method in his 'Theogony;' a revival, to judge from a passage in his first song, surely not undesigned:—
Sung the ancient heroes' deeds (the monuments of kings),
And in your dreadful verse engraved the prophecies,
The aged world's descents, and genealogies;
If as those Druids taught, which kept the British rites
And dwelt in darksome caves, there counselling with sprites
(But their opinion failed, by error led away,
As since clear truth hath showed to their posterity),
When these our souls by death our bodies do forsake,
They instantly again do other bodies take;
I could have wished your spirits redoubled in my breast,
To give my verse applause to time's eternal rest."
—Polyolb., Song i. 30-42.
Our theory of a conscious reference to Hesiod's 'Theogony' by Drayton depends on the fourth verse of this extract; but, independently of this, almost any page in the 'Polyolbion' would furnish one or more illustrations of genealogism curiously Hesiodic. We might cite the rivers of Monmouth, Brecon, and Glamorgan, in the fourth song, or the Herefordshire streams in the seventh; but lengthy citations are impossible, and short extracts will ill represent the likeness which a wider comparison would confirm. In Pope's "Windsor Forest," the enumeration of the "seaborn brothers" of Old Father Thames, from "winding Isis" to "silent Darent,"
is indubitably a leaf out of Drayton's book, and so
