Three names stand out among the writers of historical poems--William Warner, because he was at once a forerunner to the others and a link between the poetry of the earlier and the later Elizabethans; Daniel, for a certain mild, yet grave, wisdom; Drayton, for his manly force and intrinsic poetic power. Warner, who was born about 1567, and who certainly died in March 1609 (the year in which Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published), was attached in some uncertain relationship as client or servant to the Careys, Lords Hunsdon. His historical poem, _Albion’s England_, was in part written before 1586, when it was suppressed for some unknown reason by an order of the Star Chamber.[66] If this date is correct, the decidedly jejune account of the defeat of the Armada, and the most unfriendly passage on the execution of Queen Mary, must have been added later. Warner had written a collection of prose stories called _Syrinx_, as he says, “with acceptance.” But his claim to be remembered rests on his _Albion’s England_, a long poem in the old seven-foot or fourteen-syllable metre, on the history, and more particularly on the legends of the history, of England. His well-established reputation as “a good, honest, plain writer” is fully deserved. Warner, indeed, carries plainness so far that in the most poetic passage of his book--the episode of Curan and Argentill, in which there is a genuine simple poetry--he tells us that the hero “wiped the drivel from his beard.” Beginning at the creation of the world, he comes down to his own time, with constant digressions into romantic episodes of his own growing, and classical or Biblical tales. He does not always escape the tendency of his metre to drop into a jog-trot, yet in the main he canters briskly along with a very fair proportion of spirited lines. His farewell to Queen Mary is worth quoting, both as an example of his verse and as a rather engaging mixture of charity and implacability:-- “Then to her wofull servants did she pass a kind a-dew, And kissing oft her crucifix, unto the block she drew, And fearless, as if glad to dye, did dye to papisme trew. Which and her other errors (who in all did ever erre) Unto the judge of mercie and of justice we referre. If ever such conspirator of it impenitent, If ever soule pope-scooled so, that sea to Heaven sent, If ever one ill lived did dye a papist Godwards bent, Then happie she. But so or not, it happie is for us, That of so dangerous a foe we are delivered thus.” His moderate length (a fairly girt reader can begin and end him in a longish evening), his disregard for mere historical fact, and a certain childish downrightness, make Warner easier reading than much better poets. Although Warner adhered to the fourteener in the face of Spenser and Sidney, he was so far affected by their example that he generally raised his verse above the mere rocking-horse motion, which is its special bane. [SN: _Daniel._]