Perhaps the idle world was more kind to the playful poem "Nimphidia" (1627) where Titania, to the wrath of Oberon, wooes a new Bottom, Pigwiggen. The tripping measure is that of Chaucer's "Sir Thopas": the Fairy Queen's equipage is thus described, Her chariot of a snail's fine shell, Which for the colours did excell, The fair Queen Mab becoming well, So lively was the limning: The seat the soft wool of the bee, The cover, gallantly to see, The wing of a py'd butterflee, I trow, was ample trimming. The venerable and undefeated singer returned to pastoral, "The Quest of Cynthia," and (1630) gave "The Muses' Elizium," full of pretty innocent ditties, while "Noah's Flood" is naturally in a more solemn strain, as are "Moses, His Birth and Miracles," and "David and Goliath". These prolix paraphrases do not greatly improve on the heroic prose of Genesis and Samuel. Drayton died in 1631, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, but not in the Poets' Corner. Daniel. Samuel Daniel is one more of the poets whose names linger on in histories of literature because they were contemporaries of Shakespeare and Spenser and may more or less have "taken Eliza and our James". A privately printed edition of 150 copies of Daniel's works (edited by Dr. Grosart) keeps his laurels green in such abundance as his intrinsic literary merits deserve. He seems to have been born near Taunton about 1562-63: his father is described as a music-master; he was at Oxford for three years or thereabouts. He published a translation of a tract by Paulus Jovius, "of rare inventions both military and amorous called Imprese," in 1585. He was patronized by "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," and resided at Wilton, where she received much literary society and he may have enjoyed excellent trout-fishing in the Nadder and the Wily. In 1591 he "commenced poet" with twenty-seven of the stereotyped love sonnets (not in the regular Petrarchian form) which appeared unsigned in Nashe's edition of "Astrophel". In 1592-1594, three editions, emended, were published; the collection is entitled "Delia". So sounds my Muse according as she strikes On my heart-strings attuned unto her fame. Probably Delia did not strike her Samuel's heart-strings with much skill and vigour. What though my Muse no honour got thereby, Each bird sings to herself, and so will I. With "Delia" appeared a long and very tedious "Complaint of Rosamond" (who sleeps in Godstow near Oxford). The piece is in stanzas of seven lines, and is as woeful as "The Mirror for Magistrates". The abbey built by "the credulous devout and apt-believing ignorant" was already ruined by the Great Pillage, and the melancholy place by the grey waters is Rosamond's only monument. Her ghost left Daniel "to prosecute the tenor of my woes": there is abundance of moral but very little of music in Rosamond's "Complaint".