writer. Drayton’s heart too was in his work, as he had proved long before by the noble ballad on King Harry reprinted in this volume. If he has not shown himself an artist in the selection and arrangement of his topics, he deserves the name from another point of view by 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”):

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 assuredly have perceived how greatly such an appeal tended to exalt his hero’s character, and what an opening it afforded for impressive rhetoric. Nor could the incident have escaped his notice, for there is abundant internal evidence of his acquaintance with Shakespeare’s drama in the closet as well as on the stage. It can only be concluded that he did not choose to be indebted to Shakespeare, or despaired of rivalling him. His notice of his great contemporary in the “Epistle to Reynolds” is surprisingly cold; but the legend, however unauthentic, of Shakespeare’s death from a fever contracted at a merry-making in Drayton’s company, seems incompatible with any serious estrangement, and Shakespeare’s son-in-law was Drayton’s physician when the latter revisited his native Warwickshire. The same jealousy of obligation must have influenced his treatment of the incident of the Dauphin’s derisive present of tennis balls, which both Shakespeare and he have adopted from Holinshed or his authorities, but of which the former has made