nd_. _Legend of Peirs Gaveston_.

1594 _Ideas Mirrour_. _Matilda_. Lucy Harrington becomes Countess
of Bedford.

1595 Sir Henry Goodere the elder dies. _Endimion and Phoebe_,
dedicated to Lucy Bedford.

1595-6 Anne Goodere married to Sir Henry Rainsford.

1596 _Mortimeriados_. _Legends of Robert, Matilda, and Gaveston_.

1597 _England's Heroical Epistles_.

1598 Drayton already at work on the _Polyolbion_.

1599 _Epistles_ and _Idea_ sonnets, new edition. (Date of Portrait
of Drayton in National Portrait Gallery.)

1600 _Sir John Oldcastle_.

1602 New edition of _Epistles_ and _Idea_.

1603 Drayton made an Esquire of the Bath, to Sir Walter Aston.
_To the Maiestie of King James_. _Barons' Wars_.

1604 _The Owle_. _A Pean Triumphall_. _Moyses in a Map of his
Miracles_.

1605 First collected edition of _Poems_. Another edition of
_Idea_ and _Epistles_.

1606 _Poemes Lyrick and Pastorall_. _Odes_. _Eglogs_.
_The Man in the Moone_.

1607 _Legend of Great Cromwell_.

1608 Reprint of Collected Poems.

1609 Another edition of _Cromwell_.

1610 Reprint of Collected Poems.

1613 Reprint of Collected Poems. First Part of _Polyolbion_.

1618 Two _Elegies_ in FitzGeoffrey's _Satyrs and Epigrames_.

1619 Collected Folio edition of Poems.

1620 Second edition of _Elegies_, and reprint of 1619 Poems.

1622 _Polyolbion_ complete.

1627 _Battle of Agincourt_, _Nymphidia_, &c.

1630 _Muses Elizium_. _Noah's Floud_. _Moses his Birth and
Miracles_. _David and Goliah_.

1631 Second edition of 1627 folio. Drayton dies towards the end
of the year.

1636 Posthumous poem appeared in _Annalia Dubrensia_.

1637 _Poems_.

INTRODUCTION

Michael Drayton was born in 1563, at Hartshill, near Atherstone, in
Warwickshire, where a cottage, said to have been his, is still shown. He
early became a page to Sir Henry Goodere, at Polesworth Hall: his own
words give the best picture of his early years here.[1] His education
would seem to have been good, but ordinary; and it is very doubtful if
he ever went to a university.[2] Besides the authors mentioned in the
Epistle to Henry Reynolds, he was certa