arliest times. This was the famous
'Poly-Olbion,' in which, in spite of the inspiring work of his
contemporaries, Drayton harked back in spirit to the dreary monotony
of the Saxon Chronicle; the detail is so minute, the matter so
unimportant, and the absence of discrimination so apparent, that
notwithstanding many noticeable beauties of thought and style, it is
hard to realize that this poem was a favorite with that brilliant
group which had known Shakespeare, and still delighted in Ben Jonson.
After issuing eighteen books of 'Poly-Olbion,' his publishers--with
whom he was always quarreling, and whom he declared that he "despised
and kicked at"--refused to undertake the remaining twelve books of the
second part. His friends, however, loyal in their love and praise of
him, secured a more complaisant tradesman to bring out the rest of the
already famous poem.

Fortunately for his fame, Drayton had in the mean time produced two
other volumes of verse, which displayed the real grace and
fancifulness of his charming muse. The first of these, 'Poems Lyrical
and Pastoral,' included the satire 'The Man in the Moon'; while in the
second were printed the 'Ballad of Agincourt,' the most spirited of
English martial lyrics, and that delightful fantasy 'Nymphidia, or the
Court of Faery,' in which the touch is so light, the fancy so dainty,
and the conceit so delicate, that the poem remains immortally fresh
and young. Because everybody wrote plays, Drayton turned playwright,
and is said to have collaborated with Massinger and Ford. Of his long
works, the 'Heroicall Episodes' is perhaps the most readable. His last
effort was 'The Muses' Elizium,' published in 1630. A year later he
died, and was buried in Westminster, where a monument was erected to
him by the Countess of Dorset.

Drayton's place in English literature is with that considerable and
not unimportant band who have done somewhat, but whose repute is much
more for what they were in their friends' eyes than for what they did.
In an age of great intellectual achievement, he yet managed, in spite
of the stimulus of kindred minds and his own undoubted gift, to
produce little that has sustained the reputation accorded him by his
acquaintances. Most of his work lives chiefly to afford pleasing
studies for the literary antiquary, to whom the tide of time brings
nothing uninteresting. Yet in the art of living, in the unselfish
devotion of his powers to his chosen calling, in the gr