then casting them both
down into the depths of despair; finally she refuses both, yet without
altogether killing hope. Her first answer is a good specimen of her
banter and of Drayton's humour.[18]

On the accession of James I, Drayton hastened to greet the King with a
somewhat laboured song _To the Maiestie of King James_; but this poem
was apparently considered to be premature: he cried _Vivat Rex_, without
having said, _Mortua est eheu Regina_, and accordingly he suffered the
penalty of his 'forward pen',[19] and was severely neglected by King and
Court. Throughout James's reign a darker and more satirical mood
possesses Drayton, intruding at times even into his strenuous
recreation-ground, the _Polyolbion_, and manifesting itself more
directly in his satires, the _Owle_ (1604), the _Moon-Calfe_ (1627), the
_Man in the Moone_ (1606), and his verse-letters and elegies; while his
disappointment with the times, the country, and the King, flashes out
occasionally even in the Odes, and is heard in his last publication, the
_Muses Elizium_ (1630). To counterbalance the disappointment in his
hopes from the King, Drayton found a new and life-long friend in Walter
Aston, of Tixall, in Staffordshire; this gentleman was created Knight of
the Bath by James, and made Drayton one of his esquires. By Aston's
'continual bounty' the poet was able to devote himself almost entirely
to more congenial literary work; for, while Meres speaks of the
_Polyolbion_ in 1598,[20] and we may easily see that Drayton had the
idea of that work at least as early as 1594,[21] yet he cannot have been
able to give much time to it till now. Nevertheless, the 'declining and
corrupt times' worked on Drayton's mind and grieved and darkened his
soul, for we must remember that he was perfectly prosperous then and was
not therefore incited to satire by bodily want or distress.

In 1604 he published the _Owle_, a mild satire, under the form of a
moral fable of government, reminding the reader a little of the
_Parlement of Foules_. _The Man in the Moone_ (1606) is partly a
recension of _Endimion and Phoebe_, but is a heterogeneous mass of
weakly satire, of no particular merit. The _Moon-Calfe_ (1627) is
Drayton's most savage and misanthropic excursion into the region of
Satire; in which, though occasionally nobly ironic, he is more usually
coarse and blustering, in the style of Marston.[22] In 1605 Drayton
brought out his first 'collected poems', from which th