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The plot involves two more or less connected threads of action, the one dealing with the adventures of the swains and shepherdesses, the other concerned with the progress of Thetis and her court. This latter recalls the poetic geography of Drayton's Polyolbion.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there was quite a colony of jurists hard by the temple of Gogmagog and Cosineus or Gog and Magog, as the grotesque giants are designated by the unlearned, who know not the history of the two famous effigies, which originally figured in an Elizabethan pageant, stirring the wonder of the illiterate, and reminding scholars of two mythical heroes about whom the curious reader of this paragraph may learn further particulars by referring to Michael Drayton's 'Polyolbion.
His Baron's wars, and England's heroical Epistles; his Downfals of Robert of Normandy; Matilda and Gaveston, for which last he is called by one of his contemporaries, Tragdiographus, and part of his Polyolbion were written before the year 1598, for all which joined with his personal good character; he was highly celebrated at that time, not only for the elegance and sweetness of his expressions, but his actions and manners, which were uniformly virtuous and honourable; he was thus characterised not only by the poet; and florid writers of those days, but also by divines, historians, and other Scholars of the most serious turn and extensive learning.
England itself was now becoming a source of literary interest to poet and prose-writer. Warner in his "Albion's England," Daniel in his "Civil Wars," embalmed in verse the record of her past; Drayton in his "Polyolbion" sang the fairness of the land itself, the "tracts, mountains, forests, and other parts of this renowned isle of Britain."
Drayton is the most voluminous and, to antiquarians at least, the most interesting of the minor poets. He is the Layamon of the Elizabethan Age, and vastly more scholarly than his predecessor. His chief work is Polyolbion, an enormous poem of many thousand couplets, describing the towns, mountains, and rivers of Britain, with the interesting legends connected with each.
The Abbey lies in a valley sheltered by old trees, the remains of a great forest; wood-covered hills rise behind it, closing in the vale; below runs the Weaver, "that famous flood," whose praises were sung by Michael Drayton in his Polyolbion.
Thus in Drayton's Polyolbion, xi., p. 864 we find "These with the Saxons went, and fortunately wan, Whose Captain Hengist first a Kingdom here began." lesse a great deale, then ydle lokyng on before tyme had done. Shortly crepte in sickenes, and diseases, and the broyling heate and the nipping cold began to assaile their bodyes.
And with the poetical topographer such honors abounded. Not only was he gratified with the zealous labors of Selden in illustration of the "Polyolbion," but his death was lamented in verse of Jonson, upon marble supplied by the Countess of Dorset: The Laureateship, we thus discover, had not, down to the days of James, become an institution. Our mythical series shrink from close scrutiny.
The name "Kentish Longtails" seems to have been early current, and in Drayton's "Polyolbion" we find "Longtails and Liberty" given almost as a motto for the county. We are not told whether it was due to this miracle of the "tails," but it is certain that the conversion of the townspeople of Rochester must have been rapid, for we know that a see was founded here as early as 604.
The very plan of these works was fatal to their success. It is not easy to digest history and geography into poetry. Drayton was the most considerable poet of the three, but his Polyolbion was nothing more than a "gazeteer in rime," a topographical survey of England and Wales, with tedious personifications of rivers, mountains, and valleys, in thirty books and nearly one hundred thousand lines.
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