Besides Spenser, Drayton makes allusion to the Thames in his _Polyolbion_, using as an allegory the wedding of Thame and Isis, from which union is born the Thames; and in this he is correct, for where Thame and Isis unite at Dorchester there begins the Thames, and all that is usually counted Thames, up to Oxford and beyond, is, as Oxford men correctly say, the Isis. Yet by custom now the river which flows past Oxford is treated as the Thames, and when we speak of our national river we count its source as being in the Cotswold Hills. Other poets who refer to the Thames are Denham, Cowley, Milton, and Pope. In modern times Matthew Arnold's tender descriptions of the river about and below Oxford have been many times quoted. Gray wrote an _Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College_, in which he refers to the "hoary Thames", but the lines apostrophizing the "little victims" at play are more often quoted than those regarding the river. The influence of the Thames on the countless sons of England who have passed through Eton and Oxford must be incalculable. It is impossible to mention Eton without thinking of Windsor, the one royal castle which really impresses foreigners in England. Buckingham Palace is a palace in name only, its ugly, stiff, stuccoed walls might belong to a gigantic box, but Windsor, with its massive towers and its splendid situation, is castle and palace both. Well may the German Emperor envy it! It carries in it something of the character of that other William, the first of the Norman Kings of England, who saw the possibilities of the situation, though little of the castle as we see it is due to him. The mass of it is of the time of Edward III, and much of it was altered in that worst era of taste, the reign of George IV. Windsor has come scatheless out of the ordeal; the fine masses of masonry already existing have carried off the alterations in their own grandeur, and the result is harmonious. Many and many a tale might be quoted of Windsor, but these are amply told in _Windsor Castle_ by Edward Thomas, the volume which follows this in the same series. Here we must be content with quoting only four lines from _The Kingis Quhair_, the great poem of King James I of Scotland, who spent part of his long captivity at Windsor. By reason of this poem James I ranks as high among poets as among kings; in it he speaks of the Thames as-- A river pleasant to behold, Embroidered all with fresh flowers gay, Where, through the gravel, bright as any gold, The crystal water ran so clear and cold.