His moderate length (a fairly girt reader can begin and end him in a longish evening), his disregard for mere historical fact, and a certain childish downrightness, make Warner easier reading than much better poets. Although Warner adhered to the fourteener in the face of Spenser and Sidney, he was so far affected by their example that he generally raised his verse above the mere rocking-horse motion, which is its special bane.

Samuel Daniel, the son of a music-master, was born near Taunton in 1562, and was educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford. He began by translating the Imprese of Paulus Jovius, and his first independent works were his sonnets to Delia, already mentioned. It is possible that he went abroad as servant to Elizabeth’s ambassador in France, Lord Stafford, and that he visited Italy before 1590. Although Daniel wrote two tragedies—Cleopatra and Philotas—they were on the classical model, which our stage has never tolerated, and he therefore could not live by literature, since it was then only the theatre which paid. It was necessary for him to seek support in the service of rich people. He found it in the patronage of the Pembroke family, and was afterwards tutor to the daughter of the famous seafaring Earl of Cumberland. In his later years he was in the service of Queen Anne, the wife of James I., as “inspector of the children of the Queen’s revels,” and as groom or “gentleman extraordinary of her majesty’s private chamber.” At the end he appears to have achieved independence, for he died on a farm of his own near Beckington in 1619.

In spite of the interruptions caused by his tutoring, at which he repined not a little, Daniel was a voluminous writer. He was the author in prose of a history of England down to the reign of Edward III., popular in its day, and of the excellent Defence of Rime in answer to Campion’s belated plea for “pure versifying.” But it is as a poet that Daniel ranks in English literature, though with a limitation, somewhat roughly worded by his stronger contemporary Drayton, who said that “his manner better fitted prose.” This would be a very unfair judgment if it were applied to all his work without qualification. The Complaint of Rosamonde, his first considerable poem, published in 1592, is neither in manner nor matter better fitted for prose. It is a very poetic retelling of the legend of Henry II.’s mistress in the favourite seven-line stanza. His moral epistles in verse escape the vice of mere moralising by virtue of a loftiness of sentiment which is fitly enough wedded to poetic form. Yet there is none of the “lofty, insolent, and passionate” note of the Elizabethans in Daniel, and Drayton’s harsh sentence may be applied with little or no restriction to the Civil Wars. Daniel’s claim to honour was as well stated by himself in some prefatory verses to an edition of his poems in 1607 as by any of the many good judges of literature who have praised him:—

Grace to honest industry seems but a humble plea for the poet. We may paraphrase it with more dignity and not less truth by saying that Daniel was a most accomplished and conscientious artist in verse, who had a genuine, but mild, poetic nature. The care he took to revise his work is evidence of his conscience as a workman, and the fact that his changes were commonly for the better is proof of his judgment. It is mainly the beauty of his English which will cause him to be read for ever among the rest. If it never has the splendour of the greatest Elizabethan poetry, neither does it fall into “King Cambyses’ vein,” into the roaring fury which gave an outlet to the exuberant energy of that time. Southey gave Daniel as the nearest English equivalent to Camoens, on the ground that the main charm of both is the even purity of their language. This of itself is hardly compensation enough for the undoubted tediousness of his Civil Wars, which tell the essentially dreary history of the Wars of the Roses down to the marriage of Edward IV.[67]

It was perhaps partly his dislike of the Bohemian habits of his brother men of letters which has left the life of Michael Drayton so obscure. He was a Warwickshire man of respectable parentage, but so poor that he owed his education to the kindness of patrons. The date of his birth was 1563, and he died in 1631, well into the reign of Charles I. If confidence can be placed in the jottings of Drummond of Hawthornden, there was at one time an armed neutrality between Jonson and Drayton; but Jonson wrote some highly laudatory verses on the Polyolbion, and we need not place too much reliance on casual remarks he threw out in conversation when he had no knowledge that his words were to be written down. It is known, too, that Drayton was patronised by Prince Henry, who in his short life was the friend of many men of pith and substance, from Raleigh to Phineas Pett the shipbuilder. Ill-founded legend asserts that he was of the party in the carouse which is said to have been the death of Shakespeare.

Drayton[68] was a stronger man than Daniel, and there came forth more sweetness from him. No writer of the time was more voluminous. The sonnets, to which he seems to have been somewhat indifferent, form a very small portion of his work. Whenever he began to write (it is said that his love of literature was shown when he was a boy), he did not publish early. His first poem—A Harmonie of the Church—appeared in 1591. It was suppressed by the censorship, then directed by Archbishop Whitgift, but republished under another title, The Heavenly Harmonie of Spiritual Songs and Holy Hymns, in 1610. In 1593 he published nine eclogues with the title of Idea, a name also given to the sonnets printed in 1594. It is to be noted that the famous sonnet beginning, “Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part,” which is so superior to the others, and so like Shakespeare’s, was first included in the edition of 1619. Drayton, like Daniel, was much in the habit of revising his work. He not uncommonly incorporated his earlier poems in his later with great changes. In 1596 appeared the awkwardly named Mortimeriados, in the seven-line stanza, recast and republished in ottava rima in 1603 under the title of The Barons’ Wars. Between these two came the Heroical Epistles in 1597. In 1604 Drayton made a most unfortunate attempt to win the favour of James I. by flattery, and he also published a satirical poem, The Owl, and his Moses in a Map of his Miracles. To 1605 belongs a collection of short poems, including the most famous of his minor poems, except the universally known sonnet, the magnificent Ballad of Agincourt. The years which follow were employed in the composition of his vast Polyolbion, of which nineteen books appeared in 1613, and which was completed in 1622. Between these dates he brought out an edition of his poems in 1619. In 1627 he went back on the battle of Agincourt, and produced the poem of that name, together with Nymphidia and The Miseries of Queen Margaret. At the very close of his life, in 1630, he published the gay and graceful Muses’ Elysium. He wrote also for the stage, to which he had no natural inclination, in an occasional and subordinate way.

This list, which is not exhaustive, will show that the forty years of Drayton’s known activity were remarkably well filled. And the quality of this great bulk of work was not less remarkable than the quantity. It may be allowed at once, and without conceding too much to the eighteenth-century criticism, which talked of his “creeping narrative,” that much of his poetry is dull to other readers than those who find all dull except the last smart short story or newspaper scandal. The reader who can master The Battle of Agincourt (not the Ballad), The Miseries of Queen Margaret, and The Barons’ Wars without an effort may hold himself armed against the more laborious forms of study. Drayton indeed tempted dulness when he chose for subject the Barons’ War of Edward II.’s reign, and did not also decide to make the “she-wolf of France” his heroine and to throw history to the winds. Yet even in these the strong poetical faculty of the writer can never be forgotten. The longest of all his poems—the Polyolbion, or “Chorographical Description of all the Tracts, Rivers, Mountains, Forests, and other parts of Great Britain,” which may be described as a poetical guide-book to his native country—is not dull, though it cannot be praised as exciting. Drayton may have made an error when he decided to write it in the long twelve-syllable line, and not in his favourite eight-line stanza, which, in the words of his preface to The Barons’ Wars, “both holds the time clean through to the base of the column, which is the couplet at the foot or bottom, and closeth not but with a full satisfaction to the ear for so long detention.” Yet he has mastered his unwieldy verse, and after a time, when the reader’s ear has become attuned to the melody, his at first rather strange mixture of topography, legend, and vigorous romantic flashes rolls on in a majestic course. It is a proof of the essential strength of Drayton that his most delicate work—the fairy poetry of the Nymphidia and the Nymphalls or Muses’ Elysium—belongs to his later years. He grew sweet as he mellowed.

A time so rich as the Elizabethan in new forms of literature could hardly fail to produce the satirist. In this case also there were Italian and, it need hardly be added, Classic models to follow, and they were followed. Satiric writing there had always been, and that inevitably, since so soon as men began to record observation at all they would see that there was much vice and folly in the world, and from this experience all satire springs. The satiric spirit abounded in the prose pamphlet literature of the time. Between this and the help afforded by the Latin models, who supplied the ready-made mould, the poetic satirists were led forward by the hand. As a class, and in so far as they were satirists, they were the least interesting body of writers of their time. It is very necessary to limit this estimate to their satires; for the four who may be mentioned here are all, for one reason or another, notable men, or even more. Lodge, without ever attaining to originality or power of the first order, was a successful writer in many kinds. Marston has a deservedly high place in our dramatic literature. Hall, though that part of his life lies outside the scope of this book, was a divine and controversialist of mark in his later years. Donne, who however belongs in the main to a later time, is one of the most enigmatical and debated, alternately one of the most attractive and most repellent, figures in English literature.

If Hall’s boast in the Prologue to his Satires—

is to be taken seriously, he must be supposed to have claimed the honour of leading. If so, he must also be presumed not to have known The Steel Glass of Gascoigne, an undeniable though rambling and ineffective satire, belonging to the first half of the queen’s reign. |Lodge.| He certainly ignored the earlier claim of Lodge, whose Fig for Momus appeared in 1595, two years before the first six books of Hall’s Virgidemiarum. But it may be that he wrote long before he printed, and in any case the originality is not great enough to be worth fighting over, since both were followers of Latin originals; while it appears more than probable that Marston and Donne were turning their thoughts in the same direction about the same time. In fact, the Poetic Satire was so certain to arise that many men may well have begun it together in complete independence one of another. The satire of Lodge is confessedly a mere echo of Horace.

This cannot be said of the Satires of Joseph Hall. Hall, who in his very interesting brief autobiography says that he was born on the 1st January, 1574 (which, if he went by the old official calendar, means 1575), and was educated at the Puritan College of Emmanuel, Cambridge, lived to attain the bishopric of Exeter, to play a conspicuous part in the early days of the Long Parliament, to be translated to Norwich in the eclipse of King Charles’s fortunes, and to be rabbled out of his palace by the Puritans. He died at Heigham in 1656. His Satires, therefore, appeared when he was at the utmost only twenty-three. Although marked by a certain youthful loftiness of moral pose and some impudence, they show an undoubted maturity of form much more meritorious then than it would be now, when there is so much more in English to copy. In “A Postscript to the Reader,” printed with the first issue of the Virgidemiarum (a pedantic title taken from Virgidemia, a gathering of rods), he states what undoubtedly was the literary faith of the satirists of the time: “It is not for every one to relish a true natural satire, being of itself, besides the nature and inbred bitterness and tartness of particulars, both hard of conceit and harsh of style, and therefore cannot but be unpleasing both to the unskilful and over-musical ear.” In other words, a rough form and a deliberate violation of melody were proper to satire. Marston and Donne acted on that rule. But Hall in his own verses is not markedly hard of conceit or harsh of style. His couplets flow easily enough, carrying with them shrewd but not very important remarks on the contradictions of sinners. We can well believe that when Pope was shown them late in life he wished he had seen them sooner, and that he thought the first satire of the sixth book “optima satira.” Hall’s attitude of superiority to a sinful world is rather comic in a young gentleman who knew no more of it than lay inside the walls of “pure Emmanuel.” His worst fault was a habit of sniffing at contemporary poets, whose poetic shoe-latchet he was not worthy to undo. He falls upon the sonneteers and their “Blowesses” (i.e., Blowsibellas) after a fashion afterwards bettered by Swift with his incomparable brutality.[69]

Marston’s first set of Satires were printed under the assumed name of W. Kinsayder in 1598, together with a poem called Pygmalion’s Image. A second instalment of the Satires followed next year, and both bear the same title—The Scourge of Villainy. There was not much villainy to which Marston had better call to apply the scourge than the greasy lubricity of Pygmalion’s Image. He preferred to scold at his contemporaries in verse which is as pleasant to read as charcoal would be to eat, and to lecture an imaginary world made up of vices which he took at second hand from Latin books, in a style which raises the image of ancient Pistol unpacking his heart with curses.