tti_, was to be a potent influence upon his
mental growth. The main theme, the cruelty of the Fair, is the same as
that of Petrarch. Daniel follows this master in making the vale echo
with his sighs, in appealing to her hand and cruel bosom for mercy, in
recounting the number of years he has worshipped her and honored her
with sonnets on which he is depending for immortal fame, in upbraiding
her for her devotion to the mirror rather than to him, and for ensnaring
him with the golden net of her hair and transpiercing him with the
darts from her crystalline eyes. In some of Petrarch's nobler flights
Daniel does not follow; the higher teachings of love are not revealed to
him, the step from human to divine he does not take; yet in the main,
the features of the earlier poet re-appear in Daniel's verse, as they do
in most of his fellow-sonneteers, including Shakespeare.

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 ho