upon her beauty. And she need not have been ashamed of the devotion of
her knight of poesy; for Michael Drayton was, like Constable and
Daniel and Fletcher, a man good and true, and the chorus of
contemporaries that praise his character and his verse is led by pious
Meres himself, and echoed by Jonson.

_Idea's Mirrour, Amours in Quatorzains_, formed the title under which
the sonnet-cycle appeared in 1594. _Idea_ was reprinted eight times
before 1637, the edition of 1619 being the chief and serving for the
foundation of our text. Many changes and additions were made by the
author in the successive editions; in fact only twenty of the
fifty-one "amours" in _Idea's Mirrour_ escaped the winnowing, while
the famous sixty-first appears for the first time in 1619. There is a
distinct progress manifest in the subdual of language and form to
artistic finish, and while the cycle in its unevenness represents the
early and late stages of poetic progress, the more delicate examples
of his work show him worthy of the praise bestowed by his latest
admirer and critic,

"Faith, Michael Drayton bears the bell
For numbers airy."

It will be noted that, while many rhyme-arrangements are experimented
upon, the Shakespearean or quatrain-and-couplet form predominates. In
the less praiseworthy sonnets he is found to lack grammatical clamping
and to allow frequent faults in rhythm, and he toys with the
glittering and soulless conceit as much as any; but where his
individuality has fullest sway, as in the picturesque Arden memory of
the fifty-third, the personal reminiscences of the Ankor sonnets, and
the vivid theatre theme of the forty-seventh, in what Main calls that