About the author

Samuel Daniel (1562/3–1619) was a courtly poet and historian who penned narrative poems, sonnets, verse epistles, essays, plays, and masques. Daniel is best known today for his Defence of Rhyme, a treatise that promotes England's customary use of rhyme and accentual syllabic verse.

About the text

Musophilus takes the form of a dialogue between Philocosmus (love of the world) and Musophilus (lover of the muses). They voice the positions of the public life and the scholarly life. Although the two interlocutors deliver three speeches each, the eponymous character carries five-sixths of the dialogue. His lengthy and more sophisticated argumentation, as well as the poem's versification, communicates clearly Daniel's own side in the debate. The dialogue champions the vitality of civil learning for the nation state, no doubt responding to Thomas Lodge's fourth eclogue in A Fig for Momus (1595) and conversations with Fulke Greville, Daniel's friend who later wrote A Treatie of Humane Learning and to whom Daniel dedicates his dialogue.

The arts of memory

In the excerpt, which occurs near the poem's beginning, Musophilus takes issue with Philocosmus's uncritical faith in perpetuating one's name through an heir. Here two major kinds of memory arts – of being remembered after death – square off: the material legacy of primogeniture, inheritance, and estate building versus the intellectual legacy of learning and poetry. The clash in perspectives replicates the early modern tension between the values of the aristocratic class and those of the clerkly.

Textual notes

Musophilus was first printed in a collection of Daniel's writings, The Poeticall Essayes of Sam. Danyel (London, 1599), B2v–B4r.