But in sober prose Southey knew, and later in life taught, that not
one of the three named ever wore the authentic laurel.[10] That Drayton
deserved it, even as a successor of the divinest Spenser, who shall
deny? With enough of patience and pedantry to prompt the composition
of that most laborious, and, upon the whole, most humdrum and
wearisome poem of modern times, the "Polyolbion," he nevertheless
possessed an abounding exuberance of delicate fancy and sound poetical
judgment, traces of which flash not unfrequently even athwart the
dulness of his _magnum opus_, and through the mock-heroism of
"England's Heroical Epistles," while they have full play in his "Court
of Faëry." Drayton's great defect was the entire absence of that
dramatic talent so marvellously developed among his contemporaries,--a
defect, as we shall presently see, sufficient of itself to disqualify
him for the duties of Court Poet. But, what was still worse, his mind
was not gifted with facility and versatility of invention, two equally
essential requisites; and to install him in a position where such
faculties were hourly called into play would have been to put the
wrong man in the worst possible place. Drayton was accordingly a
court-pensioner, but not a court-poet. His laurel was the honorary
tribute of admiring friends, in an age when royal pedantry rendered
learning fashionable and a topic of exaggerated regard. Southey's
admission is to this purpose. "He was," he says, "one of the poets to
whom the title of Laureate was given in that age,--not as holding the
office, but as a mark of honor, to which they were entitled." And with
the poetical topographer such honors abounded. Not only was he
gratified with the zealous labors of Selden in illustration of the
"Polyolbion," but his death was lamented in verse of Jonson, upon
marble supplied by the Countess of Dorset:--