m _The Shepherd's Calendar_, or the _Hecatompathia_, or a MS. copy
of _Astrophel and Stella_, could have written as Grove wrote. There are
echoes of this earlier and woodener matter to be found later, but, as a
whole, the passionate love of beauty, the sense--if only a groping
sense--of form, and the desire to follow, and if possible improve upon the
models of melodious verse which the Sidneian school had given, preserved
even poetasters from the lowest depths.

To classify the miscellaneous verse of 1590-1600 (for the second decade is
much richer than the first) under subjects and styles is a laborious and,
at best, an uncertain business. The semi-mythological love-poem, with a
more or less tragic ending, had not a few followers; the collection of
poems of various character in praise of a real or imaginary mistress,
similar in design to the sonnet collections, but either more miscellaneous
in form or less strung together in one long composition, had even more;
while the collection pure and simple, resembling the miscellanies in
absence of special character, but the work of one, not of many writers, was
also plentifully represented. Satirical allegory, epigram, and other kinds,
had numerous examples. But there were two classes of verse which were both
sufficiently interesting in themselves and were cultivated by persons of
sufficient individual repute to deserve separate and detailed mention.
These were the historical poem or history--a kind of companion production
to the chronicle play or chronicle, and a very popular one--which, besides
the names of Warner, Daniel, and Drayton, counted not a few minor adherents
among Elizabethan bards. Such were the already-mentioned Giles Fletcher;
such Fitz-Geoffrey in a remarkable poem on Drake, and Gervase Markham in a
not less noteworthy piece on the last fight of _The Revenge_; such numerous
others, some of whom are hardly remembered, and perhaps hardly deserve to
be. The other, and as a class the more interesting, though nothing actually
produced by its practitioners may be quite equal to the best work of
Drayton and Daniel, was the beginning of English satire. This beginning is
interesting not merely because of the apparent coincidence of instinct
which made four or five writers of great talent simultaneously hit on the
style, so that it is to this day difficult to award exactly the palm of
priority, but also because the result of their studies, in some peculiar
and at first sig