420d Drayton, Michael. (1563-1631) The Battaile of Agincovrt. Fovght by Henry the Fift of that name, King of England, against the whole power of the French: vnder the raigne of their Charles the Sixt, Anno Dom. 1415. The miseries of Queene Margarite, the infortante vvife, of that most infortunate King Henry the Sixt. Nimphidia, the court of Fayrie. The quest of Cinthia. The shepheards sirena. The moone-calfe. Elegies vpon sundry occasions. By Michaell Drayton Esquire.

London: Printed by A.M. for William Lee, 1631

$3,000

Octavo, 6.3 x 4.25 in. Second edition A-U8. The inner form of signature H was not re-inked before this impression was printed and therefore the inking is light, though the text is still legible. The lower margins are lightly wormed throughout, occasionally touching a letter in the last printed line. The contents are in good contemporary condition, having avoided the nineteenth century treatment of washing, pressing, and trimming the leaves. As an interesting note regarding this copy’s provenance, an inscription is found on the front free endleaf: “This Booke belonged to my Cousen Arthur Basset and should have been sent with his trunk to Umberlye the 13th of December 1656.” We can be sure that this reference is to Sir Arthur Basset, the royalist, because of the reference to Umberleigh. The Bassets of Umberleigh represent a large group of royal descendants through John Basset of Umberley (b. 1529), who was married to Frances Plantagenet, whose Grandfather was King Edward IV. This connection also confirms Sir Arthur’s royalist alliance. Sir Arthur purchased Saint Michael’s Mount, an island in Devon connected to the town of Marazion by a causeway that is only passable at low tide, from his oldest brother, Sir Francis, formerly the Sheriff of Cornwall. Sir Arthur played an important role as the civil war unfolded in the West Country. As the owner of Saint Michael’s Mount in Devon, Sir Arthur held the Mount against the parliamentary forces until July 1646. When vanquished by the Parliamentarians, Basset was forced to sell the Mount to Colonel John St. Aubyn. Sir Arthur is also mentioned in Samuel Pepys’ diary in August of 1668 as having recently returned from Tangiers, and advising Pepys on the conditions there.

“Born within a year before Shakespeare, and dying when Milton was already twenty-three, Drayton worked hard at poetry during nearly sixty years of his long life, and was successful in keeping in touch with the poetical progress of a crowded and swiftly-moving period. His earliest published work tastes of Tottel’s Miscellany: before he dies, he suggests Carew and Suckling, and even anticipates Dryden. This quality of forming, as it were, a map or mirror of his age gives him a special interest to the student of poetry, which is quite distinct from his peculiar merits as a poet.

“The other of the two odes [most often] referred to is the most famous of Drayton’s poems, the swinging Ballad of Agincourt, dedicated ‘to the Cambro-Britans and their Harpe.’ Here, more than anywhere, is heard the echo of Hewes and his like. Drayton worked upon the text of it to good purpose between 1606 and 1619, removing snags and obstructions in the course of its rhythm, and making clearer and clearer the ringing tramp of the marching army. With his stanzas of eight short, crisp lines, rhyming aaabcccb, it is the model for a war-poem; and the brave old song has as much power today to quicken the heartbeats as has the Henry V of Shakespeare, the success of which, doubtless, helped to inspire its composition.

“Drayton’s long and busy life closed at the end of 1631, and his body was buried in Westminster Abbey, under the north wall of the nave, and not in the Poet’s Corner where his bust may be seen. His right to the honour will possibly be more fully conceded by present and future ages than it has been at any other time since his own day. We see in him now, not, indeed, a poet of supreme imagination, nor one who worked a revolution or founded a school, but a poet with a remarkably varied claim on our attention and respect. Drayton was not a leader. For the most part he was a follower, quick to catch, and industrious to reproduce, the feeling and mode of the moment. So great, however, was his vitality and so fully was he a master of his craft that, living from the reign of Elizabeth into that of Charles I, he was able to keep abreast of his swiftly moving times, and, by reason of his very powers of labour, to bring something out of the themes and measures he employed which his predecessors and contemporaries failed to secure, but which after years owed to his efforts. This is especially the case, as we have seen, with his management of the rhymed couplet and the shortlined lyric. Sluggish, perhaps, of temper, and very variably sensitive to inspiration, he lacked the touchstone of perfect poetical taste, and, like Wordsworth, lacked also the finer virtues of omission. Yet everything that he wrote has its loftier moments; he is often ‘golden-mouthed,’ indeed, in his felicity of diction, whether in the brave style of his youth or in the daintier manner of his age; and just as, in his attitude to life, ‘out of the strong came forth sweetness,’ so, in his poetry, out of his dogged labour came forth sweetness of many kinds. In the long period which his work covered, the many subjects and styles it embraced, the beauty of its results and its value as a kind of epitome of an important era, there are few more interesting figures in English literature than Michael Drayton.” (Cambridge History of English and American Literature)

STC 7191.