'Your course securely steer, West-and-by-South forth keep! Rocks,[7] Lee-shores, nor Shoals, When Æolus scowls, You need not fear: So absolute the deep.'
Captain Challons sailed to Madeira, St. Lucia, Porto Rico, and thence towards North Virginia. His little ship of fifty-five tons, with a crew of twenty-nine Englishmen (and two native Virginians), had the ill-luck on 10th November to fall in with the Spanish fleet of eight ships returning from Havanna. It was captured by the Spaniards and the crew were taken prisoners to Spain.
In a lighter vein, the ode beginning 'Maidens, why spare ye,' was worthy to have been set to music by Robert Jones. The seventh ode was written from the Peak in winter--
'Amongst the mountains bleak, Exposed to sleet and rain'--
where Charles Cotton afterwards resided. Drayton's statement in the ninth ode--
'My resolution such How well and not how much To write'--
will draw a smile from any reader who has ever seriously attempted to grapple with his multitudinous works. But in these odes, and in the other 'lyric poesies' added in the 1619 edition, he was careful to curb his tendency to diffuseness. He employed a variety of metres, and his experiments were not always happy. Ode 5, 'An Amouret Anacreontic,' cannot be unreservedly commended, and Ode 9, 'A Skeltoniad,' could be spared. One of the most attractive poems is the address 'To his Rival,' a capital piece of good-natured raillery. In his early work Drayton frequently taxes the reader's patience by his disregard for grammatical proprieties, and some of these maturer Odes are so ineptly harsh that one has to grope for the writer's meaning (while one bans the punctuation of old printers and modern editors alike). Hence it is particularly pleasant to meet such a poem as 'To his Rival,' which never swerves awry, but runs on blithely without an encountering obstacle. The 'Hymn to his Lady's Birthplace' is a polished compliment, and very charming is the canzonet 'To his Coy Love.' I end with expressing a hope that the extracts here given from Michael Drayton may induce the reader to make further acquaintance[8] with the writings of one of the most lovable of our elder poets.
[Footnote 1: Ben Jonson (_Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden_) took exception to the opening lines:--