SAMUEL DANIEL

His genius and style rarely if ever rise to that elevation, that the stronger and more terrific emotions of mind require. His figures and allusions are neither many nor bold; he had little invention in the design, or art in the arrangement of his ideas. His ear was good, his versification like his style flowing and unaffected. As his youth was passed in an age of better taste, fertile in genius and in poetry, he caught from the works he then admired, and the friendships he then form'd, a warm zeal and respect for his own art, and improv'd those abilities nature had given him to a certain pitch beyond which he never went, for his riper days were passed in an insipid court, nay worse, a court of bad taste, that affected out of policy a contempt for the favourite studies of the preceding reign, and that with a pedantic admiration and reverence for the ancients preferred to the brightest productions of genius such works as servilely and inelegantly copied their thoughts, or imitated more happily their puerilities. This may be sufficient to show why his natural talents, and the expectations Spenser had raised of him were blasted after the death of Elizabeth; he himself

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