Fell was he and eager bent,
In a battle and in tournament,
As was the good Sir Topas.[1]
He had as antique stories tell,
A daughter cleaped Dowsabel"
and so forth. We cannot pass the sixth Eclogue[2] without feeling quite sure that Drayton's sympathies would be with Gorbo in the invitation to Winken:
"Come, sit we down under this hawthorn tree,
The morrow's light shall lend us day enough;
And let us tell of Gawin[3] or Sir Guy,
Of Robin Hood, or of old Clem a Clough.[4]
Or else, some romant unto us areed,
By former shepherds taught thee in thy youth,
Of noble lords and ladies gentle deed.
Or, of thy love, or of thy lass's truth."
So did a gracious nature assert itself, and Fashion, who may well dispute with Love the sovereignty of court, and camp, and grove, sided with that nature, and urged the poet now and then to write as
- ↑ Drayton had a soft place in his heart for "sir Topas"; he refers to him again in the opening of Nymphidia [ii. 451], as though he considered him an important character in literature. The influence of Chaucer's Rime is very apparent in Dowsabel; cf. the description of the shepherd's attire with that of the knight. In an address to the reader, prefixed to Odes with other Lyrick Poesies, Drayton half apologises for having called some of the most stirring lines he ever wrote a ballad, his Ballad of Agincourt. He says—and one soon learns to be thankful that he wrote more in poetry than in prose—[I] "would at this time also gladly let thee understand what I think above the rest of the last ode of this number, or, if thou wilt, ballad, in my book, for both the great master of Italian rhymes, Petrarch, and our Chaucer, and other of the upper house of the Muses, have thought their canzons honoured in the title of ballad; which for that I labour to meet truly therein with the old English garb, I hope as able to justify as the learned Colin Clout his Roundelay." This Ballad of Agincourt gave our ancestors a fine foretaste of Tennyson, vide The Charge of the Light Brigade.
- ↑ [iv. 1412].
- ↑ In his Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare (p. 123), Hazlitt reprints an old chap-book, The Singular Adventures of Sir Gawen, which he takes to be a ramification of one of the histories concerning the Arthurian knight Gawain.
- ↑ An outlaw as famous in Inglewood, near Carlisle, as Robin Hood subsequently became in Sherwood. See Percy's Reliques for "Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudesley."
