For brief, the shape and messenger of Death.
4. George Gascoigne (1535–77) is another of the founders of the great Elizabethan tradition. He was born in Bedfordshire, educated at Cambridge, and became a lawyer. Later in life he entered Parliament.
In addition to a large number of elegant lyrics, he composed one of the first regular satires in the language, The Steel Glass (1576). This poem has the additional importance of being written in blank verse. Among his other numerous works we can mention his tragedy Jocasta (1566), a landmark in the growth of the drama (see p. [77]); his Supposes (1566), an important early comedy which was the basis of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew; and Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the Making of Verse in English (1575), one of our earliest critical essays. In ease and versatility Gascoigne is typical of the best early Elizabethan miscellaneous writers.
5. Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) was the chief of an elegant literary coterie, and exercised an influence which was almost supreme during his short life. He was the most commanding literary figure before the prime of Spenser and Shakespeare. Born in Kent of an aristocratic family, he was educated at Shrewsbury and Oxford, and then traveled widely. He took a brilliant part in the military-literary-courtly life common with the young nobles of the time, and at the early age of thirty-two was mortally wounded at Zutphen when assisting the Dutch against the Spaniards.
Sidney was successful in more than one branch of literature, but he owes his position chiefly to his collection of sonnets called Astrophel and Stella. Though they are strongly imitative of Italian sentiment, and are immature in thought and in general ideas, they are often remarkable for their flashes of real passion and their genuine poetical style. In metrical form they adopt the English scheme, and thus in another respect they foreshadow the great Shakespearian sonnets, to which alone they take second place.
6. Michael Drayton (1563–1631) represents the later epoch of Elizabethan literature. He was born in Warwickshire, studied at Oxford, was attached to a noble family as tutor, came to London about 1590, and for the remainder of his long life was busy in the production of his many poems.
His first book was a collection of religious poems called The Harmony of the Church (1591); then followed a number of long historical poems, which include England’s Heroical Epistles and The Barons’ Wars (1603). His Polyolbion is the most important of his longer poems, and belongs to a later period of his career. It is a long, careful, and tedious description of the geographical features of England, interspersed with tales, and written in alexandrines. His shorter poems, such as his well-known poem on Agincourt, and his verse tales and pastorals, such as The Man in the Moon and Nymphidia, are skillful and attractive. Drayton is rarely an inspired poet—the wonderful sonnet beginning “Since there’s no help” (see p. [152]) is perhaps his only poem in which we feel inspiration flowing freely—but he is painstaking, versatile, and sometimes (as in Nymphidia) delightful.
7. Thomas Campion (1567–1620) was born in London, educated at Cambridge, studied law in Gray’s Inn, but ultimately became a physician (1606). He wrote some masques that had much popularity, but his chief claim to fame lies in his attractive lyrics, most of which have been set to music composed partly by the poet himself. His best-known collections of songs were A Booke of Ayres (1601), Songs of Mourning (1613), and Two Bookes of Ayres (1613). Campion had not the highest lyrical genius, but he had an ear skillful in adapting words to tunes, the knack of sweet phrasing, and a mastery of complicated meters. He is one of the best examples of the accomplished poet who, lacking the highest inspiration of poetry, excels in the lower technical features.
The lyric of Campion’s that we add is typical not only of his own grace and melody, but also of the later Elizabethan lyrics as a whole. The ideas, in themselves somewhat forced and fantastic, are expressed with great felicity.
There is a garden in her face,