the Miseries of Queene Margarite and of the Moone-Calfe we have already spoken.  The most notable piece in the book is the Nimphidia.  This poem of the Court of Fairy has ‘invention, grace, and humour’, as Canon Beeching has said.  It would be interesting to know exactly when it was composed and committed to paper, for it is thought that the three fairy poems in Herrick’s Hesperides were written about 1626.  In any case, Drayton’s poem touches very little, and chiefly in the beginning, on the subject of any one of Herrick’s three pieces.  The style, execution, and impression left on the reader are quite different; even as they are totally unlike those of the Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Herrick’s pieces are extraordinary combinations of the idea of ‘King of Shadows’, with a reality fantastically sober:  the poems are steeped in moonlight.  In Drayton all is clear day, or the most unromantic of nights; though everything is charming, there is no attempt at idealization, little of the higher faculty of imagination; but great realism, and much play of fancy.  Herrick’s verses were written by Cobweb and Moth together, Drayton’s by Puck.  Granting, however, the initial deficiency in subtlety of charm, the whole poem is inimitably graceful and piquant.  The gay humour, the demure horror of the witchcraft, the terrible seriousness of the battle, wonderfully realize the mock-heroic gigantesque; and while there is not the minute accuracy of Gulliver in Lilliput, Drayton did not write for a sceptical or too-prying audience; quite half his readers believed more or less in fairies.  In the metre of the poem Drayton again echoes that of the older romances, as he did in Dowsabel.  In the Quest of Cinthia, while ostensibly we come to the real world of mortals, we are really in a non-existent land of pastoral convention, in the most pseudo-Arcadian atmosphere in which Drayton ever worked.  The metre and the language are, however, charmingly managed. The Shepheards Sirena is a poem, apparently, ‘where more is meant than meets the ear,’ as so often in pastoral poetry[23]; it is difficult to see exactly what is meant; but the Jacobean strain of doubt and fear is there, and the poem would seem to have been written some time earlier than 1627.  The Elegies comprise a great variety of styles and themes; some are really threnodies, some verse-letters, some laments over the evil times, and one a summary of Drayton’s literary opinions.  He employs the couplet in his Elegies with a masterly hand, often with a deliberately rugged effect, as in his broader Marstonic satire addressed to William Browne; while the line of greater smoothness but equal strength is to be seen in the letters to Sandys and Jeffreys.  He is fantastic and conceited in most of the threnodies; but, as is natural, that on his old friend, Sir Henry Rainsford, is least artificial and fullest of true feeling.  The epistle to Henery Reynolds.  Of Poets and Poesie shows Drayton as a sane and sagacious critic, ready to see the good, but keen to discern the weakness also; perhaps the clearest evidence of his critical skill is the way in which nearly all of his judgements on his contemporaries coincide with the received modern opinions.