Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/843

Rh Still if we accept this as the more natural alternative, we must not suppose that every detail in the narratives of the first part was planned with reference to the Syrian persecution, Nebuchadnezzar is not a mere double of Antiochus. There is a parallelism, it is true, between the circumstances of the persecuted Jews and the pious friends at Babylon, but it must not be pressed too far. Nor need we suppose that the book was circulated at once as a whole or among all classes of the Jews. The two parts of the work are separable, and the former part displays perhaps too much antiquarian research to be perfectly suitable for general circulation. The &quot; wise men, &quot; who formerly sat &quot; in the gate, &quot; had withdrawn since the time of the Captivity to the student s chamber ; and in the author of Daniel we behold the prototype of the scholar-martyrs and confessors of the Christian church.

1em  DANIEL, (1649-1728), a French Jesuit historian, was born at Rouen in 1649. He was educated by the Jesuits, entered the order at the age of eighteen, and became superior at Paris. He is best known by his His- toire de France depuis Vetablissement de la Monarchic Fran- qaise, which appeared first in 1713, and has since been pub lished in 1758 and in 1755-60, the last edition with notes by P. Griffet. Daniel published an abridgment in 1728; and another abridgment was published by Dorival in 1751. Though full of prejudices, which affect his accuracy, Daniel had the advantage of consulting valuable original sources, and his book has been praised by such authorities as Henri Martin and Thierry. Daniel also wrote a by no means successful reply to Pascal s Provincial Letters, entitled Entretiens de Cleanthe et d Eudoxe sur les Lettres Provinci- ales ; a Histoire de la Milice francaise depuis VetaUissement de la monarchic francaise jusqit a la fin de la regne de Louis le Grand (1721) ; two treatises on the Cartesian theory as to the intelligence of the lower animals, and other works.  DANIEL, (1562-1619), an English poet and historian, was the son of a music-master, and was born near Taunton, in Somersetshire, in 1562. In 1579 he was admitted a commoner of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he remained for about three years, and then gave himself up to the unrestrained study of poetry and philo sophy. He succeeded in being appointed tutor to Anne Clifford, daughter of the earl of Northumberland, and thus commenced a life of not ignoble dependence on several of the great houses of that day. He was first encouraged and, if we may believe him, taught in verse, by the famous countess of Pembroke, whose honour he was never weary of proclaiming. His first known work, a translation of Paulus Jovius, to which some original matter is appended, was printed in 1585. His first known volume of verse is dated 1592; it contains the cycle of sonnets to Delia and the romance called The Complaint of Rosamond. It has been plausibly conjectured that an earlier edition of the latter at one time existed ; if so, it seems to be lost beyond all hope. Several editions of the sonnets appeared in 1592, and they were very frequently reprinted during Daniel s lifetime. We learn by internal evidence that Delia lived on the banks of Shakespeare s river, the Avon, and that the sonnets to her were inspired by her memory when the poet was in Italy. To an edition of Delia and Rosamond, in 1594, was added the tragedy of Cleopatra, a severe study in the manner of the ancients, in alternately rhyming heroic verse, diversified by stiff choral interludes. The First Four Books of the Civil Wars, an historical poem in ottava rima, appeared in 1595. The bibliography of Daniel s works is attended with great difficulty, but as far as is known it was not until 1599 that there was published a volume entitled Poetical Essays, which contained, besides the &quot; Civil Wars,&quot; &quot; Musophilus,&quot; and &quot;A letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius,&quot; poems in Daniel s finest and most mature manner. On the death of Spenser, in the same year, Daniel received the somewhat vague office of poet-laureate, which he seems, however, to have shortly resigned in favour of Ben Jonson. In 1601 he published his Epistles to Great Personages in verse. Whether it was on this occasion is not known, but about this time, and at the recommendation of his brother-in-law John Florio, he was taken into favour at court, and published, in 1602, a Panegyric offered to ike King at Burleigh Harrington in Rutlandshire, written in ottava rima, a second edition of which, in 1603, contained an elegant prose essay called A Defence of Rime, as against the classic measures proposed by Webbe and Gosson. In 1603, moreover, Daniel was appointed Master of the Queen s Revels. In this capacity he brought out a series of masques and pastoral tragi comedies, of which were printed A Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, in 1604 ; The Queen s Arcadia, in 1606 ; and Hymen s Triumph, in 1615. Meanwhile had appeared, in 1605, Certain short poems, ivith tJie tragedy of Philotas, which latter was a study in the same style as Cleopatra. In 1604 the Civil Wars had been completed in eight books. In 1612 Daniel published a prose History of England,, from the earliest times down to the end of the reign of Edward III. This work was afterwards continued, and published towards the close of Daniel s life, without a date. He was made a gentleman-extraordinary and groom of the chamber to Queen Anne, sinecure offices which offered no hindrance to an active literary career. He was now acknowledged as one of the first writers of the time. Shakespeare, Selden, and Chapman are named among the few intimates who were permitted to intrude upon the seclusion of a garden- house in Old street, St Luke s, here, Fuller tells us, he would &quot; lie hid for some mouths together, the more retiredly to enjoy the company of the Muses, and then would appear in public to converse with his friends.&quot; Late in life Daniel threw up his titular posts at court and retired to a farm-house, which he rented at Beckington, in his native county of Somerset, where he died on the 14th of October 1619. The poetical writings of Daniel are very numerous, and, in spite of the eulogies of all the best critics, they have never yet been collected or reprinted. This is the more singular since, during the last century, when so little Elizabethan literature was read, Daniel retained his poetical prestige. In later times Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and others have expended some of their most genial criticisms on this poet. Of his multifarious works the sonnets are now, perhaps, most read. As second in date to none but Sidney s, they possess a special interest; they mark the first legalization of the great error of our sonneteers, in closing with a couplet, but they have a grace and tender ness all their own. Of a higher order is The Complaint of Rosamond, a soliloquy in which the ghost of the murdered woman appears and bewails her fate in stanzas of exquisite pathos. Among the Epistles to Distinguished Persons will be found some of Daniel s noblest stanzas and most polished verse. The epistle to the countess of Bedford is remarkable among those as being composed in genuine terza rima, till then not used in English. Daniel was particularly fond of a four-lined stanza of solemn alternately rhyming iambics, a form of verse distinctly misplaced in his dramas. These, inspired it would seeni by like 