ney-dropping Daniel doth wage
War with the proudest big Italian
That melts his heart in sugared sonnetting."

If Jonson, Daniel's rival as maker of masques for the Court, proclaimed
him a good honest man but no poet, Spenser generously said he surpassed
"all that afore him came;" and scarcely one of the more prominent of his
contemporaries failed to address compliments to him. When Daniel was
gentleman extraordinary and groom of the privy chamber to Anne,
Queen-consort to James I., the Queen is said to have been a "favourer
and encourager of his muse;" and his high social position made it easy
for less favoured aspirants to praise him. But the perspective of time
brings a more balanced judgment. While Lowell finds in the fact that
Daniel was held in high esteem by his contemporaries a proof that noble
diction was appreciated then as now, and while he admits that Daniel
refined our tongue, yet he decided that Daniel had the thinking and
languaging parts of a poet's outfit but lacked the higher creative gift.
We shall find Daniel at his best, not when in prosaic soberness he sings

"... the civil wars, tumultuous broils,
And bloody factions of a mighty land."

not when he is framing stilted tragedies with chorus and declamation in
the grand Senecan manner, not in his complimentary addresses to lords,
ladies and royalty, nor in the classic masques and philosophical
dialogue, but in the less ambitious poems of _Delia_ and _Rosamond_,
especially in such a sonnet as "Care-charmer Sleep," where we come more
near to hearing a human heart beat than in any of the others. It is not
a mighty heart, but it is one that is gentle, tender and pure.

A glance at the life of Daniel gives opportunity for an easy conjecture
as to the personality of the lady honoured under the name of Delia. At
seventeen Daniel was at Oxford, and finished a three years' residence at
Magdalen College in 1582. After a visit to Italy, he became established
at Wilton as tutor to the sons of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. To
those early days at Wilton the poet refers, when in 1603 he dedicates
his _Defense of Rhyme_ to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, his former
pupil. In the introduction to this fine essay Daniel declares that in
regard to his poetic studies he was "first encouraged and framed
thereunto by your most worthy and honourable mother, and received the
first notion for the formal ordering of those compositions at Wilton
which