It shall continewe till the worlds dissolution;

and his disciple is not to be outdone.  Never was truer lover or sweeter singer—­

    Oenon never upon Ida hill
      So oft hath cald on Alexanders name,
    As hath poore Rowland with an Angels quill
      Erected trophies of Ideas fame: 
    Yet that false shepheard, Oenon, fled from thee;
    I follow her that ever flies from me.

Thus Drayton endeavoured to follow in the footsteps of a greater than he, and small success befell him in his uncongenial task.  He knew little and cared less about the moral and philosophical rags that clung yet about the pastoral tradition.  He sang, in his lighter vein at least, for the mere pleasure that his song could afford to himself and others:  the Spenserian and traditional garb fits him ill.  His golden age is rather amorous than philosophical; he is more concerned that love should be free and true than that the earth should yield her fruits unwounded of the plough; and even so he hastens away from that colourless age to troll the delightful ballad of Dowsabel.  The inspiration for this he found, not in Spenser and his learned predecessors, but in the popular romances, and in it we hear for the first time the voice of the real Michael Drayton, the accredited bard to the court of Faery.  So again in the barren dispute of the seventh eclogue, he turns aside from his theme as the shadow of the winged god flits across his path—­

    That pretie Cupid, little god of love,
      Whose imped winges with speckled plumes been dight,
    Who striketh men below and Gods above,
      Roving at randon with his feathered flight,
    When lovely Venus sits and gives the ayme,
    And smiles to see her little Bantlings game.

If these eclogues formed Drayton’s only claim upon our attention as a pastoral poet there would be no excuse for lingering over him.  He left other work, however, which, if but slightly pastoral in subject, is at least thoroughly so in form and spirit.  The Muses Elizium did not appear till 1630, and it is consequently not a little premature to speak of it in this place.  It is, however, so important as illustrating the freer and more spontaneous vein traceable in many English pastoralists from Henryson onwards, that it is worth while to place it for comparison side by side with the more orthodox tradition as exemplified, in spite of his originality, in the work of Spenser.

The Muses Elizium is in truth the culmination of a long sequence of pastoral work.  Of this I have already discussed the beginnings when dealing with the native pastoral impulse; and however much it was influenced at a later date by foreign models it never submitted to the yoke of orthodox tradition, and to the end retained much of its freshness.  The early anthologies are full of this sort of verse, the song-books are full of it, and so are the romances