In regard to Drayton's handling of the story there is more to note. In early life he wrote a poem in heroic couplets called _Endimion and Phoebe_. This he never reprinted, but introduced passages from it into a later piece in the same metre called the _Man in the Moone_. The volume containing Drayton's earlier _Endimion and Phoebe_ became so rare that when Payne Collier reprinted it in 1856 only two copies were known to exist. It is unlikely that Keats should have seen either of these. But he possessed of his own a copy of Drayton's poems in Smethwick's edition of 1636 (one of the prettiest of seventeenth century books). The _Man in the Moone_ is included in that volume, and that Keats was familiar with it is evident. In it, as in the earlier version, but with a difference, the poet, having enthroned his shepherd-prince beside Cynthia in her kingdom of the moon, weaves round him a web of mystical disquisition and allegory, in which popular fancies and superstitions are queerly jumbled up with the then current conceptions of the science of astronomy and the traditions of mediaeval theology as to the number and order of the celestial hierarchies. In Drayton's earlier poem all this is highly serious and written in a rich and decorated vein of poetry intended, it might seem, to rival Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_: in his later, where the tale is told by a shepherd to his mates at the feast of Pan, the narrator lets down his theme with a satiric close in the vein of Lucian, recounting the human delinquencies nightly espied by Cynthia and her lover from their sphere. The particular points in Keats's _Endymion_ where I seem to find suggestions from Drayton's _Man in the Moone_ are these. First the idea of introducing the story with the feast of Pan,--but as against this it may be said with truth that feasts of Pan are stock incidents in Elizabethan masques and pastorals generally. Second, his sending his hero on journeys beside or in pursuit of his goddess through manifold bewildering regions of the earth and air: for this antiquity affords no warrant, and the hint may have been partly due to the following passage in Drayton (which is also interesting for its exceptionally breathless and trailing treatment of the verse):--