sonnets. After the historical 'tragedie' came me full-blown historical epic. The First Four Books of his Civil wars between Lancaster and York appeared in 1595, and this work rose by gradual additions to the eight-book text of 1609. It belongs to the same (happily extinct) species as Drayton Mortimeriados, a species separated by its epic pretensions from the metrical chronicle of the Middle Ages, but still catering for readers who are at least as much interested in history as in poetry. Authorities are quoted and Daniel piques himself on having added nothing to the facts except speeches--as Sallust and Livy did in prose. He does not expect his work to be judged as 'pure' literature. We must not therefore be surprised if it is often prosaic (as in I. i-xxxvi) or if what would have been excellent prose (like I. 94-98) makes very tame verse. What is less pardonable is the clumsiness with which some sentences are forced into the metre as in

And so become more popular by this;
Which he feares, too much he already is (I. 63).

Here, as often in Drayton, we see the need for critical standards. A practised versifier like Daniel could have improved such a passage by five minutes' work: he was content with it because his readers demanded nothing better.

Yet he has carried out his ill-chosen task better than Drayton. Both poets relieve their narrative with reflections, but whereas Drayton's reflections are usually gnomic platitude, Daniel's show real, and interesting, thought: witness the passages on Order (II. 96), on the mixed causes of good and evil (V. 38-39), on popular blame ( ibid. 65 ), and on the substantial indifference, to the people, of the issues for which they fought (VIII. 7). In the aetiological myth at the beginning of Book VI he opens to us his whole mind about the age in which he lived, and traces its miseries to the growth of great nation states (28), the 'swelling sciences, the gifts of griefe' which have 'let in light That all may all things see, but what is right' (35), religious controversy (36), printing (37), and gunpowder, whereby 'basest cowards from afar shall wound' (40). The latter complaint may, but need not, owe something to Orlando Furioso, IX. 90. Such passages, which illustrate a very important side of Daniel's literary character, would be equally interesting in prose, but he has others of more poetical appeal. He has expressed better than

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any poet I know what a man feels at the moment of his first big success: Bolingbroke, entering London in triumph,

Admiring what hee thought could neuer be
Did feele his blood within salute his state (II. 64).

The river that 'glides on with pomp of waters unwithstood' (II. 7) fully deserved the honour of being borrowed by Wordsworth. Henry VI's words as he looks down on both armies before Towton, 'They must a People bee When we shall not be kings' (VIII. 24) are memorable. No one perhaps has said anything better about the great deeds of our ancestors than 'The eternall euidence of what we were'. Best of all is the scene (II. 68-71) in which Queen Isabel waits to see Richard entering London and mistakes Bolingbroke for him. Here for a few stanzas the narrative is worthy of Chaucer. And these beauties, though rarer than we could wish, are never mere purple patches inorganically added to the story (as the beauties in Drayton's epic sometimes are); they arise naturally where the poet is kindled by his matter.

In 1599 came A Letter sent from Octavia to Marcus Antonius written to the formula of the Heroides. It is more gracefully executed than the Rosamond. Octavia says the things that a deserted wife of noble character (yet not too noble--she can be sufficiently catlike about Cleopatra) might be expected to say, but the verse does not carry passion enough to stir us. Yet here, as often and henceforward increasingly in Daniel, the thought holds our attention. Octavia disgresses in an interesting [?print corrupt?] on the exclusion of women from affairs;

We, in this prison of our selues confin'd
Must here shut vp with our owne passions liue
Turn'd in vpon us (18)

The matter of the poem is better than the manner. Daniel is never silly.

The long verse-colloquy Musophilus belongs to the same year. Philocosmos attacks, and Musophilus defends, the literary life, but it is not at all like a medieval conflictus between Miles and Clericus. Daniel is in earnest: the arguments of Philocosmos were those that really troubled his own mind and his defence has nothing glib about it. It is costly and difficult as though he were fighting for his life. He knows that he is living in a great age in which 'Nature hath laid doune at last That mighty birth

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wherewith so long she went' (247). Yet, like Pope in the Dunciad, he sees the enemy ahead--Confusion 'that hath all in chace, To make of all an vniuersal pray' (245). He realizes (and it is the vocational disease of scholars to forget) how small a part literature, even at the best, plays in human life; 'how many thousands never heard the name' of Sidney or Spenser (440), how the real 'managing' of the world's affairs requires arts unknown to literary men, so that often

While timorous knowledge stands considering
Audacious ignorance hath done the deede (490).

There are too many books already. Fame is at all times uncertain; and what fame can be hoped by those who write in a 'barbarous language' confined to a minute island? To this, as all know, Daniel makes at one point the spirited reply that English may have a great future on 'strange shores' in the 'yet vnformed Occident' (955 et seq.). It is well that he did not rest his whole case on that promise which history has 'kept to the ear' and 'broken to the heart', for though Daniel is read in America today, he is read there (as here) only by professional scholars; not such an audience as poets dream. He is wiser, and more appealing, when he faces squarely the possibility of almost total, or total, failure. How if very few read books? 'That few is all the world' (556), the world's heart which feels and knows only in a small minority. But how, if none? Certainly (for Daniel is very honest) that will cut off the author's 'comfort'; it cannot annihilate his love for his art. He must continue to do the thing he feels himself born to do. I am not at all sure that these thoughts have proved healthy to literature. It may well be that the author who claims to write neither for patron nor public but for himself has done our art incalculable harm and bred up infinite charlatans by teaching us to emphasize the public's duty of 'recognition' instead of the artist's duty to teach and delight. Things may have been better when you could order your ode from Pindar as you ordered your wine from the wine merchant. But that does not alter the fact that in Musophilus we find a sort of intellectual intimacy that hardly any English poet had offered us before. There is no common measure between this and the formal, external poetry about poetry which we find in Spenser and others. We are with Daniel in his solitude, chewing the bitter questions which come to all of our

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trade. In this poem every reader who is also a writer finds himself. It has also many other merits, and beauties too numerous to quote. I allow myself only this, on Stonehenge,

That huge dumbe heape that cannot tell us how,
Nor what, nor whence it is (339).

Daniel's Senecan closet dramas hardly concern us. His lyrical gifts were small, though the Pastorall 'O happy golden Age', loosely translated from Guarini Pastor Fido ( IV. ix), combines with curious success wantonness of theme and stateliness of movement; perhaps not the best thing in the world to do. The Epistles ( 1603) carry us beyond our chronological boundary and have been dealt with excellently by another hand. They claim to be 'after the manner of Horace', but of course the stanzaic form and the loftiness of Daniel's mind preclude any real similarity. In them Daniel is moving out of the Golden Age not in the 'Metaphysical' direction but towards a greater severity and weight. That to Sir Thomas Egerton is an essay (in prose it would have been a good one) on Equity as 'the soul of law'. That to Lord Howard is even more prosaic. But that to the Countess of Cumberland, a Christian-Stoical appropriation of the theme suave mari magno, is almost a success. It is at any rate frequently moving; and it is here that we catch Seneca's quam res est contempta homo nisi supra humana surrexerit (Nat. Quaest. Prolog.) on its way through Daniel to its predestined home in The Excursion ( IV. 330). ¹

Though Daniel's poetry is often uninspired, sometimes obscure, and not seldom simply bad, he has two strong claims on our respect. In the first place, he can at times achieve the same masculine and unstrained majesty which we find in Wordsworth's greater sonnets, and I believe that Wordsworth learned it from Daniel. (The two poets had much in common and Daniel would have liked Laodamia.) And secondly Daniel is, in the nineteenth-century sense of the words, a poet of ideas. There had of course been ideas in Chaucer, and Spenser: but I think those poets felt themselves to be simply transmitting an inherited and accepted wisdom. There are, again, plenty of ideas in Donne, but they are, in my opinion, treated merely as the tools of his peculiar rhetoric: he was not interested in their truth or falsehood. But Daniel actually thinks in verse: thinks deeply, ar-

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duously, and perhaps with some originality. This is something quite different from Dryden's power of neatly poetizing all the stock arguments for the side on which he is briefed. Dryden states: Daniel can doubt and wrestle. It is no necessary quality in a poet, and Daniel's thinking is not always poetical But its result is that though Daniel is not one of our greatest poets, he is the most interesting man of letters whom that century produced in England.

Michael Drayton ¹ ( 1563-1631) is also a poet only half Golden, but in quite a different way from Greville, Davies, and Daniel. They began with Gold and moved away from it; he began with Drab, constantly relapsed into it, and in his old age, when the Golden period was over, at last produced his perfect Golden work, so pure and fine that no English poet has rivalled it. His weakness is the very opposite of Daniel's; he was in a sense too poetical to be a sound poet. His sensibility responded almost too quickly to every kind of subject--myth, the heroic past, tragic story, and (most of all) the fruitful, sheepdotted, river-veined, legend-haunted expanse of England. He had an unquenchable desire to write poetry about them all, and he always seemed to himself to be succeeding because he mistook the heat which they aroused in him for a heat he was communicating to the reader. He himself has told us (in the Epistle To Henry Reynolds) how at the age of ten he hugged his 'mild tutor' begging to be made into a poet, and how the good man granted his request, in typically sixteenth-century fashion, by starting him on Mantuan. In that scene we have what is essential in Drayton the man: a man with one aim, devoted for life to his art, like Milton or Pope. If the Muse regarded merit he would have been one of our greatest poets.

His career began inauspiciously with The Harmony of the Church ( 1591), drab scriptural paraphrases to which critics are too kind when they accuse them of 'wooden regularity' for they are in reality wooden without being regular. Idea, The Shepherd'sGarland

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Garland ( 1593) might be the work of a different man. These 'eglogs' are much influenced by Spenser's pastoral poetry but wisely refrain from his attempts at rustic realism. They were republished later with so many alterations as to make them a new book. But even the 1593 version shows promise: the lyrics, as always in Drayton, are the best part.

Idea's Mirror ( 1594), which I have already noticed, makes us think that Drayton is now going on from strength to strength, but with Endimion and Phoebe ( 1595) there is another check. In this perplexing poem the style of the erotic epyllion jostles with that of Du Bartas, and there is a similar wavering in Drayton's conception of his theme. He has, rightly, a feeling that this myth demands something more than a sensuous treatment, but has not quite made up his mind what that something more should be. I think he would like to have depicted the Platonic ascent from carnal to intelligible love, but has really no idea of what one would find at the top of the ladder. He has to fill up with astronomy and the theory of numbers. When he re-wrote it eleven years later as The Man in the Moon the discrepancy remained and was aggravated by a syntax so contorted as to be almost unreadable. In the earlier version the descriptive passages often have the prettiness that was intended. The movement of the couplets is a little monotonous.

His continual rewritings set us a problem. Detailed comparisons between versions are impossible in a short account, and if these are abandoned it becomes difficult to keep any kind of chronology. The 'Legends' of Matilda, Pierce Gaveston, and Robert of Normandy were originally written between 1593 and 1596; that of Cromwell did not follow till 1607. All four reappeared in 1619, with much revision. The Mortimeriados of 1596, much altered, became the Barons' Wars of 1603. Drayton's second thoughts are often important, but cannot of course be more important than the poems in which they occur. The truth is that this enormous body of historical verse, including the Agincourt and Miseries of Queen Margaret ( 1627), adds very little to his reputation.

Of 'legends' and 'tragedies' the reader of this book has now, I hope, heard all that he ever wishes to hear. And the historical epic is, almost equally, a genre diseased at the heart. Drayton, like Daniel, takes his historical poetry seriously as history: his marginal notes are significant. At the same time he adopts all

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the rhetoric and (on occasion) the sensuous richness which his age considered proper to high poetry. But such purple patches, like the fig-leaf in sculpture, only emphasize what they are meant to hide. The whole layout of the poem remains that of prose history. We are told that public persons did this or that and for such and such reasons, but we are not shown them doing it. In the Barons' Wars we are well into the second canto before we reach anything like an epic scene with a concrete where and when. No 'historical estimate' should deter us from saying that this is bad, bad work: interesting only in so far as it shows us how necessary the introductory letter to the Faerie Queene still was. Drayton has learned no structural lessons from all the great narrative poets who preceded him. He has not advanced on the old rhyming chroniclers. If you are going to be as artless as they in ordonnance it would be better to be artless in style too. It offends less and gets over the ground more briskly. Comparison between Drayton epic Agincourt and his ballad on the same subject is instructive. The epic panoply adds nothing and loses all the race and relish of the humbler poem. The attempts to produce greatness and terror by such slaughter-house details as 'There drops a cheeke and there falls off a nose' are pitiable. The only good things in Agincourt occur in the speeches; notably in Gam's rodomontade

I tell thee Woodhouse, some in presence stand
Dare prop the Sunne if it were falling down.

It was not till 1597, when the first version of England's Heroical Epistles appeared, that Drayton's historical interests found successful poetic expression; so successful that his revisions in the later editions were less drastic than usual. The Epistles are of course modelled on Ovid Heroides and we get rid of the epic chimera. They show a mingling of three styles, the genuinely Ovidian, the Golden, and the early Metaphysical. Thus the description of the grove in Surrey to Geraldine is pure Golden, the passage on gold in Edward the Fourth to Mrs. Shore faintly suggests an Elegy by Donne, and Rosamond is so like Ovid that we catch ourselves trying to remember the Latin. These styles, however, melt into one another without producing any discomfort; nor are conceit and hyperbole (common to them all) so managed as to exclude nature. Real passions at that time expressed themselves flamboyantly. Queen Isabel's

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remark on the element of fear in all sorrows is true and, I think, original; Henry II on kingship has pathos; the haggish malice of Elinor Cobham and the chivalrous patience of her husband are well brought out; Mortimer sustains his character of Stoic magnanimity successfully. One great virtue of the whole collection is the sweetness and vigour of its verse. The heroic couplet is here in its early perfection, looser than the Augustan mode but far from the meandering of the seventeenth century or the Romantics. It can throw up every now and then a line of astonishing force--'And care takes vp her solitarie inne', or 'Where the disheuel'd gastly sea-nymph sings', or (of lipstick) 'On Beauties graue to set a crimson Hearse'.

With the exception of these Epistles nearly all Drayton's valuable work falls outside my period: accounts of the interesting though very uneven Polyolbion and of Nimphidia (dear to some who do not care for 'faerie' and hateful to all who do) must be sought elsewhere. I cannot thus surrender either the Shepherd's Sirena, which appeared in the 1627 volume, or the Muses Elizium ( 1630). No history of Golden poetry could possibly omit them. In these the unfashionable old poet who had long been fighting a rear-guard action against those who would

exile
All braue and ancient things foreuer from this Ile and proclaiming in his solitude
Antiquitie I loue nor by the worlds despight
I cannot be remoou'd from that my dear delight,

received at last his reward and was allowed to conclude the Golden Age with something (as the poetess said) 'more gold than gold'. For in these last poems of his all that richness turns finer, more rarefied, more quintessential, than ever before. The Shepherd's Sirena is in one way like all Golden poetry: yet in another way there is no poem at all like it. A hundred and twenty lines in the lulling incantatory metre of the Phoenix and the Turtle, lines full of winter and heartbreak, provide the base. Against this, silvery, cascading, the song stands out with startling beauty. Its incomparable music--which would be rather like Mr. de la Mare's if it were not so passionless and so free from his undercurrent of misgiving--depends on taking a metre which, of itself, is always threatening to develop into a commonplace dactylic tumble, and then delicately, deftly,

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variously holding it back from that development. The charm of this song is its inhumanity. We are nominally praising a woman, yet it is a river as much as a woman, or neither. It is almost 'about' nothing: as near to 'pure' poetry as the nature of language will allow. This 'purity' continues in the best parts of the Muses Elizium. Nothing more Golden had ever been produced. They teach nothing, assert nothing, depict almost nothing; or, if anything, Scaliger's and Sidney's naturam alteram. Their methods are those of Pastoral, but the last links with real shepherd life have been severed. But not the last images from actual nature. There is an exquisite mingling of impossible beauties with things really observed, 'either other sweetly gracing'. Thus on the one hand all seasons are blended so that the fruits hang 'Some ripening, ready some to fall, Some blossom'd, some to bloome'; the eyes of Lirope turn pebbles to diamond and tempest to calm; it is not beyond hope

To swerue up one of Cynthias beames
And there to bath thee in the streames
Discouer'd in the Moone,

or that all the pearls of all the seas and either India should dissolve into a lake,

Thou therein bathing and I by to take
Pleasure to see thee clearer than the Waue.

But then, on the other hand, the reflection of a girl's yellow hair upon the lily wreath that surrounds it casts a light 'like the sunnes vpon the snow'; the 'west winde stroakes the violet leaues': an early morning sky is 'chequerd' with 'thin clouds like scarfs of Cobweb lawne': bees stagger homeward 'vp in hony rould More than their thighes can hould'. The power of this Elizian poetry to transform its material is perhaps best seen in the first 'Nimphall'. Taken in itself the subject of that poem is scarcely tolerable. Each nymph praises the other's beauty by preferring it to her own. The perversity of the original Greek models survives only in the fact that this preference is dissociated from all idea of envy or even of regret: we are left with two inhuman, inexplicable voices uttering their passion for beauty and, save for that, passionless. It is thus that real fairies (not the bric-à-brac of Nimphidia) would speak if they existed. It is the ultimate refinement of Golden poetry, Gold 'to ayery thinnesse beate', without weight, ready to leave the earth.

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