the excellent metrical structure of
his octaves, and the easy fluency of his narrative. One annoying defect,
the frequent occurrence of flat single lines not far remote from bathos,
must be attributed to the low standard of the most refined poetry in an
age when "the judges and police of literature" had hardly begun either
to make laws or to enforce them. It is a fault which he shared with most
others, and of which he has himself given more offensive instances. It
is still more conspicuous in the most generally acceptable of his poems,
the "Nimphidia." The pity is not so much the occasional occurrence of
such lapses in "The Battaile of Agincourt," as the want of those
delightful touches in the other delightful poems which give more
pleasure the more evidently they are embellishments rather springing out
of the author's fancy than naturally prompted by his subject. Such are
the lines, as inappropriate in the mouth of the speaker as genuine from
the heart of the writer, near the beginning of Queen Margaret's epistle
to the Duke of Suffolk ("England's Heroicall Epistles"):

"The little bird yet to salute the morn
Upon the naked branches sets her foot,
The leaves then lying on the mossy root,
And there a silly chirruping doth keep,
As if she fain would sing, yet fain would weep;
Praising fair summer that too soon is gone,
Or sad for winter too soon coming on."

On a more exact comparison of Drayton with Holinshed we find him
omitting some circumstances which he might have been expected to have
retained, and adding others with good judgment and in general with good
effect, but which by some fatality usually tend in his hands to
excessive prolixity. This is certainly not the case with his dignified
and spirited exordium, but in the fourth stanza he begins to copy
history, and his muse's wing immediately flags. No more striking example
of the superiority of dramatic to narrative poetry in vividness of
delineation could be found than the contrast between Shakespeare's scene
representing the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely in
actual conversation, and Drayton's tame exposition of the outcome of
their deliberations. In his report of the session of Parliament where
the French war is discussed he closely follows Holinshed, so closely as
to omit Shakespeare's masterly embellishment of Henry's solemn appeal to
the Archbishop to pronounce on the justice of his cause as in the sight
of God. Drayton must a