Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/144

136 pathy for Israel. Of course, the end of it was that he left his wife without a pang being felt on either side.

When Moses went out of Egypt with the Israelites they took away the bones of Joseph, according to the promise made to that patriarch, in anticipation of the fulfilment of which his remains had been stored in a wooden coffin, instead of being immured in the mass of masonry becoming his rank and condition. Drayton says the tomb had been drowned by the Nile's inundations, and that it was discovered miraculously by Moses.

Comestor, the twelfth-century commentator, on whom Drayton greatly depended for his Moses memoir, says that this is why we say in the Psalms, "Thou that leadest Joseph like a sheep."

In the Preface to the General Header which introduces the first eighteen songs of the Polyolbion, Drayton refers to a habit of his time—a habit much affected within the present half century by Dante G. Rossetti and his school—of disdaining to multiply by the mechanical means of the printing-press poems which seemed all the more precious when there was but a scant supply of copies, and when those copies were in manuscript. He says: "Verses are wholly deduced to chambers, and nothing esteemed in this lunatic age but what is kept in cabinets, and must pass only by transcription." It was, I believe, in cursive characters that Nymphidia first charmed a literary circle; and from the manner of Drayton's mention of himself in the triad —