The dead dumb fog hath wrapped it--the frozen dews have kissed-- The morning stars have hailed it, a fellow-star in the mist. What is the Flag of England? Ye have but my breath to dare, Ye have but my waves to conquer. Go forth, for it is there!' _Kipling._ NOTES I This descant upon one of the most glorious feats of arms that even England has achieved is selected and pieced together from the magnificent verse assigned to the Chorus--'_Enter RUMOUR painted full of tongues_'--to _King Henry V._, the noble piece of pageantry produced in 1598, and a famous number from the _Poems Lyrick and Pastorall_ (_circ._ 1605) of Michael Drayton. 'Look,' says Ben Jonson, in his _Vision on the Muses of his Friend, Michael Drayton_:-- Look how we read the Spartans were inflamed With bold TyrtÊus' verse; when thou art named So shall our English youths urge on, and cry An AGINCOURT! an AGINCOURT! or die. This, it is true, was in respect of another _Agincourt_, but we need not hesitate to appropriate it to our own: in respect of which--'To the Cambro-Britons and their Harp, His _Ballad of Agincourt_,' is the poet's own description--it is to note that Drayton had no model for it; that it remains wellnigh unique in English letters for over two hundred years; and that, despite such lapses into doggerel as the third stanza, and some curious infelicities of diction which need not here be specified, it remains, with a certain Sonnet, its author's chief title to fame. Compare the ballads of _The Brave Lord Willoughby_ and _The Honour of Bristol_ in the seventeenth century, the song of _The Arethusa_ in the eighteenth, and in the nineteenth a choice of such TyrtÊan music as _The Battle of the Baltic_, Lord Tennyson's _Ballad of the Fleet_, and _The Red Thread of Honour_ of the late Sir Francis Doyle. II Originally _The True Character of a Happy Life_: written and printed about 1614, and reprinted by Percy (1765) from the _ReliquiÊ WottonianÊ_ of 1651. Says Drummond of Ben Jonson, 'Sir Edward (_sic_) Wotton's verses of a Happy Life he hath by heart.' Of Wotton himself it was reserved for Cowley to remark that He did the utmost bounds of knowledge find, And found them not so large as was his mind; * * * * * * And when he saw that he through all had passed He died--lest he should idle grow at last. See Izaak Walton, _Lives_. III, IV From _Underwoods_ (1640). The first, _An Ode_, is addressed to an innominate not yet, I believe, identified. The second is part of that _Ode to the Immortal Memory of that Heroic Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry Morrison_, which is the first true Pindaric in the language. Gifford ascribes it to 1629, when Sir Henry died, but it seems not to have been printed before 1640. Sir Lucius Cary is the Lord Falkland of Clarendon and Horace Walpole. V