If ever Nature of her work might boast,
Of thy perfection she may glory most ;
To whom fair Phoebe hath her bow resigned,
Whose excellence doth live in thee refined;
And that thy praise Time never should impair,
Hath made my heart thy never-moving sphere.
Then if my Muse give life unto thy fame,
Thy virtues be the causer of the same;
And from thy tomb some Oracle shall rise,
To whom all pens shall yearly sacrifice.

To suppose that Drayton meant to flatter two ladies at the same time and in the same way is to conclude him wanting equally in poetical ingenuity and in knowledge of human nature. And that the "sweet nymph of Ankor," addressed in Endimion and Phabe, was the Countess of Bedford is shown by the fact that Combe Abbey, near Coventry, the Warwickshire seat of Lord Harington, was situated on the banks of the Ankor.

No interruption in the smooth course of patronage and compliment appears publicly till 1603, when Drayton issued a re-cast of his Mortimeriados in ottava rima, instead of the seven-line or royal stanza, and with the title of The Baron's Wars, accompanied by a reprint of England's Heroical Epistles, and by forty-seven sonnets under the heading of Idea, quite differently conceived from the set of “ Amours " called Idea's Mirror published in 1594. From the historical poem he withdrew the dedicatory sonnet to the Countess of Bedford, prefixed to Mortimeriados, and all allusions to her in the narrative. The poem itself was now divided into books after the epic fashion, and at the end of the second book was inserted an address to Idea :

O wretched age! had not these things been done,

I had not now, in these more calmer times,

Into the search of former troubles run;

Nor had my virgin unpolluted rhymes
Altered the course wherein they first begun,
To sing these bloody and unnatural crimes :
My lays had still been of Idea's bower,
Of my dear Ankor or her loved Stoure.

Or for our subject your fair worth to choose,
Your truth, your virtue, and your high respects,
That gently deign to patronise our Muse,
Who our free soul ingeniously elects
To publish your deserts, and all your dues,
Maugre the Momists, and Satyric sects,

Whilst my great verse eternally is sung,

You still may live with me in spite of wrong.

It is evident from this that in 1603 things did not stand in the same position as in 1596. Idea has removed her dwelling from the Ankor, near Coventry, to the Stoure, which flows through the vale of Evesham; and moreover, there are "Momists and Satyric sects" who speak maliciously of her association with the poet. The sonnets also betray a change of feeling. They are no longer Idea's Mirror

Wonder of Heaven, glass of Divinity,

Rare beauty, Nature's joy, perfection's mother,
The work of that united Trinity,

Wherein each fairest part excelleth other, etc.

This sonnet, with others like it, has disappeared, and Collier naïvely suggests, as the reason for its suppression, that the allusion to the Trinity in the first quatrain may have been found objectionable.1 He does not, however, explain why the author of Idea's Mirror, who had in that work exhausted the treasury of amorous conceits in praising his divinity, should have carefully informed the readers of Sonnets under the Title of Idea that (although many of these poems had appeared in the previous collection) the later set were not to be taken seriously.

To the Reader of his Poems.

Into these loves who but for passion looks,
At this first sight here let him lay them by,
And seek elsewhere in turning other books,
Which better may his labour satisfy.

No far-fetched sigh what ever wound my breast;

See p.

1 Poems by Michael Drayton. Edited by J. Payne Collier, 1856. 183. It is fair to add that, though Collier has not any suspicion as to the reason of the alterations made by Drayton in his poems, it was through his careful editing that my attention was called to the changes themselves.

Love from mine eye a tear shall never wring;
Nor, in "ah mes!" my whining sonnets dressed,
(A Libertine) fantastickly I sing;

My verse is the true motion of my mind,

Ever in motion, still desiring change,

To choice of all variety inclined,

And in all humours sportively I range.

My active Muse is of the world's right strain,
That cannot long one fashion entertain.

The Second to his Reader.

Many there be excelling in this kind,

Whose well-tricked rhymes with all invention swell,
Let each commend, as best shall like his mind,

Some Sidney, Constable, or Daniel.

That thus their names familiarly I sing,

Let none think them disparagèd to be;
Poor men with reverence may speak of a king,
And so may these be spoken of by me :
My wanton verse ne'er keeps one certain stay,
But now at hand, then seeks invention far,
And with each little motion runs astray,
Wild, madding, jocund, and irregular.

Like me that list, my honest merry rhymes
Nor care for critic, nor regard the times.

What then had caused the flattering shepherd, Rowland, to sing in this rather over-jovial tone of independence? He himself lets us into the secret in a new edition of the Pastorals, published in 1605. In this revised version he largely retrenched the praises he had formerly bestowed upon Pandora, and in the same eclogue poured obloquy on the conduct of one Selena :

VOL. III

So once Selena seemed to regard

That faithful Rowland her so highly praised,
And did his travail for a while reward,
As his estate she purpos'd to have raised;
But soon fled from him, and the swain defies;
Ill is he stead that on such faith relies.

And to deceitful Cerberon she cleaves,
That beastly clown, so vile of to be spoken,
And that good shepherd wilfully she leaves,
And falsely all her promises hath broken,
And all those beauties whilom that her graced,
With vulgar breath perpetually defaced.

D

Let age sit soon and ugly on her brow,
No shepherd's praises living let her have,
To her last end no creature pay one vow,
Nor flower be strewed on her forgotten grave,
And to the last of all-devouring time

Ne'er be her name remembered more in rhyme.1

The "sweet golden showers" had in fact ceased to rain upon Drayton: through the fickleness of his patroness he had been disappointed of his promised promotion, and it seemed to him only just that the poetical crown formerly bestowed upon the Countess of Bedford should be transferred to some other brow. He therefore proceeds :

Then since the world's distemperature is such,
And man made blind by her deceitful show,
Small virtue in their weaker sex is much,
And to it in them much the Muses owe,

And praising some may happily inflame
Others in time with liking of their name.

As those two sisters, most discreetly wise,
That virtue's hests religious obey,
Whose praise my skill is wanting to comprise,
The eld'st of which is that good Panape,

In shady Arden her dear flock that keeps,
Where mournful Ankor for her sickness weeps.

The younger then, her sister not less good,
Bred where the other lastly doth abide,
Modest Idea, flower of womanhood,
That Rowland hath so highly deified,

Whom Phoebus' daughters worthily prefer,
And give their gifts abundantly to her;

Driving her flocks up to the fruitful Mene,
Which daily looks upon the lovely Stowre,
Near to that vale which of all vales is queen,

Lastly forsaking of her former bower,

And of all places holdeth Cotswold dear,

Which now is proud because she lives it near.

It will thus be seen that, after Drayton's desertion by the Countess of Bedford, he entered upon a very elaborate course of retaliation. In the first place, he sought to

For these and the following stanzas see Collier's edition of Drayton's Poems (1856).

remove almost every trace of the praises he had lavished on her in her own name. When he published his Baron's Wars he suppressed the eulogistic lines which he had prefixed to Mortimeriados, and the allusions to the Countess in the body of that poem; he recast his Endimion and Phabe in the form of The Man in the Moon, taking from it all those personal references to Idea which once associated it closely with Lady Bedford; his Pastorals were reissued with a prefatory discourse on bucolic poetry, thus suggesting to the reader that they were merely a literary exercise. While, however, he suppressed Endimion and Phabe in the volume of his poems published in 1599 (probably while the quarrel was only in its infancy), he preserved the dedicatory sonnet, with the significant alteration of the line,

into

Sweet lady, then grace this poor Muse of mine,

Sweet lady, yet grace this poor Muse of Mine.

No response being made to this overture, he inserted in his Pastorals (1605) the bitter invective against Selena, clearly pointing by this name at the Countess of Bedford, to whom, under the name of Idea, as he had said in Endimion and Phabe, "fair Phoebe (ie. Selene, the Moon) had her bow resigned." Nor was he content with merely depriving his patroness of the honours previously paid to her; he was resolved that she should see them bestowed upon another. Idea lived, and still honoured her poet, but, by a very subtle stroke of art, she was transformed into the younger sister of Panape (Lady Bedford being the elder of Lord Harington's two daughters), and had her abode in Gloucestershire instead of in Warwickshire.

To point out even more clearly, though still enigmatically, the name of his new patroness, Drayton, at a later date, paid an ingenious compliment to her in his Polyolbion. After describing Coventry, and mentioning in connection with it the story of St. Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins, he alludes to the legend of Lady Godiva, and then proceeds to say that the neighbourhood