an
of good family who had served as page in a noble house, who had
studied possibly at Oxford, and who in the first flush of manhood
aspired to a place among those prodigies who made the later
Elizabethan period immortal. This was Michael Drayton, whose gentle
birth and breeding, education and talents, knowledge of the world and
of men, together with a most sweet and lovable disposition, made him
at once welcome in the literary Bohemia of the day. He became the
"deare and bosom friend" of Beaumont and Fletcher, and his work
received unquestioned honor from his illustrious contemporaries.

As a child he had demanded of his elders to know what kind of beings
poets were, had spent many hours in writing childishly fantastic
verses, and had begged of his tutor to make a poet of him. And
although he seems to have been poor and to have lived by the gifts of
wealthy patrons, he cast in his lot with literature, and cherished no
other ambition than that of writing well. His first book, a volume of
spiritual poems, or metrical renderings of the Bible, was published in
1590 under the title 'The Harmony of the Church.' It is difficult to
see why this commonplace and orthodox performance should have given
such umbrage that the Archbishop of Canterbury condemned the entire
edition to destruction. Yet this was its fate, with the exception of
forty copies which Archbishop Whitgift ordered to be reserved for the
ecclesiastical library at Lambeth Palace. Undiscouraged, the poet next
produced a cycle of sixty-four sonnets and a collection of pastorals
entitled 'Idea: the Shepherd's Garland,' in which under the name
"Rowland" he celebrated an early love. It is strange that the
intrinsic merit of these verses, and their undoubted popularity,
should not have urged Drayton to continue in the same vein. Instead,
however, he set about the composition of a series of historical poems
which extended over the next twenty-four years, and to which he gave
the best energies of his life. Beginning with the epic 'Matilda,'
studied from English history, the series was continued by a poem on
the 'Wars of the Roses,' afterward enlarged into 'The Barons' Wars.'
This was followed by the epic 'Robert, Duke of Normandy.' Destitute of
imagination, prolix and tedious, these verses were yet so popular in
Drayton's day that in 1612 he began the publication of a poem in
thirty books, meant to include the entire chronology and topography of
Great Britain, from the e