Born, near Taunton (?), 1562. At Magdalen Hall, Oxford, (1579–82?). Possibly with Lord Stafford on an embassy to France, 1586. Visit to Italy, about 1588 or 1589. Tutor to William Herbert, son of Earl of Pembroke; lived at Wilton, Salisbury. Some sonnets of his first printed in 1591 edn. of Sidney’s “Astrophel and Stella.” This being done without his knowledge, he published fifty sonnets, under title “Delia,” in 1592. Tutor to Anne Clifford, daughter of Countess of Cumberland, about 1598 (?), at Skipton, Yorkshire. Possibly succeeded Spenser as poet laureate, 1599. Considerable literary activity and reputation. Masques by Daniel performed before royalty at Hampton Court, 1604; at Oxford, 1605; at Whitehall, 1610; in London, 1614. Controller of the Children of the Revels to the Queen, 1604–18. Groom of the Queen’s Privy Chamber, 1607–19. Removed from London to a farm near Beckington, Wilts, about 1603 (?). Died there, Oct. 1619. Probably married. Works: “Delia,” 1592 (2nd edition same year); “Cleopatra,” 1594; “First Fowre Bookes of the Civile Wars,” 1595; 5th, 1595; 6th, 1601; 7th and 8th, 1609; “Musophilus,” 1599; “A Letter from Octavia,” 1599; “Poeticall Essayes,” 1599; “Works … augmented,” 1601 (with new title-page, 1602); “The Defence of Rhyme,” 1602; “A Panegyricke Congratulatorie,” 1603; “The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses,” 1604; “The Queenes Arcadia” (anon.), 1605; “Philotas,” 1605; “Ulisses and the Syren,” 1605; “Certaine Small Poems,” 1605; “Certaine Small Workes,” 1607; “Tethys Festival,” 1610 (also issued with “The Order and Solemnitie of the Creation,” 1610); “The Collection of the Historie of England,” pt. i., 1612; pt. ii., 1617; “Hymen’s Triumph,” 1615. He translated: P. Giovio’s “Imprese,” 1585; and contrib. verses to the 1611 and 1613 editions of Florio’s “Montaigne.” Collected Works: ed. by his brother, John Daniel, 1623.

Personal

  HERE LYES EXPECTINGE THE SECOND COMMING OF OUR LORD & SAUIOUR JESUS CHRIST Y^E DEAD BODY OF SAMUELL DANYELL ESQ THAT EXCELLENT POETT AND HISTORIAN WHO WAS TUTOR TO THE LADY ANNE CLIFFORD IN HER YOUTH SHE THAT WAS SOLE DAUGHTER AND HEIRE TO GEORGE CLIFFORD, ÆARLE OF CŪBERLAND WHO IN GRATITUDE TO HIM ERECTED THIS MONUMENT IN HIS MEMORY A LONG TIME AFTER WHEN SHE WAS COUNTESSE DOWAGER OF PEMBROKE DORSETT & MOŪTGOMERY. HE DYED IN OCTOBER 1619.

  Samuel Daniel was a good honest man, had no children; but no poet.

  He was a Servant in Ordinary to Queen Anne, who allowed him a fair Salary. As the Tortoise burieth himself all the Winter in the ground, so Mr. Daniel would lye hid at his Garden-house in Old-street, nigh London, for some months together (the more retiredly to enjoy the Company of the Muses); and then would appear in publick, to converse with his Friends, whereof Dr. Cowel and Mr. Camden were principal. Some tax him to smak of the Old Cask, as resenting of the Romish Religion; but they have a quicker Palate than I, who can make any such discovery. In his old age he turn’d Husbandman, and rented a Farm in Wiltshire nigh the Devises. I can give no account how he thrived thereupon; for, though he was well vers’d in Virgil, his Fellow Husbandman-Poet, yet there is more required to make a rich Farmer, than only to say his Georgicks by heart…. Besides, I suspect that Mr. Daniel’s fancy was too fine and sublimated, to be wrought down to his private profit. However, he had neither a bank of wealth, or lank of want; living in a competent condition. By Justina his wife he had no child; and I am unsatisfied both in the place and time of death; but collect the latter to be about the end of the Reign of King James.

  His Geny being more, more prone to easier and smoother studies, than in pecking and hewing at logic, he left the university without the honour of a degree, and exercised it much in English history and poetry, of which he then gave several ingenious specimens.

  He has touches of tenderness as well as fancy; for he was in earnest, and the object of his attachment was real, though disguised under the name of Delia. She resided on the banks of the river Avon, and was unmoved by the poet’s strains. Rank with her outweighed love and genius.

  Though he rejected it and called out upon it, “gentle” remains Lamb’s constant epithet. And, curiously enough, in the gentleness and dignified melancholy of his life, Daniel stands nearer to Lamb than any other English writer, with the possible exception of Scott. His circumstances were less gloomily picturesque. But I defy any feeling man to read the scanty narrative of Daniel’s life and think of him thereafter without sympathy and respect…. Now there is but one answer to this—that a man of really strong spirit does not suffer himself to be “put out of that sense which nature had made my part.” Daniel’s words indicate the weakness that in the end made futile all his powers; they indicate a certain “donnish” timidity (if I may use the epithet), a certain distrust of his own genius. Such a timidity and such a distrust often accompany very exquisite faculties: indeed, they may be said to imply a certain exquisiteness of feeling. But they explain why, of the two contemporaries, the robust Ben Jonson is to-day a living figure in most men’s conception of those times, while Samuel Daniel is rather a fleeting ghost. And his self-distrust was even then recognised as well as his exquisiteness. He is indeed “well-languaged Daniel,” “sweet honey-dropping Daniel,” “Rosamund’s trumpeter, sweet as the nightingale,” revered and admired by all his compeers.

Delia, 1592

  As Parthenius Nicæus excellently sang the praises of Arete: so Daniel hath divinely sonnetted the matchless beauty of Delia.

  The publication of Daniel’s sonnets in 1592 is an epoch in the history of the English Sonnet. This was the first body of sonnets written in what is sometimes called by pre-eminence the English form—three independent quatrains closed in a couplet. Daniel also set an example to Shakespeare in treating the sonnet as a stanza, connecting several of them together as consecutive parts of a larger expression. Apart from their form, there is not very much interest in the sonnets to Delia. They have all Daniel’s smoothness and felicity of phrase, and are pervaded by exceedingly sweet and soft sentiment. Though they rouse no strong feelings, they may be dwelt upon by a sympathetic reader with lively enjoyment. One of them, with somewhat greater depth of feeling than most of the others, the sonnet beginning—“Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,” is ranked among the best sonnets in the language. But their most general interest is found in their relation to Shakespeare’s sonnets, several of which seem to have been built up from ideas suggested by the study of those to Delia.

  In a certain tender swing of movement, attained by great art in the selection of words presenting sounds upon which the tongue and ear can linger, and which at the same time suavely melt into each other with the true liquid flow of genuine poetic sequences, Daniel must be esteemed the greatest English artist.

  It is when we open Daniel’s “Delia” that we recognise close kinship. The manner is the same, though the master proves himself of tardier imagination and less ardent temper. Diction, imagery, rhymes, and, in sonnets of like form, versification distinctly resemble those of Shakspere. Malone was surely right when he recognised in Daniel the master of Shakspere as a writer of sonnets—a master quickly excelled by his pupil. And it is in Daniel that we find sonnet starting from sonnet almost in Shakspere’s manner, only that Daniel often links poem with poem in more formal wise, the last or the penultimate line of one poem supplying the first line of that which immediately follows.

  He was an estimable man, and was a good poet, according to the standard of his day, which was more tolerant of tediousness than ours. That he was a lover is not evident from his sonnets, which are not without a certain tenderness and elegance, and which may be read as exercises of fancy with considerable pleasure…. The highest compliment that can be paid them is to say that two or three of them might have been written by Shakspere, who seems to have had them in mind while writing his own sonnets.

  I do not suppose it is likely now that we shall ever know who “Delia” was. But I for one recognize in these Sonnets a human passion, and not mere “sportive wit” or “idle play.” The grief grows o’times monotonous and even grotesque, but ever and anon there comes the genuine “cry” of a man’s heart in suspensive anguish. He is by no means a strong man—contrariwise reveals a good deal of valetudinarian sentimentalism; yet is there reality of “love,” and not simply rhyme-craft.

  As a sonneteer Daniel deserves the highest praise. His sonnets are formed by three elegiac verses of alternate rhyme concluding with a couplet. For sweetness of rhythm, delicate imagery, and purity of language they nearly surpass Shakespeare’s efforts. Daniel’s corrections are usually for the better, and show him to have been an exceptionally slow and conscientious writer.

The Complaint of Rosamond, 1592

  Some dul-headed diuines deeme it no more cunninge to write an exquisite Poem, than to preach pure Caluin, or distill the juice of a Commentary in a quarter sermon…. You shall finde there goes more exquisite paines and puritie of wit, to the writing of one such rare Poem as “Rosamond” than to a hundred of your dunsticall Sermons.

  As every one mourneth, when he heareth of the lamentable plangors of Thracian Orpheus for his dearest Euridyce: so every one passionateth, when he readeth the afflicted death of Daniel’s distressed Rosamond.

  Samuel Daniel’s “Complaint of Rosamond,” with its seven-line stanza (1592), stood to “Lucrece” in even closer relation than Lodge’s “Scilla,” with its six-line stanza, to “Venus and Adonis.” The pathetic accents of Shakespeare’s heroine are those of Daniel’s heroine purified and glorified.

The Civile Wars, 1595–1623

  Daniel wrott “Civill Warres,” and yett hath not one batle in all his book.

  Samuel Daniel the historian, is unpoetical; but has good sense often.

  Gravely sober on all ordinary affairs, & not easily excited by any—yet there is one, on which his Blood boils—whenever he speaks of English valour exerted against a foreign Enemy. Do read over—but some evening when we are quite comfortable, at your fireside…. He must not be read piecemeal. Even by leaving off & looking at a stanza by itself, I find the loss.

  Sound morality, prudential wisdom, and occasional touches of the pathetic, delivered in a style of then unequalled chastity and perspicuity, will be recognised throughout his work; but neither warmth, passion, nor sublimity, nor the most distant trace of enthusiasm can be found to animate the mass.

  Faithfully adhering to truth, which he does not suffer so much as an ornamental episode to interrupt, and equally studious to avoid the bolder figures of poetry, it is not surprising that Daniel should be little read. It is, indeed, certain that much Italian and Spanish poetry, even by those whose name has once stood rather high, depends chiefly upon merits which he abundantly possesses,—a smoothness of rhythm, and a lucid narration in simple language. But that which from the natural delight in sweet sound is enough to content the ear in the Southern tongues, will always seem bald and tame in our less harmonious verse. It is the chief praise of Daniel, and must have contributed to what popularity he enjoyed in his own age, that his English is eminently pure, free from affectation of archaism and from pedantic innovation, with very little that is now obsolete. Both in prose and in poetry, he is, as to language, among the best writers of his time, and wanted but a greater confidence in his own power, or, to speak less indulgently, a greater share of it, to sustain his correct taste, calm sense, and moral feeling.

  His epic on the civil wars is a failure as a poem.

Defence of Rhyme, 1602–07

  His “Defence of Rhyme,” written in prose (a more difficult test than verse), has a passionate eloquence that reminds one of Burke, and is more light-armed and modern than the prose of Milton fifty years later.

  Daniel’s criticism is very reasonable, and adequately exposed Campion’s absurd argument.

  It must be confessed that a careful reading of Daniel’s “Defence of Ryme” will leave a better impression of the real weight of that able and thoughtful author than too continued a perusal of much of his “chaste and correct” poetry.

History of England, 1612–17

  He was also a judicious Historian; witness his “Lives of our English Kings, since the Conquest, until King Edward the Third;” wherein he hath the happiness to reconcile brevity with clearnesse, qualities of great distance in other Authours: a work since commendably continued (but not with equal quicknesse and judgment) by Mr. Trussell.

  Samuel Daniel, an author of good note and reputation in King James his reign; whose History of the Eleven first Kings of England from the Norman Conquest, though it be of all the rest of his works most principally sought after and regarded, yet are not his poetical writings totally forgotten.

  However his Genius was qualified for Poetry, I take his History of England to be the Crown of all his Works.

  Is deserving of some attention on account of its language…. It is true that the merits of Daniel are chiefly negative; he is never pedantic or antithetical or low, as his contemporaries were apt to be: but his periods are ill-constructed; he has little vigor or elegance: and it is only by observing how much pains he must have taken to reject phrases which were growing obsolete, that we give him credit for having done more than follow the common stream of easy writing. A slight tinge of archaism, and a certain majesty of expression, relatively to colloquial usage, were thought by Bacon and Raleigh congenial to an elevated style: but Daniel, a gentleman of the king’s household, wrote as the court spoke; and his facility would be pleasing if his sentences had a less negligent structure. As an historian, he has recourse only to common authorities; but his narration is fluent and perspicuous, with a regular vein of good sense, more the characteristic of his mind, both in verse and prose, than any commanding vigor.

  As a branch of literature, English history in the new shape which we have noted began in the work of the poet Daniel. The chronicles of Stowe and Speed, who preceded him, are simple records of the past, often copied almost literally from the annals they used, and utterly without style or arrangement; while Daniel inaccurate and superficial as he is, gave his story a literary form, and embodied it in a pure and graceful prose.

General

  Let other countries (sweet Cambridge) envie (yet admire) my Virgil, thy Petrarch, divine Spenser. And unlesse I erre (a thing easie in such simplicitie) deluded by dearlie beloved Delia, and fortunatelie fortunate Cleopatra, Oxford thou maist extoll thy court-deare verse-happie Daniell, whose sweete refined Muse, in contracted shape, were sufficient amongst men, to gaine pardon of the sinne to Rosamond, and euer-living praise to her loving Delia.

  The sweetest song-man of all English Swains.

  Well-languaged Daniel.

  The works of Samuel Daniel containe somewhat aflat, but yet withal a very pure and copious English, and words as warrantable as any mans, and fitter perhaps for prose than measure.

  Mr. Daniel’s Works are very various, and consist of History, Plays, and Poems; in all which he appears to me a Person of great Good-Sense, and unbiass’d Integrity; both Clear, and Concise in his Expression; rather too simple and void of Ornament, and not comparable in his Numbers either to Fairfax or Spencer; But, on the whole, highly worthy of Esteem and Reputation.

  The Atticus of his day.

  Daniel’s sonnets are very beautiful. His “Civil Wars” are rather distinguished by elegance than sublimity of expression; but they contain many curious and some highly poetical passages. His prose “History of England” was once much esteemed for the purity and conciseness of its style. Headley considers him as the Atticus of his day.

  Daniel is “somewhat a-flat,” as one of his contemporaries said of him, but he had more sensibility than Drayton, and his moral reflection rises to higher dignity.

  In Daniel’s Sonnets there is scarcely one good line; while his “Hymen’s Triumph,” of which Chalmers says not one word, exhibits a continued series of first-rate beauties in thought, passion, and imagery, and in language and metre is so faultless, that the style of that poem may without extravagance be declared to be imperishable English.

  Certainly an unconquerable Alp of weariness, his tragedies would have delighted Voltaire: they are a good deal worse than “Cato.”

  Daniel frequently wrote below his subject and his strength, but always in a strain of tender feeling, and in language as easy and natural as it is pure. For his diction alone he would deserve to be studied by all students or lovers of poetry, even if his works did not abound with passages of singular beauty. Thoughtful, grateful, right-minded and gentle-hearted, there is no poet in our language of whom it may be affirmed with more certainty, from his writings, that he was an amiable and wise and good man.

  Daniel was unquestionably one of the most skilful versifiers of his day, and in general his pen was guided by good taste, and by just if not strong feeling.

  If he avoided the pedantry and quaintness which were too apt to vitiate the style of the period, and wrote what might be called modern English, it has still been found that modern Englishmen cannot be coaxed into reading what is so lucidly written. His longest work, a versified History of the Civil Wars, dispassionate as a chronicle and unimpassioned as a poem, is now only read by those critics in whom the sense of duty is victorious over the disposition to doze. The best expressions of his pensive, tender, and thoughtful nature are his epistles and his sonnets. Among the epistles, that to the Countess of Cumberland is the best. It is a model for all adulatory addresses to women; indeed, a masterpiece of subtile compliment; for it assumes in its object a sympathy with whatever is noblest in sentiment, and an understanding of whatever is most elevated in thought.

  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 eloquence, and has at times even something of depth and originality…. 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.

  He did indeed refine our tongue, and deserved the praise his contemporaries concur in giving him of being “well-languaged.” Writing two hundred and fifty years ago, he stands in no need of a glossary, and I have noted scarce a dozen words, and not more turns of phrase, in his works, that have become obsolete. This certainly indicates both remarkable taste and equally remarkable judgment. There is a conscious dignity in his thought and sentiment such as we rarely meet. His best poems always remind me of a table-land, where, because all is so level, we are apt to forget on how lofty a plane we are standing. I think his “Musophilus” the best poem of its kind in the language. The reflections are natural, the expression condensed, the thought weighty, and the language worthy of it. But he also wasted himself on an historical poem, in which the characters were incapable of that remoteness from ordinary associations which is essential to the ideal. Not that we can escape into the ideal by merely emigrating into the past or the unfamiliar. As in the German legend the little black Kobold of prose that haunts us in the present will seat himself on the first load of furniture when we undertake our flitting, if the magician be not there to exorcise him. No man can jump off his own shadow, nor, for that matter, off his own age, and it is very likely that Daniel had only the thinking and languaging parts of a poet’s outfit, without the higher creative gift which alone can endow his conceptions with enduring life and with an interest which transcends the parish limits of his generation.

  A better instance could not be chosen, than this “Cleopatra,” to prove the impotence in England of the pseudo-classic style. Daniel’s tragedy bore points of strong resemblance to the work of contemporary French playwrights. But it hardly needed the fierce light from Cleopatra’s dying hours in Shakspere’s play to pale its ineffectual fires.

  The poetical value of Daniel may almost be summed up in two words—sweetness and dignity. He is decidedly wanting in strength, and, despite “Delia,” can hardly be said to have had a spark of passion. Even in his own day it was doubted whether he had not overweighted himself with his choice of historical subjects, though the epithet of “well-languaged,” given to him at the time, evinces a real comprehension of one of his best claims to attention. No writer of the period has such a command of pure English, unadulterated by xenomania and unweakened by purism, as Daniel. Whatever unfavourable things have been said of him from time to time have been chiefly based on the fact that his chaste and correct style lacks the fiery quaintness, the irregular and audacious attraction of his contemporaries. Nor was he less a master of versification than of vocabulary. His “Defence of Rhyme” shows that he possessed the theory: all his poetical works show that he was a master of the practice. He rarely attempted and probably would not have excelled in the lighter lyrical measures. But in the grave music of the various elaborate stanzas in which the Elizabethan poets delighted, and of which the Spenserian, though the crown and flower, is only the most perfect, he was a great proficient, and his couplets and blank verse are not inferior.

  Daniel’s writings show, by many a touch, that he was well read in Italian. He has a refinement that rejects extravagant conceits, but to the finer influences of Italian literature he owes much of his grace. Restraint from prevalent excess brought Daniel’s verse nearer to the style of a later generation that was deliberately putting such excess away.

  The almost unrelieved excision of all ornament and colour, the uniform stateliness, the lack of passion, which render Daniel admirable and sometimes even charming in a short poem, weary us in his long productions, and so invariably sententious is he that we are tempted to call him a Polonius among poets.

  Such stories … prove Warner to have had a true, pathetic vein of poetry. His English is not how ever so good as that of “well-languaged Daniel,” who, among tragedies and pastoral comedies, the noble series of sonnets to Delia and poems of pure fancy, wrote “The Complaint of Rosamond,” far more poetical than his steadier, even prosaic “Civil Wars of York and Lancaster.” Spenser saw in him a new “shepherd of poetry who did far surpass the rest,” and Coleridge says that the style of his “Hymen’s Triumph” may be declared “imperishable English.”

  Pure in utterance, refined and meditative, and typical minor master of the closet lyric.

  A most accomplished and conscientious artist in verse, who had a genuine, but mild, poetic nature. The care he took to revise his work is evidence of his conscience as a workman, and the fact that his changes were commonly for the better is proof of his judgment. It is mainly the beauty of his English which will cause him to be read for ever among the rest.