being groom of the privy chambers to the Queen, observes, that he " seems to have taken all the refinement a court could give him"; and probably the absence of pedantry in his style, and its easy and natural flow, are to be traced in great part to the circumstance of his having been a man of the world. His verse, too, always careful and exact, is in many passages more than smooth; even in his dramatic writings (which, having nothing dramatic about them except the form, have been held in very small estimation) it is frequently musical and sweet, though always artificial. The highest quality of his poetry is a tone of quiet, pensive reflection in which he is fond of indulging, and which often rises to dignity and cloquence, and has at times even something of depth and originality. Daniel's was the not uncommon fate of an attendant upon courts and the great; he is believed to have experienced some neglect from his royal patrons in his latter days, or at least to have been made jealous by Ben Jonson being employed to furnish part of the poetry for the court entertainments, the supply of which he used to have all to himself; upon which he retired to a life of quict and contemplation in the country. It sounds strange in the present day to be told that his favourite retreat from the gaiety and bustle of London was a house which he rented in Old Street, St. Luke's. In his gardens here, we are informed by the writer of the Life prefixed to his collected poems, he would often indulge in entire solitude for many months, or at most receive the visits of only a few select friends. It is said to have been here that he composed most of his dramatic pieces. Towards the end of his life he retired to a farm which he had at Beckington, near Philip's Norton, in Somersetshire, and

his death took place there. "He was married," says the editor of his works, "but whether to the person he so often celebrates under the name of Delia, is uncertain." Fuller, in his Worthies, tells us that his wife's name was Justina. They had no children. Daniel is said to have been appointed to the honorary post of Poet Laureate after the death of Spenser.

In his narrative poetry Daniel is in general wire-drawn, flat, and feeble. He has no passion, and very little descriptive power. His Civil Wars' has certainly as little of martial animation in it as any poem in the language. There is abundance, indeed, of "the tranquil mind;" but of "the plumed troops," and the rest of "the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war,” Daniel seems, in composing this work (we had nearly written in this composing work) to have taken as complete a farewell as Othello himself. It is mostly a tissue of long-winded disquisition and cold and languid declamation, and has altogether more of the qualities of a good opiate than of a good poem. We will therefore take the

few extracts for which we can make room from some of his other productions, where his vein of reflection is more in place, and also better in itself. His 'Musophilus' is perhaps upon the whole his finest piece. The poem, which is in the form of a dialogue between Philocosmus (a lover of the world) and Musophilus (a lover of the Muse), commences thus:

Philocosmus.

Fond man, Musophilus, that thus dost spend
In an ungainful art thy dearest days,
Tiring thy wits, and toiling to no end
But to attain that idle smoke of praise!

Now, when this busy world cannot attend
The untimely music of neglected lays,
Other delights than these, other desires,
This wiser profit-seeking age requires.
Musophilus.

Friend Philocosmus, I confess indeed
I love this sacred art thou set'st so light:
And, though it never stand my life in stead,
It is enough it gives my self delight,
The whilst my unafflicted mind doth feed
On no unholy thoughts for benefit.

Be it that my unseasonable song

Come out of time, that fault is in the time;
And I must not do virtue so much wrong
As love her aught the worse for others' crime;
And yet I find some blessed spirits among
That cherish me, and like and grace my rhyme.
A gain that I do more in soul esteem
Than all the gain of dust the world doth crave;
And, if I may attain but to redeem

My name from dissolution and the grave,

I shall have done enough; and better deem
To have lived to be than to have died to have.

Short-breathed mortality would yet extend
That span of life so far forth as it may,
And rob her fate; seek to beguile her end
Of some few lingering days of after-stay;
That all this Little All might not descend
Into the dark an universal prey;

And give our labours yet this poor delight
That, when our days do end, they are not done,
And, though we die, we shall not perish quite,
But live two lives where others have but one.

Further on in the dialogue Musophilus exclaims :-
So fares this humorous world, that ever-more,
Rapt with the current of a present course,

a Erroneously printed in the edition before us (2 vols. 12mo. 1718) "Again, that."

Runs into that which lay contemned before;

Then, glutted, leaves the same, and falls to a worse:
Now zeal holds all, no life but to adore;
Then cold in spirit, and life is of no force.

Strait all that holy was unhallowed lies,
The scattered carcases of ruined vows;
Then truth is false, and now hath blindness eyes;
Then zeal trusts all, now scarcely what it knows;
That evermore, to foolish or to wise,

It fatal is to be seduced with shows.

Sacred Religion! Mother of Form and Fear!*
How gorgeously sometimes dost thou sit decked!
What pompous vestures do we make thee wear!
What stately piles we prodigal erect!

How sweet perfumed thou art! how shining clear!
How solemnly observed! with what respect!

Another time, all plain, all quite thread-bare,
Thou must have all within, and nought without;
Sit poorly, without light, disrobed; no care
Of outward grace, to amuse the poor devout;
Powerless, unfollowed; scarcely men can spare
The necessary rites to set thee out.

Either Truth, Goodness, Virtue are not still
The selfsame which they are, and always one,
But alter to the project of our will;

Or we our actions make them wait upon,
Putting them in the livery of our skill,

And cast them off again when we have done.

Afterwards he replies very finely to an objection of Philocosmus to the cultivation of poetry, from the small number of those who really cared for it:

And for the few that only lend their ear,

That few is all the world; which with a few

* This fine line has been adopted by Wordsworth, a reader and admirer of Daniel, in one of his sonnets on the Duddon.

Do ever live, and move, and work, and stir.
This is the heart doth feel, and only know;
The rest, of all that only bodies bear,
Roll up and down, and fill up but the row;
And serve as others' members, not their own,
The instruments of those that do direct.

Then, what disgrace is this, not to be known
To those know not to give themselves respect?
And, though they swell, with pomp of folly blown,
They live ungraced, and die but in neglect.

And, for my part, if only one allow
The care my labouring spirits take in this,
He is to me a theatre large enow,
And his applause only sufficient is;
All my respect is bent but to his brow;
That is my all, and all I am is his.

And, if some worthy spirits be pleased too,
It shall more comfort breed, but not more will.
But what if none? It cannot yet undo
The love I bear unto this holy skill:
This is the thing that I was born to do;
This is my scene; this part must I fulfil.

Our last extract shall be from his epistle to the Lady Margaret, Countess of Cumberland (the mother of Lady Anne Clifford, afterwards Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery, to whom Daniel had been tutor) :-

He that of such a height hath set his mind,
And reared the dwelling of the thoughts so strong,
As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame
Of his resolved powers; nor all the wind

Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong
His settled peace, or to disturb the same;
What a fair seat hath he from whence he may
The boundless wastes and wealds of man survey!
And with how free an eye doth he look down
Upon these lower regions of turmoil!

Where all the storms of passions mainly beat
On flesh and blood; where honour, power, renown