ht times
before 1637, the edition of 1619 being the chief and serving for the
foundation of our text. Many changes and additions were made by the
author in the successive editions; in fact only twenty of the
fifty-one "amours" in _Idea's Mirrour_ escaped the winnowing, while
the famous sixty-first appears for the first time in 1619. There is a
distinct progress manifest in the subdual of language and form to
artistic finish, and while the cycle in its unevenness represents the
early and late stages of poetic progress, the more delicate examples
of his work show him worthy of the praise bestowed by his latest
admirer and critic,

"Faith, Michael Drayton bears the bell
For numbers airy."

It will be noted that, while many rhyme-arrangements are experimented
upon, the Shakespearean or quatrain-and-couplet form predominates. In
the less praiseworthy sonnets he is found to lack grammatical clamping
and to allow frequent faults in rhythm, and he toys with the
glittering and soulless conceit as much as any; but where his
individuality has fullest sway, as in the picturesque Arden memory of
the fifty-third, the personal reminiscences of the Ankor sonnets, and
the vivid theatre theme of the forty-seventh, in what Main calls that
"magical realisation of the spirit of evening" in the thirty-seventh,
and above all in the naive and passionate sixty-first, there is a rude
strength that pierces beneath the formalities and touches and moves
the heart. Drayton, like Sidney and Daniel and Shakespeare, draws
freely upon the general thought-storehouse of the Italianate
sonneteers: time and the transitoriness of beauty, the lover's
extremes, the Platonic ideas of soul-functions and of love-madness,
the phoenix and Icarus and all the classic gods, engage his fancy
first or last; and no sonnet trifler has been more attracted by the
great theme of immortality in verse than he. When honouring Idea in
the favourite mode he cries

"Queens hereafter shall be glad to live
Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise."

A late writer holds that years have falsified this prophecy. It is
true that Lamb valued Drayton chiefly as the panegyrist of his native
earth, and we would hardly venture to predict the future of our
sonneteer; but the fact remains that now three hundred years after his
time, his lifelong devotion to the prototype of Idea constitutes, as
he conventionally asserted it would, his most valid claim to interest