The verse exhibits no small advance on the earlier work,
and one song at least is in the author's daintiest manner. He seldom
surpassed the graceful conceit of the lines:
Through yonder vale as I did passe,
Descending from the hill,
I met a smerking bony lasse;
They call her Daffadill:
Whose presence as along she went,
The prety flowers did greet,
As though their heads they downward bent
With homage to her feete.
Spenser, in spite of the warning he addressed to his book--
Dare not to match thy pype with Tityrus his style,
Nor with the Pilgrim that the Ploughman playde awhyle--
could nevertheless assert in semi-burlesque rime:
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.
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