s melancholy truth to the lady.

Daniel is a multifarious writer, and will be mentioned again. I shall
add nothing more of him here than the following anecdote. When he was a
young student at Magdalen-Hall in Oxford, about the year 1580,
notwithstanding the disproportion of his years, and his professed
aversion to the severer acadamical [sic] studies, the Dean and Canons of
Christchurch, by a public capitular act now remaining, gave Daniel a
general invitation to their table at dinner, merely on account of the
liveliness of his conversation.[11]

About the same time, Thomas Watson published his _Hecatompathia, Or the
passionate century of love_, a hundred sonnets.[12] I have not been able
to discover the date of this publication:[13] but his _First set of
Italian Madrigals_ appeared at London, in 1590.[14] I have called them
_sonnets_: but they often wander beyond the limits, nor do they always
preserve the conformation [or] constraint,[15] of the just Italian
_Sonetto_.[16] Watson is more brilliant than Daniel: but he is
encumbered with conceit and the trappings of affectation. In the
love-songs of this age, a lady with all her load of panegyric, resembles
one of the unnatural factitious figures which we sometimes see among the
female portraits at full length of the same age, consisting only of
pearls, gems, necklaces, earings, embroidery, point-lace, farthingale,
fur, and feathers. The blooming nymph is lost in her decorations.
Watson, however, has sometimes uncommon vigour and elegance. As in the
following description.

Her yellow locks exceed the beaten gold,
Her sparkling eyes in heau'n a place deserue;
Her forehead high and faire, of comelie mould,
Her wordes are musical, of syluer sound, &c.
Her eye-browe hangs like Iris in the skies,
Her eagle's nose is straite, of stately frame;
On either cheeke a rose and lillie lyes;
Her breathe is sweet perfvme, or holie flame:
Her lippes more red than any coral-stone, &c.
Her breast transparent is, like cristal rock,
Her fingers long, fit for Apollo's lute,
Her slipper such, as Momus dare not mock,
Her virtues are so great, as make me mute, &c.[17]

Spenser's Sonnets were printed with his _Epithalamium_. They are
entered, in the year 1593, under this title to William Ponsonby,
"_Amoretti_, and _Epithalamium_, written not long since by Edmond
Spencer."[18] In a recommendatory sonnet prefixed, by G. W. senior, i