waiting till the approaching marriage of Alexis with another nymph shall have made impossible the renewal of her father’s former schemes.  Complications now arise, for it appears that Cloris has fallen in love with Thirsis, but fears ill success in her suit, supposing him in his turn to be pining for the love of Amarillis.  She employs the supposed boy to move her suit to Thirsis, and Silvia goes on her errand to court her lover for her mistress, fearing to find him already faithless to his love for her[255].  On her mission she is waylaid by the nymph Phillis, who has fallen in love with her in her male attire, careless of the love borne her by the honest but rude forester Montanus.  The varying fortune of Silvia’s suit on behalf of Cloris, Thirsis’ faith to the memory of Silvia, Montanus’ jealousy, and Phillis’ shame when she finds her proffered love rejected by the boy for whom she has sacrificed her modesty, are presented in a series of scenes and discourses which do not materially advance the business in hand.  Towards the end of the fourth act, however, we approach the climax, and matters begin to move.  Alexis’ marriage being now imminent, Silvia thinks she can venture at least to give her lover some spark of hope by narrating her story under fictitious names.  This she does, making use of the transparent anagrams Isulia and Sirthis[256].  As Silvia ends her tale Montanus rushes in, determined to be revenged for the favour shown by his mistress to the supposed youth.  He stabs Silvia, and carries off the garland she is wearing, believing it to be one woven by the hand of Phillis.  This naturally leads to the discovery of Silvia’s sex and identity, and supposing her dead, Thirsis falls in a swoon at her side.  The last act is, as usual, little more than an epilogue, in which we are entertained with a long account of the recovery of the faithful lovers, thanks to the care of the wise Lamia, an elaborate passage again modelled on Tasso, but again falling far short of the poetical beauty of the original.

Taken as a whole, and partly through being unencumbered with the satyric machinery of the Queen’s Arcadia, Hymen’s Triumph is a distinctly lighter and more pleasing composition.  At least so it appears by comparison, for Daniel everywhere takes himself and his subject with a distressing seriousness wholly unsuited to the style; we look in vain for a gleam of humour such as that which in the final chorus of the Aminta casts a reflex light over the whole play[257].  Again an advance may be observed, not only in the conduct of the plot, which moves artistically on an altogether different level, and even succeeds in arousing some dramatic interest, but likewise in the verse, which has a freer movement, and is on the whole less marred by the over-emphatic repetition of words and phrases in consecutive lines, a particularly irritating trick of the author’s pastoral style, or by the monotonous cadence and painful padding of the blank verse.  Daniel was emphatically one of those poets, neither few nor inconsiderable, the natural nervelessness of whose poetic diction imperatively demands the bracing restraint of rime.  It is noteworthy that this applies to his verse alone; such a work as the famous Defence of Rime serves to place him once for all among the greatest masters of ’the other harmony of prose.’