Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/121

Rh Then Virgil's Eclogues; being enter'd thus Methought I straight had mounted Pegasus, And in his full career could make him stop, And bound upon Paniassus' by-clift top. I scorned your ballad then, though it were done And had for Finis, William Elderton."

Happily the day did dawn when well-read Drayton became subject to the fascination of his country's poets; and when his intellectual palate no longer disdained the simple sweetness of a homely ballad. He found delight in those romances of chivalry which the English press—only a doubtful centenarian at the time of Drayton's birth—made it one of its earliest charges to disseminate; and he bade his Muse recount the deeds of Arthur the King, of Merlin, of Guy of Warwick, of Bevis of Southampton, of "merry Robin Hood, that honest thief." The Eclogues were probably amongst the first secular poems that Drayton published, and in the fourth of them we find this one-while scorner of a ballad indulging in something very like a ballad of his own:

Far in the country of Ardeu, There won'd a knight, hight Cassamen, As bold as Isenbras,