vey of England and Wales, with tedious
personifications of rivers, mountains, and valleys, in thirty books and
nearly one hundred thousand lines. It was Drayton who said of Marlowe,
that he "had in him those brave translunary things that the first poets
had;" and there are brave {98} things in Drayton, but they are only
occasional passages, oases among dreary wastes of sand. His
_Agincourt_ is a spirited war-song, and his _Nymphidia; or, Court of
Faery_, is not unworthy of comparison with Drake's _Culprit Fay_, and
is interesting as bringing in Oberon and Robin Goodfellow, and the
popular fairy lore of Shakspere's _Midsummer Night's Dream_.

The "well-languaged Daniel," of whom Ben Jonson said that he was "a
good honest man, but no poet," wrote, however, one fine meditative
piece, his _Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland_, a sermon apparently
on the text of the Roman poet Lucretius's famous passage in praise of
philosophy,

"Suave mari magno, turbantibus aequora ventis," etc.

But the Elisabethan genius found its fullest and truest expression in
the drama. It is a common phenomenon in the history of literature that
some old literary form or mold will run along for centuries without
having any thing poured into it worth keeping, until the moment comes
when the genius of the time seizes it and makes it the vehicle of
immortal thought and passion. Such was in England the fortune of the
stage play. At a time when Chaucer was writing character-sketches that
were really dramatic, the formal drama consisted of rude miracle plays
that had no literary quality whatever. These were taken from the Bible
and acted at first by the priests as illustrations of Scripture history
and additions to the {99} church service on feasts and saints' days.
Afterward the town guilds, or incorporated trades, took hold of them
and produced them annually on scaffolds in the open air. In some
English cities, as Coventry and Chester, they continued to be performed
almost to the close of the 16th century. And in the celebrated Passion
Play, at Oberammergau, in Bavaria, we have an instance of a miracle
play that has survived to our own day. These were followed by the
moral plays, in which allegorical characters, such as Clergy, Lusty
Juventus, Riches, Folly, and Good Demeanaunce, were the persons of the
drama. The comic character in the miracle plays had been the Devil,
and he was retained in some of the moralities side by side with the