A chaunce may wynne that by mischance was lost; The nett that houldes no greate, takes little fishe; In some thinges all, in all thinges none are croste ; Fewe all they neede, but none have all they wishe. Vnmingled joyes here to no man befall; Who least, hath some; who most, hath never all. The following is a stanza on Sleepe from St Peter's Complaint: Sleepe, Death's allye, obliuion of teares, Silence of passion, balme of angry sore, Suspence of loues, securitie of feares, Wrath's lenitiue, heart's ease, storme's calmest shore, In playnte I passe the length of lingring dayes; And tredd the track of death's desyred waies; Samuel Daniel, son of a music-master, was born in 1562 near Taunton, in Somerset, and seems to have been educated under the patronage of the Pembroke family. In 1579 he was entered a commoner of Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he devoted himself to poetry and history; at the end of three years he quitted the university without taking a degree. Before 1590 he visited Italy, and soon after became tutor at Wilton to William Herbert (later Shakespeare's friend), son of the Earl of Pembroke and Sir Philip Sidney's sister. Later he was tutor to Anne Clifford, daughter of the Earl of Cumberland. After the death of Spenser, Daniel became 'voluntary laureate' to the court, but was superseded by Ben Jonson. In the reign of James he was appointed to 'allow' or act as censor of new plays, for a time had charge of a company of young players at Bristol, and in 1607 was preferred to be gentlemanextraordinary and groom of the queen's chamber. He lived in a garden-house in Old Street, St Luke's, where, according to Fuller, he would 'lie hid for some months together, the more retiredly to enjoy the company of the Muses, and then would appear in public to converse with his friends.' Daniel is said to have enjoyed the friendship of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Chapman. His character was irreproachable, and his society appears to have been much courted. Towards the close of his life he retired to a farm he rented at Beckington, in Somerset, where he died 14th October 1619. The works of Daniel include sonnets, epistles, masques, and dramas; but his principal production is a History of the Civil Wars between York and Lancaster, a poem in eight books, published in 1604. Musophilus, containing a General Defence of Learning, is an elaborate and thoughtful work by Daniel; The Defence of Rhyme (1602), against Campion, is admirable prose. His tragedy of Cleopatra (1593), dedicated to his patroness, Lady Pembroke, was modelled on Seneca, and is not one of his most successful efforts; nor was his second tragedy, Philotas, on the story in Plutarch's Life of Alexander the Great, which provoked suspicion at court that Daniel was satirising the tyranny of princes. Both plays are Senecan rather than Elizabethan, and are influenced by French models. The Queen's Arcadia and Hymen's Triumph are 'pastoral tragi-comedies.' Daniel was extolled by his contemporaries, as Spenser, Lodge, Carew, Drummond of Hawthornden ; although Ben Jonson described him as 'a good honest man... but no poet,' and Drayton quotes the opinion of some wise men that he was 'too much historian in verse,' besides saying for himself that 'his manner better fitted prose.' Of modern critics, Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt unite in praising him. As a sonneteer Daniel is altogether admirable; some of the 'Delia' series rank near the best examples of this form in English. Daniel is an elegant if not a great poet. His writings are pervaded by tenderness and dignity, by thoughtfulness and purity of taste remarkable indeed, but lacking vital energy of movement and memorableness of expression. His tragedies and masques fail in dramatic interest. Southey called Daniel'the tenderest of the tender poets.' · The well-languaged Daniel' (it was William Browne who gave the epithet, now a vox signata) is strangely modern in style; Coleridge said: 'The style and language are just such as any very pure and manly writer of the present dayWordsworth, for example-would use; it seems quite modern in comparison with the style of Shakespeare.' For this reason it is the more desirable that we should adhere throughout to his own spelling also (though the merely typographical archaisms of long fs, v for u, and i for j are disregarded). The whole epistle from which our first extract is made Wordsworth pronounced very beautiful. Daniel's thoughtful, equable verse flows on unintermittingly, and with a wealth of sound and dignified reflection, and never offends; but it becomes tedious and uninteresting from its sameness and the absence of salient points-the Civil Wars is especially fatiguing to read. Yet in a letter to Lamb, Coleridge notes that 'Daniel caught and recommunicated the spirit of the great Countess of Pembroke, the glory of the north; he formed her mind, and her mind inspirited him. Gravely sober on all ordinary affairs, and 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.' From the Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland. Of vanitie or malice pierce to wrong And with how free an eye doth he looke downe He lookes upon the mightiest Monarch's warres Conspires with pow'r, whose cause must not be ill. He sees the face of right t' appeare as manifolde To serve his ends, and make his courses holde. Nor is he mov'd with all the thunder-cracks The next extract was specially praised by Cole, ridge, who, speaking of the first of the quoted stanzas, said: 'What is there in description superior even in Shakespeare? Only that Shakespeare would have given one of his glows to the first line, and flattened the mountain-top with his sovran eye, instead of this poor "A mervailous advantage of his yeares." The Death of Talbot-from Book Sixth of the Whil'st Talbot (whose fresh ardor having got Then like a sturdy Oke, that having long All the neere bordering Trees hee stood among So lay his spoyles, all round about him slaine, On th'other part, his most all-daring sonne Who thus both, having gained a glorious end, Which blood, not lost, but fast lay'd up with heed To which our Fathers, wee, and who succeed, On Early Love-from 'Hymen's Triumph.' But ever more remember well) when first Sonnet to Delia. I must not grieve my love, whose eies would rede Sonnet to Delia. Care-charmer Sleepe, sonne of the sable Night, Ulisses and the Syren. Syren. Come, worthy Greeke, Ulisses, come, The windes and Seas are troublesome, Here may we sit and view their toile And joy the day in mirth the while, And spend the night in sleepe. Ulisses. Fair Nimph, if fame or honor were To be atteynd with ease, Then would I come and rest with thee, Becomes not men of worth. Our peace, and to beguile (The best thing of our life) our rest, And give us up to toil! Ulisses. Delicious Nimph, suppose there were No honour, or report, Yet manlines would scorne to weare The time in idle sport : For toyle doth give a better touche To make us feele our joy; And ease finds tediousnesse as much As labour yeelds annoy. Syren. Then pleasure likewise seemes the shore, And perish oft the while. Who may disporte them diversly, Finde never tedious day; And ease may have varietie, As well as action may. Ulisses. But natures of the noblest frame And with the thoughts of actions past When pleasure leaves a touch at last Syren. That doth opinion onely cause, No widdowes waile for our delights, Ulisses. But yet the state of things require And these great spirits of high desire To be well chang'd for war. Syren. Well, well, Ulisses, then I see T'undoo or be undonne. See Dr Grosart's edition of Daniel's works in the Huth Library (3 vols. 1885-87), and H. C. Beeching's Selections from the Poetry of S. Daniel and M. Drayton (1899). Michael Drayton, born in 1563 at Hartshill, near Atherstone in Warwickshire, at the age of ten was made page to a person of qualitypossibly Sir Henry Goodere, to whom he says he owed the most of his education. There is nothing to prove whether he went to a university. His first work, The Harmonie of the Church (1591), was a metrical translation of parts of the Scriptures, but gave offence to the authorities and was destroyed. In 1593 Drayton published a collection of his pastorals or 'eglogs ;' in 1594, a collection of sonnets or 'quatorzains' (which helped to fix the specific English form of the sonnet); and in 1596, the first form of what, much altered, appeared as The Barons Wars, originally in a seven-line stanza, finally in ‘ottava rima.' It has fine passages, but is not everywhere interesting. England's Heroicall Epistles (1597), on the model of Ovid's Heroides, is polished but unequal. On the accession of James I. in 1603, Drayton acted as esquire to Sir Walter Aston at his investiture as Knight of the Bath. The poet expected patronage from the new sovereign, but was disappointed. The Poems Lyric and Heroic (1606) contain the famous martial lyric, The Ballad of Agincourt. He published the first part of his most elaborate work, the Polyolbion, in 1612, and the second in 1622, the whole forming a poetical 'chorographicall' description of England, in thirty songs or books. The Polyolbion, unlike any other work in English poetry, is full of topographical and antiquarian details, allusions to remarkable events and persons, local sports and customs; yet the inevitable prolixity and monotony of such a scheme is atoned for by the beauty of Drayton's descriptions, the skill of his treatment, the brightness of his fancy, and the delightfulness of his melody, as well as by the multifariousness of his information-information in general so accurate that the poem is quoted as an authority by Wood and Hearne. In 1619 Drayton collected all his poems (but Polyolbion) that he wanted preserved, and in 1627 published a new volume containing the whimsical and delightful Nymphidia, The Quest of Cynthia, and The Battaile of Agincourt (distinct from the Ballad). In conjunction with Chettle, Dekker, Munday, Webster, and others he had a share in many plays, notably Sir John Oldcastle. His last work, The Muses Elizium (1630), deals with Noah's flood, the birth of Moses, David and Goliath; and the great sonnet, 'Since there's no help,' first MICHAEL DRAYTON. From the Portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. published in the 1619 folio, was pronounced by Rossetti as almost the best in the language, if not quite.' On his death in 1631, Drayton was buried in Westminster Abbey. From 'Polyolbion.' Morning in Warwickshire-a Stag-hunt. My native country then, which so brave spirits hast bred, When Phoebus lifts his head out of the winters wave, No sooner doth the earth her flowerie bosome brave, At such time as the Yeere brings on the pleasant Spring, spare, That moduleth her tunes so admirably rare, As man to set in Parts at first had learned of her. Wren. The Yellow pate; which though shee hurt the blooming Of all the beasts which we for our veneriall name, rove At many a cruell beast, and with thy darts to pierce The lion, panther, ounce, the bear, and tiger fierce; And following thy fleet game, chaste mighty Forrests queen, With thy disheveld nymphs attyred in youthful greene, About the Launds hast scowred, and wastes both farre and neere, Brave huntress; but no beast shall prove thy quarries heere Save those the best of chase, the tall and lusty Red, Is fitt'st to hunt at force. For whom when with his hounds The laboring hunter tufts the thick unbarbed grounds, The often-bellowing hounds to vent his secret lair, He rouzing rusheth out, and through the brakes doth drive, As though up by the roots the bushes he would rive. When after goes the Cry, with yellings lowd and deepe, Each followes, as his horse were footed with the wind. Doth beat the brooks and ponds for sweet refreshing soyle; That serving not, then proves if he his scent can foyle, And makes amongst the heards and flocks of shag-wool'd sheep, Them frighting from the guard of those who had their keepe. But when as all his shifts his safety still denies, Put quite out of his walke, the wayes and fallowes tries; Whom when the Plowman meets, his teame he letteth stand, T'assaile him with his goad: so with his hooke in hand, Until the noble Deere, through toil bereaved of strength, He turnes upon his foes, that soone have him inclos'd. With his sharp-poynted head he dealeth deadly wounds. The woosell is the ouzel; the tydie, a golden-crested wren or a titmouse; nope, the bullfinch; hecco is a name for a woodpecker that assumes some thirty forms as various as hickwall, ickle, yuckel, hee-haw, and heigh-ho; greave is an old form of grove; emboss or imboss, said of a hunted animal, is to take shelter in a thicket; rechating is a particular measure on the horn. Coleridge notes as admirable a passage on the cutting down of the old English forests: Our trees so hacked above the ground, That where their lofty tops the neighbouring countries crowned, Their trunks, like aged folks, now bare and naked stand, As for revenge to Heaven each held a withered hand. Ballad of Agincourt. Faire stood the wind for France, When we our Sayles advance, Nor now to prove our chance Longer will tarry; But putting to the Mayne Landed King Harry. And taking many a fort, With all his power. Which in his hight of pride, To the King sending. Their fall portending. And turning to his men, By Fame beene raysed. And for myselfe (quoth he), Losse to redeeme me. |