m he served as page, though he never received any great or
permanent preferment.[29] On the other hand, he was not a successful
dramatist (the only literary employment of the time that brought in much
money), and friend as he was of nearly all the men of letters of the time,
it is expressly stated in one of the few personal notices we have of him,
that he could not "swagger in a tavern or domineer in a hothouse" [house of
ill-fame]--that is to say, that the hail-fellow well-met Bohemianism of the
time, which had led Marlowe and many of his group to evil ends, and which
was continued in a less outrageous form under the patronage of Ben Jonson
till far into the next age, had no charms for him. Yet he must have lived
somehow and to a good age, for he did not die till the 23d December 1631.
He was buried in Westminster Abbey, a fact which drew from Goldsmith, in
_The Citizen of the World_, a gibe showing only the lamentable ignorance of
the best period of English poetry, in which Goldsmith was not indeed
alone, but in which he was perhaps pre-eminent among contemporaries eminent
for it.

[29] Drayton has been thoroughly treated by Professor Oliver Elton in
_Michael Drayton_ (London, 1905), enlarged from a monograph for the Spenser
Society.

Drayton's long life was as industrious as it was long. He began in 1591
with a volume of sacred verse, the _Harmony of the Church_, which, for some
reason not merely undiscovered but unguessed, displeased the censors, and
was never reprinted with his other works until recently. Two years later
appeared _Idea, The Shepherd's Garland_--a collection of eclogues not to be
confounded with the more famous collection of sonnets in praise of the same
real or fancied mistress which appeared later. In the first of these
Drayton called himself "Rowland," or "Roland," a fact on which some rather
rickety structures of guesswork have been built as to allusions to him in
Spenser. His next work was _Mortimeriados_, afterwards refashioned and
completed under the title of _The Barons' Wars_, and this was followed in
1597 by one of his best works, _England's Heroical Epistles_. _The Owl_,
some _Legends_, and other poems succeeded; and in 1605 he began to collect
his Works, which were frequently reprinted. The mighty poem of the
_Polyolbion_ was the fruit of his later years, and, in strictness, belongs
to the period of a later chapter; but Drayton's muse is eminently one and
indivisible, and, notwithstandin