In boyling brimstone, lead and oyle, and bloud.”
It is, however, as a social photographer that I wish to call special attention to Dekker; indeed, his little touches upon dress, dinners, bear-baitings, watermen, walks at Powles, Spanish boots, tavern orgies—though largely ironical and much exaggerated doubtless, have the same elements of nature in them which people catch now with their pocket detective cameras. His Sinnes of London, his answer to Pierce Pennilesse, his Gull’s Horne Boke are full of these sketches. This which follows, tells how a young gallant should behave himself in an ordinary:—
“Being arrived in the room, salute not any but those of your acquaintance; walke up and downe by the rest as scornfully and as carelessly as a Gentleman-Usher: Select some friend (having first throwne off your cloake) to walke up and downe the roome with you, … and this will be a meanes to publish your clothes better than Powles, a Tennis-court, or a Playhouse; discourse as lowd as you can, no matter to what purpose if you but make a noise, and laugh in fashion, and have a good sower face to promise quarrelling, you shall be much observed.
“If you be a souldier, talke how often you have beene in action: as the Portingale voiage, Cales voiage, besides some eight or nine imploiments in Ireland.… And if you perceive that the untravellᵈ Company about you take this doune well, ply them with more such stuffe, as how you have interpreted betweene the French king and a great Lord of Barbary, when they have been drinking healthes together, and that will be an excellent occasion to publish your languages, if you have them: if not, get some fragments of French, or smal parcels of Italian, to fling about the table: but beware how you speake any Latine there.”
And he goes on to speak of the three-penny tables and the twelve-penny tables, and of the order in which meats should be eaten—all which as giving glimpses of something like the every-day, actual life of the ambitious and the talked-of young fellows about London streets and taverns is better worth to us than Dekker’s dramas.
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