Betweene the nations different afore.”[115]
In the second book of The Faerie Queene Spenser, following Geoffrey’s “auncient booke hight Briton moniments,” gives a versified
“chronicle of Briton kings
From Brute to Uther’s rayne,”
thus further emphasising the newly-discovered importance of early British history. The same patriotic fervour accounts for the production of such poems as William Warner’s Albion’s England and Michael Drayton’s Polyolbion. Warner is eminently practical, and, in his reproduction of Geoffrey’s Arthurian narrative, leaves out its more romantic incidents. Arthur’s
“Scottish, Irish, Almaine, French and Saxone battelles got
Yeeld fame sufficient: these seeme true, the reste I credite not.”
Drayton is inclined to trust Geoffrey more implicitly, and even takes up the cudgels on his behalf against the critics who were then seeking to disparage him. The “adversary says,” writes Drayton, that “Geoffrey Monmouth first our Brutus did devise,” whereas the fact is that
“pregnantly we prove, ere that historian’s days,
A thousand-ling’ring years, our prophets clearly sung