thus further emphasising the newly-discovered importance of early British history. The same patriotic fervour accounts for the production of such poems as William Warner’s _Albion’s England_ and Michael Drayton’s _Polyolbion_. Warner is eminently practical, and, in his reproduction of Geoffrey’s Arthurian narrative, leaves out its more romantic incidents. Arthur’s “Scottish, Irish, Almaine, French and Saxone battelles got Yeeld fame sufficient: these seeme true, the reste I credite not.” Drayton is inclined to trust Geoffrey more implicitly, and even takes up the cudgels on his behalf against the critics who were then seeking to disparage him. The “adversary says,” writes Drayton, that “Geoffrey Monmouth first our Brutus did devise,” whereas the fact is that “pregnantly we prove, ere that historian’s days, A thousand-ling’ring years, our prophets clearly sung The Britain-founding Brute.”[116] Drayton’s poem, so largely topographical as it is in its character, affords him many opportunities of making effective use of Arthurian traditions. When he comes, for example, to the river Camel, he remembers that Arthur was born as well as slain in that tract of western country, “As though no other place on Britain’s spacious earth Were worthy of his end, but where he had his birth.”[117] Again, referring to the songs of the ancient Britons, he tells us--much in Geoffrey’s manner--of Caerleon with “her temples and her groves, Her palaces and walls, baths, theatres, and stoves.” With all his garrulous “asides” and prosaic disquisitions, Drayton’s _Polyolbion_ is a well-intentioned poem, and its sympathetic treatment of the legends entitles it to an honoured place in the Arthurian library. Like Caxton, Drayton bewails the indifference of British poets to the wealth of native tradition which lay ready for their use, and regrets that a British Homer had not been found to rise to “the height of its great argument”; “For some abundant brain, oh, there had been a story, Beyond the blind man’s might to have enhanced our glory.”