en already
adverted to. The result is probably more true to the actual impression
of a battle than if Drayton had surveyed the field with the eye of a
tactician, but here as elsewhere the poet should rather aim at an
exalted and in some measure idealized representation of the object or
circumstance described than at a faithful reproduction of minor details.
Even the Battle of the Frogs and Mice in Homer is an orderly whole;
while Drayton's battle seems always ending and always beginning anew,
a Sisyphian epic. What, however, really kindles and vivifies the unequal
composition into one glowing mass is the noble spirit of enthusiastic
patriotism which pervades the poet's mind, and, like sunlight in a
mountainous tract, illuminates his heights, veils his depressions, and
steeps the whole in glory.

Of the literary history of "The Battaile of Agincourt" there is little
to be said. It was first published in 1627, along with "Nimphidia," "The
Shepheard's Sirena," and others of Drayton's best pieces. It was
accompanied by three copies of congratulatory verse, reprinted here, the
most remarkable of which is that proceeding from the pen of Ben Jonson,
who admits that some had accounted him no friend to Drayton, and whose
encomiums are to our apprehension largely flavoured with irony. Drayton,
in his "Epistle to Reynolds," which Jonson must have seen, had compared
him to Seneca and Plautus,[*] and Jonson seems to burlesque the
compliment by comparing Drayton himself to every poet whom he had ever
imitated, until his single person seems an epitome of all Parnassus. The
poem and its companions had another edition in 1631, since which time it
has been included in every edition of Drayton's works, but has never
till now been published by itself. Even here it is graced with a
satellite, the splendid Ballad of Agincourt ("To my Frinds the
Camber-Britans and theyr Harp"), originally published in "Poemes lyric
and pastoral," probably about 1605. This stirring strain, always
admired, has attracted additional notice in the present day as the
metrical prototype of Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," which,
in our estimation, fails to rival its model. The lapses of both poets
may well be excused on the ground of the difficulty of the metre, but
Drayton has the additional apology of the "brave neglect" which so
correct a writer as Pope accounted a virtue in Homer, but which Tennyson
never had the nerve to permit himself.

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