of enthusiasm can be found to animate the mass. In the Complaint of Rosamond, and in the Letter from Octavia, he has copied the manner of Ovid, though with more tenderness and pathos than are usually found in the pages of the Roman.
In short, purity of language, elegance of style, and harmony of versification, together with an almost perfect freedom from pedantry and affectation, and a continual flow of good sense and just reflection, form the merits of Daniel, and resting on these qualities he is entitled to distinguished notice, as an improver of our diction and taste; but to the higher requisites of his art, to the fire and invention of the creative bard, he has few pretensions.
Daniel was the intimate friend of Shakspeare, Marlowe, Chapman, Camden, and Cowel; and was so highly esteemed by the accomplished Anne, Countess of Pembroke, that she not only erected a monument to his memory in Beckington church, Somersetshire, but in a full length of herself, at Appleby Castle in Cumberland, had a small portrait of her favourite poet introduced.[612:A] This partiality seems to have sprung from a connection not often productive of attachment; Daniel had been her tutor when she was only thirteen years old, and in his poems he addresses an epistle to her at this early age, which, as Mr. Park has justly said, "deserves entire perusal for its dignified vein of delicate admonition."[612:B] Dissatisfied with the opinions of his contemporaries as to his poetical merit, which appears to have been similar to the estimate that we have just given[612:C], he relinquished the busy world, and spent the closing years of his life in the cultivation of a farm.
9. Davies, Sir John, was born at Chisgrove in Wiltshire in 1570. Though a lawyer of great eminence, he is chiefly known to posterity through the medium of his poetical works. His Nosce Teipsum, or poem on the Immortality of the Soul, on which fame rests, was published in 1599, and not only secured him the admiration of his learned contemporaries, among whom may be recorded the great names of Camden, Harrington, Jonson, Selden, and Corbet, but accelerated his professional honours; for being introduced to James in Scotland, in order to congratulate him on his accession to the throne of England, the king, on hearing his name, enquired "if he was Nosce Teipsum? and being answered in the affirmative, graciously embraced him, and took him into such favour, that he soon made him his Solicitor, and then Attorney-General in Ireland."[613:A]
Beside this philosophical poem, the earliest of which our language can boast, Sir John printed, in 1596, a series of Epigrams, which were published at Middleburg, at the close of Marlowe's translation of Ovid's Epistles, and in the same year the first edition of his "Orchestra, or a poeme of dauncing;" these, with twenty-six acrostics on the words Elizabetha Regina, printed in 1599, and entitled "Hymns of Astræa," complete the list of his publications.
His "Nosce Teipsum" is a piece of close reasoning in verse, peculiarly harmonious for the period in which it appeared. It possesses, also, wit, ingenuity, vigour and condensation of thought, but exhibits few efforts of imagination, and nothing that is either pathetic or sublime. In point of argument, metaphysical acuteness and legitimate deduction, the English poet is, in every respect, superior to his classical model Lucretius; but how greatly does he fall beneath the fervid genius and creative fancy of the Latian bard!
Sir John died suddenly on the 7th of December 1626, in the fifty-seventh year of his age.
10. Davors, John. Of this poet little more is known, than that he published, in 1613, the following work: "The Secrets of Angling: teaching the choicest Tooles, Baits, and Seasons, for the taking of any Fish, in Pond or River: practised and familiarly opened in three Bookes." 12mo.
Upon a subject so technical and didactic, few opportunities for poetical imagery might naturally be expected; but Davors has most happily availed himself of those which occurred, and has rendered his poem, in many places, highly interesting by beauty of sentiment, and warmth of description. A lovely specimen of his powers may be found in the "Complete Angler" of Isaac Walton[614:A], and the following invocation, from the opening of the First Book, shall be given as a further proof of the genuineness of his inspiration, and with this additional remark, that his versification is throughout singularly harmonious:—
"You Nimphs that in the springs and waters sweet,