But in sober prose Southey knew, and later in life taught, that not one of the three named ever wore the authentic laurel.[10] That Drayton deserved it, even as a successor of the divinest Spenser, who shall deny?  With enough of patience and pedantry to prompt the composition of that most laborious, and, upon the whole, most humdrum and wearisome poem of modern times, the “Polyolbion,” he nevertheless possessed an abounding exuberance of delicate fancy and sound poetical judgment, traces of which flash not unfrequently even athwart the dulness of his magnum opus, and through the mock-heroism of “England’s Heroical Epistles,” while they have full play in his “Court of Faery.”  Drayton’s great defect was the entire absence of that dramatic talent so marvellously developed among his contemporaries,—­a defect, as we shall presently see, sufficient of itself to disqualify him for the duties of Court Poet.  But, what was still worse, his mind was not gifted with facility and versatility of invention, two equally essential requisites; and to install him in a position where such faculties were hourly called into play would have been to put the wrong man in the worst possible place.  Drayton was accordingly a court-pensioner, but not a court-poet.  His laurel was the honorary tribute of admiring friends, in an age when royal pedantry rendered learning fashionable and a topic of exaggerated regard.  Southey’s admission is to this purpose.  “He was,” he says, “one of the poets to whom the title of Laureate was given in that age,—­not as holding the office, but as a mark of honor, to which they were entitled.”  And with the poetical topographer such honors abounded.  Not only was he gratified with the zealous labors of Selden in illustration of the “Polyolbion,” but his death was lamented in verse of Jonson, upon marble supplied by the Countess of Dorset:—­

  “Do, pious marble, let thy readers know
  What they and what their children owe
  To Drayton’s name, whose sacred dust
  We recommend unto thy trust. 
  Protect his memory, and preserve his story;
  Remain a lasting monument of his glory: 
  And when thy ruins shall disclaim
  To be the treasurer of his name,
  His name, that cannot fade, shall be
  An everlasting monument to thee.”

The Laureateship, we thus discover, had not, down to the days of James, become an institution.  Our mythical series shrink from close scrutiny.  But in the gayeties of the court of the Stuarts arose occasion for the continuous and profitable employment of a court-poet, and there was enough thrift in the king to see the advantage of securing the service for a certain small annuity, rather than by the payment of large sums as presents for occasional labors.  The masque, a form of dramatic representation, borrowed from the Italian, had been introduced into England during the reign of Elizabeth.  The interest depended upon the development of an allegorical subject apposite