The love of verse led in England, as in Spain, to the production of not a little in what is almost inevitably a bastard kind--the historical poem. By attempting to do in poetry what could be adequately done in prose, the authors of _The History of the Civil War_ or of _The Barons’ Wars_, condemned themselves to be often dull, or to endeavour to escape dulness by mixing purely romantic episodes with what professes to be record of matter of fact. The romance is superfluous to those who read for the history, and the history is tiresome to those who read for the romance. Our own historical poems are commonly the more subject to the danger of dulness, because the authors, unlike the Spaniards, did not, as a rule, choose the great events of their own time, or of the previous generation, of which the memory was still fresh. They went back to the past, which they could only know through books. This would have done no harm if they had used their authorities only to find “local colour” for their romance. But they did not. They aimed at even a minute historical accuracy, and thereby condemned themselves to produce works of learning in an inappropriate shape. It is no doubt bad criticism to condemn any form of literature for being itself and not another. Yet we could spare even the _Polyolbion_ for an Elizabethan Mariana, which Drayton, whose prose was excellent and whose learning was great, might well have been, and still have left himself free to write his sonnets, his _Nymphidia_, and his _Ballad of Agincourt_. [SN: _Fitz-Geoffrey and Markham._] The curious literary bad fortune which has pursued the achievements of Englishmen at sea is well illustrated by the vehement, but also frothy and flamboyant, poem of Charles Fitz-Geoffrey, called _Sir Francis Drake, his Honourable Life’s Commendation and his Tragical Death’s Lamentation_. It is in the seven-line stanza which Drayton, after first trying it, renounced as too soft for the subject of his _Barons’ War_. Fitz-Geoffrey wraps up the substantial figure of Sir Francis in clouds of hyperbole, and makes a terrible abuse of the figure called “by the Latines Reduplicatio.” We see the great corsair only in glimpses through the very smoky flames of Fitz-Geoffrey’s melodious rhetoric. _The most honourable Tragedie of Sir Richard Grinvill_, by Gervase Markham, in an eight-lined stanza, very flowing and mythological, has much the same defect. The author, who founded his poem on Raleigh’s pamphlet describing the last fight of the Revenge, endeavours to “outcracke the scarcrow thunderbolt.” [SN: _Warner._]