e, is peec'd with old desire;
Her Bowe is beauty with ten thousand strings....

are rare enough. Drayton, in fact, comes as near controverting the
statement _Poeta nascitur, non fit_, as any one in English literature:
by diligent toil and earnest desire he won a place for himself in the
second rank of English poets: through love he once set foot in the
circle of the mightiest. Sincere he was always, simple often, sensuous
rarely. His great industry, his careful study, and his great receptivity
are shown in the unusual spectacle of a man who has sung well in the
language of his youth, suddenly learning, in his age, the tongue spoken
by the younger generation, and reproducing it with individuality and
sureness of touch. It is in rhetoric, splendid or rugged, in argument,
in plain statement or description, in the outline sketch of a picture,
that Drayton excels; magic of atmosphere and colouring are rarely
present. Stolidity is, perhaps, his besetting sin; yet it is the sign of
a slow, not a dull, intellect; an intellect, like his heart, which never
let slip what it had once taken to itself.

As a man Drayton would seem to have been an excellent type of the
sturdy, clear-headed, but yet romantic and enthusiastic Englishman;
gifted with much natural ability, sedulously increased by study; quietly
humorous, self-restrained; and if temporarily soured by disappointment
and the disjointed times, yet emerging at last into a greater serenity,
a more unadulterated gaiety than had ever before characterized him. It
is possible, but from his clear and sane balance of mind improbable,
that many of his light later poems are due to deliberate self-blinding
and self-deception, a walking in enchanted lands of the mind.

Of Drayton's three known portraits the earliest shows him at the age of
thirty-six, and is now in the National Portrait Gallery. A look of
quiet, speculative melancholy seems to pervade it; there is, as yet, no
moroseness, no evidence of severe conflict with the world, no shadow of
stress or of doubt. The second and best-known portrait shows us Drayton
at the age of fifty, and was engraved by Hole, as a frontispiece to the
poems of 1619. Here a notable change has come over the face; the mouth
is hardened, and depressed at the corners through disappointment and
disillusionment; the eyes are full of a pathos increased by the puzzled
and perturbed uplift of the brows. Yet a stubbornness and tenacity of
purpose invests t