Yet both Drayton and Daniel are fine poets, though both of
them in their most elaborate works made shipwreck of their genius on the
shoal of a bad subject. Neither of them could make poetry coalesce with
gazetteering or chronicle-making. It was like trying to put a declaration
of love into the forms of a declaration in trover. The "Polyolbion"
is nothing less than a versified gazetteer of England and
Wales,--fortunately Scotland was not yet annexed, or the poem would have
been even longer, and already it is the plesiosaurus of verse. Mountains,
rivers, and even marshes are personified, to narrate historical episodes,
or to give us geographical lectures. There are two fine verses in the
seventh book, where, speaking of the cutting down some noble woods, he
says,--
"Their trunks like aged folk now bare and naked stand,
As for revenge to heaven each held a withered hand";
and there is a passage about the sea in the twentieth book that comes
near being fine; but the far greater part is mere joiner-work. Consider
the life of man, that we flee away as a shadow, that our days are as a
post, and then think whether we can afford to honor such a draft upon our
time as is implied in these thirty books all in alexandrines! Even the
laborious Selden, who wrote annotations on it, sometimes more
entertaining than the text, gave out at the end of the eighteenth book.
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