cycle in its unevenness represents the early and late stages of poetic progress, the more delicate examples of his work show him worthy of the praise bestowed by his latest admirer and critic,

"Faith, Michael Drayton bears the bell
For numbers airy."

It will be noted that, while many rhyme-arrangements are experimented upon, the Shakespearean or quatrain-and-couplet form predominates. In the less praiseworthy sonnets he is found to lack grammatical clamping and to allow frequent faults in rhythm, and he toys with the glittering and soulless conceit as much as any; but where his individuality has fullest sway, as in the picturesque Arden memory of the fifty-third, the personal reminiscences of the Ankor sonnets, and the vivid theatre theme of the forty-seventh, in what Main calls that "magical realisation of the spirit of evening" in the thirty-seventh, and above all in the naïve and passionate sixty-first, there is a rude strength that pierces beneath the formalities and touches and moves the heart. Drayton, like Sidney and Daniel and Shakespeare, draws freely

upon the general thought-storehouse of the Italianate sonneteers: time and the transitoriness of beauty, the lover's extremes, the Platonic ideas of soul-functions and of love-madness, the phoenix and Icarus and all the classic gods, engage his fancy first or last; and no sonnet trifler has been more attracted by the great theme of immortality in verse than he. When honouring Idea in the favourite mode he cries

66

'Queens hereafter shall be glad to live

Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise."

A late writer holds that years have falsified this prophecy. It is true that Lamb valued Drayton chiefly as the panegyrist of his native earth, and we would hardly venture to predict the future of our sonneteer; but the fact remains that now three hundred years after his time, his lifelong devotion to the prototype of Idea constitutes, as he conventionally asserted it would, his most valid claim to interest, and that the sonnets where this love has found most potent expression mount the nearest to the true note of immortality.

TO THE READER OF THESE

SONNETS

INTO these loves who but for passion looks,
At this first sight here let him lay them by,
And seek elsewhere in turning other books,
Which better may his labour satisfy.

No far-fetched sigh shall ever wound my breast;
Love from mine eye a tear shall never wring;
Nor in "Ah me's!" my whining sonnets drest,
A libertine fantasticly I sing.

My verse is the true image of
my mind,
Ever in motion, still desiring change;
To choice of all variety inclined,
And in all humours sportively I range.
My muse is rightly of the English strain,
That cannot long one fashion entertain.

IDEA

I

LIKE an adventurous sea-farer am I,
Who hath some long and dangʼrous voyage been,
And called to tell of his discovery,

How far he sailed, what countries he had seen,
Proceeding from the port whence he put forth,
Shows by his compass how his course he steered,
When east, when west, when south, and when by
north,

As how the pole to every place was reared,

What capes he doubled, of what continent,

The gulfs and straits that strangely he had past, Where most becalmed, where with foul weather

spent,

And on what rocks in peril to be cast:

Thus in my love, time calls me to relate

My tedious travels and oft-varying fate.

II

My heart was slain, and none but you

and I;

Who should I think the murder should commit?

Since but yourself there was no creature by

But only I, guiltless of murdering it.

It slew itself; the verdict on the view Do quit the dead, and me not accessary. Well, well, I fear it will be proved by you, The evidence so great a proof doth carry.

But O see, see, we need inquire no further! Upon your lips the scarlet drops are found, And in your eye the boy that did the murder,

Your cheeks yet pale since first he gave the

wound!

By this I see, however things be past,

Yet heaven will still have murder out at last.