Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/123

Rh though "honest Mantuan" and his compatriot bards had never been. But Drayton was slow in fully realising the fact that he was not a Roman citizen. Shakespeare, by A Midsummer Night's Dream, made a new revelation of faerie in 1592 (?), and we can hardly believe that Drayton's fancy was not fertilised thereby; yet Shakespeare's pen was stayed for ever, before Drayton wrote the elfin poetry on which so much of his best fame depends. In 1592 his Pegasus had been stabled for about two years in London, and he must have been already in some sort notorious on account of his Harmonie of the Church (Scripture paraphrases of "linked sweetness long drawn out"), so discordant to some that the whole edition was by public order condemned to be destroyed; and it is only because forty copies were seized by the then Archbishop of Canterbury that we have a sole surviving specimen for bibliophilists to rejoice over, in George the Third's library in the British Museum. It was wisely done of Drayton that when he next tried to charm the hearts of men he tuned his lyre to another pitch and was content to deal with lighter themes. He now "told his love," his hapless love, and, under the name of Rowland, posed amongst such Cotswold shepherds as do not seem to have been puzzled by an allusion to the phœnix; who were supposed to be able to appreciate a reference to the "fat olive tree," and to be as familiar with the deities of the heathen world as Lemprière himself.

was Moth's not uncalled-for criticism.

Without doubt it is necessary to go back to the days before Pan was dead in order to taste the sweetness of pastoral society; but we, my brethren, would willingly have foregone the pagan polish of these swains for rustic talk with a liberal seasoning of folk-lore. How disappointing it is when we hear from Perkin that