g the fruits of pretty continual study
which his verses show, they belong, in the order of thought, to the middle
and later Elizabethan period rather than to the Jacobean.

Few poets of anything like Drayton's volume (of which some idea may be
formed by saying that his works, in the not quite complete form in which
they appear in Chalmers, fill five hundred of the bulky pages of that work,
each page frequently containing a hundred and twenty-eight lines) show such
uniform mixture of imagination and vigour. In the very highest and rarest
graces of poetry he is, indeed, by common consent wanting, unless one of
these graces in the uncommon kind of the war-song be allowed, as perhaps it
may be, to the famous and inimitable though often imitated _Ballad of
Agincourt_, "To the brave Cambro-Britons and their Harp," not to be
confounded with the narrative "Battle of Agincourt," which is of a less
rare merit. The Agincourt ballad,

"Fair stood the wind for France,"

is quite at the head of its own class of verse in England--Campbell's two
masterpieces, and Lord Tennyson's still more direct imitation in the "Six
Hundred," falling, the first somewhat, and the last considerably, short of
it. The sweep of the metre, the martial glow of the sentiment, and the
skill with which the names are wrought into the verse, are altogether
beyond praise. Drayton never, unless the enigmatical sonnet to Idea (see
_ante_) be really his, rose to such concentration of matter and such
elaborate yet unforced perfection of manner as here, yet his great
qualities are perceptible all over his work. The enormous _Polyolbion_,
written in a metre the least suitable to continuous verse of any in
English--the Alexandrine--crammed with matter rebel to poetry, and obliging
the author to find his chief poetical attraction rather in superadded
ornament, in elaborately patched-on passages, than in the actual and
natural evolution of his theme, is still a very great work in another than
the mechanical sense. Here is a fairly representative passage:--

"The haughty Cambrian hills enamoured of their praise,
(As they who only sought ambitiously to raise
The blood of God-like Brute) their heads do proudly bear:
And having crown'd themselves sole regents of the air
(Another war with Heaven as though they meant to make)
Did seem in great disdain the bold affront to take,
That any petty hill upon the English side,
Should dare, not (w