Daniel visited Italy about 1592, and in 1594 published "Cleopatra," a tragedy in imitation of Seneca, with a chorus. The chorus commences thus Now every mouth can tell What close was muttered: _How that she did not well,_ _To take the course she did!_ The prologue and the chorus are the first act. Naturally in Senecan drama Cleopatra does not commit suicide on the stage. A messenger narrates the moving incident in two hundred and fifty rhyming verses. In 1595 appeared the first four books of Daniel's "Civil Wars"; a fifth book came out in 1599. In 1600 the poet became tutor to Lady Ann Clifford, but he longed to return to his Muse, and did so in 1602. His "Civil Wars" were now a Seven Years' War, and he achieved Book VI. In 1603 he addressed a panegyric to James VI and I, the new King: he obtained a Court post in connexion with the Queen's Masques, and held his place and salary till 1618; wrote a History of England, and died at Beckington, Somerset, in 1619. He had written Masques, and a "Defence of Rhyme" against the friends of unrhymed verse in classical metres. His "Civil Wars" are a chronicle in rhyme--he spares neither himself nor the infrequent reader. Daniel opens by stating that had England devoted herself solely to fighting abroad, she might have annexed Europe to the Alps, the Rhine, and the Pyrenees. But this is an error: in 1429 the tide of English conquest recoiled from the standard of the Maid, and even before the civil wars at home England had failed to hold the Loire. The poem traces civil war from Richard II onwards to Edward IV, and, as Aristotle rightly said, an Epic poem cannot be written in that way. Daniel was an excellent man; a most industrious author, and we may say of him in the words of his own Epistle to Lord Henry Howard, Vertue, though luckless, yet shall 'scape contempt, And though it hath not hap, it shall have fame. Daniel had little of the exuberant fantasy of his time; he is "well-languaged Daniel," and easily intelligible. But even his most frequently quoted sonnet, Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, is far from being one of the best of poetic Hymns to Sleep, and his best gnomic poem, He that of such a height hath built his mind, is far too long. Davies. Sir John Davies, of Tisbury in Wilts, was born about 1569, we may suppose, if he went to Queen's, Oxford, in 1585. As a young Templar he is said to have been a brawler, and to have been expelled from the society for his vivacities in 1598. In 1599 Davies published his "Nosce Teipsum" ("Know Thyself"), on the nature and properties of the Soul and on its Immortality. The psychology may be old fashioned, but the versification is not. Only the best poets of the age could write the four-lined decasyllabic verses, with alternate rhymes, with the fluency and harmony of Davies. He has an answer to all objections,