To omit Googe, Tuberville [sic], Gascoigne, and some other petty writers who have interspersed their miscellanies with a few sonnets, and who will be considered under another class, our first professed author in this mode of composition, after Surrey and Wyat, is Samuel Daniel. His Sonnets called Delia, together with his Complaint of Rosamond, were printed for Simon Waterson, in 1591.[6] It was hence that the name of Delia, suggested to Daniel by Tibullus, has been perpetuated in the song of the lover as the name of a mistress. These pieces are dedicated to Sir Philip Sydney's sister, the general patroness, Mary countess of Pembroke. But Daniel had been her preceptor.[7] It is not said in Daniel's Life, that he travelled. His forty-eighth sonnet is said to have been "made at the authors being in Italie."[8] Delia does not appear to have been transcendently cruel, nor were his sufferings attended with any very violent paroxysms of despair. His style and his expressions have a coldness proportioned to his passion. Yet as he does not weep seas of tears, nor utter sighs of fire, he has the merit of avoiding the affected allusions and hyperbolical exaggerations of his brethren. I cannot in the mean time, with all these concessions in his favour, give him the praise of elegant sentiment, true tenderness, and natural pathos. He has, however, a vigour of diction, and a volubility of verse, which cover many defects, and are not often equalled by his contemporaries. I suspect his sonnets were popular. They are commended, by the author of the Return from Parnassus, in a high strain of panegyric.
Sweet honey-dropping Daniel doth wage
War with the proudest big Italian
That melts his heart in sugar'd sonnetting.[9]
But I do not think they are either very sweet, or much tinctured with the Italian manner. The following is one of the best; which I the rather chuse to recite, as it exemplifies his mode of compliment, and contains the writer's opinion of Spenser's use of obsolete words.
Let others sing of knights & Paladines,
In aged accents, and untimely words,
Paint shadowes in imaginarie lines,
Which well the reach of their high wit records;
But I must sing of thee, and those faire eyes
Autentique shall my verse in time to come,
When yet th' vnborne shall say "Loe, where she lyes,
Whose beauty made Him speak that els was dombe."
These are the arkes, the trophies I erect,
That fortifie thy name against old age,
And these thy sacred vertues must protect
Against the Darke, & Times consuming rage.
Though th' errour of my youth they shall discouer,
Suffise, they shew I liu'd, and was thy louer.[10]
But, to say nothing more, whatever wisdom there may be in allowing that love was the errour of his youth, there was no great gallantry in telling this 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]