No More Learning

Gent,
as Nicholas Breton is here written, belongs to that school too.
A voluminous writer in verse and prose, Nicholas Breton, who
was born about 1542 and was probably in the service of Sidney,
or of his sister the countess of Pembroke, or of both, belongs in
spirit, by his protestantism no less than by his poetical usage, to
the school of Wyatt and Surrey. Many of his longer works are
written in the fourteen-syllable lines and the 'poulter's measure'
beloved of the poets of that school; and his use of stanzas of six
and eight lines, or of rime royal, does little to link him with
the new writers. In The Phoenix Nest, too, he indulges very
freely in the old allegory, a heritage from medieval times which
was soon to fall out of use. A strange description of a rare
garden plot is an allegorical poem in ‘poulter's measure. ' An
excellent dreame of ladies, and their riddles and The Chesse
Play are, also, allegorical. In the next anthology which we have
to consider, we shall find Breton in a different guise; but, in The
Phoenix Nest, the new note is struck most forcibly by Thomas
Lodge. The fifteen poems by that author which the volume
includes are the best of its treasures. Three of them are from his
Phillis (1593), a volume of eclogues, sonnets, elegies and other
lyrical pieces; the rest appear first in The Phoenix Nest, though
one, ‘Like desart woods,' is published in England's Helicon,
where it is given either to Sir Edward Dyer, or to 'Ignoto. '
It is worth noticing that Lodge, in one song, “The fatall starre
that at my birthday shined,' makes use of a metre which might
be scanned as, and is clearly modelled upon, alcaics, but is, in
practice, composed of iambic feet. The earl of Oxford has a
charming lyric, “What cunning can expresse,' and it is possible that
the longest poem in the volume, A most rare and excellent
dreame, is the work of Greene. The dream is the favourite one
of the visit of a lady to her sleeping lover. Her beauties are
described, and his parlous state explained. Then follows a long
argument on love, of the kind that had not yet passed out of
fashion; and, on the relenting of his mistress, the lover wakes.
There is much of the old school in the matter, but little in the
manner. The stanzas in rime royal move freely and strongly, and


## p. 117 (#139) ############################################

England's Helicon
117
the whole is a good specimen of the poetry of the time. It needs,
however, only to place it side by side with such a lyric as Lodge's
'My bonnie Lasse thine eie,' in the same volume, to realise the
immensely enlarged field in which the poet had to work. "Sweete
Violets (Loves paradice) that spred' is a good example of the long
stanza of complicated structure and involved rime-sequence which
the poets of the day used with rare skill, and which led the way in
time to the formal ode,
The next miscellany to be published has been generally found
the most interesting and beautiful of all. The first edition of
England's Helicon was published in 1600; it appears to have
been projected by John Bodenham, and, possibly, collected by him,
the editorial work being carried out by a certain ‘A, B. , who has not
been identified. A second edition appeared in 1614 with a few
additional poems.
In Englands Helicon, we find the best of the pastoral and
lyric poetry of the age. The only blot on the collection is the
excessive space allotted to Bartholomew Young, or Yong, whose
poems, taken from his translation of Montemayor's Diana, are
not on a level with those of the other contributors. A list of the
poets drawn upon for the collection will give some idea of its
value. Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, E[dmund] B[olton),
Michael Drayton, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, Nicholas Breton,
Shepherd Tony, George Peele, John Dickenson, Henry Howard
earl of Surrey, Thomas Watson, John Wotton, Shakespeare (? ),
Richard Barnfield, the earl of Oxford, Sir Edward Dyer, Sir
Walter Ralegh, H[enry] C[onstable), Bartholomew Yong, W[illiam]
S[mith], Fulke Greville (? ), Christopher Marlowe, William Browne
and Christopher Brooke. The large number of poems subscribed
'Ignoto' are also unusually interesting. Of these, three were
attributed in the first edition to W[alter] R[alegh]; but, in later
copies of that issue, a slip of paper bearing the word 'Ignoto' has
been pasted over the initials, though a manuscript list of poems
made by Francis Davison (editor of A Poetical Rapsody) and
now in the British Museum' ascribes them to Ralegh. The
same signature 'Ignoto' stands, in several cases, as Bullen has
pointed out, for a mysterious poet, ‘A. W. ', of whom nothing
but his work is known, and that mainly through A Poetical
Rapsody.
The poems by Sidney in England's Helicon are taken from
Astrophel and Stella, Arcadia, The May-Lady and A Poetical
1 MS Harl. 280.
1


## p. 118 (#140) ############################################

118
The Song-books and Miscellanies
Rapsody, while one, An excellent sonnet of a nymph, appears in
England's Helicon, probably for the first time.
The three poems by Spenser are taken from The Shepheards
Calender and his Astrophel, the elegy on the death of Sidney.
Edmund Bolton, the author, probably, of the four poems signed
'E. B. ', which include a particularly beautiful carol, was a retainer
of George Villiers duke of Buckingham, and belongs, properly, to
the Jacobean age. The poems of Drayton in Englands Helicon are
taken from his Eclogues, in Poems Lyric and Pastoral, and his
Idea, while two appear for the first time in this volume. Greene's
are taken from Menaphon and Francesco's Fortunes; Peele’s from
The Hunting of Cupid and The Arraignment of Paris; Lodge's
from Rosalind, A Margarite of America and Phillis, while two
appear here for the first time; and Watson's mainly from his
EKATOMIAQIA, while one appeared first in The Phoenix
Nest and another is not known before its appearance here.
Nicholas Breton, as we have said, appears here at his best.
There are eight of his poems in the book, six of which do not appear
elsewhere, and, of these six, one is in the old 'poulter's measure,'
and three in the once popular fourteen-syllable line. But Breton's
use of these almost discarded metres differs greatly from that of
the lesser followers of Wyatt and Surrey. By dividing the long
lines into two and giving them rimes at each pause-a practice
that had been followed before-he breaks the monotony; and
in his hands these measures no longer jog,' but flow. There is
a buoyancy and a liveliness in his verse which is the very spirit
of the lyrics of his age; and, though he never tries the elaborate
harmonies of some of the writers in this miscellany, his note is
clear and perfect in the short lyric outbursts which he too seldom
attempted. His longer narrative, religious and allegorical poems,
The Pilgrimage to Paradise, The Countesse of Penbrooke's love,
The Soules immortall Crowne and others, which are written,
some in fourteeners, some in rime royal, or stanzas of six or eight
decasyllables, lack variety, and cannot stand by the side of Samuel
Daniel's for dignity or depth. Nicholas Breton's best work is to
be found in the short lyrics, and in the delightful Passionate
Shepheard, a volume containing pastorals, many of which are
written in the trochaic measure of four feet, the lightness and
grace of which was then becoming fully recognised.
It seems probable, though it is strange, that Shepherd Tony,
the sweet singer of England's Helicon, is no other than the
Grub Street patriarch, the translator and playwright, Anthony
|


## p. 119 (#141) ############################################

Richard Barnfield
119
Munday. The evidence rests mainly on the charming song,
‘Beauty sat bathing by a spring,' which occurs both in England's
Helicon and in Munday's translation of Primaleon. His work in
this miscellany is far superior to that in his Banquet of Dainty
Conceits (1588). He replies to the old pastoral, 'Phylida was a
fayer mayde,' which, as we have seen, Englands Helicon ascribes
to Surrey, and makes a lovelier melody by his mixed use of iambics
and trochaics. In The Woodman's Walk, he carries us back, both
by his use of the divided fourteener and the old subject of the
failings of court and city life, to an earlier day; in ‘Fair nymphes,
sit ye here by me,' he is well abreast of his age in the long stanzas
of short lines with interwoven rimes, which discuss pleasantly and
sweetly the pleasures and pains of love-only to break at the close
into a hymn in its praise.
John Dickenson, the author of three very dainty little songs,
is a little known poet, whose Shepheardes Complaint, in which
all three occur, was published in 1594. John Wotton, who,
possibly, was the half-brother of Sir Henry Wotton mentioned by
Izaak Walton, is the author of one very famous and delightful
poem, Damaetas' Jig in praise of his love, beginning ‘Jolly shep-
herd, shepherd on a hill,' in which is concentrated the whole
quality of the collection of pastorals, and the very breath of this
springtime of poetry. The song ascribed to Shakespeare is the
'On a day (alack the day ! )' which appeared in the first edition of
Love's Labour's Lost, and, again, in the Sonnets to Sundry notes
of Music appended to The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). Both in
that volume and in England's Helicon the songs immediately
following are ‘My flocks feede not,' and 'As it fell upon a day. ' Of
these two, the latter had already appeared in the Poems in divers
Humors attached to The Encomion of Lady Pecunia, by Richard
Barnfield, published in 1598, together with the sonnet, “If Musique
and sweet Poetrie agree,' which also forms part of The Passionate
Pilgrim. This is not the place to examine the ascription of
particular songs: the best opinion determines for Barnfield's
authorship of the sonnet; that of the 'ode''As it fell upon a day'
is more doubtful. The fact that, in England's Helicon, it follows
immediately upon ‘My flocks feede not,' and is entitled Another
1 See Bullen, Lyrics from Romances and Prose-Tracts of the Elizabethan Age (1890),
pp. xviii, 77. His edition of England's Helicon, in which (p. xvii) he scouts the notion
that Munday and Shepherd Tony could be one, was published in 1887. The notion
that Shepherd Tony was a pseudonym of Anthony Copley was never tenable.
See Grosart's and Arber's reprints of Barnfield's poems and Henneman in An
English Miscellany (Oxford, 1901), p. 158.
6
>


## p. 120 (#142) ############################################

I 20 The Song-books and Miscellanies
of the same shepherd's, is part of the evidence for his author-
ship of that poem also. Barnfield, who was born in 1574, in
Shropshire, was educated at Oxford and died in 1627, was not
a professional writer. His three volumes: The Affectionate
Shepheard (1594), Cynthia (1595) and The Encomion of Lady
Pecunia (1598), were all published before he was twenty-five, and
bear evidence of being not so much the result of any strong
impulse to poetry as the elegant amusement of a young scholar.
All reveal a love of strangeness in subject, of conceit and far-
fetched imagery. The Affectionate Shepheard begins by elabora-
ting the second Eclogue of Vergil into a passionate address by an
aged man to a youth named Ganymede (to whom, also, a number
of sonnets in Cynthia are composed in the same vein), and passes
on to give a great deal of good, if ill-arranged, advice on the same
moral level as that of Polonius. For Cynthia, he claims that it is
the first imitation of the verse of The Faerie Queene: its subject
is a classical allegory, leading to a panegyric on queen Elizabeth,
and the volume contains also a narrative 'tragedy'on Cassandra,
and an 'ode,' in which a lying shepherd is heard to complain that
his love for Ganymede has been ousted by the greater beauty of
a lass, whose name we learn to be Eliza. In the introductory
letter to The Encomion of Lady Pecunia, Barnfield openly admits
his search for an uncommon, novel subject. The poem is a satire
on the power of wealth: it is followed by The Complainte of
Poetrie for the Death of Liberalitie, a topic to which he refers
more than once in his other works; and by an estrif between
Conscience and Covetousness. Then follow those Poems in divers
Humors, to which reference was made above. The traces of the
poetic exercise are clear in all Barnfield's work. It is at its best
and its pleasantest in the moments when, forgetting his intellectual
foppery and affectation, he sings naturally and sweetly about the
country. His descriptions of country scenes are sometimes ad-
mirable, and he has a quaint and pleasing way of dropping simple
country similes into the most elaborate of his fancies. His
favourite metre is the decasyllabic line, which he manages with
dignity and variety in stanzas of a quatrain and a couplet, or of
rime royal; and there are some good hexameters, as there are
certainly some extremely bad ones, in an extraordinarily 'con-
ceited' poem called Hellens Rape, or a light Lanthorne for light
Ladies. His vocabulary is rich and often strange; though not so
much with the archaism of his ‘king of poets,' Spenser, as with
the homelier usages of his own day. Another prominent feature
1


## p. 121 (#143) ############################################

!
Pastoral Poems
I 21
1
in Barnfield's work is his ardent and outspoken admiration for
Spenser, his friend Watson, Sidney, Drayton and other contem-
porary poets. Bartholomew Yong we have mentioned already,
and somewhat in disparagement. In him stands out prominently
the affectation of the time, to which we shall return, and neither
in spirit nor in melody is he worthy of the important place assigned
to him in the volume. William Smith, a rather pedantic writer,
was the author of Chloris (1596), and Christopher Brooke, whose
spirited, if conventional, Epithalamium closes the volume, is known
as the collaborator with Browne and Wither in The Shepheards
Pipe (1614), and belongs, with Browne himself, to the generation
following. To this list must be added a number of anonymous
authors, of whom 'W. H. ', the author of two very graceful and
charming songs, may, possibly, be William Hunnis, whom we met
in The Paradyse of Daynty Devises.
It is clear, then, that the compiler of the book looked far and
wide through the literature of the day for the pastorals to form
his collection. Plays, romances, sonnet-sequences, song-books (for
many of the poems in England: Helicon are taken from Byrd's
or Morley's books), all were laid under contribution; and he must
be allowed to have been a man of fine taste. It is difficult to
refer to these poems without using expressions of admiration that
must seem excessive; but to open any page (unless, indeed, one
hits on the laborious Bartholomew Yong) is to meet with some-
thing of great beauty. The book contains the best of the lyrics
with which Lodge, that various master of light music, dotted his
romances. Peele wrote but few lyrics, but the best of them are
here, and Greene seems to give voice not only to the spirit
of the renascence with its gay appetites, its rich fancies and its
humanism, but to the graver spirit which is held to be character-
istically English, and is frequent in the lyric poetry of his day,
rarely as it appears in the book under notice.
Pastoral, as has often been pointed out, is always more or less
an affectation. It is 'the townsman's dream of country life! ' It
has always been written in stages of high civilisation, by Theo-
critus, Vergil, or Mantuan. It lends itself freely to allegorical
use; the comparison of country innocence with the venality and
falsehood of city and court life leads, naturally, to moralising,
and that strain runs through pastoral in England from Barnabe
Googe to Lycidas. In Englands Helicon, and in much of the
pastoral poetry of Elizabethan days, it is another aspect that we
· Chambers's English Pastorals, p. xxxix.


## p. 122 (#144) ############################################

I 22 The
Song-books and Miscellanies
find. The convention is adopted, but for a different purpose; and,
in the end, it amounts to no more than the nomenclature. A man
is not less a man for calling himself a shepherd, and, to the
Elizabethan courtier, flocks and herds, thrushes and nightingales,
brooks and trees, must have been objects at least as familiar as
streets and houses. For it is noticeable that, in spite of much
classical imagery and talk of Phoebus, Diana and the rest, and
many new versions of classical stories, it is English (country of
which the pastoral poets chiefly sing in this volume. We are
to imagine a better climate than we have; but that is usually
the greatest demand which the convention makes. It is not the
poetry of nature, for nature is not studied as a source of con-
solation or strength or for any interest in itself: it remains the
background of the loves of the shepherd; but, in dramatising
himself against a background which he knew (though he chose
to call it by strange names), the poet gains a good opportunity
of expressing his feelings with more freedom than direct speech
would allow. A shepherd is a simple and downright person;
to pose as a shepherd is to have the advantages enjoyed by
simple and downright persons. And, since the single subject
of the poems in Englands Helicon is love, that advantage is
valuable.
The result is a strange but delightful mixture of simplicity
and affectation. There is all the colour of association with classical
poetry, the eager absorption of classical imagery characteristic
of the renascence, combined with the naked feelings of the actual
On the language of the poets, the combination could not
fail to have the important effect of lending it richness and colour;
but, through the pleasant tinsel, the native quality shows clearly.
The affectation only becomes oppressive in the case of writers like
Bartholomew Yong, whose feeling was insufficiently ardent to
endow the borrowed form with life. His Arsilius, Meliseа, Alanius
and the rest strike the reader as pieces of pedantry, while Lodge's
Montanus (we are speaking only of the lyrics), or some unknown
poet's Philistus, or Daphne, or Phyllida, are men and women,
The contrast between the technical accomplishment of these
poets and of those of the earlier school is very great. In place of
the few, repeated measures, the often cramped movement and the
halting progress of the early poetry, we find ease, grace, swift-
ness and freedom in metres of all kinds. The long fourteener
and 'poulter's measure' have been divided and flow like rippling
streams; the decasyllable has gained strength, dignity and variety,
man.
1


## p. 123 (#145) ############################################

A Poetical Rapsody
123
and great dexterity has been attained in the use of short lines.
There is no end to the ingenuity of these poets in the arrange-
ment of long, trilling stanzas, in which closely wrought rime-
construction keeps the melody from feebleness.
The way in
which subtlety and ingenuity are combined with simplicity is one
of the most remarkable qualities of the Elizabethan lyric. That
the poem is a work of delicate and conscious art is plain ; the
devices of echo, refrain and repetition are freely used, and long
and difficult schemes of rime and metre are sustained throughout.
It was this age, moreover, that saw the introduction into English
poetry of the shaped verses’ already common in Italy and France.
The writer's object was to make his verse, when printed, take the
shape of an egg, a pillar, a triangle, or one of many other shapes
mentioned by Puttenham in his Arte of English Poesie. It
seems probable that the learned Thomas Watson, author of The
EKATOMIIARIA, was the first to introduce the practice into
England; his example takes the form of 'a Pasquin Pillar. A
classical origin was claimed for the idea of the shaped verse, the
names of Anacreon and Simmias of Rhodes being cited; and the
fashion, which did little more than take root in Elizabethan days,
grew under the reigns of her successors into great popularity,
issuing not only in the pleasing and appropriate shaped verses
of Herbert, but into most fantastic absurdities in less poetical
hands. In spite, however, of occasional instances of such mis-
directed ingenuity, the Elizabethan lyric remains a bird-song in
sweetness and spontaneity, and the result is one which can only
be attained in the rare moments when accomplishment and in-
spiration are on a level.
The last of the Elizabethan anthologies which need be seriously
considered is A Poetical Rapsody issued by two brothers, Francis
and Walter Davison, in 1602. Francis Davison was the eldest
son of the secretary Davison who was Elizabeth's scapegoat
in the matter of the execution of Mary queen of Scots. In
his youth, Francis was sent to travel with his tutor, and it was
while abroad that he wrote a prose work, the Relation of Saxony,
which was highly praised by Anthony Bacon, and also (according
to his letter to the reader) the poems which are collected in the
Rapsody. Walter, his younger brother, became, it appears, a
soldier in the Low Countries and died young.
The volume opens with a dedicatory sonnet to William Herbert
earl of Pembroke; and the first contributor is Sir John Davies,
whose work is considered in another chapter of this volume.


## p. 124 (#146) ############################################

I 24 The Song-books and Miscellanies
-
Then comes the poem called The Lie, which is commonly, but
erroneously, supposed to have been written by Ralegh on the eve
of his execution; and then two pastorals by Sidney. Soon after
these follows a Dialogue between two shepheards, Thenot and
Piers in praise of Astrea, which was written by Mary countess
of Pembroke, patron and friend of all the poets of the day,
the 'Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother' of William Browne's
immortal epitaph. It is possible that this dialogue was written
for one of queen Elizabeth's visits to Wilton. Francis and Walter
Davison themselves contribute a large number of poems: eclogues,
sonnets,' odes, elegies, madrigals and epigrams, translations from
s
Horace, Martial, Petrarch, Jodelle and others—the work, mainly,
of persons of taste and education rather than of poets born,
though one song, In praise of a beggar's life, has become familiar
to many through its quotation by Izaak Walton in The Compleat
Angler, as 'Frank Davison's song, which he made forty years ago. '
One of Francis Davison's eclogues—written in a form of the long
and elaborate stanza over which the poets of the day had great
mastery-is a specially good example of the ease with which
they moved amid the conventions of pastoralism. The shepherd
Eubulus is no other than Elizabeth's late counsellor, secretary
Davison, and his cruel mistress is the queen. It is a touching and
manly plea for the poet's own disgraced father, written in a form
which could deceive nobody. A specimen of unusual ingenuity
is the long poem called Complaint, ascribed, in the Rapsody,
to Francis Davison, and, in Davison's own manuscript', to 'A. W.
Not only the eight rime-endings, but the actual words that com-
pose them, are the same in each of the eight stanzas. The age
delighted in echoes, and was constantly experimenting in metre
and rime, but, usually, with more artistic purpose than in this
instance. The madrigals of the brothers were very popular and
are found in many of the song-books.
The miscellaneous contributors to A Poetical Rapsody include
Greene (with a translation of Anacreon, from Orpharion), Campion,
Henry Wotton, T[homas) S[pilman) or Spelman (a kinsman of the
Davisons, who also translated Anacreon), Spenser, Constable and
Charles Best, with, possibly, Joshua Sylvester and Ralegh (to the
dialogue, ‘Shepherd, what's love, I pray thee tell,' we have referred
before, and the volume contains another of the many poems which
the opinion of the time was ready to attribute to Ralegh).
But the largest and the most remarkable contributor is the
i See above, p. 117.
>


## p. 125 (#147) ############################################

A. W.
125
mysterious 'A, W. , whom all efforts have failed to identify,
but whose songs worthily found place in many anthologies
and song-books of the age. The earlier part of the volume
contains a number of eclogues, the name of the shepherd being
Cuddy. In these, the author shows himself a close student and
follower of Spenser. Rustic or antique phraseology is almost
unknown in Englands Helicon. Of the thirty-five words and
phrases given by Bullen in the glossarial index to his edition of
that book, four, at the most, were not in common use in the
educated speech of the time. ‘A. W. delights in flavouring his
eclogues, like Spenser, with words that shall be racy of the soil.
Later in the volume we find a number of anonymous poems,
heralded by three admirable Petrarchian sonnets, all of which are
attributed to 'A. W. ' in the manuscript list compiled by Francis
Davison. There is a wide difference between these poems. It is
difficult to believe that the three sets of hexameters on the death
of Sidney are the work of the same author as The Tomb of Dead
Desire or the madrigal, 'Thine eyes so bright'; and it is not im-
possible that the 'A. W. ' of Francis Davison's list stands, not for the
initials of a single poet, but for the words, “anonymous writers. '
A curious fact is that the poem mentioned above, which Izaak
Walton ascribes to Davison himself, is initialled 'A. W. by Davison
in his list, and appears among the group in the Rapsody ascribed
to that author. If these poems were, indeed, the work of a single
author, he is sufficiently interesting to demand further research.
His range is wide—from the solemn measures of a poem to Time,
which, with others, recalls strongly the antithetical, paradoxical
work of years before, to the sweetest of little madrigals, that sing
themselves irresistibly. He indulges, too, in some use of classical
metres. To his hexameters we have referred. He uses, also, a
metre which he calls the Phaleuciack:
Time nor place did I want, what held me tongue-tied ?
and, on one occasion, he rimes the lines of this structure, pre-
fixing an apology to his lady for so strange a metre. ' A set of
sapphics upon the passion of Christ shows, also, that he was
affected by the movement which started with Spenser and Gabriel
Harvey and led even Campion astray for a while. His translations
from Anacreon can hardly be set beside Thomas Stanley's.
In treating the lyrics of the song-books and miscellanies we
have dealt almost exclusively with what may be called the
renascence elements in them, the gaiety, the paganism, the use of


## p. 126 (#148) ############################################

126 The Song-books and Miscellanies
mythology and classical allusion. It must not be supposed, how-
ever, that the more peculiarly English note, as it is commonly
considered—the reflective, religious and didactic note-is absent.
It is frequent even in the song-books, William Byrd in particular
having, clearly, a fondness for sad subjects as vehicles for his music.
In his First Book we find the famous poem by Sir Edward Dyer,
‘My mind to me a kingdom is,' a perfect type of the moral poetry-
the poetry of independence of character and sobriety of life-which
was common at the time, and of which Samuel Daniel's poem To
the Lady Margaret Countess of Cumberland, beginning ‘He that
of such a height hath built his mind,' Campion's The man of Life
upright, Sir Henry Wotton's 'How happy is he born and taught,'
are other notable instances. Byrd's Second Book is largely com-
posed of short moral and didactic poems; and it is plain that this
reflective vein ran as steadily in the heyday of Elizabethan glory
as in earlier years. Barnfield's Ganymede is treated in The
Affectionate Shepheard to a discourse on morality in the second
day's lament which gives, perhaps, a truer picture of the genuine
sentiments and character of that respectable man and good poet
than the remainder of the poem. And, as the heyday passed
towards sunset, as the ebullient joy in life and love died down, and
the glory of the reign was clouded by troubles and shadows of
coming evils, this note is heard more clearly. The last decade of
Elizabeth's reign was a time of thought and reflection, even
of apprehension; and instead of, or side by side with, the notes of
apparently 'careless rapture,' we find the graver poetry of men of
piety and philosophy.


## p. 127 (#149) ############################################

CHAPTER VII
ROBERT SOUTHWELL SAMUEL DANIEL
REFERENCE was made at the close of the previous chapter to the
poetry of piety and philosophy which became prominent in the
last decade of Elizabeth's reign. Such poetry falls, roughly, into
two classes, of which the two poets whose names give the title to
this chapter are representative: Southwell of the purely religious
poetry, Daniel of the humanistic and historical.
In purely religious poetry, the period was not rich. There were
few poets who did not, at one time or another, write a religious
poem; on the other hand, the whole body of religious verse, if
collected, would not amount to a large total, and only one impor-
tant poet of the age is, specifically, a religious poet. Round Robert
Southwell, the Jesuit, in late Elizabethan days no less than in our
own, floated a glamour due to the story of his life and death.
Born in 1561, of an illegitimate branch of the old Catholic family
of Southwell, probably at his father's estate of Horsham St Faith
near Norwich, he is said to have been stolen from his cradle by a
gypsy who was tempted by his uncommon beauty. At an early
age, he came under the influence of the Jesuits, being sent to the
college at Douay, and thence transferred to Paris. Thomas Darby-
shire, his chief guide in Paris, had resigned, on Elizabeth's accession,
the archdeaconry of Essex which he had held under Mary. Southwell
early showed an intense desire to belong to the Society of Jesus,
and, after a period of probation which he found almost intolerably
long, succeeded in making his own way to Rome, where he was
admitted to the noviciate at the age of seventeen.
At the end of
his noviciate, he was appointed prefect of studies at the English
college in Rome, a position which he held until, in 1586, he was
selected to accompany Henry Garnett into England on the work of
the English mission inaugurated by Parsons and Edmund Campion
in 1580. The call appeared to him to be an almost certain promise
of the martyrdom on which his desires had long been set.


## p. 128 (#150) ############################################

128 Robert Southwell. Samuel Daniel
Nevertheless, he carried on his perilous work in England for six years,
before he wasdecoyed, in 1592, into the hands of the informer Topcliffe
and imprisoned in Topcliffe's house in Westminster. After thirteen
applications of the torture and two years and a half of imprison-
ment, Southwell was executed at Tyburn, in February 1594/5.
It was in prison that his poems were mainly written. When
poets sing of the shortness and the deceptive character of life, one
is often tempted to wonder whether the sentiments are not the
purely conventional utterances of men sitting at ease in comfort-
able homes, or merely signs of reaction from an excess of pleasure.
From Southwell's own statements, we know that his body never
recovered from the tortures it had suffered, and, from his letters
and journals, that such a death as he expected had long been his
highest ambition. This certificate of sincerity, combined with a
vivid imagination and an epigrammatic keenness of expression,
imparts to his poems a brilliance only tempered by the sweetness
of nature to which they, with everything we know of the poet,
bear witness.
In writing his poetry, Southwell may be said to have had
before him three motives : the expression of his own thoughts
and feelings, to which life in prison gave no other outlet; the
comfort and edification of his fellow Catholics; and a third, which
gives them a peculiar literary interest. His poems were not pub-
lished in his lifetime ; but that he contemplated publication is
clear from the letter to his cousin which prefaces Saint Peters
Complaint. His object, like Milton's in the following century,
was to rescue the art of poetry from the worldly uses to which it
had been almost solely devoted.
Most poets,' he writes, ' now busie themselves in expressing such passions
as onely serve for testimonies to howe unworthy affections they have wedded
their wills. And, because the best course to let them see the errour of their
works is to weave a new webbe in their owne loome, 1 have here laide a few
course threds together. '
There can be no doubt that Southwell had read Shakespeare's
Venus and Adonis, which was published in 1593 and at once
became the most popular poem of the day. He seems, indeed, to
have regarded it as the capital instance of the poetry he wished to
supplant. His Saint Peters Complaint, published in 1595, soon
after his death, is written in the metre of Shakespeare's poem, and
the preliminary address from the author to the reader contains a
line, 'Stil finest wits are stilling Venus' rose,' which may be a
direct reference to it, and certainly would be considered so by
>
fal
11


## p. 129 (#151) ############################################

Robert Southwell
129
Southwell's readers. And, if Southwell had read Shakespeare, it
is clear, from a number of interesting correspondences to be found
in their works, that Shakespeare had read Southwell. At any
rate, the attempt to give to sacred poetry the merit and charm of
profane did not pass unnoticed. Saint Peters Complaint was
attacked by Joseph Hall in his eighth satire in the line : ‘Now
good St Peter weeps pure Helicon. '
Saint Peters Complaint is a long poem describing the incidents
of the last days of the life of Christ, seen in the light of the
remorse of the saint for having denied his Master; and its theme is
chiefly remarkable for the great number and ingenuity of the
'conceits' which it embodies. Comparisons, which must seem ex-
travagant and far-fetched were they applied to any subject but
the Redeemer, paradoxes and antitheses, which must seem affected
were they not the only means of expressing the illimitable in
terms of the finite, and, therefore, inevitable in dealing with the
Incarnation, are heaped one upon another until the poem becomes
a leading example of the poetical ‘wit' of the age. The paradox
'
is inherent in the subject, being almost entirely theological and
embodying the Catholic view of the nature of Christ and the
eternal contrast between the reality of things spiritual and the
unreality of the things of this world'. Southwell, almost certainly,
was a student at first hand of the Italian poetry which had
been the origin of the 'conceits' then common in English poetry;
and the effort to express the eternal through the imagery of the
temporal was one which his church, even in her liturgies, has
always sanctioned. The first line of a famous stanza in Saint
Peters Complaint, for instance, in which the bloody sweat of
Christ is compared to 'Fat soil, full spring, sweet olive, grape of
bliss,' has its theological origin in the litany of Loreto, while the
remainder of the stanza, which works out the comparisons, could
be paralleled in a hundred poems of the time. Another form of
contrast beloved by Southwell is that between the old dispensation
and the new; the idea, for instance, expressed in the hymn, Ave
maris Stella, finds its counterpart in one of his poems dealing with
the change of 'Eva' to 'Ave. '
To modern readers, however, and, especially, to modern readers
other than Catholics, who may find these constant antithetical and
paradoxical flights a little strange, Southwell's shorter poems will
1 Cf. the poem written by another Catholic, Chidiock Tichborne, on the eve of his
execution in 1586; published in Hannah; Poems by Sir Henry Wootton, Sir Walter
Raleigh and others, p. 69.
9
E. L. IV.
CH. VII,


## p. 130 (#152) ############################################

130 Robert Southwell.
Samuel Daniel
appeal more strongly. Some of them are to be found at the end
of Saint Peters Complaint ; others were collected a few months
later and published under the title Maconiae (1595). These, too
are paradoxical: poems that deal with the nativity and the life
on earth of Christ could hardly be anything else; but the shorter
flight and the greater prominence of the poet's lyrical power
render the antitheses less noticeable. And one or two of them,
when the chance occurs, are free from antithesis, and are content
with a simple, but profound, symbolism. Such are the poems
called New Prince, New Pompe; New Heaven, New Warre; or
the finely imaginative and glowing little poem, The Burning Babe,
of which Ben Jonson said to Drummond of Hawthornden that
'so he had written that piece of his, The Burning Babe, he would
have been content to destroy many of his. ' Southwell is one of
our few religious poets who have preferred the lyrical to the
didactic manner, or, in being indirectly didactic (for Saint Peters
Complaint draws a moral from every incident of the crucifixion),
hare maintained the lyric note. In a poem called Foure-fould
Meditation, of the foure last things : viz. of the Houre of Death.
Day of Iudgement. Paines of Hell. Joyes of Heaven. Shewing
the estate of the Elect and Reprobate. Composed in a Divine Poeme,
published eleven years after his death and attributed on the title-
page to‘R. S. The author of S. Peters complaint,' the meditation
on the joys of heaven is not unworthy of Southwell ; but, though
Southwell may have revised the poem, the author of it was more
probably his friend and fellow-prisoner, Philip Howard, earl of
Arundel, a grandson of the poet Henry Howard, earl of Surrey!
As a metrist, Southwell's range is not wide. For his longer poems,
he employs exclusively the decasyllabic line, arranged in stanzas of
four or six. The metre of Saint Peters Complaint, admirably
adapted for narrative or exposition, is one in which it is not easy
to preserve the lyric exaltation ; and Southwell's power as a poet
may be gauged by his success in this respect. In The Burning
Babe, he uses the old fourteener line, and indulges in a good deal
of alliteration ; but it is almost surprising to observe how, in such
hands as his, this much abused metre is capable of a force and
sweetness which its earlier practitioners had very rarely achieved.
His language is simple and easy, though he has an affection for
one or two archaic words; and he makes sparing use of words
derived from Latin.
9
1 The Month, vol. LXXXVI, Jan. -April 1896, pp. 32 et seq.


## p. 131 (#153) ############################################

John Davies of Hereford 131
A good way of learning to appreciate Southwell's poetry is to
compare it with that of another religious poet, John Davies of
Hereford Davies was born in Hereford, about 1565, and settled
at Oxford as a writing-master, living, as it appears, an easy
and prosperous life. The principal model of his uninspired verse
was Joshua Sylvester, the translator of Du Bartas's Semaines, on
which he founded his long poem, Microcosmos (1603); but he owed
something, also, to his namesake, Sir John Davies, whose Nosce
Teipsum formed the basis of Mirum in Modum (1602) and Summa
Totalis (1607). Davies of Hereford is no lyric poet. He writes
long philosophical and theological treatises in rime, modelling his
stanzas on Spenser; and neither his imagination nor his reasoning
power is sufficient to make him more than mildly interesting.
The antithesis and paradox prominent in Southwell may be found
also in Davies, but wearing the air rather of scholastic pedantry
than of living and effectual truth. Davies borrows from Sylvester
the practice of playing upon words, and carries it to tedious
lengths. In spite of the work of Sir John Davies, it may be fairly
said that the art of reasoning in verse was not mastered till
Dryden's day; and John Davies of Hereford is chiefly valuable
as illustrating by contrast the genius of Southwell, who dealt with
the same theological truth, and from much the same intellectual
standpoint, in an entirely different manner.
The same might fairly be said of Abraham Fraunce's The
Countesse of Pembrokes Emanuell, which appeared three years
before Saint Peters Complaint. Fraunce, who was a fellow of
Saint John's college, Cambridge, and a distinguished lawyer, is
of interest in the story of English prosody, since he belonged to
the Cambridge group, including Gabriel Harvey and others, which
attempted to force upon English poetry the classical metres. All
his poems are in hexameters. In The Countesse of Pembrokes
Emanuell, the poem on The Nativity is in what he calls riming
hexameters; but as this means that the last syllable only of the
lines is rimed in couplets, the effect is scarcely different from that
of the unrimed hexameters, especially as in both cases he avails
himself to excess of the convenience of participles ending in -ing.
Like many poets of his and the succeeding age, he paraphrased
some of the Psalms. A learned and laborious person rather than
a poet, he freely translated Thomas Watson's Latin poem Amyntas,
and part of Tasso's Amintà, and published the two in The
Countesse of Penibrokes Yvychurch in 1591.
9-2


## p. 132 (#154) ############################################

132 Robert Southwell. Samuel Daniel
6
In Samuel Daniel, we reach the leading example of the graver,
reflective poetry of the later years of Elizabeth's reign. Daniel is
not a religious nor a theological poet in the sense in which the
words may be used of Southwell and John Davies; and, if he is
called a philosophical poet, it is not in the sense in which the term
is applied to such writers as Fulke Greville. There is no dialectic
in his poems, and no system is advanced ; they are philosophical
in the sense that their author was a man with a wide and grave
outlook upon life, in whom (though he sang exquisitely of love)
judgment was stronger than passion, who moralised sincerely
and sanely over his own and other people's feelings and who, in
his culture, his synthetic mind and his belief in the importance of
humanism, stands much nearer to later poets, 'critics of life'as
they have been called, than to the singers of the dawn. In his 'vast
philosophic gravity and stateliness of sentiment,' to use Hazlitt's
phrase about him, he resembles Wordsworth, to whom he has
also other points of likeness to be mentioned later: in other
respects, when allowance has been made for all differences of time
and opportunity, it may not be fanciful to see in him the Matthew
Arnold of his age.
Samuel Daniel, the son of a music master, was born, probably
near Taunton in Somerset, in 1562, and went to Magdalen hall
(now Hertford college), Oxford, where, however, he did not take a
degree. In 1585, we find him in London, appearing as the translator
of Paolo Giovio's book on impresas, to which he wrote a preface.
He may, perhaps, have been in the service of lord Stafford.
In 1586, he visited Italy, and, on his return, became tutor, at
Wilton, to Shakespeare's friend and patron William Herbert, to
whom he dedicated his Defence of Ryme ; and here he made the
acquaintance of Herbert's mother, Mary countess of Pembroke.
Another of his friends was lord Mountjoy, afterwards earl of Devon-
shire, whom Daniel visited at Wanstead; and, in 1595, he was ap-
pointed tutor to Anne Clifford, daughter of Margaret countess of
Cumberland, with whose family he remained on terms of intimate
friendship, though he seems to have found the work of tutor a
bar to his poetical progress. In 1603, after greeting James I with
a Panegyrike Congratulatorie, he was appointed inspector of
Kirkham's children of the queen’s revels. Here he remained,
living a prosperous and easy life, which was only once threatened
by a slight incident. So far back as 1595, in the second book of his
epic, T'he Civil Wars, he had eulogised Robert Devereux, second
earl of Essex; and, on the publication of his play Philotas, in


## p. 133 (#155) ############################################

Samuel Daniel
133
1605, the character of Philotas was supposed to stand for that of
Essex, and the author of the play to be in sympathy with that
noble's rebellion. On being summoned before the lords in council,
he was able to prove that the first three acts of the play had been
read by the master of the revels before 1600. This, however,
could not save him from a reprimand from Essex's old friend,
Devonshire. Of his life, there is nothing more to chronicle except
that he spent his later years on his farm at Beckington, in Somerset,
where he died in 1619. His office passed to his brother John
Daniel, author of Songs for the Lute, Viol and Voice (1606).
Samuel Daniel began his literary career with a set of sonnets
entitled Delia. Twenty-seven sonnets by him had been appended
to the 1591 edition of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, without, as he
declared, his authorisation, and, probably, through the action of
Nashe. In the following year, appeared the first edition of Delia,
containing fifty sonnets, and including revised versions of eighteen
of those that had appeared in Astrophel and Stella. In 1592,
came the second edition of Delia, with four new sonnets, and
The Complaynt of Rosamond. The third edition, published in
1594, includes twenty-three new stanzas to Rosamond, and Cleo-
patra, a tragedy. In this third edition, the prose epistolary
dedication to the countess of Pembroke, which had appeared in the
previous editions, has given place to a sonnet addressed to her; while
Cleopatra is also dedicated to the same lady, the poet stating that
he wrote it at her command as a companion to her own tragedy of
Antonie (1592). In 1595, came the first four books of The Civil
Wars between the two Houses of Lancaster and York, the fifth
book being published the same year; and it was mainly the desire
to go on with his epic that made his duty as tutor to lady Anne
Clifford seem tedious to him. During the next four years, he
published nothing. In 1599, Musophilus, or a General Defence of
Learning was issued, dedicated to Fulke Greville, and, in the same
volume, was included the first of the poetical epistles, that from
Octavia to Marcus Antonius, which was dedicated to the countess
of Cumberland. In the same year, appeared the first collected
edition of his works, the Poeticall Essayes; and, two years later,
an augmented collection was published, including the sixth book of
the Civil Wars, and showing much revision of the text of other
poems. In 1602, he replied to Campion's Observations in the Art
of English Poesie with his prose Defence of Ryme', a curious and
admirable work which was the last serious blow dealt to the
1 See vol. in of the present work, chap. XIV.


## p. 134 (#156) ############################################

134 Robert Southwell.
Samuel Daniel
a
Latinisers, whom old Gabriel Harvey, then still living, had ad-
vanced into estimation, until the movement was checked by the
ridicule of Nashe and his fellows. In the same year, came the
Panegyrike Congratulatorie, on the accession of James I, and
then followed a few years in which Daniel's attention was very
largely occupied by the composition of the masques in which the
queen, Anne of Denmark, delighted. The Vision of 12 God-
desses (published 1604); The Queenes Arcadia (published 1606),
adapted from Guarini's Pastor Fido; Tethys Festival: or the
Queenes Wake (published 1610) and Hymens' Triumph (published
1615) all belong to this period, during which, also, Daniel became one
of the grooms of the queen's privy chamber. In 1605, he published
Certaine Small Poems, which included Philotas and one of his
best known lyrics, Ulisses and the Syren, and, in 1609, a new
edition of the Civil Wars, now comprising eight books. In 1623,
his brother John issued his whole works. ' It will be seen that
Daniel's activity was wide; and it should be mentioned that his prose
works included, also, a history of England (1612). He began, in
the usual way, as a translator and a sonneteer; his scope increased
until he embraced tragedy, masque and epic. And, his natural bent
being set strongly towards history, it was to epic that he attached
the greatest importance. He believed that men were more
influenced by it than by any other form of literature.
Daniel's sonnets have been discussed elsewhere', and no further
mention need be made of them here, while his Senecan tragedies
and his masques also belong to another section of this work With
The Complaynt of Rosamond, we come into touch with Daniel
in his most characteristic mood. The honour had been accorded
to him of mention by name in Spenser's Colin Clout. The 'new
shepherd late up sprong' is bidden to 'rouse thy feathers quickly,
Daniell'; and Spenser goes on to say that most, me seemes, thy
accent will excell In tragick plaints and passionate mischance. '
In Rosamond, we have the tragic plaint, combined with the
interest in English history, the ‘philosophic gravity, the pre-
occupation with morals, which are all characteristic of Daniel.
Rosamond describes and laments her sin with the king much in
the manner of the stories in A Mirror for Magistrates, but
with more flexibility, more sweetness and more smoothness.
Churchyard's tale of Shore's Wife, doubtless, was his model; but
the difference between the two poems is instructive as to the
advance that the intervening years had brought about in the
1 Sce vol. III, chap. XII.
2 See volumes v and vi.


## p. 135 (#157) ############################################

6
Samuel Daniel
135
use of language, the form of English poetry and urbanity of
judgment. Musophilus shows another side of Daniel's mind—the
importance he attached to literature and culture' as refining and
enlarging elements of life.
The poem is a dialogue between
Philocosmus, a courtier, and Musophilus, a man of letters, in
whom speaks Daniel himself. From the days of Daniel to those
of Matthew Arnold there has been in English literature no such
important pleading for the influence of letters. In Castiglione's
view of a courtier, letters had played a part : Daniel soars far above
the chivalric view of the subject; and one of the most eloquent and
lofty passages of his poetry—an apostrophe to the English lan-
guage as a force that is to spread civilisation over the world-
includes a remarkable piece of prophecy. The worlds in the
yet unformëd Occident’are to come refined with accents that are
ours. ' 'O who,' he cries, 'can tell for what great work in hand
The greatness of our style is now ordained ? '
His immense faith in his native tongue unites in him the man
of letters with the patriot and the statesman : a combination that
may be seen also in his prose Defence of Ryme. Secure of some
niche in the temple of fame (“Something I shall be,' he writes to
the countess of Pembroke, “though not the best '), he values his
immortality not so much for himself as for the English language;
and the English language is to attain a beauty and an influence
worthy of the English constitution. Frequently in the poems of
Daniel there sounds a note of sadness, the regret, of a man who
feels himself born too late, for great days that are gone. It is
heard in the epistle to prince Henry which introduces Philotas,
and very clearly again in the Panegyrike Congratulatorie. There
must have been many thoughtful men and good patriots whose
minds were similarly affected by the troubles of the later years of
the reign of Elizabeth; and, whatever may have been Daniel's
actual relation to the plot of Essex, there can be little question
that though, like Essex, he was a protestant, he had, like Essex,
sympathies with the Catholics, and must have been for some
reasons inclined to wish that Essex could have become king. At
any rate, he addresses to James what is at once a glowing patriotic
poem and a shrewd warning that the state of the times needs firm
handling from the monarch. He looks back to the despotism of
the Tudors with longing, and sees in a strong monarchy the promise
of a return of the old order, decency and security—the 'ancient
native modesty' which had never existed in his lifetime, but was
the dream of a patriotic poet.
-


## p. 136 (#158) ############################################

136 Robert Southwell. Samuel Daniel
This regret it was, doubtless, which spurred him to the com-
position of his great epic, The Civil Wars. An interest in English
history, manifested even more clearly in the dramatic Chronicles
than in the printed poetry, was characteristic of the time. Even
before the loss of the Spanish Armada, William Warner, sometime
a student at Oxford and then an attorney, had published in 1586
a part of his long historical poem, Albion's England, which began
with the Flood, passed through Grecian mythology to the Trojan
war, and so, by means of Brute, to England, the history of which
he carried down to his own period, including even the execution
of Mary queen of Scots. Warner's poem, which is written in the
old 'fourteeners,' rimed in couplets, was very successful; and, as
new editions were called for, the author continued to revise it,
and to add recent events, including the loss of the Spanish Armada,
to his story. Before his death in 1609, he had added three more
books, in which he embarked on the history of Scotland and Wales.
Often clumsy and sometimes dull, the poem contains a number
of good stories, like that of the wooing of Argentile, daughter of
Adelbright, king of Diria, and Curan, son of a Danish prince,
or that of the murder of Turgesius, the Norwegian conqueror of
Ireland, by youths disguised as girls, all told with a brave sim-
plicity. It delights in legend as much as does Poly-Olbion; but
it lacks both the haunting regret which often inspires that protest
against the inroads of time, and lacks, also, in its superficial, sturdy
patriotism, the philosophic and humane intention of Daniel's Civil
Wars.
In a less marked degree, Daniel took the Miltonic view of
the poet's office. The poet was not only to delight, but to
instruct and fortify; and, perhaps unwisely, Daniel regarded
epic as the best form of poetry for the purpose.
Guided
always by principle rather than by passion, he adopted the
poetic theory followed two centuries later by Wordsworth, and
worked something on Wordsworth’s lines, believing in the will and
the message rather than in the inspiration. It is a tribute to the
force of his mind and the fineness of his taste that The Civil Wars
is as interesting as an unprejudiced reader must find it. At
the worst, it can only be regarded as a mistake, in that it
occupied time which the poet might have devoted to other kinds
of poetry. There are, no doubt, long stretches of dulness in the
eight books; there is too much chronicle and too little drama;
but the subject, though of little importance to the world outside
England, was, in Daniel's view, of immense importance to the
a


## p. 137 (#159) ############################################

The Civil Wars
137
Englishmen through whom the world was to be civilised. The
whole poem is grave, dignified and wise; it never falls below a
very creditable level of matter and execution. It stands to Daniel's
best poetry in much the same relation as The Excursion stands
to Wordsworth's best. Daniel's example, indeed, may have sup-
ported Wordsworth through the labour of writing The Excursion,
into which he wove', with perfect propriety, a stanza from Daniel's
poem, To the Lady Margaret, countesse of Cumberland, ending
with the well known lines :
And that unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is Man!
The eight books of The Civil Wars contain nearly 900 stanzas of
eight lines each. The first book tells the story of England from
the Conquest to the return of Hereford against Richard II; the
other seven describe the wars of the Roses down to the accession
of Edward IV and his marriage to Elizabeth Grey. The poet does
not hesitate to draw the moral from these events, as from the story
of Rosamond or of Octavia, and the poem becomes particularly
interesting in book vi, where Daniel ascribes Cade's rebellion to
the spread of knowledge and the invention of artillery. In his
desire to prove himself 'the remnant of another time' and to
celebrate the good days that are gone, Daniel seems here almost to
contradict his own views on the importance of culture and letters;
but in his day the ideals of Thomas Love Peacock’s ‘learned friend'
were unknown. Democracy was not even a name, and discontent
was not yet called 'divine. ' 'Swelling sciences' were “the gifts of
griefe,' and the political absolutist who told James I that the
weight of all seems to rely Wholly upon thine own discretion' put
the spread of knowledge and the increase of discontent together
as unqualified evils. Indeed, like all the writers of his day in whom
the spirit of the age of chivalry still lingered-like Shakespeare
himself—Daniel had no sympathy with 'the mob. Yet the
patriotism which his epic was written to inspire was none the less
lofty and sincere because he regarded it as, with knowledge and
culture, the province of the knight and the noble only.
Ben Jonson, who (for a reason that will probably never be
discovered now, but may have been not unconnected with Daniel's
opposition to the Latinists) never appreciated his work, not only
parodied Daniel's verses in Everyman in his Humour (act v) and
The Staple of News (act v, sc. 1), but said bitter things about him
9
1 The Excursion, iv, 324–331.


## p. 138 (#160) ############################################

138 Robert Southwell.
Samuel Daniel
to Drummond of Hawthornden. “An honest man, but no poet,'
was his phrase. “He wrote Civil Wars and yet had not one battle
in all his book. ' "Too much historian in verse,' said Drayton in
bis epistle to Henry Reynolds Of Poets and Poesy, and added
that his manner better fitted prose. ' Both Jonson and Drayton
‘
hit upon weak spots in Daniel's Civil Wars, regarded as an epic :
neither, perhaps, took sufficiently into account the ethical purpose
with which Daniel wrote. Daniel's model, undoubtedly, was the
Pharsalia of Lucan; and Guilpin, in his Skialetheia, states that he
was called by some 'a Lucanist. ' It may be allowable, perhaps, to
find him nearer to Vergil than Lucan. Admitting that the work
has little of Vergil's dramatic power, its sweetness and the sim-
plicity and purity of its style resemble rather the Augustan poet
than the Neronian. Daniel's object was not so much to interest and
excite his readers as to rouse in them, by presenting their national
history in a moral and philosophic light, a spirit of wise patriotism;
and the wisdom, gravity and sincerity of his epic atone for its lack
of vivid incident and dramatic force. If, like his masques, it is too
serious,' the fault was deliberately committed.
In some ways, the epic is Daniel's most characteristic work: as
poetry, it falls short of such poems as his Epistles (to Sir Thomas
Egerton, lord Henry Howard, lady Anne Clifford and others),
his letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius, the charming little
lyrics in Hymens' Triumph, or the two which later taste has
selected as the best of his shorter poems, the Epistle to the Lady
Margaret, countesse of Cumberland, and the 'ballad'-or, rather,
the discussion upon honour-called Ulisses and the Syren. If the
sonnets, beautiful as they are, savour a little of an exercise in
poetry, if the masques are 'too serious' and the epic shows him
“too much historian in verse,' in these two poems he completely
proves his title to the 'something . . . though not the best' he
modestly claimed, and almost to the eulogies accorded to him by
others of his contemporaries besides Spenser.
The most glowing tribute of all came from Francis Davison,
who said in the Poetical Rapsody that Daniel's ‘Muse hath
surpassed Spenser,' and headed his poem : "To Samuel Daniel
Prince of English poets, upon his three several sorts of poesie.
Lyrical, in his Sonnets. Tragical, in Rosamond and Cleopatra.
Heroicall, in his Civill Warres. ' The last verse of the poem states
that, as Alexander conquered Greece, Asia and Egypt, so Daniel
conquered all poets in these fields. "Thou alone,' says Davison,
'art matchlesse in them all. ' From praise so extravagant as this, it
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## p. 139 (#161) ############################################

Daniel's Diction
139
is pleasant to turn to the comments of the author of The Returne
from Parnassus, part II (acted 1601—2) who speaks (act 1, sc. 2)
of 'sweet honey-dropping D[aniel]. ' The remainder of Judicio's
remarks on this poet seem to imply that he knew little or nothing
of Daniel's work besides the sonnets to Delia; for, after stating
that he
doth wage
War with the proudest big Italian,
That melts his heart in sugared sonneting,
he goes on to warn him that he should
more sparingly make use
Of other's wit, and use his own the more;
That well may scorn base imitation.
We know from the dedication to Cleopatra that one of Daniel's
wishes was to break free from Italian influence. He aspires to
make
the melody of our sweet isle
heard to Tyber, Arne and Po,
That they might know how far Thames doth outgo
The music of declinëd Italy.