NYMPHIDIA AND OTHER POEMS BY MICHAEL DRAYTON WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HENRY MORLEY LL.D., PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL GLASGOW AND NEW YORK 1887 4. Chronicle of the Cid. 5. Rabelais' Gargantua and the Heroic Deeds of Pantagruel. 6. Machiavelli's Prince. 7. Bacon's Essays. 8. Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. 9. Locke on Civil Government and Filmer's "Patriarcha." 10. Butler's Analogy of Religion. II. Dryden's Virgil. 12. Scott's Demonology and Witchcraft. 13. Herrick's Hesperides. 14. Coleridge's Table-Talk. 15. Boccaccio's Decameron. 16. Sterne's Tristram Shandy. 17. Chapman's Homer's Iliad. 18. Medieval Tales. 19. Voltaire's Candide, and Johnson's Rasselas. 20. Jonson's Plays and Poems. 21. Hobbes's Leviathan. 22. Samuel Butler's Hudibras. 23. Ideal Commonwealths. 24. Cavendish's Life of Wolsey. 25 & 26. Don Quixote. 27. Burlesque Plays and Poems. 28. Dante's Divine Comedy. LONGFELLOW's Translation. 29. Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, Plays, and Poems. 30. Fables and Proverbs from the Sanskrit. (Hitopadesa.) 31. Lamb's Essays of Elia. 32. The History of Thomas Ellwood. "Marvels of clear type and general neatness."-Daily Telegraph. HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARY MAR 20 1902 INTRODUCTION. MICHAEL DRAYTON was only a year older than his friend Shakespeare, and born in the same county. As Thomas Fuller says, when writing of him among Warwickshire Worthies, "Michael Drayton was born within a few miles of William Shakespeare, his countryman and fellow-poet, and buried within fewer paces of Geoffrey Chaucer and Edward Spenser." Drayton's birth year was 1563, his birth-place Hartshill, halfway between Atherstone and Nuneaton, near the north-eastern border of Warwickshire. Close by, in Leicestershire, just over the border, is that one of the many English parishes called Drayton-Fenny Drayton-from which his family may have derived its name. The river Anker flows by pleasant hills and woods, where there was once the Forest of Arden; it flows near to Hartshill on its way to join the Tame at Tamworth, and they were its waters that fed the Drayton fens. The Anker is the home river whose ripples are heard also in Drayton's song: "Fair Arden, thou my Tempé art alone, And thou, sweet Anker, art my Helicon." Drayton's Anker thus became associated with a poet's life, like Herrick's Dean Burn, or Spenser's Mulla. When celebrating Warwickshire, the middle shire of England, in his "Polyolbion "—" that shire which we the heart of England well may call "-Drayton speaks of it as his native county 'My native country then, which so brave spirits hast bred, Or any good of thine thou breath'dst into my birth, Drayton found patrons in his boyhood and youth. His earliest helper was a Warwickshire man, Sir Henry Goodyere of Polesworth, about seven miles northward of Hartshill, who |