Yet Drayton could write well, and had an agreeable lightsomeness of
fancy, as his "Nymphidia" proves. His poem "To the Cambro-Britons on
their Harp" is full of vigor; it runs, it leaps, clashing its verses like
swords upon bucklers, and moves the pulse to a charge.
Daniel was in all respects a man of finer mould. He did indeed refine our
tongue, and deserved the praise his contemporaries concur in giving him
of being "well-languaged."[267] Writing two hundred and fifty years ago,
he stands in no need of a glossary, and I have noted scarce a dozen
words, and not more turns of phrase, in his works, that have become
obsolete. This certainly indicates both remarkable taste and equally
remarkable judgment. There is an equable dignity in his thought and
sentiment such as we rarely meet. His best poems always remind me of a
table-land, where, because all is so level, we are apt to forget on how
lofty a plane we are standing. I think his "Musophilus" the best poem of
its kind in the language. The reflections are natural, the expression
condensed, the thought weighty, and the language worthy of it. But he
also wasted himself on an historical poem, in which the characters were
incapable of that remoteness from ordinary associations which is
essential to the ideal. Not that we can escape into the ideal by _merely_
emigrating into the past or the unfamiliar.
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