Grace to honest industry seems but a humble plea for the poet. We may paraphrase it with more dignity and not less truth by saying that Daniel was a most accomplished and conscientious artist in verse, who had a genuine, but mild, poetic nature. The care he took to revise his work is evidence of his conscience as a workman, and the fact that his changes were commonly for the better is proof of his judgment. It is mainly the beauty of his English which will cause him to be read for ever among the rest. If it never has the splendour of the greatest Elizabethan poetry, neither does it fall into “King Cambyses’ vein,” into the roaring fury which gave an outlet to the exuberant energy of that time. Southey gave Daniel as the nearest English equivalent to Camoens, on the ground that the main charm of both is the even purity of their language. This of itself is hardly compensation enough for the undoubted tediousness of his _Civil Wars_, which tell the essentially dreary history of the Wars of the Roses down to the marriage of Edward IV.[67] It was perhaps partly his dislike of the Bohemian habits of his brother men of letters which has left the life of Michael Drayton so obscure. He was a Warwickshire man of respectable parentage, but so poor that he owed his education to the kindness of patrons. The date of his birth was 1563, and he died in 1631, well into the reign of Charles I. If confidence can be placed in the jottings of Drummond of Hawthornden, there was at one time an armed neutrality between Jonson and Drayton; but Jonson wrote some highly laudatory verses on the _Polyolbion_, and we need not place too much reliance on casual remarks he threw out in conversation when he had no knowledge that his words were to be written down. It is known, too, that Drayton was patronised by Prince Henry, who in his short life was the friend of many men of pith and substance, from Raleigh to Phineas Pett the shipbuilder. Ill-founded legend asserts that he was of the party in the carouse which is said to have been the death of Shakespeare. [SN: _Drayton._]