“gazeteer in rime,” a topographical survey of England and Wales, with tedious personifications of rivers, mountains, and valleys, in thirty books and nearly one hundred thousand lines.  It was Drayton who said of Marlowe, that he “had in him those brave translunary things that the first poets had;” and there are brave things in Drayton, but they are only occasional passages, oases among dreary wastes of sand.  His Agincourt is a spirited war-song, and his Nymphidia; or, Court of Faery, is not unworthy of comparison with Drake’s Culprit Fay, and is interesting as bringing in Oberon and Robin Goodfellow, and the popular fairy lore of Shakspere’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The “well-languaged Daniel,” of whom Ben Jonson said that he was “a good honest man, but no poet,” wrote, however, one fine meditative piece, his Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland, a sermon apparently on the text of the Roman poet Lucretius’s famous passage in praise of philosophy,

  Suave, mari magno, turbantibus aequora ventis,
  E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem.

But the Elizabethan genius found its fullest and truest expression in the drama.  It is a common phenomenon in the history of literature that some old literary form or mold will run along for centuries without having any thing poured into it worth keeping, until the moment comes when the genius of the time seizes it and makes it the vehicle of immortal thought and passion.  Such was in England the fortune of the stage play.  At a time when Chaucer was writing character-sketches that were really dramatic, the formal drama consisted of rude miracle plays that had no literary quality whatever.  These were taken from the Bible, and acted at first by the priests as illustrations of Scripture history and additions to the church service on feasts and saints’ days.  Afterward the town guilds, or incorporated trades, took hold of them, and produced them annually on scaffolds in the open air.  In some English cities, as Coventry and Chester, they continued to be performed almost to the close of the 16th century.  And in the celebrated Passion Play at Oberammergau, in Bavaria, we have an instance of a miracle play that has survived to our own day.  These were followed by the moral plays, in which allegorical characters, such as Clergy, Lusty Juventus, Riches, Folly, and Good Demeanaunce were the persons of the drama.  The comic character in the miracle plays had been the Devil, and he was retained in some of the moralities side by side with the abstract vice, who became the clown or fool of Shaksperian comedy.  The “formal Vice, Iniquity,” as Shakspere calls him, had it for his business to belabor the roaring Devil with his wooden sword: 

...with his dagger of lath In his rage and his wrath Cries ‘Aha!’ to the Devil, ‘Pare your nails, Goodman Evil!’

He survives also in the harlequin of the pantomimes, and in Mr. Punch, of the puppet shows, who kills the Devil and carries him off on his back, when the latter is sent to fetch him to hell for his crimes.