friend, was still alive, his reputation had been greatly lowered by the ridicule of Thomas Nash, one of the leaders of the romantic clique of poetical Euphuism which was then directing the course of fashionable taste. The writers of this school, inspired by the affectations of Lyly and the romantic fancy of Greene, had produced such poems as Glaucus and Scilla and Venus and Adonis, the aim of which was to treat the subject of Love in a spirit by no means congenial to the chivalrous taste of Spenser :

For with lewd speeches and licentious deeds
His mighty mysteries they do prophane,
And use his ydle name to other needs,
But as a compliment for courting vaine.

So him they do not serve as they profess,

But make him serve to them for sordid uses.

But among these younger poets Colin Clout's eye rests upon one whom he can unreservedly commend :

A new shepherd late up sprong,
The which doth all before him far surpasse,
Appearing well in that well-tunèd song,
Which late he sung unto a scornful lasse.

And so highly does he appreciate the merit of the new-
comer that he distinguishes him by name, and encourages
him to fresh and loftier exertions:-
:-

Then rouse thy feathers quickly, Daniell,

And to what course thou please thy self advance :
But most, me seemes, thy accent will excell

In tragick plaints and passionate mischance.

It would be satisfactory to recover full details of the personal character and history of one whom Spenser seems thus to point out as his worthy successor; but the most striking feature in the career of the younger poet is its course of, on the whole, uninterrupted good fortune, in contrast to the disappointed ambitions of the author of The Faery Queen.

Samuel Daniel was born in 1562 near Taunton. He was the son of a music-master, and was educated at

Magdalen Hall, Oxford, which, however, he left without taking a degree. Like other poets of the time, he travelled in Italy, and made himself acquainted with the state of taste and criticism in that country. His biographers are of course anxious to prove that the sonnets addressed to the "scornful lass" were inspired by real passion, but I have little doubt that as in the case of Michael Drayton, of which I shall speak hereafter-they were merely the vehicles of courtly compliment to a literary and influential patroness. Delia is indeed represented as no less "cruel " than beautiful; but as her cruelty afforded her poet an opportunity of giving a new and graceful turn to the reproaches which Horace and Wyatt had formerly directed against their inflexible mistresses, it is probable that he was not suffering deeply when he wrote with fine skill:

When men shall find thy flower, thy glory pass,
And thou with careful brow, sitting alone,
Received hast thy message from thy glass,
That tells the truth, and says that all is gone;
Fresh shalt thou see in me the wounds thou mad'st,
Though spent thy flame, in me the heart remaining;
I that have loved thee thus before thou fad'st,
My faith shall wax when thou art in thy waning.
The world shall find this miracle in me,
That fire can burn when all the matter's spent:
Then what my faith hath been thyself shall see,
And that thou wast unkind thou may'st repent:

Thou may'st repent that thou hast scorned my tears,
When winter snows upon thy sable hairs.

When winter snows upon thy sable hairs,
And frost of age hath nipt thy beauties near,
When dark shall seem the day that never clears,
And all lies withered that was held so dear;
Then take this picture which I here present thee,
Limmed with a pensill not all unworthy;
Here see the gifts that God and Nature lent thee,
Here read thyself what I have suffered for thee:
This may remain the lasting monument,
Which happily posterity shall cherish;
These colours with thy fading are not spent ;
These may remain when thou and I shall perish.
If they remain, then thou shalt live thereby ;
They will remain, and so thou can'st not die.

Delia's seat seems from the sonnets to have been on the Avon hence, arguing from the analogy of Drayton's Idea, the "sweet nymph of Ankor," whom I shall show beyond question to have been Lucy, Countess of Bedford, it may not unreasonably be conjectured that Daniel's divinity was Mary, Countess of Pembroke, wife of the owner of Wilton, sister of Sir Philip Sidney, and among the most influential patronesses of literature in the Court of Elizabeth. One of the sonnets is addressed to the poet's mistress on the eve of his departure from England; and perhaps the Countess of Pembroke may have provided him with the means of travel, that he might acquire in Italy the accomplishments befitting the intended tutor of her son, William Herbert. To that position she at any rate appointed him on his return home-a fact which raises the further question whether (on the assumption that the Mr. W. H., the "only begetter" of Shakespeare's sonnets, was William Herbert) Daniel may not have been the rival poet alluded to by Shakespeare in several of his sonnets. Everything connected with the personal history of those poems must remain in the region of pure conjecture; but we may indulge our fancy on the subject by remembering that Daniel continued to enjoy the favour of William Herbert, after the latter had succeeded to the earldom; that he dedicated to the Earl, about the time when Shakespeare was writing the sonnets, his Defence of Ryme; and that he was a student of judicial astrology. We know also that Shakespeare admired Delia, and developed the vein of thought in the lines I have already cited through a whole series of his own sonnets.

Encouraged by the praise of Spenser and the favour of Lady Pembroke, Daniel now entered boldly on an ambitious poetical career. In 1594 he had published his rhyming tragedy, Cleopatra, a play composed on Seneca's model, and in the following year produced the first four books of his epic, The Civil Wars between the two Houses of York and Lancaster. The fifth book also appeared in 1595, but the publication of the sixth was delayed till 1601. Meanwhile he constantly advanced in favour with

the leaders of Court society, for we find him between 1595 and 1599 acting as tutor to Anne, daughter of Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, addressing a didactic Horatian epistle to the Chancellor, Egerton, and writing poetical eulogies on Essex and Mountjoy. In 1602 he published Musophilus and A Defence of Ryme. When James I. succeeded to the throne of England in 1603, Daniel welcomed him in A Panegyric Congratulatorie; and either this poem or his recognised superiority procured him in that year the post of licenser of plays to be acted before the Queen.

Anne of Denmark delighted in masques; Daniel's compositions therefore now naturally took a dramatic turn. Between 1604 and 1615 he wrote for the stage A Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, The Queen's Arcadia, Tethys' Festival, and Hymen's Triumph, all of these being masques or comedies. He also produced a play, Philotas, written after his favourite classical manner, but as this was believed to have an allegorical reference to the conspiracy of Essex in the late reign, it brought on him some odium. He was successful indeed in showing that the tragedy had been conceived, and much of it written, before 1600, but the injustice of the accusation weighed heavily on a spirit which, though naturally retiring and sensitive, was yet self-respecting. In an Epistle to the Prince (Henry), prefixed to Philotas in 1605, he says:

And therefore, since I have outlived the date
Of former grace, acceptance, and delight,
I would my lines, late-born beyond the fate
Of her spent line, had never come to light.
So had I not been taxed for wishing well,
Nor now mistaken by the censuring stage,
Nor in my fame and reputation fell,

Which I esteem more than what all the age

Or th' earth can give. But years have done this wrong,
To make me write too much and live too long.

He did not publish anything more till 1609, when he added to his Civil Wars a seventh and eighth book, and afterwards turned his attention to a History of England

in prose, which he brought out in 1612. The greater part of his life was spent in London, but his declining years at a farm which he had purchased at Beckington in Somersetshire, where he died in 1619.

Daniel's merit as a poet has been variously estimated. With the exception of Ben Jonson, who described him as "an honest man, but no poet," and who twice went out of his way to misquote his verse for the purpose of parody, all of his contemporaries spoke with respect of his abilities. General commendation was bestowed upon his earlier poems Delia and Rosamond. Drayton, who frequently imitated him, addressing him, says of the former :

And thou, the sweet Musæus of these times,
Pardon my rugged and unfilèd rhymes,
Whose scarce invention is too mean and base,
When Delia's glorious Muse doth come in place.

Nash, the enemy of Gabriel Harvey, who generally wrote with a railing pen, speaks with enthusiastic admiration of Rosamond.2 But the critics were not agreed about his Civil Wars. Guilpin, a poetaster of the time, summarises their diverse opinions :—

Daniel (as some hold) might mount if he list,
But others say that he's a Lucanist.3

Others, again, thought that, though the language of The Civil Wars was pure and lofty, the conception was not poetical, a criticism vivaciously expressed by Drayton, who, in his Epistle to H. Reynolds, Of Poets and Poesy, after enumerating the chief writers of the time, puts

Amongst these Samuel Daniel, whom if I

May speak of, but to censure do deny,
Only have heard some wise men him rehearse

To be too much historian in verse.

His rhymes were smooth, his metre well did close,
But yet his manner better fitted prose.

1 Every Man in his Humour, Act v. Sc. 1, and The Staple of News,

Act iii. Sc. I.

2 Nash, Piers Penilesse.

3 Guilpin, Skialetheia.