miration for the works and character of Daniel, and to have lost no opportunity of expressing it. Towards the close of his life, the poet retired to a farm he had at Beckington, in Somersetshire, where he died October 14, 1619.

The works of Daniel fill two considerable volumes. They 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 another elaborate and thoughtful work by Daniel His tragedies and masks fail in dramatic interest, and his epistles are perhaps the most pleasing and popular of his works. His style is remarkably pure, clear, and flowing, but wants animation. He has been called the well-languaged Daniel;' and certainly the copiousness, ease and smoothness of his language distinguish him from his contemporaries. He is quite modern in style. In taste and moral feeling he was also pre-eminent. Mr. Hallam thinks Daniel wanted only greater confidence in his own power; but he was deficient in fire and energy. His thoughtful, equable verse flows on unintermittingly, and never offends; but it becomes tedious and uninteresting from its sameness, and the absence of what may be called salient points. His quiet graces and vein of moral reflection are, however, well worthy of study. His 'Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland' is a fine effusion of meditative thought.

From the Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland.

He that of such a height hath built his mind,

And reared the dwelling of his thoughts so strong,
As neither hope nor fear can shake the frame
Of his resolved powers; nor all the wind

Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong

His settled peace, or to disturb the same:
What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may
The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey!
And with how free an eye doth he look down
Upon these lower regions of turmoil,
Where all the storms of passions mainly beat
On flesh and blood! where honour, power, renown,
Are only gay afflictions, golden toil;

Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet

As frailty doth and only great doth seem
To little minds who do it so esteem.

He looks upon the mightiest monarch's wars,
But only as on stately robberies;

Where evermore the fortune that prevails
Must be the right: the ill-succeeding mars
The fairest and the best-faced enterprise.
Great pirate Pompey lesser pirates quails;
Justice he sees, as if reduced, still

Conspires with power, whose cause must not be ill.

He sees the face of right t' appear as manifold
As are the passions of uncertain man;

Who puts it in all colours, all attires,

To serve his ends, and makes his courses hold.
He sees that, let deceit work what it can,
Plot and contrive base ways to high desires;
That the all-guiding Providence doth yet
All disappoint and mocks the smoke of wit.

Nor is he moved with all the thunder-cracks
Of tyrants' threats, or with the surly brow

Of power, that proudly sits on others' crimes;
Charged with more crying sins than those he checks.
The storms of sad confusion, that may grow

Up in the present for the coming times,

Appal not him; that hath no side at all,

But of himself, and knows the worst can fall.

Richard II. the Morning before his Murder in Pontefract Castle.

Whether the soul receives intelligence,
By her near genius, of the body's end,
And so imparts a sadness to the sense,
Foregoing ruin whereto it doth tend:

Or whether nature else hath conference

With profound sleep, and so doth warning send,
By prophetising dreams, what hurt is near,
And gives the heavy careful heart to fear:

However, so it is, the now sad king,
Tossed here and there his quiet to confound,
Feels a strange weight of sorrows gathering
Upon his trembling heart, and sees no ground;
Feels sudden terror bring cold shivering;
Lists not to eat, still muses, sleeps unsound;
His senses droop, his steady eyes unquick,
And much he ails, and yet he is not sick.

The morning of that day which was his last,
After a weary rest, rising to pain,

Out at a little grate his eyes he cast

Upon those bordering hills and open plain,

Where others' liberty make him complain

The more his own, and grieves his soul the more,
Conferring captive crowns with freedom poor.

'O happy man,' saith he,

'that lo I see,

Grazing his cattle in those pleasant fields,
If he but knew his good. How blessed he
That feels not what affliction greatness yields !
Other than what he is he would not be,

Nor change his state with him that sceptre wields
Thine, thine is that true life: that is to live,
To rest secure, and not rise up to grieve.

'Thou sitt'st at home safe by thy quiet fire,
And hear'st of other's harms, but fearest none:
And there thou tell'st of kings, and who aspire,
Who fall, who rise, who triumph, who do moan.
Perhaps thou talk'st of me, and dost inquire
Of my restraint, why here I live alone,
And pitiest this my miserable fall;

For pity must have part-envy not all.

'Thrice happy you that look as from the shore,
And have no venture in the wreck you see;
Nc interest, no occasion to deplore

Other men's travels, while yourselves sit free.

How much doth your sweet rest make us the more
To see our misery, and what we be:

Whose blinded greatness, ever in turmoil,
Still seeking happy life, makes life a toil."

Early Love.

Ah, I remember well-and how can I
But evermore remember well-when first

Our flame began, when scarce we knew what was
The flame we felt; when as we sat and sighed
And looked upon each other, and conceived
Not what we ailed, yet something we did ail,
And yet were well, and yet we were not well,
And what was our disease we could not tell.
Then would we kiss, then sigh, then look: and thus
In that first garden of our simpleness

We spent our childhood. But when years began
To reap the fruit of knowledge; ah, how then
Would she with sterner looks, with graver brow,
Check my presumption and my forwardness!
Yet still would give me flowers, still would shew
What she would have me, yet not have me know.

Sonnets.

I must not grieve my love, whose eyes would read
Lines of delight, whereon her youth might smile;
Flowers have time before they come to seed,
And she is young, and now must sport the while.
And sport, sweet maid, in season of these years,
And learn to gather flowers before they wither;
And where the sweetest blossom first appears,
Let love and youth conduct thy pleasures thither,
Lighten forth smiles to clear the clouded air,
And calm the tempest which my sighs do raise :
Pity and smiles do best become the fair;
Pity and smiles must only yield thee praise.
Make me to say, when all my griefs are gone,
Happy the heart that sighed for such a one.

Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,
Relieve my anguish, and restore the light,
With dark forgetting of my care, return.
And let the day be time enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill-advised youth;
Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn,
Without the torments of the night's untruth.
Cease, dreams, the images of day-desires,
To model forth the passions of to-morrow;
Never let the rising sun prove you liars,
To add more grief, to aggravate my sorrow.
Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain,
And never wake to feel the day's disdain.

MICHAEL DRAYTON, born, it is supposed, at Atherstone, in Warwickshire, about the year 1563, at the age of ten was made page to a person of quality-a situation which was not at that time thought too humble for the sons of gentlemen. He is said, upon dubious authority, to have been for some time a student at Oxford. It is certain that, in early life, he was highly esteemed and strongly patronised by several persons of consequence, particularly by Sir Henry Goodere, Sir Walter Aston, and the Countess of Bedford; to the first he was indebted for great part of his education, and for recommending

him to the countess; the second supported him for several years. In 1593, Drayton published a collection of his pastorals, and in 1598 gave to the world his more elaborate poems of The Barons' Wars' and England's Heroical Epistles.' On the accession of James I. in 1603, Drayton acted as esquire to Sir Walter Aston, in the ceremony of his installation as a Knight of the Bath. The poet expected some patronage from the new sovereign, but was disappointed. He published the first part of his most elaborate work, the Polyolbion,' in 1612, and the second in 1622, the whole forming a poetical description of England, in thirty songs or books.

The Polyolbion' is a work entirely unlike any other in English poetry, both in its subject and in the manner of its composition. It is full of topographical and antiquarian details, with innumerable allusions to remarkable events and persons, as connected with various localities; yet such is the genius of the author, so happily does he idealise almost everything he touches, and so lively is the flow of his verse, that we do not readily tire in perusing his vast mass of information. He seems to have followed Spenser in his personification of natural objects, such as hills, rivers, and woods. The information contained in the 'Polyolbion' is in general so accurate, that it is quoted as an authority by Hearne and Wood.

In 1627, Drayton published a volume containing 'The Battle of Agincourt,' 'The Court of Faerie,' and other poems. Three years later appeared another volume, entitled 'The Muses' Elysium,' from which it appears that he had found a final shelter in the family of the Earl of Dorset. On his death in 1631, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, where a monument, containing an inscription in letters of gold, was raised to his memory by the wife of that nobleman, the justly celebrated Lady Anne Clifford, subsequently Countess of Pembroke and Montgomery.

Morning in Warwickshire-Description of a Stag-hunt.

When Phoebus lifts his head out of the winter's wave,
No sooner doth the earth her flowery bosom brave,
At such time as the year brings on the pleasant spring,
But hunts-up to the morn the feathered sylvans sing:
And in the lower grove, as on the rising knoll,
Upon the highest spray of every mounting pole,
Those quiristers are percht, with many a speckled breast,
Then from her burnisht gate the goodly glitt'ring east
Gilds every lofty top, which late the humorous night
Bespangled had with pearl, to please the morning's sight;
On which the mirthful quires, with their clear open throats,
Unto the joyful morn so strain their warbling notes,
That hills and valleys ring, and even the echoing air
Seems all composed of sounds, about them everywhere.
The throstle, with shrill sharps; as purposely he sung
T' awake the listless sun; or chiding, that so long

He was in coming forth, that should the thickets thrill;
The ouzel near at hand, that hath a golden bill,
As nature him had markt of purpose, t' let us se

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