and thus, we may conjecture, he excuses the omission of such men as Middleton, Fletcher, and Massinger. Beginning with Chaucer, "the first of ours that ever brake Into the Muses' treasure, and first spake In weighty numbers," Drayton pays especial honour to "grave, morall Spencer," "noble Sidney ... heroe for numbers and for prose," Marlowe with his "brave translunary things," Shakespeare of "as smooth a comicke vaine ... as strong conception, and as cleere a rage, As any one that trafiqu'd with the Stage," "learn'd Johnson.... Who had drunke deepe of the Pierian spring," and "reverend Chapman" for his translations: then he passes to men of letters whom he had loved, Alexander and Drummond, and concludes the roll-call with his two Beaumonts and his Browne, his bosom friends, rightly born poets and "Men of much note, and no lesse nobler parts." This letter not only speaks the opinion of Drayton concerning the standing of the two Beaumonts in poetry, but incidentally asserts the popularity of their work, for the author informs his correspondents that he "ties himself here only to those few men" Whose works oft printed, set on every post, To publique censure subject have bin most. By 1627 all of the dramas in which Francis had an undoubted share, except _The Coxcombe_ had been printed; and some of his poems had appeared as early as 1618 in a little volume that included also Drayton's elegies on Lady Penelope Clifton and the three sons of Lord Sheffield, and Verses by 'N. H.' [Illustration: MICHAEL DRAYTON From the portrait in the Dulwich Gallery] This volume is Henry Fitzgeffrey's _Certayn elegies done by sundrie excellent wits_ (Fr. Beau., M. Dr., N. H.), with _Satyres and Epigrames_. Fitzgeffrey, by the way, was of Lincoln's Inn in Beaumont's time; and so were others connected with this volume, by dedications or commendatory verses: Fitzgeffrey's "chamber-fellow and nearest friend, Nat. Gurlin"; Thomas Fletcher, and John Stephens, the satirist, who had been entered member of the Inn in 1611. They must all have been known by Beaumont when he was writing his elegies. The 'N. H.' thus posthumously associated with our dramatist was, I think, the mathematician, philosopher, and poet, Nicholas Hill[133] Beaumont could not have failed to know him. He was of St. John's College, Oxford; he wrote and published a _Philosophia Epicurea Democritiana_ to which, mentioning him by name, Ben Jonson alludes in his epigram (CXXXIV) _Of The Famous Voyage_ of the two wights who "At Bread-streets _Mermaid_ having dined and merry, Propos'd to goe to Holborne in a wherry." He was the secretary and favourite of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was a good deal of a wag, and well acquainted with our old friend Serjeant Hoskyns of the _Convivium Philosophicum_. He died in 1610.