se are Drayton's first attempt to strike out a
new and original vein of English poetry: they are a series of letters,
modelled on Ovid's _Heroides_,[13] addressed by various pairs of lovers,
famous in English history, to each other, and arranged in chronological
order, from Henry II and Rosamond to Lady Jane Grey and Lord Guilford
Dudley. They are, in a sense, the most important of Drayton's writings,
and they have certainly been the most popular, up to the early
nineteenth century. In these poems Drayton foreshadowed, and probably
inspired, the smooth style of Fairfax, Waller, and Dryden. The metre,
the grammar, and the thought, are all perfectly easy to follow, even
though he employs many of the Ovidian 'turns' and 'clenches'. A certain
attempt at realization of the different characters is observable, but
the poems are fine rhetorical exercises rather than realizations of the
dramatic and passionate possibilities of their themes. In 1596, Drayton,
as we have seen, published the _Mortimeriados_, a kind of epic, with
Mortimer as its hero, of the wars between King Edward II and the
Barons.[14] It was written in the seven-line stanza of Chaucer's
_Troilus and Cressida_ and Spenser's _Hymns_. On its republication in
1603, with the title of the _Barons' Wars_, the metre was changed to
_ottava rima_, and Drayton showed, in an excellent preface, that he
fully appreciated the principles and the subtleties of the metrical art.
While possessing many fine passages, the _Barons' Wars_ is somewhat
dull, lacking much of the poetry of the older version; and does not
escape from Drayton's own criticism of Daniel's Chronicle Poems: 'too
much historian in verse, ... His rhymes were smooth, his metres well did
close, But yet his manner better fitted prose'.[15] The description of
Mortimer's Tower in the sixth book recalls the ornate style of _Endimion
and Phoebe_, while the fifth book, describing the miseries of King
Edward, is the most moving and dramatic. But there is a general
lifelessness and lack of movement for which these purple passages barely
atone. The cause of the production of so many chronicle poems about this
time has been supposed[16] to be the desire of showing the horrors of
civil war, at a time when the queen was growing old, and no successor
had, as it seemed, been accepted. Also they were a kind of parallel to
the Chronicle Play; and Drayton, in any case even if we grant him to
have been influenced by the example of Dan