Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/369

 THE FOLK-LORE OF DRAYTON. 361

" With pois'ning philtres and bewitching drink, Nor on thy person did I ever prove Those wicked potions so procuring love."*

Our poet who died a bachelor, and who, it must be confessed, is sometimes tedious and somniferous, is rather reticent as regards the composition of love- compelling draughts, though sufficiently com- municative as regards a sleepy drench. The fleshy mandrake,! grown in the shade of the mystic mistletoe, and only to be uprooted with the certainty of the act producing weird vegetable groans, | was par excellence the love-compelling agent. Mandrake was also used for sleeping-draughts, and so were henbane, poppy, hemlock, § and other plants still honoured by the pharmacopoeia. When Queen Isabella wished to procure the escape of Mortimer from the Tower this is the conglomeration she stewed over a vestal fire to make a " night-cap " for the warders : ||

" She plantane and cold lettuce had,

The water-lilly from the marish ground, With the wan poppy, and the nightshade sad,

And the short moss that on the trees is found, The pois'ning henbane, and the mandrake drad,

With cypress flowers that with the rest were poun'd ; The brain of cranes amongst the rest she takes, Mix'd with the blood of dormice and of snakes."

And, according to Heroical Epistles,^ that mess seemed to her to lack perfection from the absence of many strange ingredients which this moist and foggy clime denied.

It is hard to tell whether Drayton really believed in "the spirits who haunt the mines,"** and in those underground gnomes who, as he tells us in his 58th Sonnet,'\^ were formerly made guardians of treasure by those who went off to the wars, leaving behind them no better friends to confide in. Many a man, alas ! never returned to claim his hoard,

[i. 313]. t Mandragora officinalis. Nym/pTialy iii. [iv. 1467]. X Eng. Heroic Epis. [i. 368]. NympMdia [ii. 464]. § Nymphal, v. [iv. 1489]. II The Barons' Wars^ book iii. v. 7 [i. 128]. 1 [i. 243.] *• Po^.xxvi. [iii. 1176].
 * Eng. Heroic. Ejns. [i. 298] . She was also accused of contriving his death

tt [iv. 1282.]