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 much in common, and received generous encouragement from her in his literary projects. In 1591 he appeared before the world as a poet against his will. At the end of the 1591 edition of Sir Philip Sidney's ‘Astrophel and Stella,’ twenty-seven of his sonnets were printed. Daniel asserted that he was taken by surprise, and attributed his betrayal to ‘the indiscretion of a greedie printer,’ although his friend Nashe, the satirist, was concerned in editing the book. The sonnets appeared, as he frequently complained, ‘uncorrected,’ and no poet was more sensitive to typographical errors or more fastidious as a corrector of proof-sheets. To anticipate, therefore, the surreptitious publication of more of his ‘uncorrected’ sonnets, all of which, he assures us, were originally ‘consecrated to silence,’ he himself issued in 1592, with Simon Waterson, a volume (entered on Stationers' Registers, 4 Feb. 1591–2) entitled ‘Delia. Contayning certaine [50] sonnets.’ The book opened with a prose dedication to his patroness, Lady Pembroke, and ended with an ode. Nine of the previously published sonnets were omitted; the rest appeared here duly corrected. The whole relates a love adventure of the poet's youth, but it seems hopeless to attempt an identification of Delia, the poet's ladylove. She would seem to have been a lady of the west of England, for in the ‘Complaynt of Rosamond’ Daniel refers to ‘Delia left to adorn the West,’ and in sonnet xlviii of the collection writes:— Avon rich in fame though poore in waters Shall have my song, where Delia hath her seate. The Wiltshire Avon is apparently intended. The form of the volume irresistibly recalls Henry Constable's ‘Diana,’ which was not printed before 1592, although written earlier and circulated in manuscript. Daniel's poems were well received, and in the year of their first issue another edition appeared, together with four new sonnets and a long narrative poem, ‘The Complaynt of Rosamond,’ imitated from the ‘Mirror for Magistrates,’ in 106 seven-line stanzas. Two years later a third edition was called for (‘Delia and Rosamond augmented,’ 1594). Daniel took advantage of this opportunity to make a number of minute revisions in the text. He also displaced the prose dedication to Lady Pembroke with a sonnet, withdrew a few of the previously printed sonnets in favour of new ones, and added twenty-three stanzas to ‘Rosamond.’ Here, too, he printed for the first time a tragedy of ‘Cleopatra,’ modelled after Seneca. The latter, which was entered on the Stationers' Registers as early as 19 Oct. 1593, he dedicated separately to Lady Pembroke and stated that he wrote it at her request as a companion to her ‘Tragedy of Antonie,’ printed in 1592.

Before 1595 Daniel's reputation was assured. Edmund Spenser in his ‘Colin Clouts come home againe,’ which was then first published, described him as a new shepheard late up sprong, The which doth all afore him far surpasse; Appearing well in that well tuned song, Which late he sung unto a scornfull lasse. Spenser then addressing the poet by name, advises him to attempt tragedy. If Spenser thought well of ‘Delia,’ Nashe, who was readier to blame than praise, was an admirer of ‘Rosamond.’ As early as 1592 he wrote in his ‘Piers Pennilesse’: ‘You shall find there goes more exquisite paynes and puritie of wit to the writing of one such rare poem as Rosamond than to a hundred of your dimistical sermons.’

Daniel did not take Spenser's advice very literally. His next book was his ‘First Fowre Bookes of the Civile Wars between the two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke,’ 1595—a long historical poem, written in imitation of Lucan's ‘Pharsalia.’ It was entered on the Stationers' Registers in October 1594. In the same year another edition appeared with the same title, but containing a fifth book, bringing the narrative down to the death of Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset [q. v.] in 1455. At the end of the second book the writer eulogised the Earl of Essex and Lord Mountjoy, and it is clear that Daniel's acquaintance embraced almost all the cultured noblemen of the day. With Mountjoy he was henceforward especially intimate, and at the end of Elizabeth's reign was a frequent visitor at Wanstead.

Between 1595 and 1599 Daniel published nothing. Towards the end of the period he became tutor at Skipton, in Yorkshire, to Anne, daughter of Margaret, countess of Cumberland [see ; ]. The girl was only in her eleventh year. Daniel had shown some interest in the history of the Clifford family when he wrote the ‘Complaynte of Rosamond’ (ll. 335–6) [see ]. The poet's intercourse with the Countess of Cumberland and her daughter seems to have been thoroughly congenial. He addressed each of them in poetical epistles which were published in 1603, but the work of tuition was irksome to him. ‘Such hath been my misery,’ he wrote to Sir Thomas Egerton in 1601 when presenting him with a copy of his works, ‘that whilst I should have written the actions of men I have been constrayned