conflict, but has attained to a certain calm, a measure of tranquillity, a portion of content, who has learnt the lesson that there is a soul of goodness in things evil.  The Hole portrait shows him with long hair, small ‘goatee’ beard, and aquiline nose drawn up at the nostrils:  while the National portrait shows a type of nose and beard intermediate between the Hole and the Dulwich pictures:  the general contour of the face, though the forehead is broad enough, is long and oval.  Drayton seems to have been tall and thin, and to have been very susceptible of cold, and therefore to have hated Winter and the North.[25] He is said to have shared in the supper which caused Shakespeare’s death; but his own verses[26] breathe the spirit of Milton’s sonnet to Cyriack Skinner, rather than that of a devotee of Bacchus.

He died in 1631, possibly on December 23, and was buried under the North wall of Westminster Abbey.  Meres’s[27] opinion of his character during his early life is as follows:  ’As Aulus Persius Flaccus is reported among al writers to be of an honest life and vpright conuersation:  so Michael Drayton, quem totics honoris et amoris causa nomino, among schollers, souldiours, Poets, and all sorts of people is helde for a man of uertuous disposition, honest conversation, and well gouerned cariage; which is almost miraculous among good wits in these declining and corrupt times, when there is nothing but rogery in villanous man, and when cheating and craftines is counted the cleanest wit, and soundest wisedome.’[28] Fuller also, in a similar strain, says, ’He was a pious poet, his conscience having the command of his fancy, very temperate in his life, slow of speech, and inoffensive in company.’

In conclusion I have to thank Mr. H.M.  Sanders, of Pembroke College, Oxford, for help and advice, and Professor Raleigh and Mr. R.W.  Chapman for help and criticism while the volume was in the press.  Above all, I am at every turn indebted to Professor Elton’s invaluable Michael Drayton,[29] without which the work of any student of Drayton would be rendered, if not impossible, at least infinitely harder.

CYRIL BRETT. 
ALTON, STAFFORDSHIRE.

[Footnote 1:  Cf.  Elegy viij, To Henery Reynolds, Esquire, p. 108.]

[Footnote 2:  Sir Aston Cokayne, in 1658, says that he went to Oxford, while Fleay asserts, without authority, that his university was probably Cambridge.]

[Footnote 3:  Cf. the motto of Ideas Mirrour, the allusions to Ariosto in the Nymphidia, p. 129; and above all, the Heroical Epistles; Dedic. of Ep. of D. of Suffolk to Q. Margaret:  ’Sweet is the French Tongue, more sweet the Italian, but most sweet are they both, if spoken by your admired self.’  Cf. Surrey to Geraldine, ll. 5 sqq., with Drayton’s note.]

[Footnote 4:  Cf.  Sonnet xij (ed. 1602), p. 42, ’’Tis nine years now since first I lost my wit.’ (This sonnet may, of course, occur in the supposed 1600 ed., which would fix an earlier date for Drayton’s beginning of love.)]