ascends, as well as from his power of keeping longer on the wing, he must be ranked, as he always has been, much before both Warner and Daniel. He has greatly more elevation than the former, and more true poetic life than the latter.-CRAIK, GEORGE L., 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature and of the English Language, vol. I, p. 563.

The "Polyolbion" is nothing less than a versified gazetteer of England and Wales, fortunately Scotland was not yet. annexed, or the poem would have been even longer, and already it is the plesiosaurus of verse. Mountains, rivers, and even marshes are personified, to narrate historical episodes, or to give us geographical lectures. There are two fine verses in the seventh book, where, speaking of the cutting down some noble woods, he says,

"Their trunks like aged folk now bare and naked stand,

As for revenge to heaven each held a withered hand;"

and there is a passage about the sea in the twentieth book that comes near being fine; but the far greater part is mere joiner-work. Consider the life of man, that we flee away as a shadow, that our days are as a post, and then think whether we can afford to honor such a draft upon our time as is implied in these thirty books all in alexandrines! Even the laborious Selden, who wrote annotations on it, sometimes more entertaining than the text, gave out at the end of the eighteenth book. Yet Drayton could write well, and had an agreeable lightsomeness of fancy, as his "Nymphidia" proves.-LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL, 1875-90, Spenser, Prose Works, Riverside, ed. vol. IV, p. 279.

Drayton's jewels five words long are of the rarest, and their sparkle when they do occur is not of the brightest or most enchanting lustre. But considering his enormous volume, he is a poet of surprisingly high merit. Although he has written some fifty or sixty thousand lines, the bulk of them on subjects not too favourable to poetical treatment, he has yet succeeded in giving to the whole an unmistakably poetical flavour, and in maintaining that flavour throughout. The variety of his work, and at the same time the unfailing touch by which he lifts that work, not indeed into the highest regions

of poetry, but far above its lower confines, are his most remarkable characteristics.SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1880, English Poets, ed. Ward, vol. I, p. 526.

Drayton's touch is less delicate than Daniel's, and his poetry is of a heavier character; it is dull.-STODDARD, RICHARD HENRY, 1881, The Sonnet in English Poetry, Scribner's Monthly, vol. 22, p. 910.

His poetry won him applause from many quarters. He is mentioned under the name of "Good Rowland" in Barnfield's "Affectionate Shepheard," 1594, and he is praised in company with Spenser, Daniel, and Shakespeare in Barnfield's "A Remembrance of some English Poets," 1598. Lodge dedicated to him in 1595 one of the epistles in "A Fig for Momus." In 1596 Fitzgeoffrey, in his poem on Sir Francis Drake, speaks of "golden-mouthed Drayton musicall." A very clear proof of his popularity is shown by the fact that he is quoted no less than a hundred and fifty times in "England's Parnassus, 1600. Drummond of Hawthornden was one of his fervent admirers. poetry was little to the taste of eighteenth-century critics. From a wellknown passage of Goldsmith's "Citizen of the World' it would seem that his very name had passed into oblivion. Since the days of Charles Lamb and Coleridge his fame has revived, but no complete edition of his works has yet been issued.BULLEN, A. H., 1888, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XVI, p. 12.

His

Lyrical sweetness, fertility of invention, richness of descriptive power, are Drayton's most characteristic qualities, but along with these he has the great style of an heroic time. He has, perhaps, little of the dramatic gift, as usually understood, though, as Mr. Symonds has admonished us, much of the so-called dramatic work of the Elizabethans is really lyrical. Besides, Drayton had one essential of the dramatic gift: he could at least make single figures live and move before us. Drayton seems to have exercised

no selection upon his materials, but to have followed the chronicler almost slavishly from point to point.-LE GALLIENNE, RICHARD, 1893-95, Retrospective Reviews, vol. II, pp. 50, 52.

During the eighteenth century, at least, no non-dramatic poet of our period was so much read or so often reprinted as

Drayton. Joseph Hunter expressed no opinion shocking to his generation when he claimed for Drayton a place in the first class of English poets. His ease, correctness, and lucidity were attractive to our elder critics, and outweighed the lack of the more exquisite qualities of style. If Drayton can no longer be awarded such superlative honours as were formerly paid to him, he is nevertheless a poet of considerable originality and merit, whose greatest enemy has been his want of measure. His works form far too huge a bulk, and would be more gladly read if the imagination in them were more concentrated and the style more concise. Drayton attempted almost every variety of poetic art, and his aim was possibly a little

too encyclopædic for his gifts.—Gosse, EDMUND, 1894, The Jacobean Poets, p. 93.

Has left some Pastorals, so quick and airy in touch, so attractive in feeling, that it is vexing to find how completely the landscape which he saw and must have enjoyed was silenced or exiled from his poetry by the mere conventionalities of pseudo-classicalism.-PALGRAVE, FRANCIS TURNER, 1896, Landscape in Poetry, p. 146.

Grave-minded, with the ethical poet's fuller ambition, and touched with the new and deeper lyric feeling that utters itself most perfectly in Shakespeare's sonnets.

-CARPENTER, FREDERIC IVES, 1897, English Lyric Poetry, 1500-1700, Introduction, p. xliv.

Sir Robert Cotton was the author of various historical, political, and antiquarian works, which are now of little interest, except to men of kindred tastes. His name is remembered chiefly for the benefit which he conferred upon literature, by saving his valuable library of manuscripts from dispersion. After being considerably augmented by his son and grandson, it became, in 1706, the property of the public, and in 1757 was deposited in the British Museum. One hundred and eleven of the manuscripts, many of them highly valuable, had before this time been unfortunately destroyed by fire. -CHAMBERS, ROBERT, 1876, Cyclopædia of English Literature, ed. Carruthers.

His collection of coins and medals was one of the earliest. Very many languages were represented in his library. His rich collection of Saxon charters proved the foundation of the scholarly study of preNorman-English history, and his Hebrew and Greek manuscripts greatly advanced

biblical criticism. Original authorities for every period of English history were in his possession. His reputation was European. De Thou was one of his warmest admirers, and Gruterus, in his edition of Cicero, describes him as one of the most learned men of the age. Duchesne, Bourdelet, Puteanus all acknowledged obligations to him. Bishop Montague calls him "the magazine of history, and among his own countrymen, besides Camden, Speed, Selden, and Raleigh, Spelman, Dugdale, Sir Henry Savile, Knolles, Gale, Burnet, Strype, and Rymer, the compiler of the "Foedera," all drew largely on his collections. Cotton wrote nothing that adequately represented his learning, and it is to be regretted that he did not concentrate his attention on some great historical work. His English style is readable, although not distinctive, and his power of research was inexhaustible. -LEE, SIDNEY, 1887, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XII, p. 312.