The same jealousy of obligation must have influenced his treatment of the incident of the Dauphin’s derisive present of tennis balls, which both Shakespeare and he have adopted from Holinshed or his authorities, but of which the former has made everything and the latter nothing. Nor can the omission of the highly dramatic incident of the conspiracy of Scroop and Cambridge, found in Holinshed, be otherwise well accounted for. In compensation, Drayton introduces two episodes entirely his own, the catalogue of Henry’s ships, and that of the armorial ensigns of the British counties. Ben Jonson may be suspected of a sneer when he congratulates Drayton on thus outdoing Homer, as he had previously outdone, or at least rivalled, Virgil, Theocritus, Ovid, Orpheus, and Lucan. Ben might have said with perfect sincerity that Drayton’s descriptions are fine pieces of work, showing great command of language, and only open to criticism from some want of proportion between them and the poem of which they are but subordinate episodes. This censure would have been by no means just if the whole piece had been executed on the scale of the description of the siege of Harfleur. It is difficult to imagine what could have tempted Drayton to spend so much time upon an episode treated by Holinshed with comparative brevity. Some of the stanzas are exceedingly spirited, but as a whole the description certainly fatigues. If the same is to some extent the case with the description of the Battle of Agincourt itself, the cause is not so much prolixity as the multitude of separate episodes, not always derived from the chroniclers, and the consequent want of unity which has been already adverted to. The result is probably more true to the actual impression of a battle than if Drayton had surveyed the field with the eye of a tactician, but here as elsewhere the poet should rather aim at an exalted and in some measure idealized representation of the object or circumstance described than at a faithful reproduction of minor details. Even the Battle of the Frogs and Mice in Homer is an orderly whole; while Drayton’s battle seems always ending and always beginning anew, a Sisyphian epic. What, however, really kindles and vivifies the unequal composition into one glowing mass is the noble spirit of enthusiastic patriotism which pervades the poet’s mind, and, like sunlight in a mountainous tract, illuminates his heights, veils his depressions, and steeps the whole in glory.