In every way superior to its predecessor is the second venture in the kind made by Daniel after an interval of nearly a decade. Instead of being a patchwork of motives and situations borrowed from the Italian, and pieced together with more or less ingenuity, Hymen's Triumph is as a whole an original composition. The play is preceded by a prologue in which Daniel departs from his models in employing the dialogue form, the speakers being Hymen, Avarice, Envy, and Jealousy[[252]]. In the opening scene we find Thirsis lamenting the loss of his love Silvia, who is supposed to have been devoured by wild beasts while wandering alone upon the shore--we are once again on the sea-board of Arcadia--her rent veil and a lock of her hair being all that remains to her disconsolate lover. Their vows had been in secret owing to the match proposed by Silvia's father between her and Alexis, the son of a wealthy neighbour[[253]]. In reality she has been seized by pirates[[254]] and carried off to Alexandria, where she has lived as a slave in boy's attire for some two years. Recently an opportunity for escape having presented itself, she has returned, still disguised, to her native country, where she has entered the service of the shepherdess Cloris, waiting till the approaching marriage of Alexis with another nymph shall have made impossible the renewal of her father's former schemes. Complications now arise, for it appears that Cloris has fallen in love with Thirsis, but fears ill success in her suit, supposing him in his turn to be pining for the love of Amarillis. She employs the supposed boy to move her suit to Thirsis, and Silvia goes on her errand to court her lover for her mistress, fearing to find him already faithless to his love for her[[255]]. On her mission she is waylaid by the nymph Phillis, who has fallen in love with her in her male attire, careless of the love borne her by the honest but rude forester Montanus. The varying fortune of Silvia's suit on behalf of Cloris, Thirsis' faith to the memory of Silvia, Montanus' jealousy, and Phillis' shame when she finds her proffered love rejected by the boy for whom she has sacrificed her modesty, are presented in a series of scenes and discourses which do not materially advance the business in hand. Towards the end of the fourth act, however, we approach the climax, and matters begin to move. Alexis' marriage being now imminent, Silvia thinks she can venture at least to give her lover some spark of hope by narrating her story under fictitious names. This she does, making use of the transparent anagrams Isulia and Sirthis[[256]]. As Silvia ends her tale Montanus rushes in, determined to be revenged for the favour shown by his mistress to the supposed youth. He stabs Silvia, and carries off the garland she is wearing, believing it to be one woven by the hand of Phillis. This naturally leads to the discovery of Silvia's sex and identity, and supposing her dead, Thirsis falls in a swoon at her side. The last act is, as usual, little more than an epilogue, in which we are entertained with a long account of the recovery of the faithful lovers, thanks to the care of the wise Lamia, an elaborate passage again modelled on Tasso, but again falling far short of the poetical beauty of the original.

Taken as a whole, and partly through being unencumbered with the satyric machinery of the Queen's Arcadia, Hymen's Triumph is a distinctly lighter and more pleasing composition. At least so it appears by comparison, for Daniel everywhere takes himself and his subject with a distressing seriousness wholly unsuited to the style; we look in vain for a gleam of humour such as that which in the final chorus of the Aminta casts a reflex light over the whole play[[257]]. Again an advance may be observed, not only in the conduct of the plot, which moves artistically on an altogether different level, and even succeeds in arousing some dramatic interest, but likewise in the verse, which has a freer movement, and is on the whole less marred by the over-emphatic repetition of words and phrases in consecutive lines, a particularly irritating trick of the author's pastoral style, or by the monotonous cadence and painful padding of the blank verse. Daniel was emphatically one of those poets, neither few nor inconsiderable, the natural nervelessness of whose poetic diction imperatively demands the bracing restraint of rime. It is noteworthy that this applies to his verse alone; such a work as the famous Defence of Rime serves to place him once for all among the greatest masters of 'the other harmony of prose.'

Hymen's Triumph contains many more passages of notable merit than its predecessor. There is, indeed, one passage in the Queen's Arcadia which will bear comparison with anything Daniel ever wrote, but it stands in somewhat striking contrast with its surroundings. This is the opening of the speech in which Melibaeus addresses the assembled Arcadians, and well deserves quotation.

You gentle Shepheards and Inhabitors
Of these remote and solitary parts
Of Mountaynous Arcadia, shut up here
Within these Rockes, these unfrequented Clifts,
The walles and bulwarkes of our libertie,
From out the noyse of tumult, and the throng
Of sweating toyle, ratling concurrencie,
And have continued still the same and one
In all successions from antiquitie;
Whil'st all the states on earth besides have made
A thousand revolutions, and have rowl'd
From change to change, and never yet found rest,
Nor ever bettered their estates by change;
You I invoke this day in generall,
To doe a worke that now concernes us all,
Lest that we leave not to posteritie,
Th' Arcadia that we found continued thus
By our fore-fathers care who left it us. (V. iii.)

Such passages are more frequent in Hymen's Triumph. Take the description of the early love of Thirsis and Silvia, instinct with a delicacy and freshness that even Tasso might have envied[[258]]:

Then would we kisse, then sigh, then looke, and thus
In that first garden of our simplenesse
We spent our child-hood; but when yeeres began
To reape the fruite of knowledge, ah, how then
Would she with graver looks, with sweet stern brow,
Check my presumption and my forwardnes;
Yet still would give me flowers, stil would me shew
What she would have me, yet not have me, know. (I. i.)

Thirsis, who is the typical 'constant lover' of pastoral convention, and does

Hold it to be a most heroicke thing
To act one man, and do that part exact,

thus addresses his friend Palaemon in defence of love:

Ah, know that when you mention love, you name
A sacred mistery, a Deity,
Not understood of creatures built of mudde,
But of the purest and refined clay
Whereto th' eternall fires their spirits convey.
And for a woman, which you prize so low,
Like men that doe forget whence they are men,
Know her to be th' especiall creature, made
By the Creator as the complement
Of this great Architect[[259]] the world, to hold
The same together, which would otherwise
Fall all asunder; and is natures chiefe
Vicegerent upon earth, supplies her state.
And doe you hold it weakenesse then to love,
And love so excellent a miracle
As is a worthy woman? (III. iv.)