15. Greene's Farewell to Folly. 1591.

16. A Notable Discovery of Cozenage.

17. The Second and Last Part of Coney Catching. 1592.

18. The Third and Last Part of Coney Catching. 1592.

19. A Disputation between a He Coney Catcher and a She Coney Catcher. 1592.

20. Greene's Groat's Worth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance. In this tale also the adventures of the hero, Roberto, are supposed to represent, with more or less exaggeration, those of the writer.

21. Cicerone's Amor; Tully's Love. 1592.

22. A Quip for an Upstart Courtier; or a quaint Dispute between VelvetBreeches and Cloth-Breeches. 1592.

23. Philomela, the Lady Fitzwater's Nightingale.

24. The Black Book's Messenger, laying open the Life and Death of Ned Broune, one of the most notable Cutpurses, Cross-biters, and Coney Catchers that ever lived in England. 1592.

25. The Repentance of Robert Greene, Master of Arts, wherein by himself is laid open his loose Life; with the manner of his Death. 1592.

26. Mamillia, a Mirrour or Looking-Glass for the Ladies of England. 1593. 27. Mamillia, the Second Part of the Triumph of Pallas. 1593.

28. News both from Heaven and Hell.

29. Greene's Aphareon.

30. Penelope's Web, a Christal Mirror of Feminine Perfection.

31. Thieves Falling Out, True Men come by their Goods; or the Bellman wanted a Clapper. A Peel of new Villanies rung out.

32. The History of Arbasto, King of Denmark.

33. Alcida, Greene's Metamorphosis.

34. A Pair of Turtle Doves; or, the Tragical History of Bellora and Fidelio. 35. The History of Orlando Furioso. A Tragedy.

36. A Looking-Glass for London and England. A Mystery-Play.

37. The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. A Play. 38. The Comical History of Alphonsus, King of Arragon. A Play.

39. The Scottish History of James the Fourth, A Play. 40. George à Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield. A Play.

THOMAS KYD.

(Born circa 1560.)

Thomas Kyd is the author of the noted play The Spanish Tragedy, which, immensely ridiculed by contemporary dramatists and other wits, was, at all events, so well thought of by the public as to go through more editions than perhaps any play of the time; a success which must be largely attributed to the author's own merits, for it was not until after 1602 that the play was enriched with the supplemental scenes and speeches contributed by Ben Jonson, and with

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regard to some of which Collier considers, that there is nothing in Ben's own entire plays at all equalling them in pathetic beauty. It is not known in what precise year the Spanish Tragedy was first acted; but "The first part of Jeronymo," of which it is the completion, the title is, The Spanish Tragedy; or, Jeronymo is Mad again, was acted in 1588. "Kyd," writes Collier, was a poet of very considerable mind, and deserves, in some respects, to be ranked above more notorious contemporaries. His thoughts are often both new and natural; and if in his plays he dealt largely in blood and death, he only partook of the habit of the time, in which good sense and discretion were often outraged for the purpose of gratifying the crowd. In taste he is inferior to Peele, but in force and character he is his superior; and if Kyd's blank verse be not quite so smooth, it has decidedly more spirit, vigour, and variety. As a writer of blank verse, I am inclined, among the predecessors of Shakespeare, to give Kyd the next place to Marlowe." Besides Jeronymo and The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd was the translator of the Cordelia of Garnier (1594). We know nothing of Kyd's personal history.

SAMUEL DANIEL.

(1562-1619.)

Samuel Daniel, the son of a music-master, was born near Taunton, in 1562. In 1579 he was admitted a commoner of Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he continued about three years, and made considerable improvement in academical studies. He left the University, however, without taking a degree, and pursued the study of history and poetry under the patronage of the Earl of Pembroke's family. This he thankfully acknowledges in his Defence of Rhyme.

The first of his productions, at the age of twenty-three, was a translation of Paulo Giovio's discourse of rare inventions, both military and amorous, called Imprese. He afterwards became tutor to the Lady Anne Clifford; to whom, at the age of thirteen, he addressed a delicate admonitory epistle.

Among this lady's other munificent acts was a monument to the memory of our poet, on which she caused it to be engraven that she had been his pupil; a circumstance which she seems to have remembered with delight at the distance of more than half a century after his death.

At the death of Spenser, Daniel, according to Wood, was appointed poet-laureate to Queen Elizabeth; but Malone considers him only as a volunteer laureate, like Jonson, Dekker, and others, who

furnished the court with masks and pageants. In King James's reign he was made gentleman extraordinary, and afterwards one of the grooms of the privy chamber to the queen-consort, who took great delight in his conversation and writings.

He now rented a small house and garden in Old Street, St. Luke's, where he composed most of his dramatic pieces, and enjoyed the friendship of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Chapman, as well as of many persons of rank: but he appears to have been dissatisfied with the opinion entertained of his talents; and towards the end of his life retired to a farm he had at Beckington, near Philip's Norton, in Somersetshire; where, after some time devoted to study and contemplation, he died, Oct. 14, 1619.

ness.

Daniel is much praised by his contemporaries. Old Fuller writes of him: "He carried in his Christian and surname two holy prophets; his monitors so qualify his raptures, that he abhorred all profaneHe was also a judicious historian-witness his lives of our English kings since the Conquest until Edward III., wherein he hath the happiness to reconcile brevity with clearness, quality of great distance in other authors. He was a servant in ordinary to Queen Anne, who allowed him a fair salary. As the tortoise burieth itself all the winter under the ground, so Mr. Daniel would lie hid in the gardenhouse in Old Street, nigh London, for some months together (the more retiredly to enjoy the company of the Muses), and then would appear in publick, to converse with his friends, whereof Dr. Cowell and Mr. Camden were principal.

"Some tax him to smack of the old cask, as resenting of the Romish religion; but they have a quicker palate than I, who can make any such discovery. In his old age he turned husbandman, and rented a farm in Wiltshire, nigh the Devises. I can give no account how he thrived thereupon. For though he was well versed in Virgil, his fellow-husbandman poet, yet there is more required to make a rich farmer than only to say his Georgics by heart: and I question whether his Italian will fit our English husbandry. Besides that, Mr. Daniel his fancy was too fine and sublimated to be wrought down to his private profit."

His works consist of: 1. The Complaint of Rosamond (1594); 2. Various Sonnets to Delia; 3. Tragedy of Cleopatra (1594); 4. Of the Civil Wars between the Houses of Lancaster and York (1604); 5. The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, presented in a Mask (1604); 6. Panegyric congratulatory delivered to King James at Burleigh-Harrington in Rutlandshire (1604); 7. Epistles to various great Personages, in verse (1601); 8. Musipholus, containing a general defence of learning; 9. Tragedy of Philotas (1611); 10. Hymen's Triumph, a pastoral

tragi-comedy at the Nuptials of Lord Roxburgh (1623); 11. Musa, or a Defence of Rhime (1611); 12. The Epistle of Octavia to M. Antonius (1611); 13. The First Part of the History of England, in three books (1613), reaching to the end of King Stephen, in prose; to which he afterwards added a second part, reaching to the end of King Edward (1618), continued to the end of King Richard III. by John Trussel; 14. The Queen's Arcadia, a pastoral tragi-comedy (1605); 15. Funeral Poem, on the Death of the Earl of Devon (1623).

Coleridge, in a letter to Charles Lamb (written on the fly-leaf of the latter poet's copy of Daniel's works), thus speaks of Daniel : "Dear Charles,—I think more highly, far more than you seemed to do (on Monday night, Feb. 9, 1808). The verse does not teize me; and all the while I am reading it I cannot but fancy a plain England-loving English country gentleman, with only some dozen books in his whole library, and at a time when a Mercury or Intelligencer was seen by him once in a month or two, making this his newspaper and political Bible at the same time, and reading it so often as to store his memory with its aphorisms. Conceive a good man of that kind, diffident and passive, yet rather inclined to Jacobitism, seeing the reasons of the revolutionary party, yet, by disposition and old principles, leaning, in quiet nods and sighs, at his own parlour-fire, to the hereditary right (and of these characters there must have been many), and then read this poem, assuming in your heart his character,-conceive how proud he would look, and what pleasure there would be, what unconscious, harmless, humble self-conceit, self-compliment in his gravity; how wise he would feel himself, yet, after all, how forbearing; how much calmed by that most calming reflection (when it is really the mind's own reflection),—Ay, it was just so in King Henry the Sixth's time. Always the same passions at work." And again :

"Second Letter (five hours after the first).

"Dear Charles,-You must read over these Civil Wars again. We both know what a mood is; and the genial mood will it shall come for my sober-minded Daniel. He was a tutor and a sort of steward in a noble family, in which form was religiously observed, and religion formally; and yet there was much warm blood and mighty muscle of substance in them that the moulding-irons did not disturb, though they stiffened the vital man in them. Daniel caught and recommunicated the spirit of the great Countess of Pembroke, the glory of the North; he formed her mind, and her mind inspirited him. Gravely sober on all ordinary affairs, and not easily excited by

any, yet there is one on which his blood boils-whenever he speaks of English valour exerted against a foreign enemy. Do read over,but some evening when I am quite comfortable at your fireside,— and, oh, when shall I ever be if I am not so there!-that is the last altar at the horns of which my old feelings hang; but, alas, listen and tremble-nonsense!—well, I will read to you and Mary the 205, 206, and 207 pages-above all, that 93* stanza! What is there in description superior even in Shakespeare? only that Shakespeare would have given one of his glows to the first line, and flattered the mountain-top with his sovran eye, instead of that poor 'a marvellous advantage of his years.' But this, however, is Daniel, and he must not be read piecemeal;-even by leaving off and looking at a stanza by itself, I find the loss.

"S. T. COLERIDGE."

MICHAEL DRAYTON.

(Circa 1563-1631.)

Michael Drayton, of an ancient family, deriving its name from the town of Drayton, in Leicestershire, was born at Hartshill, Warwickshire, about the year 1563. His parents not being opulent, he was indebted to patronage for the benefits of education. His early discovery of talent, and sweetness of disposition and manners, recommended him to some person of distinction, whom he served in quality of page, and who bestowed what was needful for the cultivation of his mind.

In his youth he discovered a propensity to read poetry, and was anxious to know "what kind of creatures poets were.' To gratify this curiosity, the works of Virgil and other classics were put into his hands, which inspired him with a taste superior to his years. Sir Henry Godere, of Polsworth, is said to have maintained him for some time at Oxford; where, however, his name does not occur among the scholars of any college or hall. From his description of the Spanish invasion in 1568, it has been supposed he was an eye-witness of the defeat of the Armada, and held some commission in the army;

* "And, in a different style, the 98th stanza, page 208. What an image in 107, page 211! Thousands even of educated men would become more sensible, fitter to be members of parliament, or ministers, by reading Daniel; and even those few who, quoad intellectum, only gain refreshment of notions already their own, must become better Englishmen. Oh, if it be not too late, write a kind note about him!"-S. T. COLERIDGE.