=5. Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86)= was the chief of an elegant literary coterie, and exercised an influence which was almost supreme during his short life. He was the most commanding literary figure before the prime of Spenser and Shakespeare. Born in Kent of an aristocratic family, he was educated at Shrewsbury and Oxford, and then traveled widely. He took a brilliant part in the military-literary-courtly life common with the young nobles of the time, and at the early age of thirty-two was mortally wounded at Zutphen when assisting the Dutch against the Spaniards. Sidney was successful in more than one branch of literature, but he owes his position chiefly to his collection of sonnets called _Astrophel and Stella_. Though they are strongly imitative of Italian sentiment, and are immature in thought and in general ideas, they are often remarkable for their flashes of real passion and their genuine poetical style. In metrical form they adopt the English scheme, and thus in another respect they foreshadow the great Shakespearian sonnets, to which alone they take second place. =6. Michael Drayton (1563–1631)= represents the later epoch of Elizabethan literature. He was born in Warwickshire, studied at Oxford, was attached to a noble family as tutor, came to London about 1590, and for the remainder of his long life was busy in the production of his many poems. His first book was a collection of religious poems called _The Harmony of the Church_ (1591); then followed a number of long historical poems, which include _England’s Heroical Epistles_ and _The Barons’ Wars_ (1603). His _Polyolbion_ is the most important of his longer poems, and belongs to a later period of his career. It is a long, careful, and tedious description of the geographical features of England, interspersed with tales, and written in alexandrines. His shorter poems, such as his well-known poem on Agincourt, and his verse tales and pastorals, such as _The Man in the Moon_ and _Nymphidia_, are skillful and attractive. Drayton is rarely an inspired poet--the wonderful sonnet beginning “Since there’s no help” (see p. 152) is perhaps his only poem in which we feel inspiration flowing freely--but he is painstaking, versatile, and sometimes (as in _Nymphidia_) delightful.