Page:Lyra heroica.djvu/365

 NOTES

I

THIS descant upon one of the most glorious feats of arms that even England has achieved is selected and pieced together from the magnificent verse assigned to the Chorus— 'Enter painted full of tongues' to King Henry., the noble piece of pageantry produced in 1598, and a famous number from the Poems Lyrick and Pastorall (circ. 1605) of Michael Drayton. 'Look,' says Ben Jonson, in his Vision on the Muses of his Friend, Michael Drayton:—

This, it is true, was in respect of another Agincourt, but we need not hesitate to appropriate it to our own: in respect of which—' To the Cambro-Britons and their Harp, His Ballad of Agtncourt,' is the poet's own description it is to note that Drayton had no model for it; that it remains wellnigh unique in English letters for over two hundred years; and that, despite such lapses into doggerel as the third stanza, and some curious infelicities of diction which need not here be specified, it remains, with a certain Sonnet, its author's chief title to fame. Compare the ballads of The Brave Lord Willoughby and The Honour of Bristol in the seventeenth century, the song of The Arethusa in the eighteenth, and in the nineteenth a choice of such Tyrtran music as The Batttle of the Baltic, Lord Tennyson's Ballad of the Fleet, and The Red Thread of Honour of the late Sir Francis Doyle.

II

Originally The True Character of a Happy Life: written and printed about 1614, and reprinted by Percy (1765) from the Reliquiæ Wottonianæ of 1651. Says Drummond of lien Jonson, 'Sir Edward (sic) Wotton's verses of a Happy Life he hath by heart.' Of Wotton himself it was reserved for Cowley to remark that

Sec Izaak Walton, Lives. 341