of refined and elegant manners, skilled, nevertheless, in all manly sports and exercises; Cleon, no less a master in physical prowess, was nurtured by a hind in the mountains; the contrast between their manners is admirably sustained:  Cleon is rough, inclined to be rude and scoffing, totally without tact, even where his mistress is concerned.  Lalus remembers her upbringing and her tastes; he makes no unnecessary or ostentatious display of wealth; his gifts are simple and charming, while Cleon’s are so grotesquely unsuited to a swain, that it is tempting to suppose that Drayton was quietly satirizing Marlowe’s Passionate Shepherd.  Lirope listens gravely to the swains in turn, and makes demure but provoking answers, raising each to the height of hope, and then casting them both down into the depths of despair; finally she refuses both, yet without altogether killing hope.  Her first answer is a good specimen of her banter and of Drayton’s humour.[18]

On the accession of James I, Drayton hastened to greet the King with a somewhat laboured song To the Maiestie of King James; but this poem was apparently considered to be premature:  he cried Vivat Rex, without having said, Mortua est eheu Regina, and accordingly he suffered the penalty of his ’forward pen’,[19] and was severely neglected by King and Court.  Throughout James’s reign a darker and more satirical mood possesses Drayton, intruding at times even into his strenuous recreation-ground, the Polyolbion, and manifesting itself more directly in his satires, the Owle (1604), the Moon-Calfe (1627), the Man in the Moone (1606), and his verse-letters and elegies; while his disappointment with the times, the country, and the King, flashes out occasionally even in the Odes, and is heard in his last publication, the Muses Elizium (1630).  To counterbalance the disappointment in his hopes from the King, Drayton found a new and life-long friend in Walter Aston, of Tixall, in Staffordshire; this gentleman was created Knight of the Bath by James, and made Drayton one of his esquires.  By Aston’s ‘continual bounty’ the poet was able to devote himself almost entirely to more congenial literary work; for, while Meres speaks of the Polyolbion in 1598,[20] and we may easily see that Drayton had the idea of that work at least as early as 1594,[21] yet he cannot have been able to give much time to it till now.  Nevertheless, the ’declining and corrupt times’ worked on Drayton’s mind and grieved and darkened his soul, for we must remember that he was perfectly prosperous then and was not therefore incited to satire by bodily want or distress.