It is also not best to give too much weight to the opinion that Shakespeare has been over-influenced by Daniel in the adoption of the quatrain and couplet structure. The whole period from Wyatt to Shakespeare shows a slow and steady mastery of the native over the foreign tendency. The change was not a sudden leap on the part of Daniel and Shakespeare, but a gradual growth occupying a half century and culminating in the English form. But if we should feel convinced that Shakespeare's memory was influenced by the sound of Daniel's cadences, this need not be considered discreditable to Shakespeare. Daniel's lines are smooth and melodious, and he was perhaps as great a master of the technique of rhyme as was Shakespeare. If we take the sonnets of both poets as criterion, the careful Daniel uses twice as many rhyme colours as Shakespeare, while Shakespeare repeats rhymes twice as often as Daniel. If double rhymes find less favor with the captious, we admit that Daniel has a third more than Shakespeare has, but again Shakespeare uses twice as many rhymes on syllables with secondary stress as does Daniel, and Shakespeare's bad rhymes are as bad as Daniel's and more frequent. Daniel's poetic powers were appreciated to the full in his time. To his contemporaries he was the "well languaged," the "sharp conceited," one by whose verse Rosamond was eternised, one who "divinely sonnetted his Delia." When Judicio in _The Return from Parnassus_ makes his inventory of poet's qualities, in giving his judgment on Daniel, he evidently has the _Delia_ in mind. "Sweet honey-dropping Daniel doth wage War with the proudest big Italian That melts his heart in sugared sonnetting." If Jonson, Daniel's rival as maker of masques for the Court, proclaimed him a good honest man but no poet, Spenser generously said he surpassed "all that afore him came;" and scarcely one of the more prominent of his contemporaries failed to address compliments to him. When Daniel was gentleman extraordinary and groom of the privy chamber to Anne, Queen-consort to James I., the Queen is said to have been a "favourer and encourager of his muse;" and his high social position made it easy for less favoured aspirants to praise him. But the perspective of time brings a more balanced judgment. While Lowell finds in the fact that Daniel was held in high esteem by his contemporaries a proof that noble diction was appreciated then as now, and while he admits that Daniel refined our tongue, yet he decided that Daniel had the thinking and languaging parts of a poet's outfit but lacked the higher creative gift. We shall find Daniel at his best, not when in prosaic soberness he sings "... the civil wars, tumultuous broils, And bloody factions of a mighty land."