I conclude that the authorship was in the beginning one of those pleasant mysteries which have enhanced the primary interest of so many books that were to win their way to the enduring fame which comes of intrinsic worth, and not of the prestige of a writer's name. In 1627, however, the whole world of letters was made richer by the actual publication of Nymphidia, Court of the Fairy; and well used as were the readers of that day to dainty fare, and likely as they were to be critical, it is hardly probable that they could be so spoiled by the abundance of good things they had enjoyed as to be insensible to the fact that there was something out of the common way in this utterance of one whom some of them had "termed 'golden-mouthed' for the purity and preciousness of his style and phrase."[1] In this poem a modern critic has succeeded in discerning "the liveliness of Spenser, the power of Shakespeare, and the skill of Johnson."[2] One still more modern calls it "a delicious piece of fanciful invention," "an unequalled fancy- piece set in the very best and most appropriate form of metre."[3]
Not for the first time did Drayton now show his Muse in company with fairies. It was her way to treat them as being all one with the nymphs of many varieties with whom she had disported herself in the good old classic times—entities through whom, as we know, the Darwins of mythology have traced the elfin pedigree. This, however, was quite in accord with the taste of the folk for whom she now sang, and was in harmony with the book-learned ideas of the Teutonic Maker, who had wooed her for his own. In Drayton's fancy England swarmed with Oreades, Dryades, Naiades, and the like, and would have swarmed yet more had not there been a check upon their population by the dissolution of so many into rivers and springs; and it was to say the least not surprising that they and their cousins, the Fairies, should sometimes mix in society. In the twenty-first song of Polyolbion Ringdale[4] states that in her midst—
- ↑ Paladis Tamia: a comparative Discourse of our English Poets with the Greek, &c. (1598). See Arber's English Garner, vol. ii. p. 97.
- ↑ Historical Essay on the Life and Writings of Michael Drayton, prefixed to Works (1753), vol. i. p. 17.
- ↑ Keightley, Fairy Mythology (Bohn's edition), pp. 343-4.
- ↑ [iii. 1051].
