e 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. Some of his single lines
have already been quoted, and many more might be excerpted from his work of
the best Elizabethan brand in the quieter kind. Quiet, indeed, is the
overmastering characteristic of Daniel. It was this no doubt which made him
prefer the stately style of his Senecan tragedies, and the hardly more
disturbed structure of pastoral comedies and tragi-comedies, like the
_Queen's Arcadia_ and _Hymen's Triumph_, to the boisterous revels of the
stage proper in his time. He had something of the schoolmaster in his
nature as well as in his history. Nothing is more agreeable to him than to
moralise; not indeed in any dull or crabbed manner, but in a mellifluous
and at the same time weighty fashion, of which very few other poets have
the secret. It is perhaps by his scrupulous propriety, by his anxious
decency (to use the word not in its modern and restricted sense, but in its
proper meaning of the generally becoming), that Daniel brought upon himself
the rather hard saying that he had a manner "better suiting prose."

The sentence will scarcely be echoed by any one who has his best things
before him, however much a reader of some of the duller parts of the
historical poems proper may feel