poems, notably The History of the Civil Wars (1595), followed. Tradition makes Daniel poet laureate after Spenser's death in 1599. There was probably no such post, but it is clear from verses prefixed to a single copy (B.M. C. 21, 2, 17) of the Works of 1601, which are clearly addressed to Elizabeth, and not, as Grosart, i. 2, says, Anne, that he had some allowance at Court:
I, who by that most blessed hand sustain'd,
In quietnes, do eate the bread of rest.
(Grosart, i. 9.)
Possibly, however, this grant was a little later than 1599. Daniel acted as tutor to Anne Clifford, daughter of the Earl of Cumberland, at Skipton Castle, probably by 1599, when he published his Poetical Essays, which include an Epistle to Lady Cumberland. It might have been either Herbert or Clifford influence which brought him into favour with Lady Bedford and led to his selection as poet for the first Queen's mask at the Christmas of 1603. No doubt this preference aroused jealousies, and to about this date one may reasonably assign Jonson's verse-letter to Lady Rutland (The Forest, xii) in which he speaks of his devotion to Lady Bedford:
though she have a better verser got,
(Or Poet, in the court-account), than I,
And who doth me, though I not him envy.
In 1619 Jonson told Drummond that he had answered Daniel's Defence of Ryme (?1603), that 'Samuel Daniel was a good honest man, had no children; but no poet', and that 'Daniel was at jealousies with him' (Laing, 1, 2, 10). All this suggests to me a rivalry at the Jacobean, rather than the Elizabethan Court, and I concur in the criticisms of Small, 181, upon the elaborate attempts of Fleay, i. 84, 359, to trace attacks on Daniel in Jonson's earlier comedies. Fleay makes Daniel Fastidious Brisk in Every Man Out of his Humour, Hedon in Cynthia's Revels, and alternatively Hermogenes Tigellius and Tibullus in The Poetaster, as well as Emulo in the Patient Grissel of Dekker and others. In most of these equations he is followed by others, notably Penniman, who adds (Poetaster, xxxvii) Matheo in Every Man In his Humour and Gullio in the anonymous 1 Return from Parnassus. For all this the only basis is that Brisk, Matheo, and Gullio imitate or parody Daniel's poetry. What other poetry, then, would affected young men at the end of the sixteenth century be likely to imitate? Some indirect literary criticism on Daniel may be implied, but this does not constitute the imitators portraits of Daniel. Fleay's further identifications of Daniel with Littlewit in Bartholomew Fair and Dacus in the Epigrams of Sir John Davies are equally unsatisfactory. To return to biography. In 1604 Daniel, for the first time so far as is known, became connected with the stage, through his appointment as licenser for the Queen's Revels by their patent of 4 Feb. Collier, New Facts, 47, prints, as preserved at Bridgewater House, two undated letters from Daniel to Sir Thomas Egerton. One, intended to suggest that Shakespeare was a rival candidate for the
