chancel | lor of Eng- land. I By Michael Drayton | Esquier. | At London, | Imprinted by Felix Kyng- ston, for { William Welby, dwelling in Pauls Churchyard | at the signe of the Greyhound. | 1609. Quarto : 40 pages (pagination). Text altered (Hazlitt). Dedication to Sir W. Aston. Words To the Reader. Verses by I. Cooke, H. Lucas, Chr. Brooke. Identical with 1 but for title-page. Copies in Brit. Mus. (imperfect), Bodl. 190 MICHAEL DRAYTON 3 1610. In A I Mirour | for Magi- | strates : Being a trve Chronicle | Historic of the Vn timely I falles of such vnfortunate Princes and men of note, I as haue happened since the first entrance of Brute | into this Hand, vntill this our I latter Age. | Newly Enlarged with a Last | part, called A Winter nights Vision, being an addition of such Tragedies, especially famous, as are exempted | in the former Historic, with a Poem annexed, | called Englands Eliza. | At London. | Im- printed by Felix Kyngston. | 1610. | Pp. 520-547. Copy in Brit. Mus., s.v. ' Higgins, John,' in catalogue. 4 1619. In Poems (§ xv. 5). 5 1620. In Poems (§ xv. 6). 6 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9). 7 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10). 8 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11). 9 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12). 10 1815. In A Mirror for Magistrates. | edited by | Joseph Haslewood. | Volume ii. | London : | Printed for | Lackington, Allen and Co. Finsbury Square ; | and | Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, Paternoster Row. | 1815. I Pp. 502-539. BIBLIOGRAPHY 191 XVIII. POLY-OLBION 1613. Poly-Olbion | or | A Chorographicall Description of Tracts, Riuers, | Mountaines, Forests, and other Parts of this renowned Isle I of Great Britaine, 1 With intermix- ture of the most Bemarquable Stories, Antiquities, Wonders, | Rarityes, Plea- sures, and Commodities of | the same : | Digested in a Poem | By Michael Dray- ton, I Esq. 1 With a Table added, for direction to those occurrences of Story and Antiquitie, | whereunto the Course of the Volume easily leades not. | [Device.] — London, Printed by H. L. for Matthew Lownes : I. Browne : I. Helme, | and I. Busbie. 1613. Succeeding this title-page is a frontispiece repre- senting Albion, and labelled ' Great Britaine ' ; a woman with the sceptre and a cornucopia. Castle and forest are speckled over her robe. Behind is the open sea, with ships, visible through the archway. On the columns of the arch stand jfigures of the Princes whom 'Time hath seen ambitious of her.' The wording runs : — Poly-Olbion | By | Michaell Drayton | Esqr. : | London printed for M. Lownes, I. Browne | I. Helme. I. Busbie \ Ingraue by W. Hole. Folio : 303 pp. and 15 unnumbered leaves, con- taining verses ' Vpon the Frontispiece,' the frontis- piece, title-page, dedication, verses, &c., and a table. Dedication in prose to Prince Henry ; portrait of ' Henricus Princeps,' full-length, with pike in aim, and plumed helmet on the ground, ' William Hole | sculp :', and verses opposite concerning the portrait ; 192 MICHAEL DRAYTON epistle to The Generall Keader, and another to My friends, the Cambro-Britans ; preface From the Author Of The Illustrations, namely, John Selden, dated ' from the Inner Temple,' May 9, 1612. These Illustrations, or notes, follow each of the Eighteen Songs in the volume. Eighteen double-page engraved maps, one to each Song. Entered 7 Feb. 1612. In some copies the frontispiece is absent, and in some the Illustrations. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., U.L.C., T.C.C., Rylands, T.C.D. In Brit. Mus. an earlier and undated issue [? 1612], with no title-page ; a frontispiece, verses, dedication, portrait (earlier state, without Henricus Princeps) of Prince Henry, epistles, etc., as in 1613 edition, 18 songs. Folio, 303 pp. and 10 unpaginated leaves, no table, maps before each song. A copy of this issue in the Edinb. Univ. Library has Hole's portrait of the 1619 ed. of the Poems carefully pasted in ; the watermark shows that it was not part of the original book. 2 1622. A I Chorographicall | Description Of All I the Tracts, Rivers, | Mountains, Forests, | and other Parts of this Re- nowned I Isle of Great Britain, | With intermixture of the most Remarkeable | Stories, Antiquities, Wonders, Rarities, Pleasures, | and Commodities, of the same. | Diuided into two Bookes ; the latter containing | twelue Songs, neuer before Imprinted. | Digested into a Poem | By I Michael Drayton, Esquire. | With a Table added, for direction to those Occur- rences I of Story and Antiquitie, where- unto the Course of the | Volume easily BIBLIOGRAPHY 193 leades not. | London, | Printed for John Marriott, lohn Grismand, | and Thomas Dewe. 1622. | [No frontispiece, and no picture of Prince Henry. Dedications, &c., as before; but before Song Nineteen comes separate title-page : — ] The I second part, | or | A Continvance | Of Poly-Olbion | From The Eight | eenth Song. I Containing all the Tracts, Riuers, Moun I taines, and Forrests: | Intermixed with the most remarkable Stories, | Anti- quities, Wonders, Rarities, Pleasures, and Com I modities of the East, and Northerne parts of this Isle, | lying betwixt the two famous rivers of | Thames and Tweed. | London, | Printed by Augustine Mathewes for lohn Marriott, | lohn Grismand, and Thomas Dewe. | 1622. Dedication to Prince Charles : letter ' To any that will read it.' Verses by W. Browne, George Wither, John Reynolds. Folio : 12 leaves (impaginated) ; pp. 1-303 (and one blank) include the first 18 Songs ; then, preced- ing the Second Part, 7 leaves (unpaginated), and pp. 1-168 include Songs 19 to 30 = 254 flf. Entered 6 March 1622. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., U.L.C., T.C.C., T.C.D. There are variations and difficulties in the collation of Poly-Olbion, especially at the beginning, and a full comparison of the copies has yet to be made. 3 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9). 4 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10), N 194 MICHAEL DRAYTON 5 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11). 6 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12). 7 1831. In Select Works of the British Poets, edited by R. Southey (without Selden's illustrations). 8 1876. In Works, ed. Hooper (§ xv. 14). 9 1890. The | Poly-Olbion : | A | Chorographicall Description of | Great Britain. | By | Michael Drayton. | Printed for the Spenser Society. | 1890. I Facsimile reprint of 2 in Publications of the Spenser Society, New Series, Issue No. 1. Folio : 4 pp. blank ; title as above ; then reprint of 2 as above. In three parts, the third part begin- ning Song 10 (' The Second Part') of Poly-Olbion. XIX. ELEGIES I 1618. An Elegie on the Lady Penelope Clifton, by M. Dr. ; and An Elegie on the death of the three sonnes of the Lord Sheffield, drowned neere where Trent falleth into Humber. In Certain | Elegies, | done | by Svndrie | Ex- cellent Wits. I With I Satyrs and Epigrames. [Device] London, | Printed by B: A: for Miles Partriche, and are | to be solde at his shoppe neare Saint | Dunstons Church in Fleet | streete. 1618. | Copy in Brit. Mus. BIBLIOGRAPHY 195 2 1620. In ^ n • ,T. Certain | Elegies, | Done by Sundrie |Ex- cellent Wits. With Satyrs and Epigrams. [Device] | London. | Printed for Thomas lones, and are to be sold at | his shop m Chancery Lane, over a- | gainst the Roles. 1 1620. Another edition. For later reprints of these see under § xx. Copy in Bodl. XX. THE BATTLE OF AGINCOURT, Etc. I 1627. The | Battaile | of | Agincovrt. \ Fovght by Henry the | fift of that name, King of England, a | gainst the whole power of the French: | vnder the Raigne of their Charles I the sixt, Anno Dom. 1415. | The Miseries of Queene Margarite, | the infortunate wife of that most in | fortunate King Henry the sixt. I Nimphidia, the Court of Fayrie. | The Quest of Cinthia. | The Shepheard's Sirena. 1 The Moone-Calfe. | Elegies vpon sundry occasions. 1 By Michaell Drayton | Esquire. | London, | printed for William Lee, at the Turkes Head | in Fleete- Streete, next to the Miter and Phaenix. | 1627. 1 Folio : pp. 218. Portrait as in Poems of 1613 (§ xv. 4) by W. Hole. Dedication by Drayton 'To you, &c., those Noblest Gentlemen, &c.' : verses on 'Battle of Agin- court' by I. Vaughan. Sonnet by John Reynolds. 196 MICHAEL DRAYTON ' Vision of Ben. lonson, on the Mvses of his Friend M. Drayton.' Entered 16 April 1627. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., U.L.C., T.C.C. Rylands, 2 1631. The Battaile . . . London, printed by A. M. for William Lee . . . Phoenix. 1631. As No. 1. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl. 3 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9), excepting the four Elegies upon the death of Sir Henry Rains- ford, upon the death of the Lady Olive Stanhope, To Master William Jeffreys, and upon the death of Mistress Elinor Fallow- field. 4 1753. In Works (§ xv. 9), with the same excep- tions as in 3. 5 1795. In Works (§ xv. 10), with the same exceptions. 6 1810. In Works (§ xv. 11), with the same exceptions. REPRINTS OF SEPARATE POEMS The Battle of Agincourt. 7 1893. The Battaile of Agincourt | by Michael Drayton: | with introduction and | notes by Richard Garnett | London printed and issued by | Charles Whittingham & Co at I the Chiswick Press, mdcccxciii. Octavo : pp. xxiii. 120. Contains Hole's and the Dulwich portraits. The BIBLIOGRAPHY 197 latter portrait is partly reproduced in Harding's Biographical Mirrour, 1795, vol. i. p. 102. K. Clamp sculpt. Nymphidia 8 1751. The | History | of | Queen Mab; | or, the I Court of Fairy. | Being | The Story upon which the Entertain | ment of Queen Mab, now exhibiting at | Drury-lane, is founded. I By Michael Drayton, Esq. ; | Poet Laureat to King James i. and King Charles i. | London : | Printed for M, Cooper in Pater- noster-row, 1751. I Quarto : 24 pp. (paginated). Nymphidia reprinted. 9 1814. Nymphidia | The Court of Fairy: | [verses and woodcut] | Kent : | Printed at | The private press of Lee Priory. | By Johnson and Warwick. | 1814. Edited by Sir Egerton Brydges. Contains also verses by Jonson ; Advertisement, Address to Eeader ; verses by Wm. Browne, George Wither, Th. Greene, J. Beaumont, E. Heyward, John Selden, W. Selden, W. Alexander, E. Scory ; verses by Drayton to W. Brown, and to Sir Henry Goodere ; the Epistle to Eeynolds, and Sonnet to river Ankor beginning, 'Clear Ankor, on whose silver-sanded shore.' Copies in Brit. Mus., T.C.D., Bodl., U.L.C., T.C.C. 10 1819. In The Works of the British Poets . . . by Ezekiel Sanford. Philadelphia. 1819. In vol. ii., together with the Mooncalf. 1 1 1831. In Select Works of British Poets, edited by R. Sou they. 198 MICHAEL DRAYTON 12 1883. In § XXII. 1. 13 1887. In § XXII. 2. 14 1887. In CasselFs National Library, vol. 79, with Midsummer Night's Dream. 15 1896. In Nymphidia and the Muses Elizium . . . Edited by John Gray . . . [Ballantyne Press] London. 1896. 16 1899. In § XXII. a There are probably other modern reprints. XXL THE MUSES ELIZIUM, Etc. I 1630. The Mvses | Elizium, | Lately discouered, I By A New Way Over | Parnassvs. | The passages therein, being the subiect of | ten sundry Nymphalls, | Leading three Diuine Poemes, | Noahs Floud, | Moses, his Birth and Miracles | David and Goliah. | By Michael Drayton Esquire. | London, | Printed by Thomas Harper, for lohn Waterson, and | are to be sold at the signe of the Crowne in | Pauls Church-yard. 1630. I Quarto : 6 pp. (unpaginated) : pp. 1-207 and one blank = 107 ff. Dedication to Edward, Earl of Dorset ; address To The Reader. Separate dedication (p. 87) of the Divine Poems to Mary, Countess of Dorset. Entered 6 March 1630. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., U.L.C. BIBLIOGRAPHY 199 2 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9), Appendix. 3 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10). 4 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11). 5 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12). 6 1892. The Mvses Elizium. | By | Michael Drayton, Esquire. | Reprinted from the Edition of 1630. | Printed for the Spenser Society. | 1892. | Quarto : 2 pp. with above title ; then reprint of 1, with its pagination, but also with pagination at foot of the reprint, pp. 1-215 and one blank. This is Issue No. 5 of Publications of the Spenser Society, New Series. 7 1896. With Nymphidia in § xx. 13. XXII. MODERN SELECTIONS 1 1883. Selections from the Poems | of | Michael Drayton. | Edited by | A. H. BuUen. | Privately Printed by | Unwin Brothers, Chilworth. | 1883. Quarto. A valuable Introduction and notes. Of entire poems are reprinted here Ballad of Dowsabel, and various short poems, Nimphidia, the Court of Fayrie, the Quest of Cynthia, The Shepherd's Sirena. Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl. 2 1887. The Barons' Wars | Nymphidia | And Other Poems | By | Michael Drayton. | With An Introduction by Henry Morley | LL.D., Professor of English Literature at 200 MICHAEL DRAYTON I University College, London | London | George Routledge and Sons | . . . 1887. | Octavo : pp. 1-288. The ' Other Poems ' include 4 of the Heroical Epistles, Idea (63 numbers, ed. 1619), 4 Elegies (including that to Jeffries), and Quest of Cynthia. No table of contents. 3 1899. A Selection | From the Poetry Of | Samuel Daniel | & \ Michael Drayton | With an Introduction and Notes by | The Rev. H. C. Beeching, M.A. | London | J. M. Dent & Co I ... I 1899. | Octavo : pp. xxiii ^and one blank ; pp. 1-196. Valuable introduction and notes ; table of dates ; Dulwich and Hole's portraits of Drayton ; pp. 57- end are devoted to selections from Drayton. Ten of the Odes are given, 21 Sonnets, Nymphidia, Shep- herd's Sirena, several Nymphalls from Muses' Elizium, Elegy to Reynolds, and extracts from other pieces. XXIII. PREFATORY LINES, Etc. 1 1595. ' Such was old Orpheus' cunning.' In A First Book of Ballets . . . T. Morley . . . 1595. Headed : ' Mr. M. D. to the Author.' In Bodl. 2 1600. Poems by Drayton : — ' Rowlands Song in praise of the fairest Beta/ 'A Roundelay betweene two Sheepheards/ 'Rowland's Madrigall,' and ' The Sheepheards An- theme,' In Englands | Helicon. | Casta placent superis, | BIBLIOGRAPHY 201 pura cum veste venite, | Et Manibus puris | sumite fontis aquam. | [Device] At London | Printed by I. R. for lohn Flasket, and are | to be sold in Paules Church-yard, at the signe I of the Beare. 1600. | Quarto. 2a InEnglands | Helicon: | or | TheMvses | Har- mony. I The Courts of Kings heare no such straines, | As daily lull the Rusticke Swaines. | [Device.] London: | Printed for Richard More, and are to | be sould at his shop in S. Dunstanes | Church-yard. 1614. Contains the above 4 poems and ' The Shepherd's Daffodil.' Octavo. In Brit. Mus. 2b And in Englands Helicon . . . London . . . 1614 : reprinted by A. H. Bullen, 1887. 3 1600. ' Like as a man, on some aduenture bound.' In The I Legend | of Hvmphrey | Duke of Glo I cester. | by Chr: Middleton. | Device. . . . London | Printed by E. A. for Nicholas Ling, and are | to be soldo at his shop at the west doore of | S. Paules Church. 1600. | Octavo : unpaginated 23 leaves. Poem is headed ' To his friend, Master Chr. M. his Booke.' In Brit. Mus., Bodl. 202 MICHAEL DRAYTON 4 1607. Lines in The I Perfect Vse | of Silk-Wormes, | and their benefit. | With the exact planting, and artificiall handling of | Mulberrie trees whereby to nourish them, and the fi- | gures to know how to feede the Wormes, and | to winde off the Silke. | And the fit maner to prepare the barke of the white Mulberrie to I make fine linnen and other workes thereof. | Done out of the French original! of D'Oliuier de Serres Lord | of Pradel into English, bj Nicholas Geffe Esquier. | With an annexed discourse of his owne, of the meanes and | sufficiencie of England for to haue abundance of fine silke by feeding | of Silke-wormes within the same; as by apparent proofes by | him made and con- tinued appeareth. For the generall vse | and vniuersall benefit of all those his countrey | men which embrace them. Neuer the like yet here discouered by any. | Au despit d'enuie. | At London | Imprinted by Felix Kyngston, and are to be sold by Richard Sergier | and Christo- pher Purset, with the assignment of | William Stallenge. 1607. | Cum Pri- uilegio. I Octavo : 75 leaves (partly paginated). Poem ' To Master Nicholas Geffe ' by Michael Drayton, com- mencing ' As thou deare friend with thy industrious hand,' Quarto. In Brit. Mus. 5 1609. * Such men as hold intelligence with BIBLIOGRAPHY 203 letters.' In ' The | Holy | Roode ' . . . | by lohn Davies [of Hereford] . . . London . . . | for N. Butter. Reprinted by Grosart in Works of J. D. Vol. i. 1878. 6 1611. ' In new attire.' In Sophonisba by David Murray. Octavo. No title-page. 35 leaves (unpaginated). Said poem headed ' To my kinde friend Da: Murray.' 6a 1611. 'Many there be that write before thy book' In Coryat's Crudities . . . 1611. 7 1616. Two pieces, one commencing 'Describe what is faire painting of the face/ the other ' To what may I a painted wench compare ? ' In A I Treatise | against Pain- | ting and Tinctvring | of Men and Women : ... By Thomas Tuke. Signed Thos. Draiton, however. A Thomas Drayton, D.D., was writing in 1665. Quarto. In Brit. Mus., Bodl. 8 1618. ' Chapman ; We finde by thy past-prized fraught,' headed ' To my worthy friend Mr. George Chapman, and his translated Hesiod.' In The I Georgicks | of | Hesiod, | by George Chapman | Translated Elaborately | out of the Greek: | Containing Doctrine of Husbandrie, Moralitie, I and Pietie; with 204 MICHAEL DRAYTON a perpetuall Calendar of Good | and Bad Dales; Not superstitious, but necessarie | (as farre as naturall Causes compell) for all I Men to obserue, and difference in fol~ | lowing their affaires. | Nee caret vmbra Deo. I [Device] | London, | Printed by H. L. for Miles Partrich, and are to be solde I at his Shop neare Saint Dunstans Church in | Fleetstreet. 1618. | Quarto. 39 paginated pp. ; 7 unpaginated. In Brit. Mus., Bodl. 9 1619. 'If in opinion of judicial wit.' In The | famovs and Renowned | Historic of Primaleon of Greece, | Sonne to the great and mighty Prince | Palmerin d'Oliva, Emperour | of Constantinople. | Describing his Knightly deedes of Armes, as also | the Memorable Aduentures of Prince Edward of I England : And continuing the former History of | Palmendos, Brother to the fortunate | Prince Primaleon, &c. | The first Booke. | Translated out of French and Italian, into English, by A. M. | [Device.] | London : | Printed by Thomas Snodham. | 1619. Octavo. The translator is Munday. The lines face p. 1 of bk. ii. in Bodl. copy. Copy also in Brit. Mus. 10 [1621.] In Manvdvctio | ad | Artem | Rhe- toricam, Thomas Vicars. In Brit. Mus. only 1621 and 1628 editions, wherein nothing by Michael Drayton. Named by Bullen, s.v. ' Drayton,' in Diet. Nat. Biog. BIBLIOGRAPHY 205 11 1622. 'To my friend M. A. H.' commencing 'By this one line, my Holland, we may see.' In Navmachia, or | Hollands | Sea-fight. | [Surrounded by device.] Non equidem inuideo. | [Device of ship in full sail] London, Printed by T. P. for Thomas Law, and William (by Abra : Holland) Garrat. | An. Dom. 1622. | Quarto. 18 leaves (unpaginated). In Brit. Mus. 12 1629. 'This posthumous, from the brave parent's name.' In Bosworth-field : | ... by Sir John Beau- mont I . . . London | . . . 1629. Reprinted by Grosart in Works of Sir J. B. 1889. 13 1636. 'Dover, to do thee right who will not strive.' In Annalia Dvbrensia. | Vpon the yeerely celebration of | Mr. Robert Dovers Olim- pick I Games vpon Cotswold-Hills. | Written by I Michaell Dray ton, Esq. | lohn Trvssell, Gent. . . . Ben lohnson . . . Owen Felltham, Gent. . . . William Basse, Gent. . . . Thomas Heywood, Gent. | London. | . . . 1636. Reprinted in Grosart's Occasional Issues . . . Vol. iv. . . . 1877. APPENDIX k INDEX AND EDITIONS OF THE SONNETS Many inferences have been drawn as to the poets whom Drayton imitated in his sonnets, but they often turn on questions of priority and bibliography. There is also no full and correct account of the sonnets which were added or with- drawn in the successive editions (following that of 1594) of 1599, 1602, 1603, and 1619. See the Bibliography. No other editions come in question, for that of 1603 repeats 1602, and those of 1610 and 1613 repeat 1605, while those of 1630 and 1637 repeat 1619. The five relevant editions may therefore be numbered a, h, c, d, and e. The table of first lines gives in alphabetical -order all the sonnets printed at any time by Drayton in con- nection with ' Idea.' The numbers in the columns show the place each sonnet occupies in each edition where it is found. The counting has usually gone wrong, partly because in d (1605) three different sonnets are numbered 61 (61* in table) and two are numbered 62 (62* in table), and also because sonnets are often more or less rewritten, with a different first line. In all such cases the earliest version is numbered and quoted first in the table, APPENDIX A 207 the variants of the first line being appended and named again in cross-references. Thus in LV. the version a of 1594 is that numbered LV. ; the versions of 1599 (6) and of 1619 (e) follow, and are found in cross-references under * Taking my pen ' . . . and ' Yet read at last,' which are unnumbered. bed 1594 1699 1602 1606 1619 I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. XVII. XVIII. XIX. XX. XXI. XXII. XXIII. XXIV. XXV, XXVI, XXVII. XXVIII. XXIX. XXX. XXXI. XXXII. XXXIII, XXXIV An evil spirit, your beauty haunts me still, As in some countries far remote from hence As love and I late harboured in one inn, As other men, so I myself do muse, . A witless gallant, a young wench that woo'd Beauty sometime in all her glory crown'd . Black pitchy night, companion of my woe,. Bright star of beauty, on whose eyelids sit . Calling to mind, since first my love begun, Clear Ankor, on whose silver-sanded shore Cupid, dumb idol, peevish saint of love, Cupid, I hate thee, which I 'd have thee know, Dear, why should you command me to my rest Define my love, \ and tell the joys of heaven, a weal, e ) Die, die, my soul, and never taste of joy, . Eyes with your teares, blind if you be. Go you, my lines, embassadors of love. Great Lady, essence of my chiefest good, . [End. and Phoebe, 1595.] How many paltry, foolish, painted things, . I ever love where never hope appears. If chaste and pure devotion of my youth, . If ever wonder could report a wonder, If he from heaven that filched that living fire If those ten regions registered by fame I gave my faith to Love, Love his to me, , I hear some say, this man is not in love. In former times such as had store of coin In the whole world is but one Phoenix found a Within the compass of this spacious round b, J- 1 'Mongst all the creatures in this spacious round In pride of wit, when high desire of fame . Into these loves who but for passion looks, Is not love here as 'tis in other climes Letters and lines we see are soon defac'd, . Like an adventrous seafarer am I, , Looking into the glass of my youth's miseries, a Viewing the glass of my youth's miseries, b, 45 22 66 62 64 61 I 29 1 26 14 27 24 68 16 47 pref. 13 15 208 MICHAEL DRAYTON XXXV XXXVI. XXXVII XXXVIII XXXIX, XL, XLI, XLII, XLIII, XLIV, XLV, XLVI, XLVII XLVIII. XLIX L. LI, LII. LIII, LIV. LV. LVI. LVII, LVIII. LVIX. LX. LXI. LXII. LXIII. LXIV. LXV. LXVI. LXVII. LXVIII. LXIX. LXX. LXXI. LXXII. , Love, banish' d heaven, on earth was held in scorn Love in a humour play'd the prodigal, . Love once would dance Avithin my mistress' eye , Madam, my words cannot express my mind, [To Lady A. Harington.] Many there be excelling in this kind, . , Marvel not, love, though thy power admire, Methiuks I see some crooked mimic jeer, . ['Mongst all the creatures. See xxviii.] Muses, which sadly sit about my ehair, , My fair, had I not erst adorned my lute, . , My fair, if thou wilt register my love, . My fair, look from those turrets of thine eyes, My heart, imprisoned in a hopeless isle, , My heart, the anvil where my thoughts do beat, My heart was slain, and none but you and I, , My love makes hot the fire whose heat is spent, My thoughts, bred up with eagle birds of love, a, " When like an eaglet I first found my love, h, Nothing but no and I, and I and no, . Not thy grave counsels, nor thy subjects' love, . [To James I.] Now love, if thou wilt prove a conqueror, . eyes, behold your happy Hesperus, Oft taking pen in hand with words to cast my ^ woes, ^ 62 41 APPENDIX B^ VERSES FROM ASHMOLE, 38, f. 77. These verses weare made by Michaell Drayton Esquier Poett Laureatt the night before he dyed. 1. Soe well I love thee, as w%out thee I Love nothing, yf I might chuse, I 'de rather dye Than bee on day debarde thy companye. 2. Since Beasts, and plants doe growe and live and move, Beasts are those men, that such a life approve Hee only lives, that Deadly [sic] is in love. 3. The Corne that in the ground is so wen first dies And of on seed doe manye eares arise Love this worlds corne by dying multiplies. 4. The seeds of love first by thy eyes weare throwne Into a grownd untild, a harte unknowne To beare such fruitt, tyll by thy hande 'twas sowen. 5. Looke as your Looking glass by chance may fall Devyde and breake in manye peycies small And yet shews forth, the selfe same face in all. 6. Proportions, Features, Graces, just the same And in the smalest peyce, as well the name Of Fayrest one deserves as in the richest frame. 7. Soe all my thoughts arc peyces but of you Whiche put together makes a glass soe true As I therein noe others face but yours can Veiwe. ^ I have to thank Professor Firth for this transcript. 210 INDEX The roman figures {preceded by §) refer to sections of the bibliography. * ^TiON,' 37 and n. Agincourt^ Ballad of, 99, 104- 106, 139, 148. Agincourt, Battle of, 132, § xx. Alexander, Sir W., 122, 125, 127, 139. Allot, R. See England^s Par- nassus, 82. Amours. See Idea's Mii^ror. Ancor, river, 17, 20, 21, 22. Anderson's British Poets, § xv. 11. Annalia Duhrensia, § xxiii. 13. Arber, Dr. E., § ii. 12 ; § v. 19. Arms of Drayton, 94, and cover. Ariosto's octave stanza, 73. Aston, Sir W., 19, 36, 72, 94- 95, 106-107. Atherstone, 1, 3, 4. Aubrey, 1 n., 145, 147. Barnfield, W., 33 n., 81. B[axter], N., his Ourania, 35. Barons' Wars, The. SeeMorti- meriados. Beaumont, Francis, 36, 63, 97 n., 143. Beaumont, Sir John, 143, § xxiii. 11. Bedford, Lucy (Harington), Countess of, 11, 14, 23, 72. Beeching, Canon, 54, 57 n., § xxii. 3. Browne, WilHam, 66, 143 and n. BuUen, Mr. A. H., ix, x, 199, § xxii. 1. Burton, 4. Camden's Brlttannia, 110, 112- 113. Carew, 103, 130, 151. Chalmers' British Poets, § xv. 12. Chapman, George, 142 ; lines of D. to, § xxiii. 8. Charles I., 107. Chaucer, House of Fame, 43 ; MonTc's Tale and Legend of Good Women, 40 ; Troilus and Cressida, 72; Parlia- j ment of Birds, 37 ; ■S'tV j Thopas, 137; Praise of 1 Chaucer, 140. j Chettle, Henry, 85 and n. Civil Wars in France, The, 84, . 85 n. 211 212 MICHAEL DRAYTON Clifford Chambers, 20, 126- 128. Cobham, Lord, 91. Cokain, Sir Aston, 12-13. Collected Poems of D., 98, 99, 131-134, § XV. College of Heralds, 94. Collier,J.P.,ix.,13?i.,25,33n., 82?i.,95??-.,146w. ; §ii. 10; § V. 18 ; § vi. 4 ; § xv. 13, etc. Combe Abbey, 22. Constable, Henry, 45. Contention of Two Houses, etc. , 71. Cooke, (Sir) A., 43. Coryate, § xxiii. 6^ Courthope, Prof. W. J., vii, viii, 23-24 and n. Daniel, Samuel, Gom2)laint of Rosamond, 41, 62, 67 ; Delia, 45, 54 ; History of the Civil Wars, 72. David and Goliah, 132, 134. Davies, John, of Hereford, § xxiii. 5. Dekker, 84-85 and n. De La Serres, 0., § xxiii. 4. Desportes, Philippe { ' Portes '), 46. Donne, John, 61, 103, 143. Dorset, Earl and Countess of, 144-145. Drayton family and pedigree, 2-5. Drayton, Edmund, 2, 3, 147. Drayton, Michael, passim. Drummond, William, corre- spondence witli Drayton, 121-12S, 121 n., 144. Dryden, 66, 78-79. Du Bellay, 43. Elegies, 128-129, 137-144, § xix, § XX (see Epistles). 'Elphin,' pastoral name for Sidney, 35. '-Endimion and Phoebe, 21, 64- 68, 78, 99, 138, 152, § vi. England's Helicon, § xxiii. 2. England's Heroical Epistles, 11, 17, 42, 77-80, 138, 150, §ix. England's Parnassus, 82. Epistles: Of His Lady's Not Coming to Town, 128 ; To Reynolds, 68, 139-143 ; to G. Sandys, 96; on Sir H. Rainsford, 131. Essex, Robert, Earl of, 13 n. Famous Victories of Henry V. , 89. Fitzgeoffrey's Affaniae and Drake, 81, 82 ; his Elegies, § xix. 1. Fleay, Rev. F. G., x., 13 ?i., 21 and n. , 36 n. , 37 n. , 41 7i. , 47, 53 ?i., 57 n., S5n., 92-93 ?^. Fuller, 82, 146. Gayton, Edwakd, 71 n. Geoffrey of Monmouth, 116- 117. Godwin, Earl, 84. ' Goldey. ' See Lodge. Goldsmith, Citizenofthe World, 149. Goodere or Goodyere family, genealogy, 10 n. Goodere, Anne, or ' Idea,' 6, 10-12, 20; Lady Rainsford, 20, 21, 23, 68-71, 128. Goodere, Frances, 10-12, 20, 36. INDEX 213 Gooderc, Sir Henry the elder, 7-12. Goodere, Sir Henry the younger, 10, 11. Gower, 140. Qratulatory Poem, 96. Great Assizes, etc., 148-149. * Great Lady, essence' (sonnet), 16-19. Guilpin's Skialetheia, 81 n. Hall, John, 68 and w. Harington, Lady Anne and Sir John, of Exton, 17-18. Harington, Lucy. See Bed- ford, Countess of. Harmony of the Ghtirch, 24-25, §i. Harrison, J. S., on Platonism, 47 n. Hartshill, 1, 5, 6. Hathway, 85 and n., 88. Henley, Lyra Heroica, 104. Henry, Prince, 106-107, 109, 191-192. Henry I. , 84. Henslowe, Philip, 85-88, 92. Heroical Epistles. See Eng- land's Her. Ep. Hewes, John, 8. Heylin, P., 146. Hole, W., engraver, 108, 109, 181. Holland's Naumachia, § xxiii. 11. Holland, Philemon, tr. of Camden, 112. Hooper, Rev. R., edition of Drayton, § xv. 14. Horace, 100. Hunter's MS. Chorus Valum, 4 w., 21 n. Hymn to his Lady's Birth- place, 21. * Idea,' Anne Goodere, q.v. Idea; The Shepherd's Garland (eclogues), 32-39, 136, § ii. Idea's Mirrour, afterwards Idea (or Ideas), sonnets, 17, 44-55, § v., and App. A. James i. , 94. See A Pman Triumjfhal and To the Majesty of K. J. Jefifrey, Mr., epistle to, 129 n. Jonson, Ben, 100, 123, 135, 138, 142, 143, 145. Laing, 121 n. Langland's Vision of William concerning Piers the Plough- man, 42 n. Legends, 39-43 ; of Cromwell, 106, § xvii. ; of Gaveston, § iii. ; of Matilda, 42, 55, § iv. ; of Robert, 18, 42, 108, § viii. Lee, Mr. Sidney, 38 n., 46-47, 57 ?i., 61 n., 164. Leigh Hunt, 66. helaxid.' a Itinerary, 111-112. L'Idde, of De Pontoux, 47, 59. Lines ivritten the night before he died, App. B. Longsioord, William, 84, 85n., 88. Lydgate's Falls of Princes, 39. 214 MICHAEL DRAYTON Macaulay's Lays, 77. Man in the Moon, The, 67, § XV. 5. Mancetter, 2, 3, 147. Mautuanus, Baptista, 9. Margaret, Duchess of New- castle, 187. Marlowe, Christopher, 78, 80, 141-142; Hero and Leander, 62-66; Edward II., 141. Masson, Dr., 121, 123. Meres, Francis, 81, 83, 94. Merry Devil of Edmonton, The, 91-93 n. Metrical criticism by D., 73. Middleton, Chr., § xxiii. 3. Middleton, Thos., 85 and n. Milton, 43 ?i., 117, 150, 151. Mirror for Magistrates, The, 40-41. ' Mirtilla,' 36 n. Miseries of Queen Margaret, 131-132, § XX. Monday, A., 84-85, 204; § xxiii. 9. Mooncalf The, 132-134, § xx. Morley, H., § xxii. 2. Morley, T., § xxiii. 1. Mortimeriados, 17, 19 ; revised as The Barons' Wars, 72-74, 77, § vii. Moses in a Map of his Miracles, 132, 134, § xiv. ; his Birth and Miracles, § xxi. Muses' Elizium, The, 37, 132, 136, 144, § xxi. Mythomystes, by H. Reynolds, 138. Narcissus, by H. Reynolds, 138. Nash, Thomas, 141. Noah's Flood, 132, 134, § xxi. Nymphidia, or. The Court of Fairy, 131, 137, 150, § xx. 1 and 8-15. Odes, 99-103, 150, § xvi. ; To the Neio Year, 101 ; To the Virginian Voyage, 101-102. '01con,'36. Oldcastle, Sir John, 84, 85, 88- 91, 92 w., §x. Oldys, John, 98. Otia Merseiana, 56 n. Ovid, Heroides, 77, 78. Oioen Tudor, 84, 85 n. Owl, The, 5, 97-98, § xii. Poian Triumphal, -4, 96, § xiii. 'Panape,'20, 23. ' Pandora,' 35. Peacham, H., 144-145. Petrarch, 45-46, 110. Piers of Winchester, 84, 85 n. Platonism, 46-47, 47 n. Plays by Drayton, 83-93. Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, 99, §xvi. Polesworth, 6-8, 17, 20. Poly - Olblon, 21, 83, 94-95, 109-122, 124, 128, 139, 148, § xviii. Pontoux, Claude de, L'Idce, 47, 59. Poems of Divers Humours, 83. Portraits of Drayton, 107-108. Prince Henry, 106-107, 109. QuARLKS, Francis, 145. INDEX 215 Quest o/Gynthia, The, 131, 136, §xx. Kainsford, Sir Henry, 12, 20, 128-131, 131 n. Return from Parnassus, The, 82. Richard Gordelion's Funeral, 84, 85 n. Rising ofCardinalWolsey, The, 84, 85 n. Reynolds, Epistle to Henry, 138-143; Mi/thomystes, 139 and n. ' Robin,' 13 n. Ronsard, 100. 'Rowland,' 33, 39. Sandys, Geo., 87, 142, 155. Scornful Lady, The, 97 n. Selden, John, 42 ; illustrations to Poly - Olbion, 109 - 110, 116. Selections from Drayton, x., § xxii. ♦ Selena,' 19, 22-23, § ii, 2, 3. Seneca, 9. Shakespeare, 54-60, 75, 78, 80, 141 ; Venus and Adonis, 63, 67, 114 ; Lucrece, 55, 75 n. ; Richard III. , 76 ; Henry I V. , 55, 75 71., 89-91; Henry V., 91, 105; Sonnets, relation to Drayton's, 50, 55-59; iMid- siimmer Ni(jht's Dream, 137. Shex)herd''s Garland. See Idea ; The Shepherd's Garland. Shepherd's Sirena, The, 79 n., 132, 136, § XX. Sidney, Lady Mary, 35. Sidney, Sir Philip, 35 and n., 36, 45, 53-55, 69, 123, 140. ' Since there's no help,' Sonnet, 61, 152. Smith or Smythe, playwright, 85 and n. Sonnets of Drayton. See Amours; Idea's Mirror; Sid- ney, Shakespeare, Spenser. Spenser, Edmund, 26-34, 37, 38, 39, 43, 49, 53, 67, 69, 73, 75, 135, 151 ; Shepherd's Gdlendar, 32, 69 ; Faerie Queene, 27; Astrophel and Stella, 35; Ruins of Time, 37 ; Golin Glout, 38 ; Mother Hubbard's Tale, 97 ; Hymns, 72. Spenser Society reprints of Drayton, § xv. 15, § xvi. 3, § xviii. 9, § xxi. 6. Surrey, Earl of, 140. Swinburne, Mr., 101. * Sylvia,' 36. Tasso, 135, 138. Thames, verse-picture of, 115. Tixall, 95. To his Coy Love, 103. To his Valentine, 103. To the Majesty of King James, §xi. Tuke, § xxiii. 7. Tyler, T., on Shakespeare's Sonnets, 56 n. 'Verses on the night before he (Drayton) died,' 210, App. B. Versification of Drayton, 24, 32, 34, 53, 65, 66, 72-74, 78- 80, 99-106, 118-119, 15.3. Vicars' Afanuductio, § xxiii. 10. 216 MICHAEL DRAYTON Waller, Mr. A. R., ix. 44. Waller, E., 155. Warner, William, Albion's England, 40-41. Watson, T., 38 n. Webster, John, 85 and n. Whitaker, Dr. L.,91m. Whitgift, Archbishop, 25. Wither, 148. Wordsworth, 50, 153. Wyatt, 140. Wyndham, Rt. Hon. G., 47 n. 57 n: Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty at the Edinburgh Univovsity Press mrnF^i^i'^^w U DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewals only: Tel. No. 642-3405 Renewals may be made 4 days i>rior to date due. Renewed books are subject to immediate recalL Due end o^ ^■ ilff. 1471 ^ subject to APR 1 7 1972 8 5 8^ JUL 3 1972 ■ c-pa B c p ffT — DfC 1 i-n ^iUk JUL 2 2 2008 hf.L ^^A4^ .m.^^im.'^ I Jt-iEgsi,.. U. C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES CDSSlS^^bl ^ni*.. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY