prison. There Drayton makes Richard find a forgotten chronicle of the nine kings of England who preceded him, and, giving a stanza to each from William the Conqueror downward, represents the doomed king to whom the murderers are sent, tracing the troubles of the land down to the happier reign of his father, who was stout, just, and sage.

"O God,' quoth he, had he my pattern been,

Heaven had not poured these plagues upon my sin!'"

Edward, then turning the leaf, finds record of the day of his own birth, weeps for the wasted life, "and on his death-bed sits him down at last." Then come the cruel murderers, and the last shriek of their victim's agony affrights in dead of night the simple people who dwell near. They lift their eyes, with heaviness opprest, praying to Heaven to give his soul good rest.

The Sixth and last Canto tells of Mortimer, now Earl of March, and the enamoured queen in their high state at Nottingham, with the Queen's Paradise, which she called the Tower of Mortimer. But the young king, Edward III., by way of a cave that communicated with the castle keep, entered at night with an armed band.

"Unarmed was March, she only in his arms,

Too soft a shield to bear their boisterous blows."

The queen pleads in vain, Mortimer (March) is torn from her, and led a prisoner to London, where the Parliament proceeds against him to the death. Mortimer, in prison, writes to the queen his farewell letter, and the poem closes vigorously with the passion of the queen on reading it.

There was high aim in the shaping of this poem. The first sketch of it appeared in the same year as the second part of "The Faerie Queene," containing the fourth, fifth, and sixth cantos, when Spenser had won from his countrymen a general acceptance as the greatest English poet of his time, Chaucer's successor. Setting aside "The Faerie Queene" and Shakespeare's plays, Drayton's "Barons' Wars" must take rank as the best heroic poem written in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The poet sought in all ways to give to the treatment of his subject epic dignity. The action is one great in itself and in its consequences,

national, and associated with first principles of civil polity. There is greatness in the persons, and for the chief person Drayton uses all arts of the poet to enlarge and raise the character of Mortimer. The thoughts are noble, and associated clearly with the action. There is a strong passion of love well blended with strong passion of war. There is care to maintain the level of heroic thought in treatment of mere trivial incidents. There is even some suggestion of an episode of the past in the description of Edward's glance over the chronicle of reigns of predecessors that he found, before his murder, in the prison. If there could have been 'a clearer view of greatness in the consequences of the action, that could have been presented to us by an episode of the future, this heroic poem, though without epic "machinery," would rank among our epics. But it is enough to say that Drayton, with an eye towards epic, did achieve the writing of a true heroic poem, laboured carefully in the first writing, and twice revised.

England's Heroical Epistles."

In 1597 Drayton first published another book, founded on the history and legend of the land, "England's Heroical Epistles," in imitation of the Heroides of Ovid. There was a new and enlarged edition in 1598; other editions followed in 1599 and 1600. There was an edition in 1602 with "Idea"; and the "Heroical Epistles" were joined to the revised edition of "The Barons' Wars" in 1603. In his preface Drayton said of this work that two points in it were especially to be explained:

"First, why I entitle this England's Heroical Epistles'; secondly, why I have annexed notes to every Epistle. For the first, the title, I hope, carrieth reason in itself; for that the most and greatest persons herein were English, or else that their loves were obtained in England. And though Heroical be properly understood of demigods, as of Hercules and Æneas, whose parents were said to be the one celestial the other mortal, yet is it also transferred to them who, for the greatness of their mind, come near to Gods: for to be born of a

celestial incubus, is nothing else but to have a great and mighty spirit, far above the earthly weakness of men, in which sense Ovid (whose imitator I partly profess to be) doth also use Heroical. For the second, because the work might in truth be judged brainish if nothing but amorous humour were handled therein, I have interwoven matters historical, which unexplained might defraud the mind of much content."

There was a separate dedication of each pair of Drayton's "Heroical Epistles." Rosamond to King Henry II. and King Henry II. to Rosamond, the author dedicated to Lucy Countess of Bedford; King John to Matilda and Matilda to King John followed without separate dedication. Queen Isabel to Mortimer and Mortimer to Queen Isabel were dedicated to Anne, wife of Sir John Harrington and mother to the Countess of Bedford; Edward the Black Prince to Alice Countess of Salisbury, and Alice Countess of Salisbury to the Black Prince, were dedicated to Sir Walter Acton. The others were: Queen Isabel to Richard II. and Richard II. to Queen Isabel, dedicated to Edward Earl of Bedford; Queen Katherine to Owen Tudor, and Owen Tudor to Queen Katherine, dedicated to Sir John Swinnerton, alderman of London; Elinor Cobham to Duke Humfrey, and Duke Humfrey to Elinor Cobham, dedicated to Drayton's "worthy and dearly esteemed friend" Mr. James Huish; William de la Poole, Duke of Suffolk, to Queen Margaret, and Queen Margaret to William de la Poole, Duke of Suffolk, dedicated to Elizabeth, "sole daughter and heir of that famous and learned Lawyer, Laurence Tanfield, Esq.; " Edward IV. to Jane Shore, and Jane Shore to Edward IV., dedicated to Sir Thomas Munson; and there were yet three more, dedicated successively to Sir Henry Goodere of Polesworth, to the poet's "most dear friend Mr. Henry Lucas, and to Sir Henry Goodere's wife, the Lady Frances. These three pairs of letters were exchanged between Mary, the French queen, and Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk; Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey,

and the Lady Geraldine; Lady Jane Grey and Lord Guildford Dudley. It is to be noted that Drayton represents the Earl of Surrey writing to Geraldine from Florence, and, by adopting from Nash's "Jack Wilton" the fiction of the tournaments in Italy, and of Geraldine shown to Surrey by Cornelius Agrippa in a magic glass, gives wider currency to these inventions. But, as to Cornelius Agrippa's glass, Drayton observes in a note that "in honour of so rare a gentleman as this earl, invention may make somewhat more bold with Agrippa above the barren truth."

Heroic
Couplet.

The measure of these "Heroical Epistles" is the rhymed couplet of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." It was used by Drayton with an easy strength, while in France it was beginning to pass into general use as heroic couplet, lending itself more and more to artificial tricks of style. With later generations this couplet will take, through French influence, long and strong hold upon English literature. Drayton's use of it may be illustrated by Queen Katherine's praise of Welsh as Owen Tudor spoke it :

"If thou discourse, thy lips such accents break,

The Spirit of Love doth seem from thee to speak.
The British Language, which our vowels wants
And jars so much upon harsh consonants,
Comes with such grace from thy mellifluous tongue

As the sweet music of a well-set song,

And runs as smoothly from those lips of thine
As the pure Tuscan from the Florentine;

Leaving such seasoned sweetness on the ear,

The voice though passed, the sound abides still there :
As when in Nisus tower Apollo lay,

And on his golden viol used to play,

The senseless stones were with such music drown'd
As many years they did retain the sound."

Michael Drayton was engaged also in fellowship of work with the playwrights between 1597 and the end of Elizabeth's reign. He was then forty years old, and stood but

V-VOL. X.

midway in his life among the poets, for he lived and wrote until the age of sixty-seven.

Two or three pieces by Samuel Daniel remain to be considered before we leave him also, at the age of about forty, entering the reign of James I.

Daniel's
Octavia to
Antony.

Daniel lived, under Elizabeth, in great houses, as private tutor to the young, and in 1601, when presenting his works to Sir Thomas Egerton, said: "Such hath been my misery that whilst I should have written the actions of men, I have been constrained to bide with children, and, contrary to mine own spirit, put out of that sense which nature had made my part.' He was tutor at Appleby and Skipton Castle to Anne Clifford, then a girl of about eleven, daughter of Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, when he published, or just after he published, "The Poeticall Essayes of Sam. Danyell, newly corrected and augmented." Besides the Fifth Book of the "Civil Wars," this volume contained, in fifty-one stanzas of octave rhyme, "A Letter sent from Octavia to her husband Marcus Antonius into Egypt," with a sonnet of dedication to the Countess of Cumberland :

"Most virtuous Lady, that vouchsaf'st to lend
Ear to my notes, and comfort unto me."

The letter is the forsaken wife's plea to the husband who has been caught in the toils of Cleopatra. This is its closing stanza, to which Daniel gave a second couplet as a finish to the letter:

"Come, come away from wrong, from craft, from toil,

Possess thine own with right, with truth, with peace :
Break from these snares, thy judgment unbeguile,
Free thine own torment and my grief release.

But whither am I carried all this while

Beyond my scope, and know not where to cease?