Following Daniel's "Complaint of Rosamond," Drayton versified the stories of Piers Gaveston, Matilda, daughter of Lord Robert Fitzwater, Robert Duke of Normandy, and "The Great Cromwell" (Thomas). Like Daniel, he gave little sack to a monstrous deal of bread, in a close following of prose chronicles. "Mortimeriados" (1596) is another legend, in rhyme royal, of the wars of the barons against the second and third Edwards, later recast as "The Barons' Wars," in an eight-lined stanza. "The English Heroical Epistles" were a following of the Letters of Ovid's heroines; there are twelve lovers and ladies, each writes a letter and receives a reply. Rosamond, Jane Shore, and Geraldine are, naturally, among the ladies. Drayton employs the rhymed decasyllabic couplet, and adds learned notes, comparing, for example, the Maze of Rosamond to the Cnossian Labyrinth of the Minotaur in Crete. The verses are curiously modern in some places. The poet now did work for Henslowe and the stage. Like Daniel he wrote a panegyric of the new King, James VI and I, in 1603: it brought him no advancement, and in the next year he made "The Owle" the mouthpiece of a satire, opening with the outworn dream-formula which had so long haunted verse. In 1606 he attempted odes: the best known is on "The Virginian Voyage": Virginia is a paradise, doubtless the laurel is indigenous, and Drayton foresees a Virginian poet (possibly Edgar Poe, in a way a Virginian). By the famous patriotic "Ballad of Agincourt," Drayton holds his most secure title to popularity. He had long been working at his "Polyolbion," in which the rivers of England, and the great events which occurred in their valleys, are celebrated. The first thirteen books were published in 1612-1613. Drayton's best Muse is the patriotic. He was not encouraged by the reception of the book (reprinted with twelve new songs in 1622), and unhappily he stopped at the Cumberland Eden, and did not, like Richard Franck in prose, celebrate the Scottish rivers from the Debatable Land to the Naver. Drayton's ambling Alexandrine couplets are, at least, interesting to the angler, for he has a minute knowledge of even such burns as the "roaring Yarty" (mark the _Yar_, as in Cretan and Greek Jardanus, Yarrow, and the Australian Yarra-Yarra) and the troutful Mimram, which he calls the Mimer. Had Drayton spoken more particularly of the streams, and been less copious in endeavours "the battle in to bring," battles Celtic, or of the many civil wars, his poem would have more attractions. History, copious and minute, is a stumbling-block to poetry in Drayton, and as to history, the public, he says, "take a great pride to be ignorant thereof": "the idle humorous world must hear of nothing that savours of antiquity".