"I WILL here set down the worth of a poet (as of that sweet muse of his) who not unworthily beareth the name of the chiefest Archangel Michael, and singeth after that soule-ravishing manner. So we read in Robert Tofte's "Blazon of Jealousy," and, it may be, pause to wonder on the faded fame of the poet that nearly every contemporary writer loads with eulogy. Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Greene, and Heywood, Davies the epigrammatist, Selden the antiquary, William Browne, and many others, praise "the soul-rapping strains of that all-loved poet," as Drayton's poems are styled in "Britannia's Pastorals." Perhaps there lies an explanation in the quaint personal adjective, for we hear fully as much of Drayton's sweet nature, dignified conversation and purity of life, as of the renown of his verses. Such virtue (says Mere in his "Wit's Academy") was almost miraculous in so good a wit. It seems to us that this charm of character must unconsciously have done a great deal to widen Drayton's influence among his fellow poets, and to build up a renown for which we should find it hard to account on purely critical grounds. But perhaps after all the secret lies in the difference of his aim from theirs, in the fact that in an essentially dramatic age he dared to vary and "th' old lyrick kind revive."

Drayton's songs and pastorals are by far the most valuable legacy

he has left us. Changing taste and the lapse of years have made his once famous historical poems unsatisfying and even wearisome; but the charm remains in his more fanciful verse, an innocent freshness lingers in it, and here and there, from among a mass of conceited tawdriness, we pick out some rare jewel of song-still pure and bright, with an exquisite simplicity of style.

Occasionally we single out a passage of wonderful vigour, touched with all the picturesque vividness of the time; but as a rule vigour is not a special quality of Drayton. He seems, in escaping the coarseness that soils the work of other Elizabethan poets, to have also left behind much of the grasp of character, richness of ideas and lyrical variance, that are their chiefest glory. And yet his songs have an indefinable charm of their own; perhaps we may express it roughly as a combination of playfulness and irritability. This playfulness which lights up many of his shorter poems is never absolutely merry or joyful, and is so delicate and rare in kind, that any name we find for it gives the effect of exaggeration. Nothing could be further removed from wit, and satire it certainly is not; for Drayton's satire is of the clumsiest and the heaviest. There is a tender humorousness in it, although we cannot call it humour, and it is certainly easier to feel than to

explain the delight of its gay wistfulness.

The irritability is more plainly apparent. All his personal poems are touched by it; there, and not only there, we hear a little too keenly the note of a disillusioned and embittered nature. With the actual world, with its ignoble strifes and disappointments, Drayton has little sympathy; fame and death must dignify its heroes and heroines before he will adopt them for his own, and the nymphs and shepherds of his non-historical poems are frankly and plainly unreal. His longest poem has neither hero nor heroine, and no relation to purely human interests; woods, streams, and mountains are the personages of the Polyolbion.

For Nature of a certain kind Drayton had a very real and enduring sentiment, but the scenery that he admires must be wellwooded, pastoral, and (to use one of his favourite adjectives) neat. He never allows us to forget that he was born in Warwickshire, and seldom wrote better than when he sang the quiet pleasures of its meadow-lands and coppices. It may be that his life-long taste for the pastoral can be traced to these early associations, for it would seem that Drayton was of a nature singularly simple and sincere; he never appears to have quarrelled with an old friend or an early opinion, neither did he weary of his native lanes and woods.

In

the thirteenth song of the Polyolbion there is a description of the Forest of Arden, almost pathetic in its inability to comprehend that such is not the highest kind of natural beauty, and in an earlier sonnet he exclaims ::

Fair Arden, thou my Tempé art alone, And thou, sweet Ankor, art my

Helicon ;

but rugged mountains and hurrying torrents, wild cliffs and barren

wildernesses, seem to have inspired him with a Greek distaste. His ode written in the Peak is full of ludicrous discomfort at the cold air, and the "grim and horrid caves, whose looks affright the day;" it is quite in vain that he strives to console himself for his exile from the south by what of all things in Derbyshire he admired the mostthe baths of Buxton. Even the thought that at least the muse is everywhere cannot cheat him into satisfaction. It is better not to imagine how uncomfortable he would have felt in Switzerland.

Drayton was born at Hartshull, near Atherstone, in Warwickshire, in 1563; that is to say, one year before Shakespeare. His parents belonged to an old and honourable family, but were not rich, it would seem, since Michael owed a great part of his education to the generosity of Sir Henry Goodeere, himself a poet and the friend of poets, by whom a not very interesting elegy on the death of Prince Henry is to be found in Silvester's collection. We may fancy that the kindly Mæcenas was attracted by the poetic promise of this dreamy and scholarly lad, who had set his ambition on becoming a poet while he was quite a child. We find a charming account of his early longing after laurels in one of Drayton's versified letters written to his friend, Henry Reynolds:

For from my cradle you must know that I
Was still inclin'd to noble Poesie,
And when that once Pueriles I had read,
And newly had my Cato construéd,

In my small self I greatly wondered then
Among all other, what strange kind of

men

These poets were, and pleased with the

name,

To my mild tutor merrily I came, (For I was then a proper goodly page, Much like a pigmy, scarce ten years of age),

Clasping my slender arms about his thigh "Oh, my dear Master, cannot you (quoth I) Make me a poet ?"

The wise tutor tasked his pupil's perseverance by a steady course of classics, but "to it hard went I," says Drayton, who soon mastered his Ovid and Virgil. We can imagine him wandering, Latin classic-book in hand, under those branches of green Arden that have overhung so many poets. Those woods were then, as now, full of long grass, and all kinds of wild flowers, with here and there little natural arbours made by the twining branches of honeysuckle or dogberry bushes, where one may lie down on cowslips and lady smocks, and listen all day long to the songs of the birds. Here Michael Drayton must often have come to read, laying the base of the solid learning and delicate love of nature that distinguished him in afterlife; the green trees, the plashing Ankor, and the live things that inhabit the wood seem to have grown a part of his nature. Doubtless he would often forget his Eneid to watch a frolicsome squirrel, and Dido's sorrow would take a sweeter voice when he heard his favourite nightingale break through the daylight twitter of mated birds, like death in life. But Drayton was not long satisfied to remain a listener; he began versifying in the grand style; he tells us that:

Methought I straight had mounted Pegasus,
And in his full career could make him stop,
And bound upon Parnassus by-clift top,
I scorned your ballet then.

We hear nothing of more boyish pleasures; his books seem to have been his best companions. As he outgrew the learning of his earlier tutors, Sir Henry Goodeere sent him to graduate at the University of Oxford.

In 1593 Drayton published his first book with a dedication to this good-hearted patron. It is called "Idea," and contains sixty-three sonnets in the praise of a lady

that he celebrated under this name. Bound up with these were several eclogues, the outcome of his early studies, afterwards reprinted as Pastorals. The sonnets concern us chiefly. Though often spoiled by the tiresome conceits and laboured fantasies of the period, there are several among them so strong, so vigorous, that these alone should be able to maintain their author's reputation as a poet. They are all in praise of the same lady, of whom nothing more certain is mentioned than that her birthday fell on the fourth of August and was celebrated at Mich-Park in Coventry. From a passage in the Polyolbion we may, however, infer that Drayton, like Donne, had fallen deeply in love with the daughter of his patron, with Anne Goodeere, of Powlesworth Abbey. From the sonnets in her honour, we learn that for many years the lovers kept up an intercourse, but that some unexplained fatality finally separated them for ever. From

the tone of several poems, it appears likely that Anne would not risk the displeasure of her relations. The sonnets that in conjunction with later verses reveal this love story, are written in a manner so guarded, so purposely obscure, that we might almost believe that they celebrate an idea and no more. But Drayton cautions us earnestly against this view, beseeching us not to judge the strength of his love by such loose trifling, for (he says) as some men are most humorous in the presence of danger, so the passion that wrings tears from others can only force him to laugh of fortune though he die jesting. Indeed, to those who perceive in Drayton's poetry the evidence of a singularly sensitive nature (whose very irritability, like that of Molière's Alceste, was produced by the discord between

his high ideals of life and duty and the mean realities) this reserve of his deepest feelings will appear more natural and pathetic than the stormiest protestations of love. We extract the finest of these sonnets, in one of which he assures Idea of her immortality in his verse; the second describes their parting. It is written in a passion of angry love, but the love seems to have lasted when the anger passed, for in the Polyolbion he refers with regretful tenderness to Anne. He never married, and never sang the love praises of any other woman. Of women in general he speaks with scornful bitterness, assuring us that their nature is to be cold in love and hot in hate, that they are deceitful and wanton, shunning neither sin nor shame. Their intellectual power he considers beneath contempt. But for Anne he sang with another voice:

I.

How many paltry, foolish, painted things That now in coaches trouble every street

Shall be forgotten, whom no poet sings, Ere they be well wrapp'd in their wind. ing sheet ?

While I to thee Eternity shall give

When nothing else remaineth of these days,

And queens, hereafter, shall be glad to live

Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise:

Virgins and matrons reading these, my rimes

Shall be so much delighted with thy story

That they shall grieve they lived not in these times,

To have seen thee, their sex's only glory,

So shalt thou fly above the vulgar throng Still to survive in my immortal song.

Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows. And when we meet at any time again, Be it not seen in either of our brows

That we one jot of former love retain. Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath,

When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,

When Faith is kneeling by his bed of Death

And Innocence is closing up his eyes, Now if thou wouldst when all have given him over,

From Death to Life thou mightest him

recover.

Drayton has so often expressed his hatred of "things italionate " that it is strange to find that in the next year he published another volume of sonnets called "Idea's Mirrour, Amours in quatorzaines. Che suve e tace assai domanda. At London, published by James Roberts for Nicholas Linge; Anno 1594, with an allegorical engraving." This volume, dedicated to his friend, Anthony Cooke, is extremely rare. It is noticed in the Censura Literaria but has not been remarked by any of Drayton's editors, and we have never been able to find a copy of it. It is probably a reprint, with additions, of the earlier volume.

During the next three or four years Drayton was employed in composing four historical legends, each written with a moral purpose, and in collecting materials for twenty-four love letters supposed to be written by various historical persons, and conceived in the manner of Ovid. These were published in 1598 under the titles of "England's Heroical Epistles," and evince the ruling aim of all Drayton's historical and descriptive poetry, a patriotic desire to celebrate the heroism and pathos of English history, the beauty of English scenery. The letters, not-withstanding a too prominent pedantry, show sentiment, and a sense of the picturesque, but it is rarely that we come across a passage of

such keen dramatic insight as this from Fair Rosamond's letter to Henry II.:

As in the gallerie the other day

I and my woman passed the time away, 'Mongst many pictures which were hanging by,

The silly girl at length hapt to espie Chaste Lucrece image, and desires to know,

What she should be herself that murdered So P

Why girl (quoth I) this is that Roman dame

-Not able then to tell the rest for shame, My tongue doth mine own guiltiness betray

With that I sent the prattling wench away.

At this time Drayton was about three-and-thirty years of age, and one of the best scholars of his day. He was also a popular poet, and in 1594 he was thought to have won for himself a place in the front rank of living authors by the pub

lication of his" Barons' Wars." This poem was first written in sevenline stanzas, but in the second and revised edition (1602) the whole work was greatly altered and the measure changed for Italian octaves. The "Barons' Wars" was received with great favour, was widely read, and for many years held a foremost position in English patriotic literature. Even now the poem is interesting and pleasant to read, although we find in it none of the highest qualities of poetry. It is as a rhymed chronicle, and not as a work of art, that this book must be considered. The period chosen for representation offers great opportunity for the display of dramatic intuition; the characters of Edward II., Isabel, and Mortimer, are so strongly contrasted by nature that the driest record of their fate has the impressiveness of tragedy; but of this Drayton feels nothing. It is an eventful piece of English history to him and little more. The only really memorable passage in the

poem is that one where Edward on his way from Kenilworth to Berkeley having swooned and for a moment forgotten his miseries, awakes to find himself hopeless and helpless in the midst of his tormentors, with no belief in earthly or heavenly redress.

To whom, just Heaven, should I my griefe complayne,

Since it is onely Thou that workest all?

These two lines give us a clearer insight into the pious melancholy nature of the king than any others in the poem. There are, however, isolated lines and passages of considerable beauty. This couplet, for instance, shows a finer appreciation of the aim and limits of descriptive writing than we remember to have found in any of our modern poets-It is with regard to the representations of Beauty

And where the pen fayles, pensils cannot show it,

Only the Soule may be suppos'd to know it.

In the next year (1603) Queen Elizabeth died, and Drayton looked forward to advancement and court honours under James I., to whom he had been of service in days when such support was difficult and unrewarded. Sir Roger Aston (the brother of Sir Walter Aston, a dear friend of Drayton's, and next to Sir Henry Goodeere, his chief patron) had been a gentleman of the bedchamber at Holyrood, and after his term of office had expired retained his influence with the king. Moreover, he was the person principally entrusted to forward James's secret letters to the English court, which were sent under cover to Sir Walter Aston. Drayton had been often employed to deliver these letters, being a close enough friend of the Astons' to be admitted to their secrets, while as a favourite poet naturally much about the court, he escaped