Michael Drayton.
We encounter next a personage of a different stamp, and one who, very likely, would have shaken his head in sage disapproval of the flippant advices of Dekker; I refer to Michael Drayton,[109] who wrote enormously in verse upon all imaginable subjects; there are elegiacs, canzonets, and fables; there are eclogues, and heroic epistles and legends and Nimphidia and sonnets. He tells of the Barons’ Wars, of the miseries of Queen Margaret, of how David killed Goliath, of Moses in the burning bush—in lines counting by thousands; Paradise Lost stretched six times over would not equal his pile of print; and all the verse that Goldsmith ever wrote, compared with Drayton’s portentous mass would seem like an iridescent bit of cockle-shell upon a sea of ink. This protracting writer was a Warwickshire man—not a far-off countryman of Shakespeare, and a year only his senior; a respectable personage, not joining in tavern bouts, caring for himself and living a long life. His great poem of Poly-olbion many know by name, and very few, I think, of this generation ever read through. It is about the mountains, rivers, wonders, pleasures, flowers, trees, stories, and antiquities of England; and it is twenty thousand lines long, and every line a long Alexandrine. Yet there are pictures and prettinesses in it, which properly segregated and detached from the wordy trails which go before and after them, would make the fortune of a small poet. There are descriptions in it, valuable for their utter fidelity and a fulness of nomenclature which keeps alive pleasantly ancient names. Here, for instance, is a summing up of old English wild-flowers, where, in his quaint way, he celebrates the nuptials of the river Thames (who is groom) with the bridal Isis, that flows by Oxford towers. It begins at the one hundred and fiftieth line of the fifteenth song of the fiftieth part:—
“The Primrose placing first, because that in the Spring
It is the first appears, then only flourishing;
The azuréd Hare-bell next, with them they gently mix’d
T’ allay whose luscious smell, they Woodbine plac’d betwixt;
Amongst those things of scent, there prick they in the Lily,
And near to that again, her sister—Daffodilly
To sort these flowers of show, with th’ other that were so sweet,
The Cowslip then they couch, and the Oxlip, for her meet;
The Columbine amongst, they sparingly do set,
The yellow King-cup wrought in many a curious fret;
And now and then among, of Eglantine a spray,
By which again a course of Lady-smocks they lay;
The Crow-flower, and thereby the Clover-flower they stick,
The Daisy over all those sundry sweets so thick.”
The garden-flowers follow in equal fulness of array; and get an even better setting in one of his Nymphals, where they are garlanded about the head of Tita; and in these pretty Nymphals, and still more in the airy, fairy Nymphidia—with their elfins and crickets and butterflies, one will get an earlier smack of our own “Culprit Fay.” Those who love the scents of ancient garden-grounds—as we do—will relish the traces of garden love in this old Warwickshire man. In his Heroic Epistles, too, one will find a mastership of ringing couplets: and there are spirit and dash in that clanging battle ode of his which sets forth the honors and the daring of Agincourt. Its martial echoes—kept alive by Campbell (“Battle of the Baltic”) and revived again in Tennyson’s “Balaclava,” warrant me in citing two stanzas of the original:—
“Warwick in blood did wade,
Oxford the foe invade,
And cruel slaughter made
Still as they ran up;
Suffolk his axe did ply,
Beaumont and Willoughby
Bear them right doughtily,
Ferrers and Fanhope.
“They now to fight are gone;
Armour on armour shone,
Drum now to drum did groan,
To hear, was wonder;
That, with the cries they make,
The very earth did shake,
Trumpet to trumpet spake,
Thunder to thunder.”[110]