Justice & Law Quote by Samuel Daniel

Custom comes first: not as quaint tradition, but as the invisible software that runs a society before legislators ever start drafting. When Samuel Daniel writes, "Custom, that is before all law", he’s staking out an almost anthropological claim in an age obsessed with authority. In late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England, "law" was gaining prestige as the formal expression of state power, yet daily life was still governed by habit, inherited practice, and the unspoken rules of class, church, and household. Daniel’s line quietly demotes statute to a second-order phenomenon: law doesn’t create behavior so much as it tries to corral what people already do.

Then he flips the hierarchy again: "Nature, that is above all art". For a Renaissance poet, "art" isn’t just painting and verse; it’s craft, rhetoric, the learned performance of culture. Daniel isn’t anti-art so much as he’s drawing a boundary around its ambition. Nature is the ultimate standard that refuses to be fully improved, civilized, or edited. That’s a subtle rebuke to courtly polish and the era’s faith in humanist training to perfect the self.

The subtext is a double warning: political reformers who ignore custom will fail, and artists (or courtiers) who think technique can outrank temperament are kidding themselves. Daniel’s couplet works because it sounds like a calm maxim while smuggling a critique of power and pretension: the deepest forces shaping us are prior to our rules and higher than our refinements.