In 1593 and 1594 Drayton also published his earliest pieces on the mediaeval theme of the 'Falls of the Illustrious'; they were _Peirs Gavesson_ and _Matilda the faire and chaste daughter of the Lord Robert Fitzwater_. Here Drayton followed in the track of Boccaccio, Lydgate, and the _Mirrour for Magistrates_, walking in the way which Chaucer had derided in his _Monkes Tale_: and with only too great fidelity does Drayton adapt himself to the dullnesses of his model: fine rhetoric is not altogether wanting, and there is, of course, the consciousness that these subjects deal with the history of his beloved country, but neither these, nor _Robert, Duke of Normandy_ (1596), nor _Great Cromwell, Earl of Essex_ (1607 and 1609), nor the _Miseries of Margaret_ (1627) can escape the charge of tediousness.[12] _England's Heroical Epistles_ were first published in 1597, and other editions, of 1598, 1599, and 1602, contain new epistles. These are Drayton's first attempt to strike out a new and original vein of English poetry: they are a series of letters, modelled on Ovid's _Heroides_,[13] addressed by various pairs of lovers, famous in English history, to each other, and arranged in chronological order, from Henry II and Rosamond to Lady Jane Grey and Lord Guilford Dudley. They are, in a sense, the most important of Drayton's writings, and they have certainly been the most popular, up to the early nineteenth century. In these poems Drayton foreshadowed, and probably inspired, the smooth style of Fairfax, Waller, and Dryden. The metre, the grammar, and the thought, are all perfectly easy to follow, even though he employs many of the Ovidian 'turns' and 'clenches'. A certain attempt at realization of the different characters is observable, but the poems are fine rhetorical exercises rather than realizations of the dramatic and passionate possibilities of their themes. In 1596, Drayton, as we have seen, published the _Mortimeriados_, a kind of epic, with Mortimer as its hero, of the wars between King Edward II and the Barons.[14] It was written in the seven-line stanza of Chaucer's _Troilus and Cressida_ and Spenser's _Hymns_. On its republication in 1603, with the title of the _Barons' Wars_, the metre was changed to _ottava rima_, and Drayton showed, in an excellent preface, that he fully appreciated the principles and the subtleties of the metrical art. While possessing many fine passages, the _Barons' Wars_ is somewhat dull, lacking much of the poetry of the older version; and does not escape from Drayton's own criticism of Daniel's Chronicle Poems: 'too much historian in verse, ... His rhymes were smooth, his metres well did close, But yet his manner better fitted prose'.[15] The description of Mortimer's Tower in the sixth book recalls the ornate style of _Endimion and Phoebe_, while the fifth book, describing the miseries of King Edward, is the most moving and dramatic. But there is a general lifelessness and lack of movement for which these purple passages barely atone. The cause of the production of so many chronicle poems about this time has been supposed[16] to be the desire of showing the horrors of civil war, at a time when the queen was growing old, and no successor had, as it seemed, been accepted. Also they were a kind of parallel to the Chronicle Play; and Drayton, in any case even if we grant him to have been influenced by the example of Daniel, never needed much incentive to treat a national theme.