Then Virgil's Eclogues; being enter'd thus
Methought I straight had mounted Pegasus,
And in his full career could make him stop,
And bound upon Paniassus' by-clift top.
I scorned your ballad then, though it were done
And had for Finis, William Elderton."
Happily the day did dawn when well-read Drayton became subject to the fascination of his country's poets; and when his intellectual palate no longer disdained the simple sweetness of a homely ballad. He found delight in those romances of chivalry which the English press—only a doubtful centenarian at the time of Drayton's birth—made it one of its earliest charges to disseminate; and he bade his Muse recount the deeds of Arthur the King,[1] of Merlin,[2] of Guy of Warwick,[3] of Bevis[4] of Southampton, of "merry Robin Hood,[5] that honest thief."[6] The Eclogues were probably amongst the first secular poems that Drayton published, and in the fourth[7] of them we find this one-while scorner of a ballad indulging in something very like a ballad of his own:
"Far in the country of Ardeu,
There won'd a knight, hight Cassamen,
As bold as Isenbras,[8]
- ↑ Pol. iv. [ii. 733].
- ↑ Eclogue, iv. [iv. 1399]; Pol. iv. [ii. 735], v. [ii. 757], x. [iii. 842].
- ↑ Pol. xii. [iii. 895], xiii. [iii. 922].
- ↑ Pol. ii. [ii. 691].
- ↑ Pol. xxvi. [iii. 1174]. It is a significant fact that there is nothing relating to Robin Hood in the recently published Records of the Borough of Nottingham from 1135 to 1399.
- ↑ Pol. xxviii. [iii. 1194], where Drayton also refers to "the pindar of the town of Wakefield, George a Green," whose combat with Robin Hood, Scarlet, and Little John, is the theme of a well-known ballad, printed in Ingledew's Ballads and Songs of Yorkshire. The editor notes (p. 47), "In 1557 certain 'ballets' are entered on the books of the Stationers' Company . . . one of which is entitled 'of wakefylde and a grene,' meaning, probably, this ballad."
- ↑ [iv. 1401].
- ↑ The story of Syr Ysambrace, generally called "Isumbras," was very popular in this country in early times. It is included in The Thornton Romances (Camden Society), p. 88; and there is an abstract of it in Ellis's Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances, p. 479 (Bohn's edition).
