yton was
bred and educated; and one may picture the fair child standing
"gravely merry" by the little page to listen to "John Hews his lyre,"
at that ancestral fireside. "Where I love, I love for years," said
Drayton in 1621. As late as 1627, but four years before his death, he
writes an elegy of his lady's not coming to London, in which he
complains that he has been starved for her short letters and has had
to read last year's over again. About the same time he is writing that
immortal sonnet, the sixty-first, the one that Rossetti, with perhaps
something too much of partiality, has declared to be almost, if not
quite, the best in the language. The tragedy of a whole life is
concentrated in that sonnet, and the heart-pang in it is
unmistakable. But Drayton had stood as witness to the will of Anne's
father, by which L1500 was set down for her marriage portion. She was
an heiress, he a penniless poet, and what was to be done?

About 1590, when Drayton was twenty-eight, and Anne was probably
twenty-one years old, Drayton left Polesworth Hall and came to London.
Perhaps the very parting was the means of revealing his heart to
himself, for it is from near this time that, as he confesses later, he
dates the first consciousness of his love. He soon publishes _Idea,
the Shepherd's Garland, Rowland's Sacrifice to the Nine Muses_, where
we first see our poet, in his pastoral-poetic character, carving his
"rime of love's idolatry," upon a beechen tree. Thirteen stanzas of
these pastoral eclogues do not exhaust the catalogue of her beauties;
and when he praises the proportion of her shape and carriage, we know
that it was not the poet's frenzied eye alone that saw these graces,
for Dr. John Hall, of Stratford, who attended her professionally,
records in his case-book that she was "beautiful and of gallant
structure of body." Anne was married about 1595 to Sir Henry
Rainsford, who became Drayton's friend, host and patron. It is likely
that Lady Rainsford deserved a goodly portion of the praises bestowed
upon her beauty. And she need not have been ashamed of the devotion of
her knight of poesy; for Michael Drayton was, like Constable and
Daniel and Fletcher, a man good and true, and the chorus of
contemporaries that praise his character and his verse is led by pious
Meres himself, and echoed by Jonson.

_Idea's Mirrour, Amours in Quatorzains_, formed the title under which
the sonnet-cycle appeared in 1594. _Idea_ was reprinted eig