The Battaile of Agincourt — Edition Insights

but something should also be said of the former. Drayton not unfairly hit the blot in his successful rival when he said of him:

“His rimes were smooth, his meeters well did close, But yet his maner better fitted prose.”

This is one way of putting it; from another point of view Daniel may be regarded as almost the most remarkable literary phenomenon of his time; he is so exceedingly modern. He outran the taste of his own period by a hundred years, and without teacher or example displayed the excellences which came to be preferred to all others in the eighteenth century. “These poems of his,” says his editor in that age (1718), “having stood the test of above a century, and the language and the versification being still pure and elegant, it is to be hoped they will still shine among his countrymen and preserve his name.” At this time, and for long afterwards, Drayton, save for an occasional reprint of his “Nimphidia” among miscellaneous collections, was utterly neglected. Even after the editions of 1748 and 1753 he is alluded to by Goldsmith as a type of the poet whose best title to fame is his tomb in Westminster Abbey.

The nineteenth century has reversed this with other critical verdicts of the eighteenth, and, with all due respect to Daniel, Drayton now stands higher. Yet, where the two poets come most directly and manifestly into competition, Drayton’s superiority is not so evident. As a whole, Daniel’s “Civil War” is a better poem than Drayton’s “Barons’ Wars.” The superiority of the latter lies in particular passages, such as the description of the guilty happiness of Isabella and Mortimer, quoted in Mr. Arthur Bullen’s admirable selection. This is to say that Drayton’s genius was naturally not so much epical as lyrical and descriptive. In his own proper business as a narrative poet he fails as compared with Daniel, but he enriches history with all the ornaments of poetry; and it was his especial good fortune to discover a subject in which the union of dry fact with copious poetic illustration was as legitimate to the theme as advantageous to the writer. This was, of course, his “Polyolbion,” where, doing for himself what no other poet ever did, he did for his country what was never done for any other. Greece and Rome, indeed, have left us versified topographies, but these advance no pretension to the poetical character except from the metrical point of view, though they may in a sense claim kinship with the Muses as the manifest offspring of Mnemosyne. If any modern language possesses a similar work, it has failed to inscribe itself on the roll of the world’s literature. The difficulties of Drayton’s unique undertaking were in a measure favourable to him. They compelled him to exert his fancy to the uttermost. The tremendous difficulty of making topography into poetry gave him unwonted energy. He never goes to sleep, as too often in the “Barons’ Wars.” The stiff practical obstacles attendant upon the poetical treatment of towns and rivers provoke even the dragging Alexandrine into animation; his stream is often all foam and eddy. The long sweeping line, of its wont so lumbering and tedious, is perfectly in place here. It rushes along like an impetuous torrent, bearing with it, indeed, no inconsiderable quantity of wood, hay, and stubble, but also precious pearls, and more than the dust of gold. Its “swelling and limitless billows” mate well with the amplitude of the subject, so varied and spacious that, as has been well said, the “Polyolbion” is not a poem to be read through, but to be read in. Nothing in our literature, perhaps, except the “Faery Queen,” more perfectly satisfies Keats’s desideratum: “Do not the lovers of poetry like to have a little region to wander in, where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second reading: which may be food for a week’s stroll in the summer? Do they not like this better than what they can read through before Mrs. Williams comes down stairs? a morning work at most?”