I tf f -SO REESE LIBRAR UNIVERSITY Received , Accessions No. OF CALIFORNIA Shelf No. THE LIVES OF THE POETS-LAUREATE THE LIVES OF THE POETS-LAUREATE WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ON THE TITLE AND OFFICE. BY WILTSHIRE STANTON AUSTIN, JUN., B. A./ EXETER COLLEGE, OXON ; AND JOHN RALPH, M.A., BARRISTER-AT-LAW. OVTE yap iffroplaf ypa^opey, aXXa fliovs' ovre TCUS eT afcfft Travrcue eVeort cr]\(t)ffts aper^e* >} Ka.Kia., aXXa Trpay^ta ftpa-^y KO.I pf]fJLa t KOI Trai^ia rig, efjujxiffiv ijQove iTroirjae pa\\ov t r} /ua^at p,vpt6vKpoi, Kal Trapara^eig at ptytorai, Kal TroXiopKtai . PLUTARCH. LONDON: v RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET, in rtiinarg to f^er M ajejstg* M.DCCC.LIII. LONDON: Printed by Schulze and Co., 13, Poland Street. PREFACE, THIS Work is an attempt to arrange, under a new classification, an interesting portion of our literary and dramatic annals, and to give the origin and antiquities of an office, which, if it in some reigns fell deservedly into contempt, was in earlier times graced by the genius of Jonson and Dryden, and has of late been brought into honourable connection with the names of Southey, Words- worth, and Tennyson. The object of the Authors has been to produce a Work popular in style, but to be relied on for its accuracy. That some errors may be found in a volume, the contents of which are spread over such a space of time, and which make mention of the works of so many writers, will not be matter for surprise. Had the Authors been intent upon mere bodk-making, it would have been quite possible to have constructed two or three volumes out of the materials which have been PREFACE. sparingly (and it is hoped judiciously) used. Their aim has rather been to give the most concise accounts, which might be consistent with clearness, of the lives of such of the Poets-Laureate as have met with biographers, and, in collecting from multifarious sources the narratives of the career of those who have not been so fortunate, to record nothing which was not in itself valuable, or interesting from its relation to literary, dramatic, or political history. Nothing would have been easier than to have imparted to the Work, by a copious parade of references, an appearance of industry and research, if not of learning. LONDON, JULY 21, 1853. CONTENTS. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER ..... 1 BEN JONSON ...... 49 SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT . . . . .109 JOHN DRYDEN ...... 14.9. THOMAS SHADWELL . . . . . .183 NAHUM TATE ...... 196 NICHOLAS ROWE ....... 223 REVEREND LAURENCE EUSDEN .... 239 COLLEY CIBBER ...... 246 WILLIAM WHITEHEAD ..... 287 REVEREND THOMAS WARTON ..... 316 HENRY JAMES PYE ...... 333 ROBERT SOUTHEY . . . . . .346 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 396 LIVES THE LAUREATES INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. THE vivid imagination of the Greeks created a mytho- logy, which has coloured the sentiments of all succeeding generations. To understand many of our vernacular phrases and allusions, we must even now go back to that wonder- ful life and learn something of its tendencies and meaning. In its commonest forms it overflowed with poetry. All nature ministered to its embellishment. Every stream had its naiad : the forest, the plain, the mountain and the ocean-cave were thronged with imaginary habitants ; while the diversified products of the earth had each their guardian divinity, and their consecrating use. The con- spicuous glory of the Olympic conqueror was typified by the silvery olive ; and what symbol so appropriate to indicate the immortality of Verse as the unfading laurel ? A myth was readily supplied. The tree was at one time a nymph seen and beloved by Apollo. The bashful Thessalian fled B 2 INTRODUCTION. before his eager pursuit, and ere overtaken an interposing power shielded her from harm, and the virgin stood trans- formed into a bay-tree. The disappointed god wreathed for himself a garland from its boughs, and pronounced it for ever sacred to himself. The Romans adopted from the Greeks the practice of rewarding eminent merit by the presentation of some symbolical chaplet. They, however, enlarged it into an elaborate system. A variety of crowns, formed of various materials, were held forth as the worthy guerdon of nume- rous warlike feats and accomplishments ; and certain rules were prescribed which the candidate or the champion was strictly required to observe. We have no very authentic assurance that poets were thus rewarded under the repub- lic ; but later, Statius three times gained the prize in the Alban contests, instituted or revived by Domitian, and on such occasions a garland of laurel leaves was the usual acknowledgment of musical or poetical success. The custom most prevailed, however, after the revival of letters in the middle ages. Learning then appeared to many with more than a syren's fascination. Its progress and its pursuit became the sole subject of their concern. No form or ceremony was omitted that might feed a useful vanity or kindle the ennobling emulation. Such forms then, were not idle or meaningless. At a time when profound learning existed side by side with an almost hopeless barbarism ; any fiction that surrounded the individual with dignity, or challenged respect for his occupation, was more valid to withstand wrong, than the fitful vigilance of a prince, or the frail enactments of ill-executed laws. Hence originated the pomp and the splendour of the mediaeval laureations to which we shall have occasion presently to advert. In England the title of poet-laureate was then never conferred, as is now the case, by royal appointment ; it was INTRODUCTION. 3 a scholastic distinction, and of many poets-laureate, the King merely selected one to publish his praises and to attend his court. It was simply a university degree. The origin of degrees, as is the establishment of the universities by which they were conferred, is involved in considerable obscurity. Such institutions have no type in the classic era. As Christianity prevailed over Paganism, the schools connected with cathedral churches, and after- wards with monasteries, became the sole nurseries of general education. When Bishops became temporal lords and monks accumulated wealth, those seminaries were neglected; and scholars eschewing the rule of their negligent masters, withdrew from their several societies and themselves opened independent places of teaching. In this way the University of Paris had its origin. These establishments were encouraged and prospered. Nobles endowed them and kings granted immunities ; but though schools of universalia studia, as had been the cathe- dral and monastic seminaries, it was long before they were erected into universities or corporations; and this word University we first find applied to the school at Paris, in a decretal of Pope Innocent III., dated the beginning of the thirteenth century. They then obtained powers of self- government and of conferring degrees of honour and precedence within their several republics. These degrees which at first were only the old distinction between teacher and scholar became civil honours, were conferred with great pomp, and were in some cases placed on a par with nobility itself. " When a Bachelor was created Master," says Wood, " the Chancellor gave him the badges with very great solemnity, and admitted him into the fraternity with a kiss on his left cheek using then these words, ' En tibi insignia honoris tui en librum, en cucullum, en pileum, en denique amoris mei pignus, osculum ; in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sanctus.' That being- is 2 4 INTRODUCTION. done, he was to consider what was to belong to the reverence of so great a name as Master, viz., what he ought to have in relation to his habit, because for fifteen days he was to walk the streets in a round cap, not a plaited cap; neither in a collobe or tabard. He ought also to be so chaste and modest in word, look and action, that he may resemble a virgin newly espoused. Also that he was not to go alone ; but always chiefly within these fifteen days have with him an Esquire or supporter of his body or at least a com- panion. "When the ultimate day of proceeding was come, care was to be taken that the Inceptor should be commended by a venerable company of Masters with a brief and well- ordered speech, and that also the Master under whom he proceeds should use decent and fruitful words, lest the venerable company of Masters should be reviled by the standers-by, for the miscarriage and ill deport- ment of one Master redounds to the dishonour of all the rest." Laureation, which had accompanied degrees in law and medicine, was reserved eventually for the graduate in gram- mar. It w r as in fact, his Master's degree in that faculty which included rhetoric and the art of versification. These degrees were more common at Oxford than at Cambridge, and there are various instances of their beir>g taken so late as the sixteenth century. Thus by the University Registers at Oxford, we find that on the 12th March, 1511, one Edward Watson, student in grammar, obtained a concession to be graduated and laureated in that faculty, provided he composed a Latin comedy, that is ; any short poem not of a tragic cast, or one hundred Latin verses in praise of his University. The next year Richard Smyth obtained the like concession on condition that at the next public Act he should affix one hundred Latin hexameters to the great INTRODUCTION. 5 gates of St. Mary's Church ; and Maurice Byrchenshaw, scholar in rhetoric, obtained the same honour provided he wrote the customary number of verses, and promised not to read Ovid's " Art of Love" to his pupils. On the 5th June, 1511, John Bulman graduated in rhetoric, and a wreath was placed on his head by the Chancellor of the University. Skelton was laureated at Oxford, and some years afterwards, viz. in 1493, he obtained public per- mission to wear his laurel at Cambridge, or as we now should term it, took an ad eundem there ; thus Churchyard writing in 1568 says : " Nay, Skelton wore the laurel wreath, And past in schoels, ye knoe." Whittington, a graduate in rhetoric, in his panegyric on Wolsey, says : " Suscipe Lauricomi munuscula parva Robert!." (Accept this slight tribute from Robert the Laureate.) Through the more general use of English, the Latin lan- guage gradually became an accomplishment rather than a medium of communication ; and such degrees ceasing to be useful were no longer solicited or conferred. The last instance was in 1514, when one Thomas Thomson was laureated. In the annals of the German Empire, we meet with several instances of poets being presented with a crown of laurel. Frederick III. conferred it on Conradus Celtes Protuccius, the first poet-laureate of Germany, who by a patent of Maximilian I. was made Superintendent or Rector of the College of Poetry and Rhetoric in Vienna, with power to bestow the laurel on approved candidates. The honour being purely civil, emanated solely from the supreme authority, and the power of conferring it was occasionally invested in Counts Palatine and others, as a 6 INTRODUCTION. delegated portion of the imperial prerogative. Rodolph 11. by his letters patent, elevated two professors of the law at Strasburg, George Obrechtus and his son Thomas, to that rank ; and the licence to grant the degrees of Doctor, Licentiate, and Bachelor of both laws, of Master and Bachelor of Arts, and of Poet-Laureate was inserted in the patent, as appurtenant to the dignity. It was long a debated question among the learned whether such degrees were the same in their nature, and consequently were attended with the same privileges as those conferred by a University, and the power itself like all other authority was at length contested by the Popes, and Pius V. by a bull denied it to the Counts, and deprived the recipients of all the privileges such degrees might otherwise have conferred upon them in the Church. The learned research of Selden has enabled us to present the reader with the following account of the manner in which the ceremony of laureating was performed at Stras- burg in the seventeenth century. In the year 1616 one John Paul Crusius had petitioned for the laurel. Obrechtus, the Count Palatine, in a formal instrument dated 20th December, reciting how degrees are conducive to the ad- vancement of learning, and how Crusius having already attained the dignity of Master in Arts, now through his skill in versifying, deserved also the laurel of Poetry ; through the power and licence given him by the Emperor, appointed the 23rd of December for the presentation. In the document which is extant, he beseeches and entreats all who have any affection for learning, and especially all noble and illustrious lords, counts, and barons, all academic dignitaries, all doctors, licentiates, professors, masters and others, not only to dignify the ceremony by their presence, but also to assist him with their prayers for the safety of the Church, the School* and the Commonwealth. On the day appointed, Crusius stept forward before the as- INTRODUCTION. 7 sembled magnates, arrayed in all the pompous insignia of their quality, and recited a short Latin poem petitioning for the honour of the laurel. The Count then in a long Latin oration extolled the poetical art, and addressing Crusius, proceeded in graceful panegyric to exhort him ever to merit and sustain his high reputation ; that Justice herself might pronounce him worthy of the honour, nor even Envy question his claim. When the murmur of applause had subsided, Crusius again stood forth to recite an original poem, on a subject selected by himself. This composition extended to about three hundred lines in elegiac metre, its theme was " Quam nihil omnis homo," and it was termed his exercise for obtaining the laurel. The Count, to give the greater assurance that he had full power and authority to confer the title, produced his letters patent from the Emperor. The public notary solemnly inspected the seal and subscription, and read the document aloud to the meeting. The Count then briefly summing up the authority given him, observed that whoever desired to be crowned with the laurel, must first take the oath of allegiance to the Emperor and his successors, which he ordered the notary to read and Crusius carefully to listen to. When Crusius had taken the oath, the Count in another Latin oration proceeded to the main business of the day, and placed the laurel upon the head of the candidate, and a ring of gold upon his finger, pronouncing him Poet- Laureate, and confirming him in all the privileges of the degree. The Count then made another speech, expatiating upon the laurel and the ring ; and Crusius returned thanks in a poetical recitation which concluded the elaborate cere- monial. All patronage given to letters requires the nicest tact and judgment in its application. The indulgence of the emperors was abused by the lavish and indiscriminate dis- tribution of poetical honours ; and the very means designed 8 INTRODUCTION. as an encouragement of the art, tended ultimately to cover it with ridicule. The learned Paulus Hachenbergius, in his " Dissertations on the state of Mediaeval Germany," a monument, as his editor Franckius justly observes, of stupendous diligence, has commented on the evil con- sequences of this injudicious liberality. Referring to the time of the promulgation of the constitution of Maximilian, concerning the privileges of poets, he writes : " Ab eo tempore magnus poetarum proventus in Germania fuit, qui Latino aeque ac patrio carmini studium addixere : plures procul dubio et meliores futuri ; nisi coronse laurese etiam ad imperitos delatse essent, et divinam ccelestemque artem ipsa canentium vilitas paupertasque prostituisset." To check the abuse, it was ordained that those only should be crowned who had obtained testimonials of their capacity from a board of at least three examiners. But this rule was relaxed, and it was observed that poets-laureate were as plentiful in Germany as poets were rare in all countries. The wits of Italy and Germany launched the most ferocious satires (" de sanglantes satires" is the strong expression of the Abbe du Resnel) alike against those who received and those who conferred the title. We do not read, however that the privilege was ever suspended, and so late as 1621, the Emperor Ferdinand II., in augmenting those of the University of Strasburg, especially gave it the right of creating poets-laureate, before enjoyed by the Counts Palatine. That body was not slow to exercise its authority. The examination of three candidates who presented them- selves was referred to the Faculty of Philosophy ; and it was arranged the degrees in the two branches should be conferred at the same time. The ceremony was announced. The degrees in philosophy were conferred, and a concert of vocal and instrumental music divided the labours of the day. The Syndic of the University then made an inge- nious speech upon the connection between philosophy and INTRODUCTION. poetry, and the three candidates proceeded to give public proofs of their sufficiency. The Dean then rose. He applauded these favourites of the Muses, and bitterly reflected upon what had happened : that, through the ignorance and the corruption of the times, the sacred laurel, the peculiar privilege of the Caesars, was prostituted and sold, so to speak, to men whose harshness, prosiness, and insipidity rendered them unworthy of the name of poets. But he would not hesitate to assure his audience that the University of Strasburg, in the case of the three poets now before them, could never be exposed to such reproaches. The Chancellor next proposed three oaths, which were severally taken ; 1 . that they would sustain the privileges of the University ; 2. that they would not accept the crown from any other University, nor from any Count Palatine, even though he were an hereditary one ; and 3. that, in all their compositions, they would propose for their object, the glory of God and the honour of his Imperial Majesty ; that they would banish from their work anything that might hurt another's reputation ; and that in their conduct, nothing should escape them which might be turned to the disgrace of literature or the dishonour of their University. He then created and crowned them poets-laureate, and accorded them all the honours, ornaments, privileges, prerogatives, and immunities, in the best possible form, in such manner as other poets-laureate use and enjoy them, notwithstanding all laws and customs which would seem to derogate from such imperial grace and concession. The laureation of Petrarch in the Capitol, will naturally suggest itself to the reader's mind. This proceeding appears to have been an act of homage, and a public assurance of protection on the part of the city or senate to the most distinguished poet and man of letters of the age. Petrarch had coveted some such distinction, and Robert of 10 INTRODUCTION. Anjou, King of Naples, aware of his desires, had urged the Roman Senate to offer such a recognition of the poet's merit. Accordingly, a notification of their intention reached Petrarch, at Vaucluse, on the 23rd of August, 1340. The Neapolitan monarch was an enthusiast in letters, and Petrarch embarked at once for the court of his patron, carrying with him his Latin epic, " Africa." He there demanded a public trial of his qualifications, and offered to reply, during three successive days, to all questions that might be pro- posed to him in history, literature, or philosophy. He passed his examination with distinguished success ; and the King, pronouncing him fully worthy of the proposed triumph, took off his robe of state, and threw it around Petrarch, desiring him to wear it on the day he was to receive his crown. He proceeded to Rome, and on Easter day, 8th of April, 1341, slowly ascended the Capitoline Hill, amid the acclamations of the assembled city. Twelve youths, belonging to the principal families in the place, preceded him, reciting extracts from his poems; and the Count Anguillara, one of the senators who governed the town during the residence of the Popes at Avignon, after having made a speech to the people, placed the laurel on his head, and crowned him as poet-laureate and historio- grapher. He then recited a sonnet on the heroes of ancient Rome, and returning to the Church of St. Peter, dedicated his chaplet on the altar, and travelled home slowly by land, luxuriating in his renown. He was pre- sented with letters patent by the King of Naples and from the Senate, authorizing him to read and explain ancient books, compose new ones, write poems, and wear his laurel crown whenever it pleased him. The poet had sought this honour partly, perhaps, from vanity, but chiefly for protection. We read in his letters how some had called him a necromancer, some a heretic, because he read Virgil. Accusations or even suspicions of INTRODUCTION. 1 1 such a nature were then no light matter. Verse-making- was looked upon by many as nearly allied to magic, and such unholy tampering with unseen agencies called for reprehension or summary punishment. These opinions were not counteracted by the conduct of those in authority, and the Dominican Solipodio, when Grand Inquisitor, was the scourge and the terror of poetasters. Petrarch escaped from Scylla to fall into Charybdis. Though relieved from the imputation of witchcraft, he feelingly complained that envy had stepped in to increase the number of his calumni- ators. Even the great Maffei could not contain his spleen. He was a scholar, and one of the first Latin poets of his time, and some epistles Petrarch had written appeared to him excessively absurd. " Having read them," says he, " I could not help laughing ; and who would not laugh, to see a man, who can only be famous through the assent of those who concur to praise him, fool enough to make his reputation depend on the certificate of an ignorant notary ?" Maffei had not been guilty of such folly. He had never been offered the laurel. But the Romans, in the dearth of more manly occupa- tion, were delighted with any idle or frivolous spectacle, and undignified burlesques would occasionally divert the listlessness of an unoccupied but lively people. About a hundred years after Petrarch's coronation, one Camillo Querno visited the city, bearing as his credentials an epic poem, with the title of "Alexias," extending to the im- posing length of twenty thousand lines. These he proposed to repeat for the edification of the Latin gentry; a day was fixed for the purpose, when, to give the performance greater eclat, he retired with a select circle to a small island in the Tiber. He there proceeded with the recita- tion, assisting his labour by frequent and copious draughts of wine, till at the conclusion of the feat a crown of mingled laurel, vine, and cabbage leaves was placed on his 1 2 INTRODUCTION. head, and he was dubbed Archipoeta by his jocose auditory. Leo X., hearing of the circumstance, was delighted with the jest, and invited Querno to the pontifical palace. His voracious appetite was whetted rather than satiated by the sumptuous dishes sent to him from the papal table ; but before receiving his wine he was required to extemporize a certain number of Latin verses, an art in which he pos- sessed a marvellous facility, and for every false quantity, a proportion of water was added by the unfeeling orders of his entertainer. On one unhappy occasion, holding forth a goblet pallid with immoderate dilution, the poet assuaged his despondency by the following epigrammatic conceit : "In cratere meo Thetis est conjuncta Lyseo : Est Dea juncta Deo, sed Dea major eo." Such refined torture on the part of His Holiness amused their Eminences the Cardinals, and once excited some literary sparring between the accomplished Leo and his dependent, which the pious care of Paulus Jovius has preserved for the amusement of posterity : " Archipoeta facit versus pro mille poetis," once indignantly yet proudly exclaimed Querno. " Et pro mille aliis archipoeta bibit," was the ready and reproving reply. " Porrige," exclaimed the bard in despair, " Porrige quod faciat mihi carmina docta, Falernum." The pontifical punster smiled as he observed : i " Hoe etiam enervat debilitatque pedem" and the worsted victim at once withdrew from the unequal contest. INTRODUCTION. 13 Some of our readers may be surprised to discover a poet-laureate among the Popes. Pius II., however, attained that dignity, and has left his written testimony to the fact. In a letter to his friend, Cardinal Sbigneus, Bishop of Cracow, he confesses his former devotion to the Muses, and his composition of elegies, eclogues, nay, even a satire. He assumed not, however, the designation of poet of his own accord, nor used the title until the Emperor Frederick, having seen some of his letters, presented him with the laurel at Frankfort. " Edidimus et nos aliquando versus; scripsimus elegias, eclogas, satyram quoque dic- tavimus ; non tamen poetse nomen propria temeritate suscepimus, nee prius hoc titulo sumus usi quam nos Fredericus Csesar apud Franckfordiam, visis quibusdam epistolis nostris, laurea nos donavit." Thus England, Germany, and Italy had their poets- laureate, nor was the title unknown in Spain. Nicolas Antoine mentions one Arias Montanus, who received the laurel at Alcala, and asserts that the custom was estab- lished in the University of Seville. Le Tassoni speaks of Ausias March, a Catalan, who was poet-laureate, and as famous in his time as Petrarch had been eighty years before. It may not be deemed out of place here to mention Vargas the Spaniard, who, for an epithalamium he wrote on Queen Mary's marriage with Philip at Win- chester, received a pension of two hundred crowns for life. France alone appears never to have known the title, and this peculiarity has elicited some amusing and characteristic remarks from a French writer, jealous for the honour of his country. Referring to a formula used at Strasburg, the Abbe du Resnel asks, " What are these privileges and immunities which were conferred with such emphasis ?" and replies, "It is not easy to give any idea." The worthy Abbe had forgotten that he had before confessed to the tangible realities that accrued from them, but his 14 INTRODUCTION. patriotism at that moment must have been dormant. These immunities might have been in the first instance usurped, but that they were ultimately recognised by law is evident from the constitution of Maximilian, " De Honore et privilegiis Poetarum," referred to by Hachen- bergius. Such, however, must necessarily in process of time have become more and more contracted, until they gradually became extinct, and a law of the Emperor Philip expressly declared that such could no longer be claimed. " Poetse nulla immunitate donantur." The weighty dispute upon this simple text will afford an illustration of legal subtlety. The learned Cujas and his followers maintained that it by no means implied that poets were not most worthy of such, but that there was no actual legislative enactment upon the point. The opposite school pro- ceeding farther in the reaction against such privileges, maintained that the clause was not to be regarded as noticing an omission merely, but was a peremp- tory exclusion of poets from any and all immunities whatever. To return, however, to the Abbe du Resnel. The im- possibility those in power labour under to confer always real honours upon meritorious persons, drives them often to invent imaginary ones. But when they who govern are fortunate enough to have as much generosity as power, it is by solid recompenses and not by exterior ornament and vain titles that they nourish emulation among those who consecrate their talents to the advantage and glory of the state. Although the French poet Ronsard is ordinarily represented with the laurel crown, yet the Abbe could not discover he have ever received one in due form, though the University of Paris believed it had the right to grant it. " Nevertheless," says he, " no poet perhaps was ever more honoured than he was. Charles IX. condescended to write poetry in his praise, in which he assured him the INTRODUCTION. 1 5 art of versifying ought to be held in greater honour than the capacity to rule. " L'art de faire des vers, dftt-on s'en indigner, Doit etre a plus haut prix que celui de regner." " A prince," resumes the excited Abbe, " who could think and express himself after this fashion, was he under any necessity to have recourse to the laurel, to assure immortality to a poet he judged worthy of it ? And, on the other hand, the signal favours the generality of our kings, especially since Francis I., have heaped upon those who cultivated the Muses ; the highest dignities in church and state, which often become their recompense, inspires them with an indifference to a crown, which was granted to poets in other countries, only because the donors had usually nothing better to give them." Oh, incomparable land, in which a sonnet or a satire is repaid with arch- bishoprics and dukedoms ! Well may the Abbe exclaim : " It is not surprising, we have had many poets amongst us, who have exulted in the title of Poet to the King ; whilst we have had no one who has taken that of Poet- Laureate !" Chaucer obtained from King Edward III. the grant of a pitcher of wine, charged on the port of London, to be received daily during his life. This was commuted by Richard II. into an annual payment of twenty marks ; but it does not appear from the letters patent, that the allowance was in acknowledgment of the poetical merit of the recipient. On his return from abroad, where he had probably made the acquaintance of Petrarch, he styled himself, Poet-Laureate ; but the title was probably nothing more than a poetical assumption ; as Skelton, writing of Gower, Chaucer and Lydgate, winds up his description with the line : " They wanted nothing but the lawrell." 1 6 INTRODUCTION. The great eminence of this poet has induced some writers to take his laureateship for granted, forgetful of the fact, that in those times poetical merit was even nominally no qualification for the honour. Skill in Latin versi- fication was the essential requisite. Petrarch relied upon his " Africa." The university exercises were, of course, in Latin, and poets-laureate were only expected to celebrate their patrons in that tongue. The language fell into disuse, and the degrees became obsolete ; the designation was wrested from its original meaning, and survives solely in its present acceptation. From very early times, there was an officer attached to the court, termed the King's Versifier. Richard I. took with him to Palestine one William the Foreigner, who was styled an excellent poet of that age, to sing the renown of his crusade. Edward II., in his advance on Scotland, was accompanied by his versifier Baston, a Carmelite friar of Scarborough, described by Bale as " laureatus apud Oxonienses," who was to celebrate his conquest of that country. He wrote a poem on the siege of Stirling Castle, but was captured, and compelled to change his views, and to write on the contrary side. " Jussu Roberti Brusii tormentis compulsus erat, ut contrarium scriberet, quasi Scoti de Anglis triumphassent." This he did ingeniously, though with reluctance, and thereby obtained his release. The Scotch must have had some relish for humour even in those days. Wale the versifier, panegy- rised King Henry I. and the park which he made at Woodstock. In Henry III.'s reign, we first find a record of an annual stipend being paid to that officer. A French minstrel, Henry of Avranches, received six shillings a day (equivalent to seven and sixpence of the present currency) as the King's Versifier. Master Henry, as he is termed, must have been a man of note, and consequently had his enemies. In one of his poems he had reflected on the INTRODUCTION. 1 7 boorish manners of the denizens of Cornwall. The insult was taken up by one Michael Blancpaine, i. e. Whitebread, or Whitbread, a Cornish man, with great spirit. It is amusing to witness the atrabilious rancour of the literary character manifesting itself in those far-off ages. Michael, in a Latin poem recited before the Abbot of Westminster and other high ecclesiastical dignitaries, tells Master Henry how he had once termed him the arch poet, but that henceforth he will only call him a poet ; nay and he waxes wroth as he approaches his climax he shall be dubbed a petty poetaster ! He then launches out in a virulent attack on his person, much in the style of Churchill's " Epistle to Hogarth." We first read of the King's poet-laureate in the reign of Edward IV. JOHN KAY was honoured with the appointment, and by a singular fatality, none of his poetical efforts have been transmitted to our times. The reputation of some of his successors might probably not have suffered had they been equally negligent or careful of their fame. The only specimen of his literary talents that has survived to prop his reputation, is an English prose translation of the Siege of Rhodes, a work originally written in Latin. This was printed in London, in 1506. We have no record of the date of his birth or death. ANDREW BERNARD was poet-laureate to Henry VII. and Henry VIII. He was born at Toulouse, and became an Augustine monk. Rymer preserves an instrument by which the King grants to Bernard, poet-laureate, a stipend of ten marks, until he can obtain some equiva- lent appointment. He received several ecclesiastical preferments in this country, one of which was the mastership of St. Leonard's Hospital at Bedford, which c 1 8 INTRODUCTION. he owed to the favour of Smith, Bishop of Lincoln, one of the founders of Brasenose. He was likewise made the royal historiographer, and tutor in grammar to Prince Arthur. In his character as laureate, he wrote an address to Henry VIII. for the most auspicious beginning of the tenth year of his reign, an " Epithalamium on the Mar- riage of Francis, the Dauphin of France, with the King's daughter," "A New Year's Gift, 1515;" and verses wishing prosperity to his Majesty's thirteenth year. All these were of course in Latin. As royal historiographer, he wrote a " Chronicle of the Life of Henry VIIL," and " Commentaries" upon his reign. He composed likewise some Latin hymns, and was living in 1522. JOHN SKELTON was poet-laureate to King Henry VIII . He was the last who bore the title in its primary signi- fication as a University degree, the last whose qualification for the office was skill in Latin versification. The little we know of this singular writer only serves to provoke our curiosity. A jesting priest, with coarse humour, his rough laugh tingled rudely in the ear of Wolsey, and cowled monks waxed wroth at his strange and caustic satire. Unconsciously, like Chaucer and others our greatest thinkers, while entertaining a profound reverence for the Romish Church, he was steadily pre- paring the English mind for the great Reformation. Those men were ever foremost to brand with ignominy the foul corruptions of the papal system ; but while abhorring heretics, and justifying persecution, they little dreamed that they themselves were efficient instruments in securing the triumph of the opinions they denounced. So essential are institutions for the preservation of truth, so fondly does human weakness cling to any system that has obtained the sanction of time, that the boldest would INTRODUCTION. 1 9 have shrunk from any attempt to deface the unity of that marvellous organization which had assumed an indefeasible dominion over the consciences of men. They thought to purify the stream, and blinked the fact that the fountain- head was poisoned. The struggles of such men awake a painful interest. Enslaved to a system they reverenced as a whole, yet despised in detail ; their inner belief jarring with that outer creed which education and custom had fastened round their minds ; they inculcate alike a lesson and a warning. The chain that shackled them has been broken, and the thraldom shattered. A spurious liberality would again facilitate the imposition of the exploded delusion. Skelton was descended from a family anciently settled in Cumberland. He himself was probably born in Norfolk soon after the middle of the fifteenth century. He studied at Cambridge, at Oxford and at Louvaine. At Oxford he was laureated, and obtained the privilege to wear a parti- cular robe. In a satirical poem against his contemporary Garnythe, he says triumphantly : " A king to me mine habit gave : At Oxford, the University, Advanced I was to that degree ; By whole consent of their senate, I was made Poet-Laureate." The habit here referred to, and which by special favour he was allowed to wear at Cambridge, was a robe of white and green, as we gather from another of his diatribes against the same individual. " Your sword ye swear I ween, So trenchant and so keen, Shall cut both white and green. Your folly is too great, The king's colors to threat." The word Calliope was worked upon it, in silk and gold as we learn from the following poem : c 2 20 INTRODUCTION. " Why were ye, Calliope, embroider'd with letters of gold ? Skelton Laureate, orator regius, maketh this answer : " Calliope, As ye may see, Regent is she Of poets all, Which gave to me The high degree Laureate to be Of fame royal ; Whose name enrolled, With silk and gold, I dare be bold Thus for to wear Of her I hold And her household ; Though I was old And somewhat sere. Yet is she fain, Void of disdain, Me to retain Her servitor, With her certain I will remain As my sovereign Most of pleasure. Malgre tous malheurs." Our author became famous as a scholar and a satirist ; and was almost the only popular poet that appeared during the reign of Henry VII. But though a favourite with the lower orders, his talents were equally recognised by the learned, and fostered by the noble. Erasmus styled him the light and the glory of English literature ; and Caxton, in his preface to a work published in 1490, pays him the following compliment : " But I pray Master Skelton, late created poet-laureate in the University of Oxford, to oversee and correct this said book, and to address and expound where, as shall be found fault, to them that shall require it. For him I know sufficient to expound and English every difficulty that is therein. For he hath late translated the epistles of Tully, and the INTRODUCTION. 21 book of Diodorus Siculus, and divers other works out of Latin into English, not in rude and old language, but in polished and ornate terms craftily, as he that hath read Virgil, Ovid, Tully, and all the other noble poets and orators to me unknown. And also he hath read the Nine Muses, and understands their musical sciences, and to whom of them each science is appropred. I suppose he hath drunk of Helicon's well. Then I pray him, and such other, to correct, add, or minish where as he or they shall find fault," &c. His talents procured him the appointment of tutor to Prince Henry, and he received substantial encouragement from Algernon Percy, fifth Earl of Northumberland, a noble- man who, in an illiterate period, was an enthusiastic student of letters, and a liberal patron of all contemporary merit. In 1498 Skelton took orders, and was soon afterwards presented to the rectory of Dysse, in Norfolk ; but his conduct was not such as to obtain the approbation of his diocesan. His conversation partook largely of the nature of his ballads; and in the pulpit his propensity to buf- foonery and raillery was not held in due subjection. " Having been guilty of certain crimes, as most poets are," quietly observes Wood, Bishop Nykke suspended him from his benefice, and in 1501, it would seem, he suffered temporary incarceration. But though his mouth was closed, his pen was free ; and his angry soul threw forth fierce invectives, written in coarse rude doggrel, too pun- gent to be soon forgotten. These were flung abroad at random, like floating seeds upon a gusty day, and settled and struck root, as chance listed. Many of them were never committed to print, but learned by heart by hundreds, repeated in the roadside alehouse or at the market-cross on fair days, when dealer and customer left booth and stall vacant, to push into the crowd hedging round the itinerant ballad-singer. 22 INTRODUCTION. Puttenham, the stately critic of Elizabeth's reign, speak- ing of the jingling carols and rounds sung " by blind harpers or such like tavern minstrels, who give a fit of mirth for a groat," says " such were the rhymes of Skelton, usurping (i. e. using) the name of a poet-laureate ; being, indeed, but a rude railing rhymer, and all his doings ridiculous. He used both short distances and short measures, pleasing only the popular ear, in our courtly maker we banish them utterly." It was in this consisted his strength. While enjoying with a keen relish the severer beauties of the classic writers, he could indulge in homely galloping verses which went right to the hearts of those he addressed, and made him at once the darling of the populace. Webbe, another critic, appreciated him more correctly. After a reference to preceding writers, he continues : " Since these, I know none other till the time of Skelton, who writ in the time of Henry VIII., who, as indeed he obtained the laurel garland, so may I with good right yield him the title of poet. He was doubtless a pleasant conceited fellow, and of a very sharp wit, exceeding bold, and would nip to the very quick where he once set hold." His principal objects of attack were the clergy and the Dominicans, until at length, for some reason unexplained, his whole strength was directed against Wolsey. The Cardinal was then luxuriating in the full plenitude of his more than regal pomp, and his imperious demeanour had caused a wide-spread though concealed dissatisfaction. There were no newspapers then to drain off the discontent that in a greater or less degree will always fester in every free community ; and any production that gave utterance to the sentiments of an aggrieved class, would be effective in proportion to the extent of the distemper. And, more- over, the sarcasms of an obscure priest, himself in ill odour for certain assumed irregularities of life, must have irri- tated the sensitive pride of one impatient of reproof or of INTRODUCTION. 23 contradiction. The Cardinal, at length, " being inveighed at by his pen, and charged with too much truth," issued orders for his arrest, and the satirist fled for sanctuary to Westminster, where Islip the Abbot afforded him an effectual safeguard. One of the charges afterwards preferred against Wolsey bears a striking resemblance to a passage in one of Skel- ton's poems. In " Why come ye not to Court ?" he writes : " In the Chamber of Stars All matters there he mars : Clapping his rod on the board, No man dare speak a word, For he hath all the saying, Without any renayiug ;* He rolleth in his records, He saith, How say ye, my lords ? Is not my reason good ? Good even, good Robin Hood !f Some say yes, and some Sit still as they were dumb : Thus thwarting over themj He ruleth all the roast With bragging and with boast ; Borne up on every side With pomp and with pride." Turning to the articles of impeachment, we find the fifteenth runs thus : " Also the said Lord Cardinal, sitting among the lords and others of your most honourable Privy Council, used himself, that if any man should show his mind, according to his duty, contrary to the opinion of the said Cardinal, he would so rake him up with his accustomable words that they were better to hold their peace than to speak, so that he would hear no man speak but one or two personages, so that he would have all the * Contradiction. f A proverbial expression a civil answer returned through fear. | Perversely controlling them. 24 INTRODUCTION. words himself, and consumed much time with a fair tale." Wolsey was unrelenting in his resentment, and Skelton never ventured from his place of voluntary confinement. He died on the 25th of June, 1529, and was buried in the chancel of the neighbouring church of St. Margaret, where the following inscription was placed upon his gravestone : " Joannes Skeltonus, Vates Pierius, hie situs est." He remained, nominally at least, rector of Dysse, till his decease, as the institution of his successor is dated the 17th of the following month. " This ribald and ill-living wretch," such is the delicate language of Miss Agnes Strickland, who insinuates that King Henry's " grossest crimes " resulted from the " cor- ruption imparted " by his former tutor, had been guilty of an unpardonable enormity in the eyes of the Christian clergy of that day, as perhaps also in the immaculate imagination of Miss Agnes Strickland. The Church that could denounce marriage and countenance brothels was scandalized that one of its ministers should be so obtuse to all notions of decorum, as to enter that state which it had solemnly pronounced dishonourable. Preferring to obey the moral rather than the ecclesiastical law, his name was loaded with disgrace, and " merry Skelton being a priest, and having a child by his wife, every one cried out : ' O ! Skelton hath a child, fie on him !' " His fluctuating reputation has now assumed some definite shape. The high opinion of his contemporaries, of the learned as of the vulgar, was succeeded by the un- just depreciation of the critics in the reign of Elizabeth : he was gradually neglected and almost forgotten. An effort was made in Pope's time to revive his fame by the republi- cation of an edition of his works, but the epithet " beastly," INTRODUCTION. 25 applied by the poet, consigned them again to oblivion. After some further lapse of time, some resolute inquirers undertook to read his productions, and his originality and spirit have at length received their due recognition. Of his writings many are lost, and what remain can only be appreciated by one who is both an antiquarian and a poet. His qualities are judgment, fancy, little imagination, but considerable humour. He took the language of low life, and twisted the unformed stubborn tongue with mar- vellous power, coining words when it suited his purpose, and running riot in his exuberant facility of rhyming. He was conscious where lay his strength. " Though my rhyme be ragged, Tatter'd and jagged, Rudely rain beaten, Rusty, moth-eaten, If ye take well therewith, It hath in it some pith." His favourite measure was one which was named after him " Skeltonical," and his success in Macaronics was universally conceded. This curious transition style of verse was frequently practised about that time and later. English composition larded with patches of Latin, some- times of French, in a most extraordinary jumble, would seem absurd to us, but appeared natural then; and the skilful execution of the feat was highly commended. We select a specimen of each of these styles. The first are extracts from the description of Miss Jane Scroupe, who resided at the nunnery of Carow at Norwich, taken from " The Book of William Sparrow." " How shall I report All the goodly sort Of her features clear That hath not earthly peer ? The favour* of her face, Ennew'df with all grace, * Beauty. f Refreshed. 26 INTRODUCTION. Comfort, pleasure, and solace, My heart doth so embrace, And so hath ravished me Her to behold and see, That, in words plain, I cannot me refrain To look on her again. Alas ! what should I fain ? It were a pleasant pain With her to aye remain. The Indy sapphire blue* Her veins doth ennew ; The orient pearl so clear The whiteness of her lere ;f The lusty ruby ruddesj Resemble the rose-buds ; Her lips, soft and merry, Embloom'd like the cherry, It were a heavenly bliss Her sugar'd mouth to kiss. Her beauty to augment, Dame Nature hath her lent A wart upon her cheek. Who so list to seek In her visage a scar, That seemeth from afar Like to a radiant star, All with favour fret, So properly it is set ; She is the violet, The daisy delectable, The columbine commendable, This blossom of fresh colour, So Jupiter me succour, She flourisheth new and new In beauty and virtue. But whereto should I note How often I did tote|| Upon her pretty foot ? It raised mine heart-root * The azure blue sapphire. f Skin. | The beautiful ruby complexion. Wrought with beauty. || Gaze. INTRODUCTION. 2? To see her tread the ground With heels short and round. She is plainly express Egeria the goddess. There is no beast savage, Nor no tiger so wood,* But she would change his mood, Such relucent grace Is formed in her face ; For this most goodly flower, Tin's blossom of fresh colour, She flourisheth new and new In beauty and virtue. " So goodly as she dresses, So properly she presses The bright golden tresses Of her hair so fine, Like Phoebus' beams shine. It is for to suppose How that she can wear Gorgeously her gear, Her freshf habiliments With other implements To serve for all intents, Like Dame Flora, queen Of lustyj summer green. For this most goodly flower, This blossom of fresh colour, So Jupiter me succour, She flourisheth new and new In beauty and virtue. " My pen it is unable, My hand it is unstable, My reason rude and dull To praise her at the full ; Goodly Mistress Jane, Sober, demure Diane ; Jane, this mistress hight, The load-star of delight, Dame Venus of all pleasure, The well of worldly treasure ; * Furious. f Gay. Pleasant. 28 INTRODUCTION. She doth exceed and pass In prudence Dame Pallas ; This most goodly flower, This blossom of fresh colour, So Jupiter me succour, She flourisheth new and new In beauty and virtue. " It were no gentle guise Tliis treatise to despise, Because I have written and said Honour of this fair maid ; Wherefore should I be blamed That I Jane have named, And famously proclaimed ? She is worthy to be enroll' d With letters of gold." The following passage is taken from " Colin Clout :" " And how, when ye give orders. In your provincial borders, As at Sitientes,* Some are insufficientes, Some parum sapientes, Some nihil intelligentes, Some valde negligentes, Some nullum sensum habentes, But bestial and untaught ; But when they have once caught Dominus vobiscum by the head, Then run they in every stead,f God wot, with drunken noils ;| Yet take they cure of souls, And wot not what they read, Paternoster, Ave, nor Crede ; Construe not worth a whistle, Neither Gospel nor Epistle ; Their matins madly said, Nothing devoutly pray'd ; * Sitientes is the first word of the passage from Isaiah, (ch. LV., v. l.) f which commences the Introit of the mass for Passion Sunday. t Place. t Heads. INTRODUCTION. 29 Their learning is so small, Their primes and hours* fall And leap out of their lips Like saw-dust or dry chips. I speak not now of all, But the most part in general, Of such vagabundus Speaketh totus mundus ; . How some sing leetabundus At every ale stake, With welcome hakef and make !| I speak not of the good wife, But of their apostle's life, Cum ipsis vel illis Qui manent in villis Est uxor vel ancilla, Welcome Jack and Gilla ! My pretty Petronilla, And you will be stilla You shall have your willa Of such Paternoster pekes, All the world speaks." The chief satires of our poet are " The Bowge of Courte," " Colyn Cloute," and " Why come ye not to Court?" The first is an allegorical poem in which a variety of characters are introduced, touched with great powers of discrimination. The second is a denunciation of the corruptions of the Church ; and the fearless way in which he assailed the most glaring abuses of the time, shows a strength of mind and a courage rare in that age of universal obsequiousness to the powerful. " Why come ye not to Court ?" is a personal satire on Wolsey. The attack is unsparing, and in places scurrilous, though in commenting upon the extravagant pomp and the insolent demeanour of the grasping Cardinal, even satire itself could but speak the simple truth. His " Philip Sparrow" is a fanciful piece occasioned by * The devotions so named. f A haking fellow means a loiterer. J Make a companion. Contemptible fellows. 30 INTRODUCTION. an event similar to the one Catullus has immortalized, and has won from Coleridge the praise of being an exquisite and original poem. His most popular production, how- ever, was "The Tunning of Elinor Rumming." This is a description of an old hostess, who kept an ale-house at Leatherhead in Surrey, with some of her customers ; and for coarseness, and at the same time for broad humour, exceeds anything he ever wrote. An interlude called " Magnificence," and " The Garland of Laurel," conclude the list of the larger poems which have survived to our times. In style they are obsolete, and without a copious glossary difficult to be understood, but they are valuable as having once powerfully affected opinion, and interpreted human conviction. The man has passed away, and his works, from their nature, could only be transitory as their author ; but the brief glimpse we have of him, the scholar and the buffoon, a priest with his married concubine, and bastardized children, mocking half in anger, half in jest, or it might be in the wantonness of sorrow, at the false- hoods by which he was surrounded, may justly awaken our sympathy, nor fail to suggest a moral. Skelton being the wag par excellence of his time, his name, as more recently that of honest Joe Miller, was woefully abused ; and all the stray jests that nobody would own, were freely fathered upon him. Soon after his death, a small volume appeared, and became popular, entitled " Merry Tales, newly Imprinted and made by Master Skelton, Poet-Laureate," "very pleasant for the recreation of the mind," The admirers of " Punch" may be entertained with a specimen of the drollery that could amuse a ruder age. TALE I. HOW SKELTON CAME LATE HOME TO OXFORD FROM ABINGDON. " Skelton was an Englishman, born as Scogan was, and he was educated and brought up at Oxford; and there INTRODUCTION. 31 was he made a poet-laureate, And on a time he had been at Ahingdon to make merry, where that he had eat salt meats ; and he did come late home to Oxford, and he did lie in an inn named the ' Tabard/ which is now the * Angel/ and he did drink, and went to bed. About midnight, he was so thirsty or dry, that he was constrained to call to the tapster for drink ; and the tapster heard him not. Then he cried to his host, and his hostess, and to the ostler, for drink, and no man would hear him. * Alack !' said Skelton, ' I shall perish for lack of drink ! what remedy ?' At the last he did cry out, and said : * Fire ! fire ! fire !' When Skelton heard every man bustled himself upward, and some of them were naked, and some were half-asleep and amazed, and Skelton did cry, ' Fire ! fire !' still, that every man knew not whither to resort ; Skelton did go to bed, and the host, and hostess, and the tapster with the ostler, did run to Skelton's chamber with candles lighted in their hands, saying : ' Where where is the fire ?' ' Here, here, here/ said Skelton, and pointed his finger to his mouth, saying, ' Fetch me some drink to quench the fire, and the heat and the dryness in my mouth / and so they did. Wherefore it is good for every man to help his own self in time of need with some policy or cra/t, so be it there be no deceit nor falsehood used." We conclude our quotations by an extract from a brochure termed " The Life of Long Meg of Westminster," detailing the first introduction of that interesting personage to our jovial laureate. " After the carrier had set up his horse, and despatched his lading, he remembered his oath, and therefore bethought him how he might place these three maids. With that he called to mind that the mistress at the ' Eagle' in West- minster had spoken divers times to him for a servant. 32 INTRODUCTION. He with his carriage passed over the fields to her house, where he found her sitting and drinking with a Spanish knight, called Sir James of Castille, Doctor Skelton, and Will Somers ; told her how he had brought up to London three Lancashire lasses, and seeing she was oft desirous to have a maid, now she should take her choice which of them she would have. c Marry,' quoth she, (being a very merry and a pleasant woman), ' carrier, thou comest in good time ; for not only I want a maid, but here be three gentlemen that shall give me their opinions which of them I shall have.'. With that the maids were bidden come in, and she entreated them to give their verdict. Straight, as soon as they saw Long Meg, they began to smile ; and Doctor Skel- ton, in his mad, merry vein, blessing himself, began thus : " ' Domine, Domine, iinde hoc ? What is she in the gray cassock ? Methinks she is of a large length, Of a tall pitch and a good strength, With strong arms, and stiff bones j This is a wench for the nones. Her looks are bonny and blithe, She seems neither lither nor lithe, But young of age, And of a merry visage, Neither beastly nor bowsy, Sleepy nor drowsy, But fair-faced, and of a good size ; Therefore, hostess, if you be wise, Once be ruled by me ; Take this wench to thee, For this is plain, She'll do more work than these twain. I tell thee, hostess, I do not mock, Take her in the gray cassock.' " ' What is your opinion ?' quoth the hostess to Sir James of Castille. ' Question with her,' quoth he, 4 what she can do, and then I'll give you mine opinion. And yet first, hostess, ask Will Somers' opinion.' Will smiled, and swore that his hostess should not INTRODUCTION. 33 have her, but King Harry should buy her. * Why so, Will?' quoth Doctor Skelton. ' Because/ quoth Will Somers, ' that she shall be kept for breed ; for if the King would marry her to long Sanders, of the Court, they would bring forth none but soldiers.' Well, the hostess demanded what her name was ? ' Margaret, forsooth,' quoth she. ' And what work can you do ?' 1 Faith, little, mistress,' quoth she, ' but handy labour, as to wash and wring, to make clean a house, to brew, bake, or any such drudgery ; for my needle, to that I have been little used to.' ' Thou art,' quoth the hostess, ' a good lusty wench, and therefore I like thee the better. I have here a great charge, for I keep a victualling-house, and divers times there come in swaggering fellows that, when they have eat and drunk, will not pay what they call for ; yet, if thou take the charge of my drink, I must be answered out of your wages.' ' Content, mistress,' quoth she ; ' for while I serve you, if any stale cutter* comes in and thinks to pay the shot with swearing, hey, Gog's wounds! let me alone! I'll not only (if his clothes be worth it) make him pay ere he pass, but lend him as many bats as his crag will carry, and then throw him out of doors.' At this they all smiled* 'Nay, mistress,' quoth the carrier, ' 'tis true ; for my poor pilchf here is able, with a pair of blue shoulders, to swear as much !' and with that he told them how she had used him at her coming to London. *I cannot think,' quoth Sir James of Castille, f that she is so strong.' ' Try her/ quoth Skelton ; ' for I have heard that Spaniards are of won- derful strength.' Sir James, in a bravery, would needs make experience, and therefore asked the maid if she durst change a box on the ear with him ? c I, Sir/ quoth she, c that I dare, if my mistress will give me leave.' * A cant word for swaggerer or bully, f A carman's leather coat. 34 INTRODUCTION. ' Yes, Meg,' quoth she, ' do thy best 1' and with that it was a question who should stand first. ' Marry, that I will, Sir,' quoth she, and so stood to abide Sir James's blow, who, forcing himself with all his might, gave her such a box that she could scarcely stand. Yet she stirred no more than a post. Then Sir James he stood, and the hostess willed her not to spare her strength. ' No,' quoth Skelton ; ' and if she fell him down, I'll give her a pair of new hose and shoes.' ' Mistress/ quoth Meg (and with that she strook up her sleeve), ' here is a foul fist, and it hath past much drudgery, but, trust me, I think it will give a good blow !' and with that she raught at him so strongly, that down fell Sir James at her feet. 1 By my faith/ quoth Will Somers, ' she strikes a blow like an ox, for she hath struck down an ass.' At this they all laughed, Sir James was ashamed, and Meg was entertained into service." We have ventured, in our extracts, to modernise the spelling, for the greater convenience of those readers who may not be familiar with our older authors. EDMUND SPENSER was born in London about the year 1553, in East Smithfield, near the Tower, if we may trust the uncertain whisper of tradition. He was descended from the stock of the Spensers, afterwards Spencers of Hurstwood, near Burnley, in Lancashire, his own branch being probably seated on a small estate still called Spen- cers, situated at Filley Close, in the forest of Pendle, at the foot of Pendle Hill. The direct ancestor of the poet, Adam le Spenser, held lands of King Edward II., by mili- tary tenure, in the township of Worsthorne, a few miles from Spencers ; and though the branch to which he belonged had sunk into obscurity, the remote connection was acknow- ledged by the Spencers of Althorpe, afterwards distinguished by the trophies aiad dukedom of Marlborough. INTRODUCTION. 35 Spenser was sent to Cambridge, and entered at Pem- broke Hall as a sizar, 20th of May, 1569. He there contracted a friendship with Gabriel Harvey, of Christ's College, or, according to another account, of Pembroke Hall, afterwards fellow of Trinity Hall, who, like himself, was in reduced circumstances, with powerful connections, and became afterwards eminent as a poet and scholar. This friendship endured through life, and Harvey figures as Hobbinol in his friend's " Eclogues." Spenser is recorded to have taken his B.A. degree in January, 1573, and his M.A. in June, 1576, and he then finally quitted the University. There is some obscurity hanging over this part of his career, but the prevailing impression is that he left in chagrin, being disappointed in his expectations of a fellowship. This probably prevented him from taking orders. He always remembered the University with gratitude, and frequently mentions it with honour; but it is a singular fact that Pembroke Hall is never once referred to through the voluminous range of his compositions, strewed as they are with allusions to his personal history. On retiring from the University, he went to live with his relatives in the north of England. Here the sensitive poet fell a victim to the arts of a country girl, whom he has immortalised under the name of Rosalind, but whose actual name is still a mystery. An ingenious writer has attempted a solution by resolving the anagram into " Rose Linde," averring that " Linde" is a common surname in Kent, and " Rose" a frequent feminine appellation every- where. He himself calls her " the widow's daughter of the glen," and writes as though she were of low degree, though in the gloss on the poems, written, probably, by Harvey, we are told she was of gentle blood. The wily maid encouraged his advances, and then left him, to give her hand to another. The heart-broken .poet turned the D 2 36 INTRODUCTION. incident to account in some plaintive pastorals ; and, under the name of Menalcas, took satisfactory vengeance on his rival in the shape of satire. To relieve his despondency, or perhaps to dissipate his idleness, Harvey urged him to remove to London, and obtained his introduction to Sir Philip Sydney. Sydney presented him to his uncle the Earl of Leicester. He was invited to Penshurst, the princely domain of the Sydneys in Kent, where he stayed a few months, doubtless assisting his patron in his studies, and returned with him to London, as, in October, 1579, we find him writing to Harvey from Leicester House. In 1579, Spenser, in a letter to his friend, several times alludes to his prospect of travelling abroad ; and in some Latin lines enclosed, intimates that his journey may stretch, not only to the Alps and Pyrenees, but beyond, to the inhospitable Caucasus and to Babylon. This was some proposed appointment as agent for the Earl of Leicester a project, however, which proved abortive as, from the first, had appeared likely, and probably as the poet hoped. In the following year, Lord Grey of Wilton, was appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland. This nobleman was a connection of the Earl of Leicester; and on his recommendation, took out Spenser with him as his secretary. This first offer of employment was speedily followed by a second, as in March of the following year, 1581, the poet became clerk to the Irish Court of Chancery ; and in the same year the Queen conferred on him the grant of a lease of the Abbey of Iniscorthy or Enniscorthy, with the castle and manor attached, in the county of Wexford, at an annual rent of 300. 6s. 8d., on condition of keeping the buildings in repair. This property the estimated value of which, at the commence- ment of the present century, was 8,000 per annum he conveyed, by jndenture, on the 9th December, 1581, to INTRODUCTION. 37 Richard Synot, who afterwards conveyed it to Sir Henry Wallop, the Treasurer of War in Ireland, from whom the Earls of Portsmouth descended, in which family the estate remained. From the short time Spenser retained pos- session of it, we may infer either that his resources were exhausted or that a residence in Ireland had no attractions for him, and that he was already meditating his departure. In 1582, Lord Grey resigned, or was recalled, and it has been generally assumed that his secretary returned to England with him. On the 27th June, 1586, Spenser, probably through the powerful mediation of Sir Philip Sydney, obtained from the Crown a second grant of land in Ireland. This consisted of 3,028 acres in the county of Cork, at an annual rental of 17. 7s. 6d., forming part of the forfeited estates of the rebellious Earl of Desmond. On the 1 7th October of the same year, Sir Philip Sydney fell at the battle of Zutphen. Never before had the death of a subject been mourned with so universal a regret. In his lofty character we see the ideal of that age the model of what every Englishman longed to be. Oldys says, he could muster two hundred authors who had written in praise of Sydney. It seemed as though every mean passion was disarmed by the nobleness of that rare dispo- sition. Spenser bitterly felt the loss of his patron, and bewailed him through life. But the lassitude of grief was dispelled by the active duties of his position. By the terms of his grant, he was compelled to cultivate his land, and accordingly the poet departed to establish himself in his new domain. In the castle of Kilcolman, now a ruin, but then in tolerable repair a seat of the Earl of Desmond he resumed his life of meditation. His new home was delightfully situated on the margin of a fine clear lake, which stretched away to the southward, its position, about two miles west of Doneraile. It stood in 38 INTRODUCTION. a broad plain, surrounded on all sides by mountains by the Waterford mountains on the East, and the Nagle on the south. Northward rose the Ballyhowra Hills, or, as he termed them, " the mountains of the Mole," from which descended the stream of Awbeg or Mulla, mean- dering through his grounds, while, on the west, the vista was closed by the mountains of Kerry. In this retreat, he was visited by no less a person than Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh had been active in the suppression of the rebellion, and had been rewarded with an extensive grant of the forfeited estates. The tastes of the two neighbours were congenial, for Raleigh was a poet ; and here, Spenser tells us, would he sit with his friend, the Shepherd of the Ocean, in the shade of the green alders that waved beside the stream of Mulla, listening to projects of high adventure, or wandering through Faery Land, whose utmost romance was exceeded by the every- day wonders of that adventurous age. When the first three books of the " Faery Queen" were completed, Raleigh urged their immediate publication, and the two friends proceeded to London together. The work was entered on the Register of the Stationers' Company 1st December, 1589, and was published probably early in January following, with the title of " The Faerie Queene, disposed in XII Bookes, fashioning XII Morall Virtues." It was dedicated to the most mighty and magnificent Empress Elizabeth ; and in the second edition, containing six books, Spenser again entrusted his labours "to the Most High, Mighty, and Magnificent Empress, to live with the Eternity of her Fame." To the end of the first edition he appended a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, expounding his whole intention in the course of the work, and among other similar compliments, two copies of verses heralded in the poem, written by his distinguished friend. INTRODUCTION. 39 He had resigned his clerkship on the 22nd June, 1588, and was appointed Clerk to the Council of Munster. Although we have mentioned no previous publication, yet it must not be concluded that this was the first poem with which Spenser delighted his contemporaries. Our author was one of those extraordinary men who appear occasionally to prove the marvellous fecundity of the human mind. With him incessant production seemed a law of nature ; composition was but the spontaneous and un- laboured flow of his ever teeming fancy ; an exercise neces- sary to his healthy existence, and an ever originating source of solace. His earliest work was his " Shepherd's Calender," published ten years before, a series of twelve eclogues, ap- propriated to each month of the year, detailing the course of his hapless passion. Within the intermediate decade of years, he had written nine comedies, a composition called " The Dreams," " The Dying Pelican," " Slumber," " The Court of Cupid ;" " Legends," probably afterwards worked into the " Faery Queen," " Pageants," concerning which a like conjecture has been expressed, " Sonnets," " The Marriage Song of the Thames," Translation of Moschus's " Idyllium of Wandering Love, " " The English Poet," probably a prose essay, and " Stemmata Dudleiana." In 1591, William Ponsonby, publisher of the "Faery Queen," brought out a volume of his minor poems. Among these were " The Ruins of Time," a poem in ninety-seven stanzas, bewailing the death of the Earl of Leicester. In this piece there are a few bitter lines, which have generally been applied to Burleigh. The occasion of the attack is contained in a story related by Fuller, which it has been the fashion of late to discredit. The recent discovery of a MS. diary of a barrister from 1601 to 1603 tends, however, to confirm the tale, which bears no internal im- probability. On the presentation of some poems to the Queen, we are told. that s'he ordered him a gift of 100. 40 INTRODUCTION. Burleigh disliking Spenser probably on political grounds, he being protected by the party opposed to himself, ob- served testily, " What, all this for a song ?" The Queen replied, " Then give him what is reason." Spenser waited, but no realization of the royal bounty reached him, and he embraced an opportunity of presenting her with a paper, purporting to be a petition, in which were written the following lines : " I was promised on a time To have reason for my rhyme ; From that time unto this season, I have had nor rhyme nor reason." The device was successful, as the Queen requested the immediate payment of the money. In "The Tears of the Muses," a poem containing numerous allusions to the persons and literary history of the time, are some stanzas referring to " Our Pleasant Willy," by whom it is supposed that Shakespeare is meant. " Virgil's Gnat" is a free translation of the " Culex" attri- buted to that poet. " Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberd's Tale" is a remarkable poem. Lying ill of a sickness pro- duced by the excessive heats of Midsummer, some friends gathered round him to divert him with their stories, and among the rest a good old woman named Mother Hubberd, who related this fable of the "Fox and the Ape." In it occur those powerful lines, which springing from blighted hopes, are among the most nervous that dropped from his pen. " So pitiful a thing is suitor's state ! Full little knowest thou that hast not tried What hell it is in suing long to bide ; To lose good days that might be better spent, To waste long nights in pensive discontent ; To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow ; To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow ; To.have thy prince's grace, yet want her peers' ; To have thy asking, yet waft many years ; INTRODUCTION. 4 1 To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares ; To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs, To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run, To spend, to give, to want, to be undone." " The Ruins of Rome" by Bellay, are thirty-three sonnets translated from the French, of no particular merit. " Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterfly," is an allegory, the drift of which at present is not very apparent. " Visions of the World's Vanity," and a few sonnets completed the list of this collection. Ponsonby, in the address to the reader prefixed to his volume, observes that finding the " Faery Queen" had found a favourable passage among them, for the better increase and accomplishment of their delight, he had collected such small poems of the same author, as he had heard were dispersed abroad in sundry hands, and refers to other poems in addition to those enumerated as lost. Those, however, which were published, and the titles of others already recapitulated, to which frequent allusions were made in the poet's correspondence, exhibit in their amount alone a rare industry, and an un- paralleled facility of composition. We may assume and most of the incidents in the biography of Spenser are but assumptions, gleaned from incidental notices of himself in his works that he now remained in England for a year or two. In February, 1591, Elizabeth conferred on him a grant of 50 a-year. The discovery of this instrument in the Chapel of the Rolls has induced his biographers to class Spenser with the Poets-Laureate. He held, however, a sort of intermediate position between the old University Graduates, and the subsequent tenants of a legally constituted office. In January of the following year he published his "Daphnaida," an elegy on the death of Mrs. Arthur Gorges, and soon afterwards he returned to Ireland. Though we fail now to trace his proceedings from his writings, we have some 42 INTRODUCTION. glimpse of him through the following unpoetical documents. In 1593, Maurice, Lord Roche, Viscount Fermoy, petitioned the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, objecting that " one Ed- mund Spenser, gentleman, hath lately exhibited suit against your suppliant for three plough lands, parcels of Shanbally- more, your suppliant's inheritance, before the Vice- President of the Council of Munster, which land hath been hereto- fore decreed for your suppliant against the said Spenser and others, under whom he conveyed, and nevertheless for that the said Spenser being Clerk of the County in the said province, did assign his office unto one Nicholas Curteys, among other agreements with covenant, that during his life he should be free in the said office for his causes, by occasion of which immunity he doth multiply suits against your suppliant in the said province upon pretended title of others." Lord Roche presented at the same time another petition against one Callaghan, whom he therein alleges as his opponent, " by supportation and maintenance of Edmund Spenser, gentleman, a heavy adversary unto your suppliant." In a third petition the same suppliant states, " that Edmund Spenser, gentleman, hath entered into three plough-lands, parcel of Ballingerath, and disseised your suppliant thereof, and continueth by countenance and greatness the possession thereof, and maketh great waste of the wood of the said land, and converteth a great deal of corn growing thereupon to his proper use, to the damage of the complainant of 200 sterling." Where- unto we are informed by the Record in the Rolls Office, the said Edmund Spenser had several days prefixed unto him peremptorily to answer, which he neglected to do. Wherefore, after a day of grace given on the 12th Feb- ruary, 1594, Lord Roche was decreed his possession. From these extracts, we may suspect that Spenser was by no means neglectful of his rights as a proprietor, or considerate of those of his neighbours. The plaintive, INTRODUCTION. 43 even querulous complaints with which his works are studded, indicate some deficiency of moral power, and are no assurance of the writer's gentleness or sensibility. Such laments spring usually from a deep selfishness, which precludes the possibility of a keen sensitiveness to the rights of others, or a generous sympathy with suffering. Thus Spenser encroached upon his neighbours, and never made way in the affections of the surrounding poor, and his memory was long held in detestation. In life he was eminently fortunate. Starting from obscure circumstances, he gained the affection and patronage of the noblest in the land. The Queen was munificent in rewarding his merit. His works were highly popular, and he escaped all annoyance from the irritating shafts of satire, yet in one poem he terms himself " the wofullest man alive." He was always complaining and always poor. So assiduous was he in soliciting the favour of the great, as apparently to be oblivious of the obligation and dignity of self- reliance, and his comparative failure as a courtier over- whelmed him with mortification. " Poorly, poor man, he lived, poorly, poor man, he died." So wrote Phineas Fletcher ; summing up his history in a line. In 1595, Ponsonby published a quarto in London, containing, with other poems, " Colin Clout's come home again." Colin Clout is Spenser himself, and the poem, which is dedicated to Raleigh, is most interesting as refer- ing to contemporary circumstances and persons. Here we meet with the last allusion to his false but not yet forgotten Rosalind. In the same year appeared a small duodecimo, containing the " Amoretti," a series of eighty-eight sonnets relating the progress of a new affection, with the " Epitha- lamium ; or, Bridal Song." After so long an interval he again had wooed, and this time with success, as he was married at Cork, June 11, 1594. 44 INTRODUCTION. The pastoral elegy of " Astrophel," devoted to the memory of Sydney, "the pride of a proud age," was given to the world in 1595. In 1596, Spenser returned to England with the three latter books of his " Faery Queen, and in the course of the year the whole six were published together. The " Protholamium," and " Four Hymns," which appeared likewise in the course of the year were the last of his publications. The two additional cantos of the " Faery Queen" were posthumous as they were first printed in the folio edition of 1609. His prose dialogue on the state of Ireland, showing enlarged political knowledge and much antiquarian learning, finished in 1596, did not see the light till thirty-four years after his death, when Sir James Ware published it at Dublin, with a dedication to the then Lord-Deputy Wentworth. Some short additional poems appeared in the collected edition of his works in 1611, and a few sonnets have been recovered by a later editor. The poet had returned to Ireland, and on the last day of September, 1598, the Queen, not forgetful of her absent flatterer, addressed a letter to the Irish Governor, recommending Spenser to be Sheriff of Cork. In the next month broke out the rebellion of the treacherous Tyrone. Kilcolman was sacked and burned. The poet fled from his* flaming home ; one of his children perished amid the havoc, and with his wife and remaining two he, with difficulty, escaped to England. He did not long survive this mishap, as he died January 16, 1599, at an inn or lodging-house in King Street, Westminster. " A damp of wonder and amazement struck Thetis' attendants ; many a heavy look Followed sweet Spenser, till the thickening air Sight's further passage stopped. A passionate tear Fell from each nymph ; no shepherd's cheek was dry ; A doleful dirge and mournful elegy Flew to the shore." BROWNE'S PASTORALS. INTRODUCTION. 45 He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and placed where he wished, by the side of his favourite Chaucer. The pall was held up by poets, who assembled round the grave, and dropped in their farewell elegies with the pens that wrote them, a touching tribute to his memory. The charges of his funeral were defrayed by the Earl of Essex, and after an interval of upwards of thirty years, his monument was erected by Anne, Countess of Dorset. This was restored and rectified as to dates in 1788 at the expense of his college at Cambridge. Spenser was the last interpreter of those waning modes of thought, which had once exercised so powerful an influence through the wide extent of Christendom. With him the romance of the mediaeval chivalry expired, and his genius availed to immortalize the splendid euthanasia. SAMUEL DANIEL has been termed a volunteer laureate. We know but little of his life, and principally acquire our estimate of his character from the general tenor of his writings. Through all, there runs a propriety and an unaffected simplicity, that the " well-languaged" poet cannot fail to be a favourite with all who have mused over his pages. He was born near Taunton in Somersetshire, in the year 1562, of a father " whose faculty," to use the quaint language of Fuller, " was a master of* music, and his harmonious mind made an impression on his son's genius, who proved an exquisite poet. He carried in his Christian and surname two holy prophets, his monitors, so to qualify his raptures, that he abhorred all prophaneness." In 1579, he was entered as a commoner at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he remained about three years, but left without a degree. He then resided in some capacity at Wilton, and under the patronage of the Countess of Pembroke, sister of Sir Philip Sydney, devoted himself to 46 INTRODUCTION. the study of poetry and history. He was afterwards selected by the Countess of Cumberland to superintend the education of her daughter, the Lady Anne Clifford. This high-spirited and accomplished lady profited by his advice, and was not unmindful of his memory ; and many years afterwards, when he had long been dead, but she had become the great Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and Montgomery, she superintended the erection of a monu- ment over his remains; and a likeness of the poet accompanied a full-length portrait of herself, which hung in one of her castles in Westmoreland. Daniel was fortunate in his patrons. Lord Mountjoy, afterwards Earl of Devon- shire, Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and Henry Wriothesly, Earl of Southampton, the friend of Essex, honoured him with their friendship, and enriched him by their munificent regard. He was fortunate likewise in his friends, among whom may be enumerated Sir Fulke Greville, Sir John Harrington, Sir Henry Spelman, Sir Robert Cotton, Cowell, Camden, Spenser, Jonson, Drayton and Browne. Great names ! but that was the heroic age of England. The works of our author were varied but not volu- minous. He wrote Masques, Tragedies, Poems and Sonnets, and a History of England, extending to the reign of Edward III. His poetical efforts are deficient in force either of imagination or passion. Their flow is temperate and equable. His aim was to please ; and he seldom aspired to influence or inflame his readers. " He wrote the ' Civil Wars/ and yet had not one battle in his book," was the depreciatory observation of Ben Jonson ; and from this poem, which may be regarded as his most ambitious effort, we have selected the following favourable specimen of his manner. It is taken from the third book, and depicts the captive Richard soliloquizing, on the morning of his murder in Pomfret Castle. INTRODUCTION. 4? " The morning of that day, which was his last, After a weary rest rising to pain, Out at a little grate his eyes he cast Upon those bordering hills and open plain, And views the town, and sees how people pass'd : Where others' liberty makes him complain The more his own, and grieves his soul the more, Conferring captive crowns with freedom poor. " 0, happy man, saith he, that lo I see Grazing his cattle in those pleasant fields ! If he but knew his good (how blessed he That feels not what affliction greatness yields !) Other than what he is he would not be, Nor change his state with him that sceptres wields ; Thine, thine is that true life, that is to live, To rest secure, and not rise up to grieve. " Thou sitt'st at home safe by thy quiet fire, And hear'st of others' harms but feelest none, And there thou telTst of kings, and who aspire, Who fall, who rise, who triumphs, who do moan ; Perhaps thou talk'st of me, and dost inquire Of my restraint, why here I live alone, And pitiest this iny miserable fall ; Tor pity must have part, envy not all. " Thrice happy you that look as from the shore, And have no venture in the wreck you see ; No interest, no occasion to deplore Other men's travails, while yourselves sit free. How much doth your sweet rest make us the more To see our misery and what we be ! Whose blinded greatness ever in turmoil, Still seeking happy life, makes life a toil. " Are kings that freedom give, themselves not free, As meaner men to take what they may give ? What, are they of so fatal a degree, That they cannot descend from that and live ? Unless they still be kings, can they not be, Nor may they their authority survive ? Will not my yielded crown redeem my breath Still am I fear'd ? is there no way but death ?" Daniel received warm encouragement from Queen Anne, consort of James I. He was nominated Gentleman- Extraordinary, and afterwards one of the Grooms of her 48 INTRODUCTION. Privy Chamber. It was during the leisure afforded by these offices, he composed the chief part of his history. He likewise wrote several Masques for the entertainment of the Court ; but gradually declined the occupation, awed or chagrined by the superior ascendant of Ben Jonson. When in the fervour of dramatic composition, he generally withdrew to the seclusion of a garden residence he occupied in Old Street in the parish of St. Luke's, then a suburban district. Here he would remain for months together, patiently weaving his solitary task. Ben Jonson said of him that he " was a good honest man, had no children and was no poet," poetical and connubial fecundity we presume being usually associated. His reputation, though equal to his deserts, fell far short of what he had fondly anticipated, and he at length retired altogether from public view. He returned to his native county, and occupied the intervals of studious contempla- tion, by the labours of his farm at Beckington, near Philips-Norton. He died October 13, 1619, and was buried in the parish church. BEN JONSON. THE life of Jonson has never been given to the public in the form in which it is now presented. A short, popular biography of this great dramatist, making accuracy and candour its especial aim, is a novelty in our literature. And none can sufficiently estimate the difficulty of the task save those who have looked into the diverse and scattered materials from which this personal history must be drawn. Our labours indeed are much lightened by the work of Mr. Gifford, to whom a warm tribute is due from us for the patience with which he has investigated the subject, and the courage with which he has defended the character of the poet. His edition of Jonson's works forms an epoch in dramatic criticism, and the volume containing the memoir is such an introduction to them as, we venture to predict, will never be superseded. All former sketches of the poet's life had more or less repeated the idle and mis- chievous calumnies which the envy and malice of some inferior contemporary writers had invented. To sift and expose these was the arduous duty Mr. Gifford imposed E 50 BEN JONSON. on himself, and manfully has he performed his task. But those very qualities which, in one point of view, make his work so valuable, seen in another, detract from its merits. It is as full and exhaustive an account as can be gleaned from multifarious sources it is throughout the eloquent defence of an able advocate determined to rescue from unjust imputation a noble character; but the continuity of the narrative is broken by frequent quotations, lengthened notes, much sifting of evidence, and unsparing sarcasm on slanderers living or dead. The object of our less ambitious history is to give to the general reader, as simply and briefly as we can, such incidents in the poet's career as seem to us authentic, and such criticism on his character and writings as our knowledge of both may suggest. Benjamin, or (as he himself abbreviated it) Ben Jonson, was born A.D. 1573. There exists some doubt about the exact place of his nativity. Fuller tells us that, " with all his industry he could not find him in his cradle, but that he could fetch him from his long coats : when a little child, he lived in Hartshorn Lane, near Charing Cross." Whether in this street or not, we cannot ascertain, but there is little doubt that he was born in Westminster, a month after the death of his father.^/He was of good ancestry, his grandfather having been a man of family and fortune, who resided first at Anandale in Scotland, afterwards at Carlisle, and who was in the service of Henry VIII. His son, the father of the poet, suffered in thfe reign of Mary, persecution for his religious opi- nions. His estates were confiscated, and he underwent a long imprisonment, but was liberated at the decease of the Papist Queen. As was not unlikely, his zeal was warmed by the sufferings it had provoked ; for, upon his quitting prison, he at once entered holy orders, and BEN JONSON. 51 became, as Antony Wood assures us, " a grave minister of the Gospel."* To school in the Church of St. Martin's in the Fields, Master Benjamin was sent, when his years were ripe enough to fit him for instruction in the first rudiments of knowledge. We know little or nothing of his boyhood and school career. . If " the boy is father to the man" we have no doubt that young Jorison learned his lessons with rapidity, entered into his games with zest, pro- voked occasional chastisement for insubordination, fought his battles with courage, and was a leader among his peers. What promise he gave of his future greatness, we know not ; but his aptitude for learning, and a consideration for his good ancestry, raised him up a friend who generously sent him to Westminster School. The great Camden was then second master there, and although Ben Jonson reached the sixth form, over which the head master, Grant, presided, we have no mention of him in Jonson's writings ; while Camden, who seems to have befriended the schoolboy, is always spoken of with affection. In an epigram, written many years after, the poet thus speaks of him : " Than thee the age sees not that thing more grave, More high, more holy, that she more would crave. What name, what skill, what faith hast thou in things, What sight in searching the most antique springs ! What weight and what authority in thy speech ! Men scarce can make that doubt but thou canst teach. * Mr. Malone, Mr. Gifford, Barry Cornwall and many others have stated that Jonson's mother married Mr. Thomas Fowler, a master-bricklayer. They have all blundered more or less. Mr. Payne Collier has shown in a note, the materials of which were supplied by Mr. Peter Cunningham, that Mrs. Margaret Fowler was dead in 1595, whereas Jonson's mother was living after the production of " Eastward Hoe," and we agree with Mr. Collier, that " if Ben Jonson's mother married a second time we have yet to ascertain who was her second husband." E 2 52 BEN JONSON. Pardon free truth, and let thy modesty, Which conquers all, be once o'ercome by thee. Many of thine this better could than I, But for their powers, accept my piety." In " The King's Entertainment," Jonson calls him " the glory and light of the kingdom," and mentions him eulogistically in " The Masque of Queens." But his most graceful tribute of gratitude to his revered teacher is the dedication of " Every Man in his Humour" to Camden, thus for ever associating with the most lasting monument of his own fame, the name of the man who had been in the morning of life his " guide, philosopher, and friend." It was first printed when he collected his works in 1616, and runs, as follows : "To the most learned, and my most honoured friend, Master Camden, Clarencieux " Sir There are no doubt a supercilious race in the world who will esteem all office done you in this kind, an injury ; so solemn a vice it is with them to use the autho- rity of their ignorance to the crying down of poetry or the professors. But my gratitude must not leave to correct their error ; since I am none of those that can suffer the benefits conferred upon my youth to perish with my age. It is a frail memory that remembers but present things ; and had the favour of the times so conspired with my disposition, as it could have brought forth other or better, you had had the same proportion and number of the fruits, the %st. Now I pray you to accept this : such wherein neither the confession of my manners shall make you blush, nor of my studies repent you to have been the instructor ; and for the profession of my thankfulness, I am sure it will, with good men, find either praise or excuse. " Your true lover, " BEN JONSON." BEN JONSON. 53 \ The friend who had so kindly sent him to Westminster School procured for him an exhibition at St. John's College, Cambridge, whither Jonson went in his sixteenth year. We do not know its value, but it was inadequate to his support even in an age of fewer wants and simpler habits than the present, when billiards and Newmarket were as yet no part of the University course. He returned to his home after a stay of some months, though Fuller limits its duration to a few weeks?) Numerous apocryphal stories, some of them injurious to Jonson's character, have been handed down on the subject of this interval spent at home between his leaving the University and volunteering in the army in Flanders. /He appears for some time to have toiled at an humble and laborious trade, and at last to have given it up in disgust, because, as he tells us, " he could not endure the occupation of a bricklayer." We next find the scholar-artisan in arms, and daring heroic deeds!? He went through one campaign in the Low Countries, and performed an exploit better fitted for description in the pages of Livy than in those of a literary biography. In the sight of both armies, he engaged in single combat with one of the enemy, slew him, stripped off his arms, and carried them away in triumph. This, at the age of eighteen, was a warlike achievement of no mean kind, and is enough to show, that whatever other faults his slan- derers have attributed to him, he did not, at any rate, lack chivalrous courage. A poet militant is not without precedent. ^Esthylus fought at Salamis, Horace ran away at Philippi, Jonson's immediate successor, Davenant, was knighted for his valour at the siege of Gloucester, and a later laureat, Colley Gibber, bore arms in the Revolution of 1688. If "silent leges inter arma" be true, the same remark will apply to letters. Though more congenial to his nature 54 BEN JONSON. than the toils of the hod and trowel, the profession he had adopted left Jonson no leisure for the enjoyment of the " calm air of delightful studies." Like Coleridge, in our own day, he soon laid aside the sword for the pen. Both felt that with this weaker instrument their mission was to be worked out. x Jonson crossed the Channel for his home, bringing with him little money, and a not much larger stock of Dutch than that with which Goldsmith contemplated teaching English at Amsterdam, and leaving behind him among his comrades in arms, a reputation for valour. He always looked back upon his military career with satisfaction, and boasted " that while he was in the profession, he did not shame it by his actions." It has been said that he now returned to Cambridge, but there is no evidence what- ever of the fact. After having thrown aside the bricks and mortar in disgust, and then abandoned the army, he appears to at once have turned his attention to the stage. The English drama, at that time, if not in its infancy, had not advanced many steps beyond the Thespian con- dition. Only a few good plays of Shakespeare and others had succeeded the moralities, interludes, and translations which had as yet been presented at Court, in the Inns of Law, and in the Globe Theatre, Southwark. Jonson, like Shakespeare, embraced the profession of an actor, and with as little or less success. That he totally failed, as has been asserted, seems highly improbable, for we agree with Mr. Gifford " that with the advantages of youth, person, voice, and somewhat more of literature then fell to the share of every obscure actor in a strolling company, Jonson could scarcely fail to get a service among the mimics ;" and we have the testimony of the Duchess of Newcastle, whose husband was* the Maecenas of his day : " I have never heard any man read well but my husband ; BEN JONSON. 55 and I have heard him say that he never heard any man read well but Ben Jonson." Whatever our poet's his- trionic success may have been, his inventive faculties soon began to show themselves, for he was employed as an anonymous assistant to other dramatists, to help them in writing and altering plays. C.His career, whether theatrical or literary, was soon interrupted by an unfortunate event. Our poet now stained himself with the blood, not of a public enemy, but of a brother actor. * This man was Gabriel Spencer ; but he has been absurdly stated to have been Marlow, who was killed two years before by another hand, and in a disreputable quarrel. A dispute arose, and a challenge was received by Jonson, which he was not loath to accept/ They met : Spencer using a sword ten inches longer thafr 3 Jonson's, nevertheless fell by his hand./Jt was a painful and melancholy triumph for the victor. He had been severely wounded, and was cast into prison on a charge of murder, and, as he himself tells us, " brought near to the gallows." How long the incarceration lasted, we cannot exactly ascertain. It was very little more or less than a year; but this must have seemed a long passage in his life, to a man immured in a dungeon (and we know what prisons then were)/ with the blood of a fellow-creature on his conscience, and in constant expectation of public trial, and perhaps summary punishment. He has told us nothing of this gloomy period, but it is connected with an incident not unimportant. We have reason to suspect that in his solitude and suffering he received no spiritual aid or consolation from the teachers of his own Church. But * Mr. Payne Collier, in his " Life of Shakespeare," gives the following extract from a letter of Henslowe's to Alleyne, dated Sept. 26th, 1598 : " Since you were with me, I hav lost one of my company, which hurteth me greatly ; that is Gabriel, for he is slain in Hoxton Fields by the hand of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer." 56 BEN JONSON. that restless activity which compasses sea and land to make one proselyte, did not hesitate to avail itself of so favourable an opportunity, and he was visited by a Popish priest. In times when we have witnessed so many perversions, especially among the class of the young and the highly educated to which our poet belonged, we can feel little surprise at his embracing a creed, whose professors had at least been guiltless of grossly neglecting him. That a youth of nineteen, who had most probably only a general knowledge of the points of difference between the rival Churches, should fall a victim to the sophistries of a skilled disputant, need not be matter of marvel : and especially when we call to mind that he was of a morbid and gloomy temperament, and lying in chains neglected and forgotten, and also remember that in those days such perversions were as common as they have been during our Tractarian movement. Jonson's own account of the matter is " that he took the priest's word for it." Another such change of creed must be chronicled in the Lives of the Poets-Laureate : but one which, however palliated or defended, is, to speak of it in the gentlest terms, far less excusable than this. Dryden was converted, not in youth, but in mature age; not unversed in the controversy, but so skilled in it, that he wrote on both sides ; not as a prisoner, when a Protestant Queen was on the throne, but free and unfettered, and to win the favour and patronage of a Papist King. And Dryden never made the atonement, which Jonson did for quitting the faith of his childhood. For he some years after gave the question a serious consideration, and returned from the bosom of that Church, by whose professors his father had been plundered and persecuted, to that one whose scriptural doctrines that father had zealously preached. No one that knows the BEN JONSON. 57 religious pieces of our poet, can hesitate to pronounce them to be the outpourings of devotion and penitence. However confident or haughty his hearing among his fellow- men, in the presence of his Maker he is contrite, and humbles himself in the dust. They show, if we can read an author in his works, as plainly as words can speak, that he had sincerely repented his early sins and follies, and had fully realized those simple and sublime truths, which have been in all ages the stay and comfort of the wise and the good. We make one extract, which will prove our assertion, and more than compensate our reader for the interruption of the narrative. TO THE HOLY TRINITY. holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity Of persons, still one God in Unity, The faithful man's believed mystery, Help, help to lift Myself up to Thee, harrow 5 d, torn, and bruised By sin and Satan ; and my flesh misused, As my heart lies in pieces, all confused, O, take my gift. All-gracious God, the sinner's sacrifice, A broken heart, Thou wert not wont despise, But 'bove the fat of rams or bulls to prize An offering meet For Thy acceptance : 0, behold me right, And take compassion on my grievous plight ! What odour can be than a heart contrite To Thee more sweet ? Eternal Father, God, who didst create This all of nothing, gav'st it form and fate, And breath' st into it life and light with state To worship Thee. Eternal God, the Son, who not denied'st To take our nature, becam'st man and died'st To pay our debts upon Thy cross, and cried' st All's done in Me. 58 BEN JONSON. Eternal Spirit, God from both proceeding, Father and Son ; the Comforter in breeding Pure thoughts in man ; with fiery zeal them feeding For acts of grace. Increase those acts, glorious Trinity Of persons, still one God in Unity, Till I attain the long'd-for mystery Of seeing your face, Beholding one in three, and three in one, A Trinity to shine in union ; The gladdest light dark man can think upon, O, grant it me ! Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost, you three, All co-eternal in your majesty, Distinct in persons, yet in unity One God to see. My Maker, Saviour, and my Sanctifier ! To hear, to meditate, sweeten my desire With grace, with love, with cherishing entire 0, then how blest ! Among Thy saints elected to abide, And with Thy angels placed side by side, But in Thy presence, truly glorified, ShaU I then rest. In an age when shallow and short-sighted men are seeking to import and popularize the mystic subtleties of foreign scepticism, it is refreshing to find that we can add to the names of Milton and Newton, and others of the Kings of Thought, one whose noble intellect, strengthened by learning, and matured by time, accepted with a reasonable faith and a wise humility the mysteries of our revealed religion. Mpnson's release from prison was in all probability owing to the fact of his enemies dropping the prosecution. He immediately betook himself to his former avocations ; and now only in his twentieth year, with small means and dark prospects, was so bold as to enter the holy estate of matri- mony. The fair object of his choice was young, and of thelreligion which he had adopted. If any faith can be BEN JONSON. 59 put in the report of his conversation with Drummond, her husband described her as somewhat shrewish, but in the more correct and classical sense in which the word was then used, an honest woman, of domestic habits, and courageous in struggling with the poverty and privations of their early married life. Their first child was a daughter, who lived only six months, and whose death called forth from the poet and father these pathetic lines : " Here lies, to each her parents' ruth, Mary, the daughter of our youth, Yet all Heaven's gifts being Heaven's due, It makes the father less to rue. At six months' end she parted hence, With safety of her innocence ; Whose soul, Heaven's Queen, -whose name she bears, In comfort of her mother's tears, Hath placed amongst her virgin train, Where, while that severed doth remain, This grave partakes the fleshly birth Which cover lightly gentle earth." (J.u the following year his wife bore him a son, to whom some of the players stood as sponsors, and it is said, Shakespeare among them. This was a year of pinching want and incessant toil, f What his necessities at this time, were, we may to some extent judge from a memorandum of Mr. Henslowe, which records " an advance of five shillings" to him ; and those who know his works, will remember that he never stooped to any of the small artifices, by which inferior writers gained a contemporary applause to be followed swiftly by an eternal oblivion ; that he looked on a poet's mission as something high and holy, and has taught that we should look on poetry as a " sacred invention," and " Yiew her in her glorious ornaments Attired in the majesty of art, Set high in spirit with the precious taste Of sweet philosophy, and, which is most, Crown'd with the rich traditions of a soul, 60 BEN JONSON. That hates to have her dignity profaned With any relish of an earthly thought." At what precise period he produced " Every Man in his Humour," it is impossible to decide, for there is an inextricable confusion about the dates of the earlier events of his life. We have seen that in 1598, his duel with Gabriel Spencer occurred, and there is an uncontra- dicted tradition, that his marriage took place after the imprisonment which he suffered for killing Spencer. Many of his biographers assert that it was first played in 1596, when the Author was only in his two and twentieth year ; that the characters were Italian, and the scene laid near Florence. Whether this be true or not, (arid there is no authority but tradition,) it was without doubt origin- ally acted in the form in which it has been handed down to us, by the Lord Chamberlain's servants in the year 1598. And, notwithstanding Mr. Gifford's state- ments to the contrary, it is highly probable that through Shakespeare's interposition this famous drama was ac- cepted. The fame which this comedy won for him brought with it that envy which ever pursues greatness as its shadow. He tells us that they began " to provoke him on every stage with their petulant styles, and as if they wished to single him out for their adversary." His career now becomes what that of too many of the genus irritabile has been a strife with many of his contemporaries. He appears not only to have felt his superiority, but to have somewhat too confidently asserted it. It required even less than this to provoke a herd of assailants ; and so through the remainder of his life we find him constantly lampooned, and occasionally replying to his vituperative enemies. " He who surpasses or subdues mankind Must look down on the hate of those below." BEN JONSON. 61 And would you struggle to be ranked among the great, you should be patient under the attacks of the small. We shall find that the master spirits of each age have mostly lived in friendship, and held sweet counsel together. It is among the lesser aspirants for fame that petty passions and little jealousies have broken out. The giants know their intellectual strength and stature, and reign each in his own kingdom supreme, but on terms of amity with foreign powers, while the dwarfs and pigmies, whose terri- tories in the world of letters are small, whose boundaries uncertain and undefined, wage with each other an unceas- ing warfare, and only band together to attack their com- mon superior, and therefore common foe. So, while all attempts to prove that any feud existed between the gentle Shakespeare and the learned Ben Jonson fall to the ground, there is no doubt whatever that with Dekker, Marston, Gill and others, our poet carried on endless hostilities. It is sad that a profession which might rank so high, should enjoy so unenviable a notoriety ; but true it is, that in the republic of letters the Temple of Janus is never shut. One need not indulge in visionary hopes of the perfectibility of human nature to believe that, although this state of things cannot be entirely got rid of, it will undergo and is undergoing great and rapid change for the better. Literature has escaped the degrading influences of patronage. For a book to be now successful it is no longer deemed necessary that it should have attached to it the name of an aristocrat, or be cumbered with a dedica- tion teeming with servile if not blasphemous adulation. An author now at once addresses himself to his audience. If he can instruct or interest or amuse his fellow-men, he will not lack reward for his labours without stooping to fawn and flatter. Under such a system, there is between writers a loftier rivalry, a diviner emulation. It is not an 62 BEN JONSON. ignoble jostling of one another in the ante-chamber of a patrician. There are no pangs of jealousy, because Mae- cenas smiled on one and passed another by unnoticed. Write what the public can read to its benefit or its plea- sure, and by the sweat and labour of your brain you will earn your bread as independently as man can amid the mutual relations, " nice connections and strong depen- dencies" of the economy in which we live. The best will, for the most part, be the best rewarded ; and though we cannot weed hate and envy from the human heart, there is an instinct in men which prompts them to acquiesce in what is fair and reasonable ; and there will be less of railing and bickering when ability and exertion meet with their proportionate recompense, when success no longer depends on circumstance and accident, when a letter of introduction can no more clothe mediocrity in purple and fine linen, or the want of it leave genius in squalor and rags. Jonson's literary strifes must be again alluded to, though the quarrels of authors be neither a flattering or pleasing aspect of literary history. He next produced " Every Man out of his Humour," which met with a favourable reception. This and all of his earliest and best productions were part of " Those melodious bursts which fill The spacious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still." And the Virgin Queen's honouring the performance with her presence called forth from the grateful poet the follow- ing tribute to her in the epilogue. It was spoken by Macilente, who kneels and prays : " Yet humble as the earth do I implore, O Heaven, that she, whose presence hath effected This change in me, may suffer most late change In her admired and happy government : BEN JONSON. 63 May still this island be called Fortunate, And ragged treason tremble at the sound When fame shall speak it with an emphasis. Let foreign polity be dull as lead, And pale Invasion come with half a heart, When he but looks upon her blessed soil. The throat of war be stopt within her land, And turtle-footed peace dance fairy rings About her court ; when never may there come, Suspect or danger, but all trust and safety. Let flattery be dumb, and envy blind In her dread presence ; Death himself admire her, "And may her virtues make him to forget The use of his inevitable hand. Fly from her, Age ; sleep, Time, before her throne ; Our strongest wall falls down when she is gone." The play is dedicated to " the noblest nurseries of humanity and liberty in the kingdom, the Inns of Court." It was played at the Globe Theatre, of which Shakespeare was then manager. He had acted in " Every Man in his Humour," but took no part in this. Jonson, with his characteristic confidence, and inability to conceal his strong self-esteem, added when he published it, this motto from Horace, " Non aliena meo pressi pede si propius stes Te capient magis, et decies repitita placebunt." His slender means do not appear to have been much bettered by his successful dramatic compositions, for in Henslowe's Memorandum Book, Mr. Gifford finds forty shillings advanced to Dekker and Johnson for a play they were together writing, twenty to Chettle and himself for another, and twenty on a tragedy upon which he was solely employed. His next production was " Cynthia's Revels." This was aimed at some fashionable follies. It is dedicated to " the special fountain of manners, the Court." This quaint but beautiful piece of English, however, contains what we would fain construe as anything rather 64 BEN JONSON. than a reflection on the memory of the monarch whom in our last quotation he had so enthusiastically eulogized ; but the reader may judge for himself. " Such shalt thou find some here, even in the reign of Cynthia, a Crites and an Arete. Now under thy Phcebus (James I.) it will be thy province to make more." It was played by the children of the Queen's Chapel at first a private re- presentation but afterwards brought before the town, and it was revived after the Restoration. It was directed against the fantastic fopperies of the courtiers, and the tiresome pedantry of the Euphuists. It is strange that while it did not incense the parties attacked, it stirred up a swarm of small poets and critics, and Marston and Dekker thought themselves represented under the names of Hedon and Anaides. Jonson replied to their caballings in " The Poetaster," where he introduces them plainly enough as Crispinus and Demetrius. It is dedicated to Mr. Richard Martin, then Recorder of London, an eloquent *man, and one of the most convival of the wits who drank at the same board with Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Jonson. " The Poetaster" was written in fifteen weeks, which fact invalidates the oft-repeated averment that our poet was slow in composition. He appended to it a translation of Horace's, Sat. i., lib. n., dialogue between himself and Trebatius, and added one in which Polyposus and Nasutus are the chief speakers, in which he vindicates his character against his accusers. " It concludes with a fine burst of indignant sarcasm. "Once I'll say, To strike the ear of time in those proud strains, As shall beside the cunning of their ground Give cause to some of wonder, some despite, And more despair to imitate their sound. I that spend half my nights and all my days Here in a cell to get a dark pale face, To come forth worth the ivy and the bays, And in this age can hope no other grace. BEN JONSON. 65 Leave me ! There's something come into my thought That must and shall be sung high and aloof Safe from the wolfs black jaw and the dull ass's hoof." The higher effect of his muse to which Jonson evidently here alludes was tragedy. Accordingly in 1603, he pro- duced " Sejanus," of which play we must make some special mention hereafter. It met with much opposition, was withdrawn, and afterwards remodelled. During the next few years, little is known of his literary labours, but he seems to have written for the stage in conjunction with some of his contemporaries, and his worldly affairs wore a sunnier aspect. Whatever his occasional inability to suit the tastes of theatrical audiences, he was winning golden opinions from the most eminent men of the day, and en- joying their love and friendship. His just reputation for great learning which frequently induced the spectators and critics to receive with apathy, if not displeasure, the works of one who they imagined was more bent on instructing than entertaining them, gained for him among the judicious a high esteem. At the " Mermaid Tavern," in Friday Street, a club had been founded by no less a man than Sir Walter Raleigh, and here were wont to meet together the master spirits of the age. Here Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Selden, Cotton, Martin and Donne, indulged convivial wit, and joined in intellectual discourse. Like the Roman Senate it was an assembly of kings. And with his knowledge and humour, and critical acumen, not the least star in that resplendent galaxy was the learned Ben Jonson. It was at this time, too, that he paid several visits to the country-houses of the aristocracy. If we may trust Drummond, as early as 1603 our poet was on a visit to Sir Robert Cotton, and Camden, his old master, was his fellow-guest. 66 BEN JONSON. At this time the plague was raging in London. Jonson had left his family behind him. His thoughts were doubtless much occupied on them. One night he dreamed that his eldest boy, then seven years of age, appeared to him with a bloody cross (the plague spot) on his forehead, " that he appeared of a manly stature, and of such growth as he thought he would be at the resurrection." This alarmed Jonson. He communicated his fears to Camden, and it is strange that on the very next day came from his wife the sad tidings that his little son was dead. He has dedicated some lines to his memory, which though as good as many such elegies are, do not deserve such a rank in the Poetry of Sorrow as those on his daughter already quoted. His talents also in the new reign gained for him the favour of the Court. Elizabeth, though she had not failed to appreciate his abilities, doled out but a niggard patronage to the professors of the humane arts. James himself an author, and desirous of a reputation for even more learning than he really possessed, readily and freely encouraged men of intellect. Jonson was so unfortunate as soon to provoke the displeasure of the monarch. The act, however indiscreet, redounds to his credit in more than one particular. He wrote in conjunction with Chap- man and Marston, a comedy called " Eastward Hoe." In this play some sarcasms were aimed at the Scotch, who were enjoying in this reign a larger share of office and privi- leges than seemed fit in the eyes of Englishmen, even when a Scot was on the throne. However popular this comedy was, as might be expected, among his own countrymen, it incensed some Scotch courtiers, and on a representation being made to James, he issued an order for the imme- diate arrest of the offending authors. Chapman and Marston were apprehended, while Jonson remained unmo- lested. With a magnanimity which has been seldom BEN JONSON. 67 mentioned with eulogy, he voluntarily accompanied his brother poets to prison, where he remained until the kind offices of Camden and Selden secured the release of all. A report had been circulated that the comic triumvirate were to suffer a degrading punishment not uncommon in those ruder and fiercer times. It was merely this : Their ears were to be cropped and their noses slit. Escape from the threatened mutilation was fitting cause of ovation. Jonson gave an entertainment to celebrate their deli- verance, and to receive the congratulations of friends on the unscathed integrity of their features. Camden and Selden, who had saved the faces of Jonson and his brother bards, graced the banquet with their presence. An anecdote in connection with this, told of his mother, shows that that lady had in her character a tinge of romance, and something of Spartan heroism. She sat at the table with her son's guests, pledged him in a goblet of wine, and showed him a paper " of strong and lusty poison," which, had the expected sentence been pronounced, she designed to have mingled with his drink, and to have partaken of herself. After his release from this second incarceration, he pro- duced " The Masque of Blackness," written for some court festivities, but not as has been wilfully asserted, full of fulsome adulation to the King. He was also at this time employed upon his translation of Horace, and his version of Aristotle's " Poetics." The latter perished in the fire, which destroyed so many of his manuscripts, and which he has commemorated by his poem "The Execration of Vulcan." In 1605, he gave to the world the comedy which ranks next in merit to " Every Man in his Humour." " Volpone ; or, The Fox" was received with great applause. It is dedicated to the Universities in a long and eloquent F 2 68 BEN JONSON. defence of his character and literary career. He added a smart and amusing prologue. It was at this time that Jonson gave that serious consideration to the controversy between the rival churches, which induced him to return to the faith of his childhood. We need not pause to eulogize the wisdom of the act ; and the sincerity no one who knows anything of his life and writings will be so bold as to impugn. It is said that when he first, after his return to the bosom of the Anglican Church, attended the Holy Communion, he drank off the whole cup of sacramental wine. If this be true, it might seem to us an act of daring irreverence. It would perhaps be more philosophical to consider it as displaying a strange exu- berance of religious zeal and rude sincerity, for in those days, as Mr. Gifford remarks, the consecrated elements were more largely partaken of than they are now, and not without scriptural and apostolical authority. Jonson was now rising fast in public estimation. He again basked in the sunshine of Court favour, had won the applause of the universities, and fixed by the strong spell of his genius the admiration of the fickle and fastidious votaries of the drama. No festival was deemed complete if his Muse omitted to aid by her grace and ornament the ceremony or the banquet. The King was about to dine with the Worshipful Company of Merchant Tailors. Mr. Gifford quotes from Stow the following : " Whereas the company are informed that the King's most excellent majestic, with our gratious Queene, and the noble Prince and divers honorable lords and others, determyne to dyne on the day of the eleccion of M. and Wardens, therefore the meeting was appointed to advise and consult how everie thinge may be performed for the reputacion and credit of the company, to his Majestie's best lyking and contentment. And Sir John Swynnerton (afterward Lord Mayor) is entreated to confer with Master Benjamin BEN JONSON. 69 Jonson, the poet, about a speech to be made to welcome his Majesty, and about music and other invencions which may give liking and delight ; by reason that the company doubt that their schoolmaster and scholleres be not acquainted with such kinde of entertainment." For this and other labours of the kind, Jonson received a pecuniary remuneration. In 1609, he produced "The Silent Woman," and " The Masque of Queens." In the next year his brain was equally prolific, for that is the date of " The Masque of Barriers," and also " The Alchymist." "Catiline" followed in 1611. This play, though not at first very successful, retained its place as a stock piece, until the Puritan, in the day of his power, banished the drama from the " kingdom of the saints," and closed the theatres where the lofty teachings of Shakespeare and Jonson had humanized and exalted their fellow-men. Next year an event occurred which threw a gloom over the Court and the nation. Prince Henry, eldest son of James I., died suddenly at the tender age of eighteen. His personal beauty, unblameable life, and engaging manners had won for him the admiration and affection of all. Men who hated the father, looked forward with pride and pleasure to the accession of the son. The sorrow which his death occasioned was not disproportionate to the popularity he had enjoyed through life. " Hark ! forth from the abyss a voice proceeds, A long, low, distant murmur of dread sound Such as arises when a nation bleeds With some deep and immedicable wound." It is perhaps a trite observation here to remark by how slender a thread does the sword of destiny seem to be suspended. On some casualty how seemingly insignifi- cant, on one life alas ! how uncertain ! hang eventful 70 BEN JONSON. consequences, whose momentous importance it were impossible to exaggerate. And, albeit it should provoke the sneer of the optimist and the fatalist, to consider that the current of events might have run in another channel than that in which it shaped its way, it is diffi- cult to escape the reflection how different might have been the history of the last two centuries, how different too the present condition of this country and the phases of its civilization, had Henry and not Charles Stuart ascended the throne of England. Then might the page that proudly records our progress have been unstained by the blood of an erring but unfortunate monarch ; civil war, and restoration, and revolution might never have added their strange and swift vicissitudes to the catalogue of our crimes and follies ; and our literature and our drama had perhaps retained something more of the noble grandeur of the Elizabethan age, and escaped the debasing pollution of the licence which followed unnatural and hypocritical restraint. And now, perchance, our national church her cathedrals undesecrated by the sacrilegious hand of the Iconoclast, and her sacred spires studding at intervals more frequent our beautiful landscapes might feed with spiritual and intellectual food the hungering millions of our dense population, neither needing the aid or experi- encing the opposition of those sects and " subdichotomies of schisms,"* whose strifes and passions cannot but remind us of the too fiery zeal and too intemperate hate with which their stern forefathers rose up to defend, against kingcraft and priestcraft, the cause of conscience and of freedom. But so it seemed not good to Him whose will it ofttimes is that nations, as well as individuals, should learn in the school of suffering. With the exception of the case of the beloved Princess * Milton. BEN JONSON. 71 Charlotte, a royal death has seldom wrung so sincere a sorrow from the heart of a people as did the pre- mature fate of this best scion of the doomed House of Stuart. Much as the Court might need such pastime to dissipate the cloud of gloom which hung over it, they would not insult the memory of so lamented a Prince by even the innocent recreation of masque or revelry. Jonson, doubtless, very deeply felt a loss, which he has commemorated in his poems. He had frequented the Court much of late, and in one of his masques, had paid a. loyal tribute of admiration to Prince Henry. He now embraced this opportunity, when there would naturally be but little demand on his time and talents, for European travel. Slow as communication was in those days, and great as the obstacles in the way of travelling then were, Jonson was too well known in his own country not to have gained something like a continental reputation. Ambassadors who visited our Court may have met him there, and carried back some record of the national enter- tainments, adorned if not created by the genius of the Laureate. Whether he was actuated by a desire to pay homage to, and receive it from, the great men of other countries, or whether he was anxious to visit the scenes of his early campaign, we know not. None of the interest that attaches itself to the travels of other poets, belongs to those of the subject of our memoir. We have no record that, like Milton, he visited Galileo in a dun- geon for thinking as Franciscan licensers did not think, or that like Byron, he was wont, in the soft and sunny south " To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Nesera's hair." He was in Paris in 1613, and in the next year we 72 BEN JONSON. find him again in England, as diligent as ever with his pen. He now wrote " Bartholomew Fair," and not long after a play, with the singular title of " The Devil's an Ass." He next revised and commenced a regular publication of his works in folio. The first volume contained his Epigrams and several poems, called " The Forest," with some of his Masques and his early Plays. He was not, however, sufficiently encouraged by his contemporaries to proceed with his task, for had he done so, we should have now possessed many valuable productions of his, of which only fragments have been preserved from the fire, to which we have before alluded. Just about this time died William Shakespeare. It is not for us to venture a tribute of weak and insufficient praise to that myriad-minded, God-like man, whose genius has enriched the thought of the world, and whom, in the words of Hallam, we may call " the greatest being Nature ever produced in the human shape ;" but we re- joice to be able to record, in spite of malicious assertions to the contrary, that Jonson admired him and loved him while he lived, and loved and praised him when he died. His lines " To the Memory of my beloved William Shake- speare," are too well known to be quoted. Daniel, as has been elsewhere said, had been, up to this time, the Court poet. There was no salary attached to the office, and its rewards were merely such favours and gratuities as the poet might be so fortunate as to gain by his writings, or by ingratiating himself with royalty or noble courtiers. James, however, now gave to Jonson the letters patent, from which we date the commencement of the present laureate dynasty, with an annual pension of one hundred marks for life. Daniel grew jealous at this, and at once quitted the Court in disgust. He lived about three years longer; and although self-exiled from the Court, died generally beloved and lamented. Though BEN JONSON. 73 Jonson was the fortunate occupant of a post which Daniel thought he had a prior right to, no breach occurred in the friendship which had long existed between them. Jonson 's continental wanderings had increased his love of travel. In 1618, he started on a tour to Scotland. In these days, when we are whirled from London to Edinburgh between the morning and evening meal, it is strange to think of our poet's walking the whole way from the one capital to the other. Jonson wrote an account of this pedestrian excursion and stay in the north, but un- fortunately it perished in the fire at his house. In its absence, little more is known than that he spent several months at the seats of the nobility and gentry in the vicinage of the modern Athens. At Leith, he encoun- tered Taylor, the water poet, who alludes to the meeting, and makes grateful mention of the generosity of Jonson, who gave him, at parting, " a piece of gold, two-and- twenty shillings value, to drink his health in England." In the spring he proceeded to Hawthornden, where he passed the greater part of April with another brother bard, Drummond. To Jonson's reputation, this visit was fraught with injury, perhaps never wholly to be erased. His host had a tendency to what has been well called " Boswellism ;" but it unfortunately lacked two important features in that amiable weakness, accuracy and kind feeling. He had some appreciation of the great capacities of his guest, but was not devoid of jealousy and envy. From the brief, blundering account which he gives of Jonson's conversa- tions with him, a candid critic would gather, had he no other proofs to aid him in the conclusion, that the Laureate possessed varied and profound information on most sub- jects, was a severe censor of books and men, had wit to 74 BEN JONSON. overflowing, but with a self-esteem and self-confidence almost arrogant. But these notes of the fireside dialogues of the two poets have been made the foundation of the innumerable calumnies which, with the notorious vitality of error, have been copied, page after page, into our literary and dramatic annals. Those who are curious on a matter which would be to the general reader wearisome should consult Mr. Gilford's memoir, the pages of which, though we have praised their candour and courage, sometimes degenerate into some- thing less like a biography than the speech of a counsel for the defence in a criminal court, whose duties to his client may demand of him that he shall assail unsparingly the testimony and characters of witnesses for the prose- cution. Jonson appears to have been as free from suspicion as he was superior to many other evil tempers which have been laid at his door. On his return, he wrote to Drum- mond the following letter : "To my worthy, honoured, and beloved friend, W. Drummond. " Most loving and beloved Sir, against which titles I should most knowingly offend if I made you not some account of myself, to come even with your friendship. I am arrived safely, with a most Catholic welcome, and my reports not unacceptable to his Majesty. He professed, thank God ! some joy to see me, and is pleased to hear the purpose of my book, to which I most earnestly solicit you for your promise of the inscription at Pinky, some things concerning the Loch of Lomond, touching the government of Edinburgh, to urge Mr. James Scot, and what else you can procure for me, with all speed. Though these requests be full of trouble, 1 hope they BEN JONSON. 75 shall neither burthen nor weary such a friendship, whose commands to me I will ever interpret a pleasure. News we have none here, but what is making against the Queen's funeral, whereof I have something in hand which shall look upon you with the next. Salute the beloved Fentons, the Nisbets, the Scots, the Levingtons, and all the honest and honoured names with you, especially Mr. James Wroth, his wife, your sister, &c. ; and if you forget yourself, you believe not in " Your most true friend and lover, " BEN JONSON." Jonson was now in the zenith of his fame. The Universities, however slow sometimes to discover abilities in their own alumni, are never tardy in offering a tribute to parts which have already commanded the admiration of the world. Oxford now delighted to honour him, and he received from that learned body the honorary degree of Master of Arts. The King was also desirous of giving him an honour which, whatever its conventional value in other reigns, had been so lavished by James as to fall in public estimation, and Jonson respectfully declined knight- hood which the monarch had conferred on only two hundred and thirty-seven persons within six weeks after his entrance into the kingdom. The noontide of Jonson's career was as brief as it was bright. From the moment his sun of life had reached its meridian, it hastened in cloud to its setting. From 1616 to 1625, he had never written for the stage. His annual pension, his constant remuneration from the Court, and some of the civic companies had kept him from want, and had tempted him to an expenditure which utterly precluded all providence for the future. He indulged in a lavish hospitality, assembled at his table the first men of the day ; and on every occasion his genuine love of conviviality 76 BEN JONSON. led him, whether at the " Mermaid" or in his own house, to warm his naturally sluggish and saturnine temperament with wine. He soon suffered from a severe attack of palsy, which shook his constitution to its centre. Disease was aggra- vated by the want which soon followed with swift retri- bution on his former profuseness. He now was again compelled by his necessities to betake himself to the stage. He produced " The New Inn," a play which, albeit some passages of great merit, scarcely deserved a better fate than it met with. There is little doubt that it was " completely damned." " The just indignation the author took at the vulgar censure of his play, by some malicious spectators, begat the following ode to himself." This is Jonson's heading to it. We quote it almost entire. " Come, leave the loathed stage, And the more loathsome age, Where pride and impudence, in faction knit, Usurp the chair of wit, Indicting and arraigning every day Something they call a play. Let their fastidious, vain Commission of the brain Kun on, and rage, sweat, censure and condemn, They were not made for thee, less thou for them. " Say that thou pour'st them wheat, And they will acorns eat ; 'Twere simple fury still thyself to waste On such as have no taste ! To offer them a surfeit of pure bread Whose appetites are dead ! No, give them grains their fill, Husks, draff to drink and swill : If they love lees, and leave the lusty wine, Envy them not ; their palate's with the swine. " Leave things so prostitute, And take the Alcaic lute, Or thine own Horace, or Anacreou's lyre, BEN JONSON. 77 And though thy nerves be shrunk, and blood be cold, Ere years have made thee old. Strike that disdainful heat Throughout to their defeat, As curious fools, and envious of thy strain, May blushing swear no palsy's in thy brain." ****** It was very cleverly parodied by Owen Feltham, and there is a spirited answer in imitation of it as eulogistic as the parody is severe. The play was, it is said, hissed off the stage before it had reached the last act ; but Jonson immediately published it as an appeal from the audience of the theatre to his readers and patrons. An allusion in the epilogue to his want and illness, called forth from Charles I. a present of one hundred pounds. Jonson was truly obliged by so munificent a succour, and poured forth his gratitude in three poems. He also made it an occa- sion for petitioning the King to increase the annual pen- sion granted him by James I. Such a begging letter in rhyme is perhaps a literary curiosity. The merit of the verse would not induce us to quote it. " The humble petition of poor Ben To the best of monarchs, masters, men, Doth most humbly show it To your Majesty, your poet ; That whereas your royal father James the blessed, pleased the rather Of his special grace to letters To make all the Muses debtors To his bounty, by extension Of a free poetic pension, A large hundred marks annuity To be given me in gratuity. * * * * * Please, your Majesty, to make, Of your grace, for goodness sake, Those your father's marks your pounds." Charles immediately granted the request, and added to it a tierce of Jonson's favourite wine. The letters patent 78 BEN JONSON. were made out. They gave to the Poet- Laureate the annual pension of one hundred pounds and " a terse of Canary Spanish wine," " in consideration of the good and accept- able service done unto us and our said father by the said Benjamin Jonson, and especially to encourage him to pro- ceede in these services of his wit and his penn which we have enjoined unto him, and which we expect from him." In 1627 he had written "The Fortunate Isles." For the next three years no masque had been represented at Court. The date of the letters patent is 1630, and Charles immediately on the augmentation of his pension called on him to prepare one. Jonson wrote " Love's Triumph through Callipolis." It was highly esteemed and well received. He shortly after produced, with the assistance of Inigo Jones, " Chloridia." This was printed, and in the title-page Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones were said to be the inventors. According to a quotation of I. Disraeli's, again quoted by Mr. Gifford, it appeared that the architect was incensed at the poet's name appearing first in the title-page. He seems to have had great influence at Court, and to have been so malevolent as to have used it to injure Jonson ; for the next year the Court Masque was penned, not by our poet, but by Aurelian Townsend. Just at this time also he suffered neglect from the city authorities, from whom he had for some time received an annual bounty, and who now deprived him of what he calls their " chanderley pension." He was reduced to great want, and wrote to the Earl of Newcastle the first of what have been termed his " mendicant letters :" " My noblest Lord and Patron, " I send no borrowing epistle to provoke your Lordship, for I have neither fortune to repay, nor security to engage that will be taken ; but I make a most humble petition to BEN JONSON. 79 your Lordship's bounty to succour my present necessities this good time of Easter, and it shall conclude all begging requests hereafter, on behalf of your truest beadsman and most thankful servant, "B. J."* This appeal was liberally responded to. We know now but little more of him and that little is sad. The latter portion of his life is as free from incident as it was full of suffering. His whole career, save the few points in his earlier days, which we have attempted to seize on, is much like the toilsome and monotonous existence of the workers of the pen. They do not attract applause on the high places of the world. Their pains and troubles are in the smaller sphere of the library and the study. It is there that, unseen by their fellow-men, they are torn by the intellectual agony in the struggle for subsistence or the pursuit of fame. We must read them in their works, and think of the thousands of hours of careful study and patient thought in which those stately volumes were elabo- rated which have outlived envy and anger, and taken their place in the literature of England. And viewed in this light, even if it lack event and excitement, Jonson's life is not devoid of noble moral, and heroic example. For it was one long, honest, patient labour, to earn the bread of independence by the sweat of his brain, and to win the applause of the good and great of his own and of all time. In his career, undiversified though it be, he was ever toiling ; he came frequently before the public, had his brilliant successes and signal failures, encountered fierce assaults from envious enemies, and was cheered by warm tributes of admiration from friends, was driven by a too lavish expenditure and a too munificent hospitality into dependence upon the rich and great, and ended his days in * Harl. MSS. 80 BEN JONSON. that gloom which has so often darkened the sun of genius in its setting. Had he died much younger, he had lived long enough for fame ; and we may apply to him some of his own beautiful lines to the memory of Sir H. Morrison : " It is not growing like a tree In bulke, doth make man better be, Or standing like an oake three thousand yeare, To fall a logge at last, dry, bald and scare ; A lilie of a day Is fairer far in May, Although it fall and die that night, It was the plant and flowre of light. In small proportions we just beauties see And in short measure life may perfect be." Dry den has called his last plays his dotages, and the sarcasm is perhaps as true as it is severe. Among them were "The Magnetic Lady," and "The Tale of a Tub," the last work that he submitted to the stage. It should be remembered, however, that, in contrast to these, he in his later days penned " Love's Welcome at Welbeck," which was represented when his friend and patron, the Earl of Newcastle, entertained Charles I. In " The Sad Shepherd," too, all his pristine powers seemed for a time to have revived. In this beautiful swan- song there is a classic elegance, and a sweet pastoral sim- plicity which is entrancing. The verse is music itself. There are lines which combine the stately majesty of Keats' " Hyperion" with the faultless melody of the "^Enone" of Tennyson. This was Jonson's last effort, except a fragment of a tragedy entitled " The Fall of Mortimer." He was employed, too, even when the pen shook in his palsied hand, on the " Discoveries" and " Grammar," of which only fragments have reached us, On the 6th of August, 1637, he closed his eyes on this world. He had outlived by many years his wife and all his children. No tender offices of family affection soothed BEN JONSON. 81 the lone old man upon his dying pillow. He was constantly visited by Dr. Duppa, Bishop of Winchester ; and as we have before expressed our belief in the sincerity of his religious convictions, we may add as a farther proof of it, that he expressed on his death-bed deep penitence for the oaths and irreverent expressions which, according to the manners of his times, he had introduced into his dramatic writings. Three days after his decease, he was buried in West- minster Abbey. Near the scene of his boyish sports, hard by the school-room where so many years ago he had listened to the words of Camden, he came home to his last long rest. In those holy aisles where sleep so many of the wits and the worthies of England, lie the ashes of one who was both. There may we read the simple epitaph that marks the spot " O rare Ben Jonson !" Malicious dulness has arraigned this short epiphonema as blasphemous. Such a charge is little worthy of remem- brance except to show the malignity with which our poet, whether living or dead, was assailed. An anecdote is told of the origin of the laconic inscription. Sir J. Young, of Great Milton, Oxfordshire, was passing through the Abbey, and stopped and gave one of the workmen eighteen-pence to carve the words on the stone. A subscription for a monu- ment was immediately set on foot, and was very successful ; but the dark days of civil discord were close at hand, and the tomb of a poet who had adorned the courts of three English Sovereigns by his genius, was forgotten amid the gathering murmurs of the storm which shook down throne and temple. Jonson's personal appearances were singular, and in youth prepossessing. His intense application, sedentary habits, and convivial tastes, afterwards impaired his good looks. His " dark pale face" was affected by a scorbutic humour, and he became large and corpulent. Dekker has represented G 82 BEN JONSON. him as a monster in " Satiro-mastix ;" but taking Jonson's own account of himself, we know that he had a " mountain- belly and ungracious gait." Mr. D'Israeli has called him an elephant Cupid. His love of the wine of the name gained for him the facetious nickname of the Canary Bird. His character we have so endeavoured to shadow forth in our narrative, that we have but little more to say. No man has perhaps ever provoked so much acrimonious attack and malevolent calumny as did Jonson. Now this arose from two faults not very uncommon in men of his splendid abilities. He had an overweening self-confidence, and was yet morbidly sensitive to attack from the meanest assailant. He was not content with taking that high place to which his abilities entitled him, but assumed an air of superiority which did not fail to give offence. His too great readiness to exaggerate the malice of his enemies, and meet their opprobrious assaults, perpetuated controversies which had otherwise been long forgotten. The, quarrels have been handed down, and the Lilliputians of later days have come to the aid of the pigmies of Jonson's time, and done their little all to bespatter the character of the Giant. Hence have been repeated, until we are wearied and disgusted by them, those false and ill-natured scandals which disgrace well-nigh all our literary and dramatic records. It may be objected, " Can a man be good or worthy of our love who thus continually provokes assault ?" Let us remember the orator who trembled lest he had said some- thing wrong when the crowd applauded. To win golden opinions from all sorts of men is rather the proof of successful talent than of moral worth. "Ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake," were the words of Him who " spake as never man spake" to His chosen band of followers. Without attempting to show that Jonson was a martyr in so holy a cause as this, it may be said of him that he BEN JONSON. 83 was one of a small class which we find sometimes in history, and which we occasionally see among contempo- raries, who, while they merit and enjoy the strong love of friends and family, are, if not generally unpopular, frequently involved in controversy and quarrel. They are not good, easy men they have no hypocritical reticence, no diplomatic dissembling, no tender compassion for vices and follies. When anything that is wrong or mean offends their moral sense, they use hard names un- sparingly ; and when themselves assailed, -they are not content to diminish or destroy opposition by the silent eloquence of an honourable career, but they strive to write it down and talk it down as well. Such was Ben Jonson. It may be enough to say of him that, whatever his faults and weaknesses, he lived on terms of intimacy and affec- tion with the best and greatest men of his day ; that there are numerous testimonies to his worth as a man, and his ability and wit a a conversationalist ; that his letters breathe a spirit of good feeling and kindness ; that, to sum up his character, he was, in the highest sense of the words, laborious, brave, and noble. He has been compared to many great men to Shake- speare, to Milton, and others. As no two cases are exactly alike, and no two faces possess the same expres- sion, so such comparisons are usually unsatisfactory, if not false and fruitless. But we cannot pass by a parallel not suggested, but yet rendered stranger by the identity of name between the Poet-Laureate and our great Lexico- grapher. Both were hard-working, strong-minded men, who, by dint of incessant exertion, merited an immortal fame. Both, in parts of their life, endured neglect and want ; both died, and left no children to perpetuate a name they had made honourable ; both found a home in clubs and coffee-houses in the society of intellectual friends ; both were self-confident and self-opinionated, full of G 2 84 BEN JONSON. strong prejudices, supporters of the existing order of things, stern censors, critics candid to a fault, great conversationalists and brilliant wits ; in their religious views sincere, but gloomy, if not superstitious ; both devoted heart and soul to literature ; and whatever shape their writings assumed the moral satirists of the eras which they severally adorned. It now remains for us to attempt an estimate of Ben Jon son's literary efforts. Let us look at him first as the writer of tragedies. We cannot say of him as, with Hazlitt, we may of Shakespeare, that he was " greatest in the greatest." The author of" Every Man in his Humour," " The Fox," and "The Alchymist," must rank above the author of " Sejanus" and " Catiline." Jonson had all the keen observation and abundant wit which can descry and picture the weakness of human follies and fashions. He was deficient in that sublimer inspiration which is the voice of passion. In his selection of subjects also he was not happy. The regal history of our own country which Shakespeare has made his own, Jonson eschewed. His knowledge of ancient authors tempted him to draw from Roman annals the sources of tragic interest. In this, his learning became his snare. If we compare " Julius Csesar" with either of Jonson's dramas drawn from the history of the same nation, our preference to Shakespeare's play must be yielded without a reservation. Shakespeare has avoided the prolix speeches, the literal translations from Latin writers, the too faithful adherence to minute inci- dents historical, but not, therefore, necessarily interesting ; and he has seized, with the same instinct, on Roman character, exhibiting, as he always does, a profound knowledge of men's feelings, and the power of clothing mere abstract humanity in palpable flesh and blood. " Sejanus" was the first of our poet's two tragedies. BEN JONSON. 85 It is an attempt to portray a state of things such as few pens, save those of Tacitus and Gibbon, are able to depict. The once great and free republic, whose internal history had been the vehement and protracted struggle of powerful classes, whose external history the record of valiantly won victories and extended territory, was now groaning under its own bulk, and had exchanged its ancient liberties for the despotism of the sword. Society was in a state so corrupt that barbarism, because purer, would have been preferable to it. It was an age of plots, intrigues, open assassinations and secret poisonings, adul- teries and lewd abominations which insult all natural instinct. No vice was too abject to be indulged, no passion too morbid, no desire too impure to reap its unholy gratification. Those senators whose fathers had seen Catiline tremble at the thunders of Cicero, and Caesar fall by the steel of Brutus, wore the fetters of servitude without a blush, and stooped to be panders and pro- curers, while slaves enjoyed a prouder criminality as the ministers of murder. There was no crime which the ingenuity of wickedness can invent which did not blacken the gown of the conscript and the purple of his imperial master. Such an epoch would seem to possess some elements of dramatic interest and tragic grandeur. Contemporary writers, in such times, would stand in strong contrast, and may easily be classified. They must prostitute genius to be the slave of lust and folly, or take their rank among the stern satirists of vice. But when such an age becomes historical, one might think the dark landscape would present wonders and warnings which might fitly be exhibited on the stage. On a closer view, however, it would appear that there is a want of that rude healthy life and genuine feeling, without which the pomp and circumstance of the drama, however grand and gaudy, 86 BEN JONSON. would seem weak and sickly, and its utterance faltering and faint. The principle of decay is at work, and the empire tottering to its fall. There are none of those nobler strifes and passions which are the symptoms of vigorous existence. And we see this in the " Sejanus" of Ben Jonson. There are only two characters with whom the spectator can feel any sympathy, and they are not sufficiently prominent. They are two senators who are noble exceptions to the general depravity of their order, who blush at the degradation into which the once great assembly had sunk. The amour for it is a story, not of love, but of lust that is woven into the plot has nothing of depth or tenderness in it. It may be a faithful picture of the sensual passion of such an age, but excites no sympa- thetic interest in the reader, and is therefore one among many reasons we might enumerate why this portion of history is not well adapted to dramatic action. But the play has faults which do not belong immediately to the subject. It is too long ; and though it does not lack incident, it is incident of an undramatic kind. There is a lack of plot, the speeches are far too lengthy even for orations in the senate, and there are many long passages of rhyming heroics which none but the admirers of French tragedy and Dryden's uncongenial imitation of them will be so hazardous as to praise. The characters are very numerous, and the most im- portant are men whose crimes have nothing in them to dazzle or cheat us into a temporary admiration. Livia is an abandoned woman ; Sejanus himself an unprincipled, ambitious man; and Tiberius a more bestial slave to sense, a murderer, a coward, and yet the despot of the degraded senate. The main interest is centred in these two bad men. The Emperor is a deeper dissembler, and more than equal to the reckless plot-making and versatile BEN JONSON. 87 cunning of Sejanus. There is a fault too in the moral. Wickedness in the highest place escapes unpunished, and the greatest criminal is unscathed. It is true that a bad man who is the instrument of another bad man's crimes should meet with fitting punishment, and it is also true that among the worst men united for any object, there must be a semi-romantic counterfeit honesty, and that he who first violates it should suffer the quickest fall. But there is a higher truth still, that the chief agent in the plot of crime should not escape the bolts of justice ; and the fault in the moral lesson conveyed by this drama is, that it is less the fall of Sejanus than the triumph of Tiberius ; and with the success of such a man who could sympathize ? " Catiline " was written after an interval of eight years, and bears evident marks of improvement, though a few faults are exaggerated. In the former play, Jonson had kept with servile fide- lity to the description he drew from ancient authors ; but in this he goes a step farther in the wrong direction, and translates verbatim page upon page of Cicero and Sallust. For example, the well-known commencement of the first oration against Catiline, is thus rendered : " Quousque tandem abutre Catilina, patientia nostra ? quamdiu furor iste tuus nos eludet ? Quern ad finem sese effrenata jactabit audacia ? Nihilne te nocturnum prsesidium Palatii, nihil urbis vigilise, nihil fimor populi, nihil concursus bonorum omnium, nihil hie munitissimus habendi sena- tus locus, nihil horum ora vultusque moverunt ?" " Whither at length wilt thou abuse our patience, Still shall thy fury mock us ? To what license Dares thy unbridled boldness run itself ? Do all the nightly guards kept on the palace, The city's watches, with the people's fears, The concourse of all good men this so strong 88 BEN JONSON. And fortified seat here of the Senate And present looks upon thee, strike thee nothing ?" And again : " O tempora ! O mores ! Senatus haec mtelligit, consul videt : hie tamen vivit. Vivit ? immo vero in sena- tum venit, fit publici consilii particeps ; notat et designat oculis unumquemque nostrum. Nos autem, viri fortes, satisfacere reipublicse videmur, si istius furorem ac tela vitemus." " 0, age and manners ! this the Consul sees, The Senate understands, yet this man lives. Lives ? Ay, and comes here into council with us, Partakes the public cares, and with his eye Marks and points each man of us, to slaughter. And we good men do satisfy the state If we can shun but this man's sword and madness." Jonson's admiration of the ancients was so unbounded, that he is tempted into long imitations and literal transla- tions. When thrown on his own resources he is infinitely superior. The reader shall judge for himself. The fol- lowing extracts will prove this assertion, and will also show the marked improvement of Catiline on Sejanus. They are the best passages of the respective plays. The first is Sejanus' soliloquy on fear. " How vain and vile a passion is this fear, What base, uncomely things it makes men do ! Suspect their noblest friends, as I did this, Flatter poor enemies, entreat their servants, Stoop, court, and catch at the benevolence Of creatures unto whom, within this hour, I would not have vouchsafed a quarter look, Or piece of face ! By you that fools call gods, Hang all the sky with your prodigious signs, Fill earth with monsters, drop the Scorpion down Out of the zodiak, or the fiercer lion ; Shake off the loosen'd globe from her long hinge, Roll all the world in darkness, and let loose The enraged winds, to turn up groves and towns ! BEN JONSON. 89 When I do fear again, let me be struck With forked fire and unpitied die Who fears, is worthy of calamity." This degenerates into rant, but is better than the trans- lation of Cicero. In the following extract from " Catiline," there is a Shakespearean strength and terseness. " It is, methinks, a morning full of fate, It riseth slowly, as her sullen car Had all the weights of sleep and death hung at it ! She is not rosy fingered, but swollen black, Her face is like a water turn'd to blood, And her sick head is bound about with clouds, As if she threatened night ere noon of day ! It does not look as it would have a hail, Or health wish'd in it, as on other morns." In this play he had added a chorus, of which one can scarcely say anything more severe than that it abounds in the common-places of the Greek chorus, unrelieved by its occasional sublimity and beauty. This was not merely in imitation of the Greek and Roman tragedy, but was the custom in old English plays. There are choruses in the u Cleopatra and Philotas " of Jonson's predecessor, Daniel. The play of " Catiline/' like that of " Sejanus," displays great learning. But we are here wearied, as before, by the endless prolixity of the speeches. Cicero is as rhetorical in his conversations with Curtius and Fulvia, as he is when haranguing the Senate. It commences strangely. The Ghost* of Sylla rises and makes a very long speech, in the midst of which the curtain is drawn and Catiline discovered in his study. The Ghost advises Catiline to perpetrate all kinds of enormities, and then disappears. Catiline soliloquizes. Then ensues a scene between Aurelia, Orestilla, and himself. Next enter Lentulus and Cethegus. The scene between Fulvia and Curtius is only one part of a grossly licentious amour, very similar to the 90 BEN JONSON. one in the former play, and it would be blasphemy to compare this illicit intrigue with the warm, true passion of Romeo and Juliet. There is a more than stage exaggeration in his portrayal of the guilt of Catiline and his fellow-conspirators. Men, however the appetite for blood and lust may become palled and morbid from satiety, scarcely destroy and ruin from the mere love of mischief and injury ; and here they speak as if they did so from a keen enjoyment of crime for crime's sake, without the further incentives of pleasure, ambition, or revenge. The fault in Jonson's two tragedies is that there is not enough to interest flesh and blood in them, and to stir the sympathies, the hopes and fears of humanity. There is a cold, historic sublimity, which, however it may command the homage of the intellect, awakes no responsive echo in the heart. The characters are true to history ; true, therefore, to human nature ; and they move on in the plot with stern and terrible decision. But the harsh outline lacks those lighter pencillings, those softer colourings, in which poetry surpasses history, and without which the picture, though bold and masterly, will not chain the loving gaze of the spectator to the painter's canvas. The subject of his two tragedies, from its very nature, compelled Jonson to depict men, not as they should be, but as they are in a state of society corrupt and abomi- nable. Much better had he chosen some portions of our national history ; but there was something deep and gloomy in his own mind that caused him to dwell on these dark scenes of guilt and ruin. Had he introduced the comic element, it might have created a graceful contrast, and at any rate pleased the less educated portion of his audiences. His tragedies are better fitted for the student in the closet, than the BEN JONSON. 91 theatrical audience ; and this is but a meagre praise of them as plays. But his greatest fault, and specially patent in these higher efforts of his muse, is that he cannot borrow and make what he borrows his own. He cannot assimilate. He is learned, his information vast and varied, but he cannot stamp with his own genius the thoughts of others, and impart any fresh beauty or lustre to them. On this ground he stands in exact con- trast to his greatest contemporary. Shakespeare made his little learning go so far, that we think his powers encyclopsediacal. And he used his information with the utmost discretion, and coloured everything with his own originality. Jonson, who was infinitely more learned than Shakespeare, thrusts his reading so palpably before us, that we are sometimes tempted to suspect that he is a pedagogue and a pedant. With him much, and not a little learning, was a dangerous thing. As a tragic writer he has little of the majestic grandeur of ^Eschylus, the tempered softness and sweetness of Sophocles, the pro- verbial philosophy and eloquent declamation of Euripides ; and if we compare him with the myriad-minded Shake- speare, he will weigh yet lighter in the balance. Those who know " Sejanus" and " Catiline/' will not dare to class them with "The Agamemnon," "The Antigone" or "The Medea," and still less with "Hamlet" and " Macbeth." They will occupy no mean place in litera- ture, when they are ranked more fairly with " Cato" and " Ion." His best comedies are so generally known, that a lengthy critique on them would be tedious. Those that are less read are scarcely deserving of any notice, beyond the in- terest that must attach itself to any production from the pen of such a man. " Every Man in his Humour," " The Alchymist," " Volpone, or the Fox," and " The Silent Woman," are the best of the numerous comedies he has 92 BEN JONSON. left us. They have provoked unsparing censure from Bishop Kurd. He condemns the first as " an unnatural and as the painters say, hard delineation of a group of simply existing passions, wholly chimerical, and unlike to anything we may observe in the commerce of real life." He terms " The Alchymist" " a farcical comedy," asserts that " Volpone" is " not a complete model of comedy," and complains generally that Jonson's wit is too frequently caustic, his raillery coarse, and his humour excessive. We need not pause to express our utter disregard for such censure. When we know that Voltaire said that " Hamlet" seemed the work of a drunken savage, we can feel no surprise when we are thus dashed against the shallows of criticism. We live too in an age when tenth-rate men review the writings of their superiors with cheerful confi- dence and fatal facility. Mr. Gifford declares that Hurd knew little or nothing of Jonson's works, and while we tremble in charging dishonesty on a writer on Prophecy and a Bishop, we think Mr. Gifford is not far wrong. But we will favour our reader with one or two counter opinions from no less a man than Mr. Hallam. Speaking of " Every Man in his Humour," Mr. H. calls it " an ex- traordinary monument of early genius in what is seldorn the possession of youth, a clear and unerring description of human character, various and not extravagant beyond the necessities of the stage." He adds, " It is, perhaps, the earliest of European domestic comedies, that deserves to be mentioned." Of " The Alchymist," he remarks that " The plot with great simplicity is continually animated and interesting, the characters are conceived and delineated with admirable boldness, truth, spirit and variety; the humour, especially in the two Puritans a sect who now began to do penance on the stage is amusing ; the lan- guage, when it does not smell too much of book learning, is forcible and clear." Mr. Gifford is more enthusiastic BEN JONSON. 93 and unmeasured in his panegyric. He writes, " If a model be sought of all that is regular in design and perfect in execution in the English Drama, it will be found (if found at all) in ' The Alchymist.' " It is certainly a comedy of first-rate merit. A particular subject is singled out for attack, and learning, wit and sarcasm are brought com- binedly to bear on it. It is equally to be admired, whether looked on as a play or a satire. By it Jonson destroyed the pretenders to the counterfeit science of Alchemy, and effected by his ridicule what legislative enactments had failed to do. There is a very clever though too lavish use of the jargon of the sham science ; but Jonson puts an apology for this into the mouth of one of the characters. Sir Pertinax Surly is ridiculing Alchemy, and more par- ticularly its nomenclature. Subtle replies : " Was not all the knowledge Of the Egyptians writ in mystic symbols ? Speak not the Scriptures oft in parables ? Are not the choicest fables of the poets, That were the fountains and the spring of wisdom, Wrapp'd in perplexed allegories ?" Sir Epicure Mammon's gluttony is pedantic in the extreme, but such minor faults are fully compensated for by its general merit. No one who has once read the play will forget the matchless portraiture of Tribulation Wholesome and Ananias. Abel Dragger was one of Garrick's famous characters. " The Fox" we rank with Hallam, as second to "The Alchymist" in merit. Dryden has praised " The Silent Woman," Hallam places it below the plays we have spoken of, but observes, "It is written with a great deal of spirit, and has a value as the representation of London life in the higher ranks at that time." He also remarks that both the story and passages are taken from Liberius, a writer not familiar to many readers, except such as Jonson or Mr. Hallam. 94 BEN JONSON. It has been well remarked that to give specimens of a play by extracts, is like showing a brick as a sample of the edifice of which it is but a small constituent part. The force and beauty of passages in a drama depend on their relative fitness to the character by whom, and the situation in which they are uttered. This would prevent our making quotations from the comedies ; but to one passage in " Every Man in his Humour," we must call the reader's attention. It is the description of jealousy. Kitely speaks. " A new disease ! I know not new or old, But it may well be called poor mortal's plague ; Tor like a pestilence it doth infect The houses of the brain. First it begins Solely to work upon the phantasy, Filling her seat with such pestiferous air As soon corrupts the judgment ; and from thence Sends like contagion to the memory ; Still each to other giving the infection, Which as a subtle vapour spreads itself Confusedly through every sensitive part, Till not a thought or motion in the mind Be free from the black poison of suspect." Now, such passages, as well as Jonson's great reputa- tion for learning, have misled many, and among them, no less a man than Sir W. Scott, who, in his life of Dryden, says, that " Jonson gave an early example of metaphysical poetry." This word metaphysical is a talisman in the hands of some, a very sorcerer's wand, and magical in its powers of confusion. It has been well observed, that when a man is saying that which his audience does not comprehend, and which he does not himself comprehend, he is talking "metaphysics." Like a weapon clumsily handled, or a lantern not dexterously used, it will only wound or discover its possessor. Sir W. Scott's remark fully illustrates this. In using that word he shows either an ignorance of its meaning or an ignorance of the BEN JONSON. 95 writings to which he applies it. Jonson is not a whit more metaphysical than Shakespeare. Are there not frequent passages in Shakespeare where almost every line would form a text for a treatise on Psychology ? It were hard to classify the poetry of any age as metaphysical and not metaphysical; hut to say of Jonson, in contradistinction to Shakespeare, that he was so, is simply incorrect. What we suspect is here meant by the word is, that Shakespeare read men, and Jonson books ; that one drew his characters from the study of human nature, and the other from the pages of philosophy. If the word is thus used in the wrong sense, the statement is only partially, if in the right one, it is wholly erroneous. Jonson's masques are beautiful. Though with occa- sional extravagant fancies and strained conceits, they are full of learning and taste. They were many of them written for great festive occasions. There may seem to us something grotesque and cumbrous in their scenic splendour; and our Lord Mayor's show, the only relic we have of such an entertainment as Jonson's on James L's coronation, does not fill us with rapture at its grandeur or dignity. Some beautiful songs are introduced into them. The genius of the architect and the painter came in to aid the poet. The art of stage decoration was not, however, far advanced, and the scenery must have then been inferior to the language, as the latter is now below the former in " Those gew-gaws men-children love to see," now exhibited, much to the expulsion of. tragedy and comedy, on the boards of our theatres. " The Sad Shepherd" we have already criticised. The following are the opening lines, which, beautiful as they are, are not better than the greater portion of the masque : 96 BEN JONSON. " Here she was wont to go ! and here ! and here ! Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow ; The world may find the spring in following her, For other print her airy steps ne'er left. Her treading would not bend a blade of grass, Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk ! But like the soft west wind she shot along, And where she went the flowers took thickest root, As she had sowed them with her odorous foot." Milton was a great admirer of Jonson : his " Comus" is written very much in imitation of our poet's masques ; but is not so fitted as they are for dramatic action. Some will remember in " Penseroso" these lines : " Entice the dewy-feathered sleep, And let some strange mysterious dream Wave at his wings in airy stream Of lively portraiture displayed Softly on my eyelids laid." Kurd has remarked that it is an imitation of the following passage in Jonson's " Vision of Delight," and* Milton has not, we think, improved on the original : " Break, Phant'sie, from thy cave of cloud, And spread thy purple wings ; Now all thy figures are allowed, And various shapes of things, Create of airy forms a stream, It must have blood, and nought of phlegm, And tho' it be a waking dream, Yet let it like an odour rise To all the senses here, And fall like sleep upon their eyes Or musick in their ear." As a translator he must not be forgotten. He has left a version of Horace's " Ars Poetica," and a few of the odes. The former is marvellously literal, and not so tame as might therefore be supposed. In the latter there is little to praise ; but he has excelled these regular transla- tions in passages of the masques and elsewhere, which he has borrowed from ancient authors and literally ren- dered. It is strange that Kurd, in his letter to Mason on BEN JONSON. 97 " the marks of imitation," has singled out the following instance. The original lines are from " Catullus," and are the following : " Ut flos in septis secretus nascitur hortis Ignotus pecori, nullo convulsus aratro, Quern mulcent aurse, firmat sol, educit imber Multi ilium pueri, multse optavere puellse Idem quum tenui carptus defloruit ungue Nulli ilium pueri, nullse optavere puellae." In one of his masques, Jonson translates this : " Look how a flower that close in closes grows, Hid from rude cattle, bruised with no ploughs, Which th' air doth stroke, sun strengthen, show'rs shoot higher, It many youths and many maids desire ; The same when cropt by cruel hand 'tis withered, No youths at all, no maidens have desired." Kurd here calls Jonson "a servile imitator, and a painful translator." Now, what the true theory of translation is, is a matter on which the learned are as yet undecided. But the lines just quoted have far more force and beauty, than much smooth paraphrase, which is accepted as translation; and are more literal and infinitely superior to certain versions of Horace and Virgil lately published in a great University. There is at any rate this defence for them ; they were written at a time when translation was in its infancy, and when great stress was laid upon verbal rendering. This was a false view of translation ; but certainly more excusable than when now attempted in open violation of the fact, that such literal interpretations of the idioms of other languages compel the translator to violate those of his own, and in doing so, to commit a greater fault even than paraphrasing. There are two methods of translation, if, indeed, one deserves the name at all. The first is to give word for word H 98 BEN JONSON. as a mere guide to those learning the language by such aid, a rendering which sacrifices to literal interpretation, the propriety and beauty of our own language ; the next is, to give the spirit and meaning of a writer, in our own language, violating none of its laws and introducing no foreign idiom. The former of these theories was the earlier, and as in the lines we have quoted, was occasion- ally carried out with success. With the usual vitality of error, an attempt has been made to revive it ; but fortu- nately this retrograde movement numbers as yet but few supporters. The true theory was next discovered ; but after some time degenerated in many cases into para- phrase. Sir J. Denham, in his Preface to his translation of Book II. of "^Eneid," has made a few remarks on this subject which we cannot help quoting. u I conceive it," he writes, " a vulgar error in translating poets to affect being fidus interpres. Let that care be with those who deal in matters of fact and matters of faith ; but whoso- ever aims at it in poetry, as he attempts what is not required, so shall he never perform what he attempts ; for it is not his business alone to translate language into language, but poesie into poesie, and poesie is of so subtle a spirit, that in pouring out of one language into another it will all evaporate ; and if a new spirit is not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a caput mortuum" Those who abet the attempt to revive the old system of translation should consider these remarks, and remember that on a very different theory, one of the best lengthy translations in the English language was produced the " Georgics" of Virgil, by Mr. Sotheby. Jonson is no exception to the rule that clear and strong utterance is one of the chief characteristics of genius, and that great poets have been good prose writers. The frag- ment entitled " Lumber, or Discoveries," sufficiently shows, BEN JONSON. 99 without appealing to his letters, dedications and prefaces, that English literature lost much by the destruction of his prose manuscripts. The small remnant that is left is full of erudite criticism, profound reflection, and great severity of judgment. There are notes on books and on life, arranged in a strange and arbitrary manner, written in a concise and pregnant style ; and though they do not contain so much sententious wisdom, remind us forcibly of the " Essays " of Bacon. Two extracts we must give. The first shows us what laws of composition he laid down for himself ; the second is interesting as a criticism on his great rival. " For a man to write well, there are required three necessaries : to reade the best authors, observe the best speakers, and much exercise of his own style. In style to consider what ought to be written, and after what manner ; he must first think and excogitate his matter ; then choose his words and examine the weight of either ; then take care in placing and ranking both matter and words, that the composition be comely, and to do this with diligence and often. No matter how slow the style be at first, so it be laboured and accurate ; seeke the best and be not glad of the forward conceits, or first words that offer themselves to us, but judge of what we invent, and order what we approve. Repeat often what you have formerly written ; which beside that it helps the consequence and makes the juncture better, it quickens the heate of imagination, that often cooles in the time of setting downe, and gives it new strength, as if it grew lustier by the going back, as we see in the contention of leaping, they jump farthest that fetch their race longest, or as in throwing a dart or javelin we force back our arms to make our tosse the stronger. Yet if we have a faire gale of wind I forbid not the steer- ing out of our angle (?) or the favour of the gale deceive H 2 100 BEN JONSON. us not. For all that we invent doth please us in the conception or birth, else we should never set it downe. But the safest is to returne to our judgement, and hand over again those things, the easinesse of which might make them justly suspected. So did the best writers in their beginnings. They imposed upon themselves care and industry. They did nothing rashly. They obtained first to write well, and then custome made it easie and a habit. By little and little, their matter showed itself to them more plentifully, their words answered, their composition followed ; and all as in a well-ordered family, presented itselfe in the place. So that the summe of all is, ready writing makes not good writing ; but good writing brings on ready writing : yet when wee thinke wee have got the faculty, it were then good to resist it, as to give a horse a check sometimes with a bit which doth not so much stop his course as stirre his metal." Of Shakespeare he says : " I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer had been, ' Would he had blotted a thousand !' which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own can- dour ; for I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry, as much as any. Ha was indeed honest, and of an open and free n s ature ; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions ; wherein he flowed with that facility, that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped. * Sufflaminandus erat? as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power. Would the rule of it had been so too ! Many times he fell into those things which could not escape laughter ; as when he BEN JONSON. 101 said in the person of Gsesar, one speaking to him, ' Caesar, thou dost me wrong.' He replied, * Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause ;' and such like, which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was even more in him to be praised, than to be pardoned." This criticism, full as it is of candour, has been made the basis of charges of malignity against Shakespeare. We have spoken of Jonson as the author of tragedy, of comedy, of masque, as a translator, and prose writer. But it is as a lyric poet also that we claim for him a homage and admiration which has hitherto been sparingly given, if yielded at all. In the aspects in which we have already viewed him, he is a great rather than a pleasing writer. He is not one of those whose works we make fire- side friends, and the constant companions of our leisure and solitude. It is a duty more perhaps than a pleasure to read him. This is not a high praise of a writer of tragedy and comedy ; but we must admit when we rise from the study, it is with a profound conviction of the vast powers of the writer. There is something grand, massive, colossal in his intellect. There is in him the profound erudition, and sustained dignity which we admire in Milton, and which cause us to gaze at reve- rent distance and muse in sacred silence, on his genius. And although we may not make either the one or the other familiar friends, as we do Homer and Shake- speare, with their more genial strains, yet they are not all gloom and grandeur. They have their lighter moods, and livelier utterances. Do not let us forget " Lycidas and 1'Allegro," and the lyrics of Jonson. Than these nothing can be more exquisite, and their beauty is heightened by the contrast in which they stand to the other works. The smile of a countenance usually grave, has more charms than all the dimples and laughter of 102 BEN JONSON. Lalage. It is not only by their depth and their vigour that we must judge of poets. With these remarks we proceed to give some of the Nugse Canorse of our Laureate. O, do not wanton with those eyes, Lest I be sick with seeing ; Nor cast them down, but let them rise, Lest shame destroy their being. O, be not angry with those fires, For then their threats will kill me ; Nor look too kind on my desires, Eor then my hopes will spill me. 0, do not steep them in thy tears, Eor so will sorrow slay me ; Nor spread them as distract with fears, Mine own enough betray me. Mr. Gifford is as extravagant in his praise as the world has been cold in its appreciation. He speaks of this song thus : " If it be not the most beautiful song in the lan- guage, I freely confess, for my own part, that I know not where it is to be found." Now, it is pretty enough, but from Waller to Moore we could quote many that would equal, and some that would surpass it. Much better known, and far more beautiful, is Jonson's " Epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke." " Underneath this sable hearse Lies the subject of all verse, Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother. Death ! ere thou hast^slain another, Learn'd and fair and good as she, Time shall throw a dart at thee." And so are the three following verses, selected from some BEN JONSON. 103 prefixed by Jonson to " The Touchstone of Truth," by J. Warre, published 1630: " Truth is the trial of itself, And needs no other touch, And purer than the purest gold Refine it ne'er so much. " It is the life and light of love, The sun that ever shineth, And spirit of that special grace, That faith and love defineth. " It is the warrant of the word, That yields a scent so sweet, As gives a power to faith to tread All falsehood under feet." The following elegy, though some verses stand in weak contrast to others, which are beautiful, seems too much like the model of " In Memoriam " not to be quoted entire. Mr. Tennyson, the music of whose poetry is almost faultless, has improved on the metre and rhythm of the elder Laureate, but the similitude of some of the verses is very striking : AN ELEGY. Though beauty be the mark of praise, And yours of whom I sing be such As not the world can praise too much, Yet 'tis your virtue now I raise. A virtue like alloy, so gone Throughout your form ; as though that move And draw and conquer all men's love, This subjects you to love of one, Wherein you triumph yet, because 'Tis of yourself, and that you use The noblest freedom, not to choose Against, or faith or. honour's laws. But who could less expect from you, In whom alone love lives again, By whom he is restored to men, And kept, and bred, and brought up true ? 104 BEN JONSON. His falling temples you have rear'd, The withered garlands ta'en away, His altars kept from the decay That envy wished and nature fear' d ; And on them burn so chaste a flame, With so much loyalty's expense, As love to acquit such excellence Is gone himself into your name. And you are he, the Deity To whom all lovers are design' d That would their better objects find, Among which faithful troop am I, Who as an offering at your shrine Have sung this hymn, and here entreat One spark of your diviner heat, To light upon a love of mine, Which if it kindle not, but scant Appear, and that to shortest view, Yet give me leave t' adore in you What I in her am grieved to want. Our last quotation is well known, but many, we fear, while they listen to the beautiful strain, forget that it is one of the lighter efforts of the learned Jonson. SONG TO CLELIA. Drink to me only with thine eyes, And I will pledge with mine ; Or leave a kiss but in the cup, And 111 not look for wine. The thirst that from the soul doth rise Doth ask a drink divine ; But might I of Jove's nectar sip I would not change for thine. I sent thee late a rosy wreath, Not so much honouring thee, As giving it in hope that there It could not withered be ; But thou thereon dids't only breathe, And sent'st it back to me, Since when it grows, it smells, I swear, Not of itself, but thee. BEN JONSON. 105 We have spoken frequently in our life of the poet, of the rancour with which his character has been assailed. Posterity have scarcely been more merciful to his fame as a writer. Dibdin has slandered him and sought to de- preciate his merits. Hume has penned a shallow, flippant notice of him, as well as of Shakespeare.* Schlegel, with too great severity, but with more depth and truth, has called him " a younger contemporary and rival of Shake- speare, who laboured in the sweat of his brow, and with no great success, to expel the romantic drama from the English stage, and to form it on the model of the ancients."f Hazlitt confesses that he cannot much relish Ben Jonson, and remarks that his genius " resembles the grub more than the butterfly, and plods and grovels on, and wants wings to wanton in the idle summer's air, and catch the golden light of poetry ."j It should be remembered that it is in contrasting him with Shakespeare that Hazlitt is thus depreciatory. In attempting the same anti-parallel, Sir W. Scott falls into more exaggerated error. " The one," he says, " is like an ancient statue, the beauty of which, springing from the exactness of proportion, does not always strike at first sight, but rises upon us as we bestow time in considering it ; the other is the representa- tion of a monster, which is at first only surprising, and ludicrous and disgusting ever after. " How unfortunate for the fame of Jonson that he had not lived a generation before or after his immortal rival ! In such a time he had reigned supreme. In dividing the kingdom of literature, though the dominions of one are wider than the other, the colleagues in the empire are scarce ever mentioned without an invidious comparison * History of England, f Lectures on Dramatic Literature. | Lectures on English Comic Writers. Life of Dryden. 106 BEN JONSON. being instituted. In literature, as in religion, there is a strong tendency to party spirit a wish to make a faction and appoint a leader a setting up of Paul and Apollos, instead of a catholic admiration of genius apart from personal feelings and prejudices. To counter-balance the severe remarks, which we have quoted, we must remember that Jonson received the warmest eulogies from his greatest contemporaries ; and we therefore give two quotations from Fuller and Dry- den, where the comparison is handled with temper and judgment. Fuller, in speaking of the " Wit Combats " between Shakespeare and Jonson at the " Mermaid Tavern," adds : " Which two, I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jon- son, like the former, was built far higher in learning, solid, but slow in his performances : Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention." Dryden writes : " As for Jonson, to whose character I am now arrived, if we look upon him while he was him- self (for his last plays were but his dotages), I think him the most learned and judicious writer which any theatre ever had. He was a most severe judge of himself as well as others. One cannot say he wanted wit, but rather that he was frugal of it. In his works you find little to retrench or alter. Wit, and language, and humour also in some measure we had before him, but something of art was wanting to the drama before he came. He managed his strength to more advantage than any who preceded him. You seldom find him making love in any of his scenes, or endeavouring to move the passions ; his genius was too sullen and saturnine to do it gracefully, especially when he knew he came after those who had performed both to such BEN JONSON. 107 a height. Humour was his proper sphere, and in that he delighted most to present mechanical people. He was deeply conversant in the ancients, both Greek and Latin, and he borrowed boldly from them. There is scarce a poet or historian among the Roman authors of those times whom he has not translated in ' Sejanus' or ' Catiline/ But he has done his robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades authors like a monarch, and what would be theft in other poets is only victory in him. With the spoils of these writers, he so represents old Rome to us, in its rites, ceremonies, and customs, that if one of their poets had written either of his tragedies, we had seen less of it than in him. If there was any fault in his language, it was that he weaved it too closely and laboriously, in his comedies especially ; perhaps, too, he did a little too much Romanize our lan- guage, leaving the words he translated almost as much Latin as he found them, wherein, though he learnedly followed their language, he did not enough comply with the idioms of ours. If I would compare him with Shake- speare, I must acknowledge him the most correct poet, but Shakespeare the greater wit. Shakespeare was the Homer or father of dramatic poets, Jonson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing. I admire him ; but I love Shakespeare." Clarendon says of him : " Ben Jonson's name can never be forgotten, having by his very good learning, and the severity of his nature and manners, very much re- formed the stage, and, indeed the English poetry itself. His natural advantages were judgment to order and govern fancy rather than success of fancy, his production being slow and upon deliberation, yet then abounding with great wit and fancy, and will live accordingly ; and surely as he did exceedingly exalt the English language in elo- quence, propriety, and masculine expression, so he was 108 BEN JONSON. the best judge and fittest to prescribe rules to poetry and poets of any man who had lived with or before him." We conclude with an extract from Churchill's " Rosciad :" " Next, Jonson sat, in ancient learning train'd ; His rigid judgment Fancy's flights restrain' d, Correctly pnm'd each wild luxuriant thought, Mark'd out her course, nor spar'd a glorious fault. The book of Man he read with nicest art, And ransack'd all the secrets of the heart ; Excited Penetration's utmost force, And trac'd each passion to its proper source ; Then, strongly marked, in liveliest colours drew, And brought each foible forth to public view. The coxcomb felt a lash in every word, And fools hung out, their brother fools deterr'd ; His comic humour kept the world in awe And laughter frighten'd folly more than law." SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. THE lot of Sir William Davenant fell on strange and stirring times. He contributed to found a new literature, witnessed the installation of a new political system, and the birth-convulsions of a new religion. His life spanned that mighty chasm which separates the ancient from the modern of English History : when those principles of thought and action which had cradled the infant kingdoms of Europe, and toned their civilization, retreated angrily before the stormy ingress of a meaner though stronger spirit. But unlike his great contemporary, Milton, his character took no form or colour from the solemn events that were passing around him. If he was prominent in the scene, it was from an inherent buoyancy, rather than from any intellectual superiority ; nor from the perusal of his works can we gather that the wreck of old opinions that everywhere met his gaze, affected him with appre- hension, -or excited him to deeper thought or more vigorous expression. To his private history a more touching interest attaches. Shakespeare was his early friend. He, whose very name to us is an inspiration, listened to his boyish 110 SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. talk, encouraged his awakening literary tastes. The match- less harmony of his deepest utterances was then newly vibrating on the public ear. Davenant pondered over them, loved them to the last, taught others to love them, but never penetrated the mystery of their influence. Thus he lived to witness the banishment of his idol from the English stage, and was himself an effectual instrument in contributing to such a result. He was born at Oxford in the parish of St. Martin, towards the close of February, 1605. His father was a vintner in that city, and kept the " Crown Inn" near Carfax, where Shakespeare was accustomed to stay on his annual journeys from London to Warwickshire. His mother, who was a woman of great beauty and sprightliness, con- trasting strangely with the severe gravity of her husband, has well-nigh had her fair fame tarnished through the culpable vanity or levity of her son, who among boon companions would sometimes indulge in sly inuendoes touching Shakespeare's preference for his father's inn. " Where are you running to so fast ?" said an Oxford dignitary one day to little Davenant, whom he met in the street, scampering along in breathless haste. " I am going to see Godfather Shakespeare," replied the boy. " Fie ! fie !" rejoined the divine, " why are you so superfluous ? Have you not learnt the third commandment ?" This unbecoming jest, Davenant himself in after years, with strange indelicacy adopted ; and was wont to observe, though an impartial judge will scarcely concur in his estimate of the likeHhood of its truth, that " it seemed to him he writ with the very pen that Shakespeare wrote, and was contented enough to be thought his son." Aubrey, too, observes that he " was proud of being thought so, and had often, in his cups, owned the report to be true to Butler the poet." Such unseemly jocularity would have been unworthy of record, had it not been made the ground- SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 1 1 1 work of serious comment by writers of credit and position, who have inclined to favour the insinuation. There exist not, however, the slightest grounds for such an imputation, which is falsified by all we know of the mother of Sir William Davenant, and jars with our well-grounded belief in the irreproachable moral character of our great national dramatist. Davenant, in very early life, gave promise of a taste for literature, and one of his first attempts at composition was "An Ode in Remembrance of Master William Shakespeare." He acquired the rudiments of knowledge at the grammar school of his native parish, then flourishing under the management of Edward Sylvester, and in 1621, he matri- culated at Lincoln College, his father being Mayor of the city that year. He pursued his studies there for some little time, but did not proceed to his degree. Wood, who terms him the " sweet swan of Isis," tells us " he obtained some smattering of logic," so " that, though he wanted much of University learning, yet he made as high and noble flights in the poetical faculty as fancy could advance without it." On quitting the University, he went to London ; and we first hear of him as page to the famous Frances, Duchess of Richmond. The eccentric career of this lady had acquired for her considerable notoriety, and in her household she observed all the etiquette and cere- mony of a court. She was the grand-daughter of the third Duke of Norfolk, had been thrice married, and, to complete her ambition, aspired to the august dignity of Queen of England. Her first match, which appears to have been made through affection or caprice, was with " one Prannel, a vintner's son," for which, in her after days of grandeur and magnificence she was frequently and sharply twitted. Her second husband was Edward Sey- mour, Earl of Hertford. During her widowhood, she had inspired one Sir George Rodney, a Somersetshire gentle- 112 SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. man, with so infatuated a passion, that, on her marriage, his frenzy acquired the mastery over his reason; and retiring to an inn in the town in which the Earl and Countess were staying, he composedly drew up a copy of verses, which he transcribed in his own blood, sent to the object of his extravagant ardour, and then ran himself through with his sword. She next married Ludowick Stuart, Duke of Lenox and Richmond. "After his decease," says Wilson, " Lenox and Richmond, with the great title of Duchess, gave period to her honour, which could not arrive at her mind, she having the most glorious and transcendant heights in speculation ; for finding the King a widower, she vowed, after so great a Prince as Richmond, never to be blown with the kisses, or eat at the table of a subject, and this vow must be spread abroad that the King might take notice of the bravery of her spirit- But this bait would not catch the old King, so that she missed her aim ; and to make good her resolution, she speciously observed her rule to the last." Davenant next resided in the household of Sir Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, a poet and philosopher, a patron of learning, and the friend of Sir Philip Sydney. His stay there was but short, as that nobleman fell in 1628 by the hand of one of his servants, who stabbed him in a fit of dis- content, and afterwards, " to save the law a trouble," as Winstanley tersely expresses it, put an end to his own exist- ence. This melancholy event was a severe blow to the hopes of Davenant. He was thereby thrown upon his own resources ; and, as frequently happens, misfortune begat success, as it necessitated the attempt to achieve it. Bereft of his patron, without fortune or position, he addressed himself seriously to the business of life, and his pre- dilections pointed to the theatre. In the following year, he presented for representation his " Albovine, King of the Lombards," a tragedy written in prose, the plot taken SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 113 from a novel by Bandello. He had already had some practice in dramatic composition, having some two or three years previously written a piece called " The Cruel Mother/' which was duly licensed by the Master of the Revels, but whether it was ever brought on the stage or not is uncertain. His present tragedy, however, was acted with great applause, and lifted him at once into notice. It was published with a dedication to the favourite Car, Earl of Somerset, which commences with the following fulsome conceit : " My Lord, you read this tragedy, and smiled upon it that it might live ; and therein your mercy was divine, for it exceeded your justice." And in conclusion he says : " I shall live in vain unless you still continue to acknowledge, your humblest creature, DAVENANT." Recommendatory verses were prefixed to it, as was the fashion of that age, written by Sir Henry Blount, Hyde, afterwards Earl of Clarendon, and others ; and the success of this piece confirmed his tastes and decided his future career. For the next eight years he resided constantly about the Court, in high favour with the principal men of wit and fashion of the age. He possessed a pleasing address, a handsome person, buoyant spirits and a ready wit ; and his society was courted and enjoyed by the choicest intellects of the day. The leaven of the courtier was strongly infused into his nature, but he exhibited only its more alluring qualities. Though devoid of any very lofty principles of honour, he was not destitute of generous and manly sentiments, as the sincerity and duration of his friendships with several eminent men abundantly testifies. Carew, Sir John Suckling, Endymion Porter, Jermyn, afterwards Earl of St. Albans, the Hon. Henry Howard and others were among his friends ; and his poems show that he was regarded with consideration by the Earl of Dorset, the Lord Treasurer Weston, and other influential personages in the State. I 114 SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. This sudden gale of success acted as a refreshing stimu- lant to his sanguine temperament, and during the period in question he poured forth a series of plays, which (though there is some difficulty in ascertaining the dates of each) seem to have appeared in the following order of succession : " The Colonel." " The Just Italian." " The Wits." . " Love and Honour." " News from Plymouth." " The Unfortunate Lovers." " The Fair Favourite." " The Spanish Lovers." " The Just Italian " is a witty, bustling production, and exhibits great skill in contrivance, but on its first appear- ance was only saved from condemnation by the expressed approbation of the Earl of Dorset. "The Wits," dedi- cated " to the chiefly-beloved of all, that ingenious and noble Endymion Porter, of his Majesty's Bedchamber," had likewise a narrow escape on the first night of repre- sentation, though it afterwards had a successful run. Sir Henry Herbert, who was Master of the Revels at this time, and possessed the privilege of licensing plays, was occasionally, like the Lord Chamberlain in modern times, troubled with qualms of conscience, occasioned by the delicate nature of his duties. " This morning," he writes, " being the 9th Jan., 1633, the Kinge was pleased to call mee into his with- drawinge chamber, to the windowe, wher he went over all that I had croste in Davenant's play-booke, and allowing of faith and slight to bee asseverations only, and no oathes, markt them to stande, and some other few things, but in the greater part allowed of my reformations. This was done upon a complaint of Mr. Endymion Porter's, in December. SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 115 " The Kinge is pleased to take faith, death, slight, for asseverations and no oathes, to which I doe humbly submit, as my master's judgment; but, under favour, conceive them to be oathes, and enter them here to declare my opinion and submission." The play which gave rise to this difference of sentiment between his Majesty and Sir Henry must have been " The Wits," as on the following day there is this entry in his journal : "The 10th Jan., 1633, I returned unto Mr. Dave- nant his play-booke of 'The Witts,' corrected by the Kinge. " The King would not take the booke at Mr. Porter's hands, but commanded him to bring it unto mee, which he did, and likewise commanded Davenant to come to me for it as I believe ; otherwise he would not have byn so civill" Davenant doubtless being irate with the keen- eyed Master of the Revels for detecting so much bad language lurking in his seemingly innocent production. At a later date there is the following entry in the same work : " ' The Witts ' was acted on Tuesday night, the 28 January, 1633, at Court, before the Kinge and Queene. Well likt. It had a various fate on the stage, and at Court, though the Kinge commended the language, but dislikt the plott and characters." In " Love and Honour " may be traced manifest imita- tions of the style of Shakespeare ; and the care manifested in the composition shows that success had no effect in abating the most strenuous endeavours to deserve it. Evelyn, writing many years later, after the Restoration, says, " I was so idle as to go see a play called ' Love and Honour.' Dined at Arundel House ; and that evening discoursed with his Majestie about shipping, in which he I 2 116 SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. was exceeding skilfull." From which it appears that the performance took place in the day-time. Davenant likewise produced the following masques for the entertainment of the Court : "The Temple of Love," 1634, "a masque presented by the Queen's Majesty and her ladies at Whitehall." "The Triumphs of the Prince d' Amours," 1635, repre- sented in the Middle Temple Hall, and written at the request of the Benchers for an entertainment given by the Inn to the Prince Charles Elector Palatine, nephew of King Charles I. " Britannia Triumphans," 1637. " Salmacida Spolia," presented to the King and Queen at Whitehall, the 21st of January, 1639 ; the scenery and ornaments of which were the work of Inigo Jones. The first nobles of the day took their parts in these pageants ; and in " The Temple of Love," the Queen herself, who held Davenant in great favour, condescended to appear a circumstance which the rising puritanical spirit of the times did not suffer to pass unnoticed. She likewise honoured the entertainment given at the Middle Temple in a marked manner. Sir William Herbert writes : " On Wensday, the 23 of Febru., 1635, the Prince d' Amours gave a masque to the Prince Elector and his brother in the Middle Temple, when the Queene was pleased to grace the entertaynment by putting off majesty to putt on a citizen's habitt, and to sett upon the scaffold on the right hand amongst her subjects. " The Queene was attended in the like habitts by the Marques Hamilton, the Countess of Denbighe, the Coun- tess of Holland, and the Lady Elizabeth Feildinge. Mrs. Basse, the law woman (i. e., the woman who had the care of the Hall), leade in this royal citizen and her com- pany. SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 1 1 7 " The Earle of Hollande, the Lord Goringe, Mr. Percy, and Mr. Jermyn were the men that attended. "The Prince Elector sat in the midst, his brother Robert on the right hand of him, and the Prince d'Amours on the left. " The masque was very well performed in the dances, scenes, cloathing, and musique; and the Queene was pleased to tell mee, at her going away, that she liked it very well. " Henry Lause 1 WiUiam LauseJ made themus "l ue - " Mr. Corseilles made the scenes." Much ridicule has, in later times, been heaped upon these diversions ; and we have been taught to smile at the grotesque taste which was gratified with such fanciful exaggerations ; but there is this diversity between a Court pageant of the olden time and a modern costume ball. In our advanced stage of civilization, we rely solely upon the genius of the tailor and the milliner ; while our fore- fathers, less enlightened, called in the additional aid of the poet and the artist. The noble of the nineteenth century lounges languidly through a quadrille, bedizened in the coxcombry of an exploded fashion; the noble of the seventeenth exercised both body and mind, and betrayed a heartiness of enjoyment that would provoke only wonder and contempt in a more refined and fasti- dious age. Davenant had now established his fame as a popular dramatist, and his successive productions were sure of a cordial welcome. They, as must the works of all save the chosen few, have now fallen into oblivion; so that their very titles are probably quite new to the majority of our readers ; but they will repay the labour of perusal. They were the popular pieces of their day. Men the most competent, from their acquirements to judge, pro- 118 SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. nounced in their favour, and the applause of the vulgar was the ready ratification of the decision of the learned. These, together with some miscellaneous poems, consti- tuted his claim to the laureateship when Ben Jonson died in 1637. For sixteen months the office remained in abeyance. The Queen interested herself in behalf of Davenant, and he obtained the appointment on the 1 3th of December, 1 638. Thomas May, the translator of "Lucan," who had expected it from the favour of the King, was sorely nettled; and in after years, the quondam royalist, when writing his parliamentary history, could not altogether forget his paltry disappointment. " As for Mr. Davenant," observes his biographer, " he continued very steadfast in his old road, adhered to his old principles and his old friends, writing from time to time new poems, exhibiting new plays, and having the chief direction and management of the Court diversions, so long as the disorders of those times would permit." The following tribute to Davenant's poetical merits is from the pen of Sir John Suckling : TO MY PBJEND, WILL. DAYENANT, ONHIS OTHER POEMS. Thou hast redeemed us, Will, and future times Shall not account unto the age's crimes Dearth of pure wit : since the great lord of it, Donne, parted hence, no man has ever writ So near him, in 's own way. I would commend Particulars ; but then, how should I end Without a volume ? Every line of thine Would ask (to praise it right) twenty of mine. The struggle between the Crown and the Commons was now rapidly approaching a crisis, and Davenant's station about the Court rendered him too conspicuous an SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 1 1 9 object to be passed over unnoticed by the popular party. In May, 1641, he was accused of being implicated in a plot set on foot to induce the army to desert the Parlia- ment for the King. Davenant, aware of the inevitable consequence of such an accusation at such a time, sought safety in flight, and a proclamation was issued for his arrest. He was overtaken at Faversham, brought back to London, and consigned to the custody of the Serjeant- at-Arms. In the month of July, he was released on bail, and a second time betook himself to flight. His second attempt was as unsuccessful as the former one, as he was seized and detained by the Mayor of Canterbury. Sir John Mennis thus introduces the circumstance in some indifferent verses addressed to a friend : " To make amends, There's news for Jack to tell his friends. You heard of late what chevaliers, (Who durst not tarry for their ears) Proscribed were for laying a plot, Which might have ruin'd God knows what ! Suspected for the same 's Will Davenant, Whether he have been in't or haven't. He is committed, and like sloven, Lolls on his bed in Garden Coven ; He had been rack'd, as I am told, But that his body would not hold. Soon as in Kent they saw the bard, (As, to say truth, it is not hard, For Will has in his face the flaws Of wounds received in 's country's cause.) They flew on him, like lions passant, And tore his nose, as much as was on't : They call'd him superstitious groom, And Popish dog, and curre of Rome ; But this I'm sure was the first time That Will's religion was a crime. Whate'er he is in outward part, He's sure a poet in his heart. But 'tis enough : he is my friend, And so am I, and there's an end." Eventually, Davenant contrived to effect his escape, and 120 SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. remained abroad two years. Jermyn, Sir John Suckling, Percy, brother to the Earl of Northumberland, were of the number of those who were implicated, and fled on this occasion. The Queen was at that time residing in France, and had been active in collecting military stores for the army, under the command of the Earl of New- castle. The opportunity was tempting, and Davenant, sick of exile and inaction, returned with the transports, and offered his services to the Earl. He was named Lieutenant-General of the Ordnance, but the appointment excited some dissatisfaction, and a military laureate was deemed a fitting subject for ridicule. It must have been forgotten, or perhaps it was remembered to his disad- vantage, that the General himself was a play-writer. Davenant's subsequent conduct showed that he was deficient neither in skill nor bravery, and fully approved his patron's discernment. He was present at the siege of Gloucester (September, 1643), and received the honour of knighthood for his signal services on that occasion. His military avocations did not entirely break off his connection with the booksellers, since he published about this time a tragedy, a tragi-comedy, and a volume entitled " Madagascar and other Poems." To the second edition of this book, published some years later, he prefixed a few graceful lines, which contrast favourably with the prolix dedications customary at that time. They run thus : " If these poems live, may their memories by whom they were cherished, Endymion Porter and H. Jermyn, live with them." He shortly afterwards returned to France, renounced his religion, and conformed to the Church of Rome. His whole course of life, which was tinctured with the disso- luteness that almost became a badge of his party, forbids us to believe that he was ever the subject of any very SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 121 serious convictions ; and his attendance upon the Queen, who was a Roman Catholic, and possibly the belief that the maintenance of the Established Church in its in- tegrity would prove an insuperable obstacle to any recon- ciliation between the King, and the faction who were now obtaining the ascendancy, might have induced him to desert what he deemed a hopeless cause. " His private opinion," says Aubrey, " was, that religion at last (e.g., a hundred years hence) would come to a settlement, and that in a kind of ingeniose Quakerisme." Why, if such was his private opinion, he should desert to so opposite a system as the papal one, is not very apparent. The Queen, who, as Lord Clarendon observes, " was never advised by those who either understood or valued his (the King's) true interest," was induced about this time to send an embassy to the King, to entreat him to consult his own safety by sacrificing the Church ; and Sir William Davenant was selected, on account of his recent conversion, to conduct this delicate negotiation. The choice was as injudicious as the failure was signal, and we read that, on Davenant urging his reasons for the unpalatable course he was suggesting, " the King was transported with so much passion and indignation, that he gave him more reproachful terms and a sharper reprehension than he did ever towards any other man, and forbade him to presume to come again into his presence," whereupon he returned, " exceedingly dejected and afflicted." Feeling much chagrined at the ill success of his diplo- macy, he returned to France, and settled at Paris, where the Prince of Wales was then staying. He here began his much talked-of metrical romance, or epic, " Gondibert," which Pope justly characterizes as " not a good poem, if you take it in the whole, though there are many good things in it." The first two books, which he wrote at the Louvre while staying with Lord Jermyn, were published 122 SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. in 1651, with a long letter to Hobbes prefixed, and a shorter and well- written reply from that philosopher. They caused some sensation on their appearance, and long divided the suffrage of the literary world. Hobbes, Waller, Cowley, Aikin, Hendley defended them ; Rymer, Blackwall, Grange, Knox, Kurd, Hayley are amongst those who have most severely censured them. A satirical pamphlet on the subject, written by Sir John Denham and others, gave Davenant some annoyance. In 1650, his active mind, barred from its accustomed occupation, projected a plan for leading out a body of workmen to Virginia, as that colony was in great need of artificers. This scheme was warmly encouraged by the Queen, and he was not long in collecting a band of men, chiefly weavers, with whom he embarked at one of the ports of Normandy. But Davenant was wofully unsuccessful in all his travels, for his little vessel had hardly quitted the French coast when it was pounced upon by a Parliament ship and cap- tured, and he himself carried a prisoner to Cowes Castle, in the Isle of Wight. Here in his forlorn solitude he set to work again on " Gondibert," and had written about half of the third book, when he laid aside his pen, appre- hensive that the darkness of the grave was about to enclose him. " I am here arrived," says he, " at the middle of the third book, which makes an equal half of the poem, but' 'tis high time to strike sail and cast anchor, though I have run but half my course, when at the helm I am threatened with Death ; who, though he can visit us but once, seems troublesome ; and even in the innocent may beget such a gravity as diverts the music of verse. And I beseech thee, if thou art pleased with what is written, not to take ill, that I run not on till my last gasp ; for in a worthy design I shall ask leave to desist, when I am interrupted in so great an experiment as dying, and 'tis SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 123 an experiment to the most experienced, for no man, though his mortifications may be much greater than mine, can say he has already died." His situation soon became critical in the extreme. The Parliament delivered him over by an ordinance to the High Commission Court, and he was removed to the Tower, preparatory to his being tried for his life. How he escaped we have no very authentic grounds for deter- mining ; but Milton is said to have interceded for him, and two aldermen of York, who had formerly been his prisoners under Newcastle, and whose escape he had favoured, hearing of his distress, hastened to London, and exerted themselves so effectually in his behalf as to obtain his pardon. Aubrey says : " 'Twas Harry Martyn that saved Sir William's life ; in the House when they were talking of sacrificing one, then said Henry, that in sacri- fices they were always offered pure and without blemish ; ' now ye talk of making a sacrifice of an old rotten rascal,' alluding to the personal deformity caused by his irregular course of life, and on which the wits were so 'cruelly bold.' ' And not the wits only, but others of less pretensions ventured to indulge their raillery upon his unfortunate peculiarity. One day, while pensively peram- bulating the mews, a beggar-woman followed him, and with .frequent and earnest tones implored Heaven his eyesight might be spared. Davenant, annoyed, at length turned round, and asked why she was so solicitous about his eyesight, as he felt no symptoms of approaching blind- ness. " Perhaps not," said she, " but if you ever should, you have nothing to hang your spectacles upon." Though pardoned, he was not liberated, as, two years later, we find him still a prisoner in the Tower, by the following letter inserted in " Whitelocke's Diary." Whitelocke writes: " 12th Oct., 1652. I received this letter from Sir William Davenant." 124 SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. " My Lord, 11 1 am in suspense whether I should present my Thank- fulness to your Lordship for my Liberty of the Tower; because, when I consider how much of your time belongs to the Public, I conceive that, to make a Request to you, and to thank you afterwards for the Success of it, is to give you no more than a Succession of Trouble, unless you are resolved to be continually patient and courteous to afflicted Men, and agree in your Judgment with the late wise Cardinal ; who was wont to say, If he had not spent as much time in Civilities as in Business, he had undone his master. " But whilst I endeavour to excuse this Present of Thankfulness, I shall rather ask your Pardon for going about to make a Present to you of myself, for it may argue me to be incorrigible, that, after so many afflictions, I have yet so much Ambition as to desire to be at Liberty, that I may have more opportunity to obey your Lordship's Commands, and show the World how much I am, " My Lord, " Your Lordship's most obliged, " Most humble, and obedient Servant, " WILLIAM DAVENANT. " Tower, Oct. 9th, 1652." By unceasing exertions, however, he finally obtained his release, and then began to reflect how he might resume his old occupation. He showed great address in his method of proceeding. Tragedies and comedies were held to be abominable things by the dominant faction, and yet the prevalent hypocrisy was already beginning to disgust even those who had watched the progress of political events with undisguised satisfaction. He knew if he could once open a house, he should be sure of an audience ; and Davenant, ever restless, loved exertion, and SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 125 was inspired by difficulty. After much scheming and solicitation, to the surprise of every one, he was suc- cessful. The required licence was obtained, but his dramatic exhibitions were to hold no affinity with ordinary plays laughter and tears were discountenanced. Instead of the regular drama, the audience was to be roused by sonorous declamation, or soothed by the gentle influence of music. Lord Keeper Whitelocke, Serjeant Maynard, and other men of note, looked with favour on the under- taking; and responsible citizens were pledged that the performances should be conducted with decency, seemli- ness, and without rudeness. The first of these " entertainments," as they were termed, took place at Rutland House, Charterhouse Yard, May, 1656, and was published in the following Sep- tember. A copy of the piece, with the following letter, was forwarded to the Lord Keeper : "My Lord, " When I consider the nicety of the Times, I fear it may draw a curtain between your Lordship and our Opera ; therefore 1 have presumed to send your Lordship, hot from the Press, what we mean to represent ; making your Lordship my supreme Judge, though I despair to have the honour of inviting you to be a Spectator. I do not conceive the perusal of it worthy any part of your Lord- ship's leisure, unless your ancient relation to the Muses make you not unwilling to give a little entertainment to Poetry, though in so mean a dress as this, and coming from " My Lord, " Your Lordship's most obedient servant, "WILLIAM DAVENANT." Its title runs : " The First Day's Entertainment at 126 SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. Rutland House, by Declamations and Music, after the Manner of the Ancients." The success was complete. This literary curiosity, interesting as being the first repre- sentation on our present stage, is highly ingenious, and affords a favourable specimen of Davenant's skill and mental resources. It was a bold experiment. He had to amuse his auditory, yet not let them think they were amused to give them a play, and yet cozen them into a belief that it was not a play they were witnessing, but something totally different. It began with a flourish of music, for which Davenant had procured the assistance of some able composers. Then came a somewhat long pro- logue, in which the poet gives a sketch of what the audience were to expect, and the curtains were closed again. Then " A consort of instrumental music adapted to the sullen disposition of Diogenes, being heard awhile, the curtains are suddenly opened, and in two gilded rostras appear sitting Diogenes the Cynic and Aristophanes the Poet, in habits agreeable to their country and professions : who declaim against and for public entertainment by moral representations;" and Diogenes accordingly ad- dresses the Athenians in a long speech, in which are elaborately set forth the folly and evil of all public amusements. Then "a consort of music befitting the pleasant disposition of Aristophanes being heard," that personage comes forward, and makes a long speech on the other side of the question, in which, of course, he has the best of the argument. This done, " the curtains are suddenly closed, and the company entertained by instru- mental and vocal music." This was the serious section of the entertainment the tragedy before the farce which was wound up by a song, containing a brief sum- ming-up of the views of each antagonist. The second part was something similar, though in a lighter strain. "The song being ended, a consort of SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 127 instrumental music, after the French composition, being heard awhile, the curtains are suddenly opened, and in the rostras appear sitting a Parisian and a Londoner, in the livery robes of both cities, who declaim concerning the pre-eminence of Paris and London." The Parisian has the first speech, in which all the odd customs and habit's of the Londoners are ridiculed with considerable humour. " After a consort of instrumental music, imitating the Waites of London, the Londoner rises," and retaliates on the pleasantry of his antagonist in a similar vein ; then " the curtains are suddenly closed, and the company entertained by instrumental music and a song. The song ended, the curtains are drawn open again, and the Epilogue enters." The Epilogue performs his business, and " after a flourish of loud music, the curtain is closed, and the entertainment ended." With this singular performance, our theatres recom- menced their career under the Protectorate, after their violent suppression during the civil troubles. It was not a drama, it was not an opera, though partaking of the nature of each ; and thus the English stage, at its second birth, received an impress which has affected its future progress. Although from the time of Sir William Davenant to that of Sir Bulwer Lytton, men the most conspicuous in their day for literary attainments have been candidates for the palm of dramatic excellence, their efforts in this walk have been either feeble or exaggerated. During the intervening period we have had authors who have excelled in every other department of literature, but not one dramatist who can be compared with that " giant race before the flood," the play-writers of the Elizabethan age. Mere amusement has been the aim ; and with no more exalting object to purify its tone, the theatre at one time sank to be the nursery of vice, the 123 SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. hot-bed of idleness and depravity. The grandeur and the depth of its earlier votaries were unappreciated. It recog- nised no ennobling mission, ministered to no lofty pur- pose, inculcated no eternal truths ; and therefore it has produced no great embodiment of thought and passion, appealing to the universal sympathies of the human race. One main cause was the frivolity and coarseness of the times which immediately succeeded the revival of the drama. Davenant himself had a masculine taste, and his productions exhibit nothing offensive to virtue or morality. But not so his immediate successor, Dryden. The rhyming plays of that great poet are disgraceful to the author who so debased his talents, and to the public that not only endured but applauded such offensive exhibitions. Then, too, when the intolerant bigotry of the Puritan fanaticism had generated that awful revulsion of tastes, manners, feelings and beliefs, that spread with such bane- ful rapidity over the land; and men sought relief from their previous forced hypocrisy in a licentious and depraved extravagance, the wickedness found its fullest and most perfect expression in the theatre ; and the most consum- mate wit was exhausted in ridiculing all the loftier pro- pensions of man's nature, and the foundation-principles of morality and social life. A literature nursed in so poi- sonous an atmosphere, necessarily progressed to a sickly maturity. Effects frequently become causal; and long after the nation had changed, the old manners exercised a traditionary influence on the stage, and literary aspirants continued to model their conceptions by established pre- cedents. The next piece brought out was styled the " Playhouse to be Let, containing the History of Sir Francis Drake, and the Cruelty of the Spaniards at Peru." The piece itself is a stranger jumble than the title. It is divided into five acts, and each act is a complete performance. SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 129 In the first act, which is a sort of introduction to the rest, we have depicted the distress of the players in vacation time, compelling them to let their theatre. Several appli- cants come forward, offering to take the building for various purposes, and among the rest a Frenchman pro- poses to hire it for the performance of a farce by his troop of French actors. The second act constitutes the farce which is the " Sganarelle," of Moliere, translated into broken English. The third act gives the history of Sir Francis Drake, put together as a sort of comic opera ; and the serious opera follows in the fourth act, which depicts the cruelties of the Spaniards in Peru. The fifth act is a burlesque, written in the heroic measure, upon Antony's passion for Cleopatra, which was so popular that it was frequently acted afterwards as a separate piece. The amiable and pious Evelyn attended the representation, and thus mentions the fact in his diary : " 5 May, 1659. I went to visit my brother in Lon- don, and next day to see a new opera, after the Italian way, in recitative music and sceanes, much inferior to the Italian composure and magnificence; but it was prodigious that in a time of such publiq consternation such a vanity should be kept up or permitted. I being engaged with company, could not decently resist the going to see it, though my heart smote me for it." With success Davenant grew bolder, and soon ventured to bring on the stage several new plays, which were well received. He imperceptibly introduced a style novel both in the language and the acting ; he studied smoothness of diction, and what a succeeding age would have termed greater correctness in the structure of his compositions. The circumstances, too, under which he was compelled to produce his pieces, forced him to appeal to the eye and the ear more than to the imagination, and he was the first that exchanged the rude hanging for the illusory scene. K 130 SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. What he began, Dryden and others carried out to greater completion; and the public taste eventually became so changed, that Otway's "Caius Marius" displaced "Romeo and Juliet" for seventy years. For eighty years, Dry den's " All for Love" was performed instead of " Antony and Cleopatra ;" and Davenant's alteration of " Macbeth " was preferred to the original for a like number of years. Dryden looked on this as the commencement of a new and more auspicious era for the English stage. "For myself," he observes, " and others who come after him we are bound with all veneration to his memory, to acknowledge what advantage we received from that excel- lent groundwork which he laid." But, as Hazlitt re- marks, "Dryden had no dramatic genius, either in tragedy or comedy." He was unable to estimate correctly in what the great excellence of the Elizabethan writers consisted, nor did he discern the tendency or the causes of the literary revolution in which he was so conspicuous an actor. His appreciation, however, of the peculiar talents of his coadjutor shows both generosity and discernment. " I found him," says he, " of so quick a fancy, that nothing was proposed to him, on which he could not suddenly produce a thought extremely pleasant and surprising ; and those first thoughts of his, contrary to the old Latin proverb, were not always the least happy. And as his fancy was quick, so likewise were the products of it remote and new. He borrowed not of any other ; and his imagi- nations were such as could not easily enter into any other man. His corrections were sober and judicious ; and he corrected his own writings much more severely than those of another man, bestowing twice the time and labour in polishing which he used in invention." Davenant's loyalty or restlessness brought him into further trouble during the commotions which took place previous to the Restoration. To use his own words, he SIR WILLIAM -DAVENANT. 131 could not sit idle, and sigh with such as mourn to hear the drum. He became implicated in some way in the insurrection headed by Sir George Booth which extended over the counties of Cheshire and Lancashire, and was again consigned to a prison. Whitelocke has the following entries : "9 Aug. 1659. A Proclamation past, declaring Sir George Booth and his adherents to be rebels and traitors. " 16. Sir William Davenant was released out of prison." So that his incarceration lasted but a few days. With the Restoration all political perils vanished, as well as the dangers that attended the exercise of his vocation. To no class of men in England was that event more auspicious than to the persecuted actors. During the civil troubles they had been widely scattered, and but few of the old race remained. Some had sunk be- neath the pressure of poverty and despair ; some had fought and fallen for their Sovereign with unflinching heroism ; some had been murdered in cold blood, by the pious enthusiasts who called that, " doing the work of the Lord." Those that survived had gradually gathered hope, new aspirants appeared, and soon a sufficient number was collected to constitute two efficient companies. Rhodes, a bookseller, who had formerly been wardrobe- keeper to the Blackfriars Company, had got a small company together. But Killegrew and Davenant obtained the sole privilege of opening places for theatrical enter- tainments by the following grant, which passed the Privy Signet 2 1st of August, 1660. " Charles II., by the grace of God, of England,. Scot- land, France and Ireland, King, Defender of the Fayth, &c., to all to whome these presents shall come, greeting. Whereas we are given to understand that certain persons K 2 132 SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. in and about our citty of London, or the suburbs thereof, doe frequently assemble for the performing and acting of playes, and enterludes for rewards, to which divers of our subjects doe for their entertainment resort ; which said playes, as we are informed, doe containe much matter of profanation, and scurrility, soe that such kind of enter- tainments, which, if well managed, might serve as morall instructions in human life, as the same are now used, doe for the most part tend to the debauchinge of the manners of such as are present at them, and are very scandalous and offensive to all pious and well-disposed persons. We taking the premisses into our princely consideration, yett not holding it necessary totally to suppresse the use of theaters, because wee are assured, that, if the evih 1 and scandall in the playes that now are or haue bin acted were taken away, the same might serve as innocent and harm- lesse divertisement for many of our subjects ; and hauing experience of the art and skill of our trusty and well- beloued Thomas Killegrew, Esq., one of the Groomes of our Bedchamber, and of Sir William Dauenant, knight, for the purposes hereafter mentioned, doe hereby giue and grante unto the said Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Dauenant, full power and authority to erect two companies of players, consistinge respectively of such persons as they shall chuse and appoint, and to purchase builde and erect, or hire at their charge, as they shall thinke fitt, two houses or theatres, with all convenient roomes and other necessaries thereunto appertaining for the representation of tragydies, comedy es, playes, operas, and all other entertainments of that nature, in convenient places : and likewise to settle and establish such payments to be paid by those that shall resort to see the said repre- sentations performed, as either haue bin accustomely giuen and taken in the like kind, or as shall be reasonable in regard of the great expences of scenes, musick, and such SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 133 new decorations as haue not been formerly used, with further power to make such allowances out of that which they shall so receive, to the actors, and other persons em- ployed in the saide representations in hoth houses respec- tively, as they shall think fitt : the said companies to be under the government and authority of them the said Thomas Killegrew and Sir William Davenant. And in regard of the extraordinary licentiousness that hath been lately used in things of this nature, our pleasure is that there shall be no more places of representations, nor com- panies of actors or playes, or operas by recitative, or musick, or representations by dancing and scenes, or any other entertainments on the stage, in our citties of London or Westminster, or in the liberties of them, than the two to be now erected by vertue of this authority. Nevertheless, wee doe hereby by our authority royal, strictly enjoine the said Thomas Killegrew and Sir William Dauenant, that they do not at any time hereafter, cause to be acted or represented, any play, enterlude, or opera, containing any matter of prophanation, scurrility or obscenity. And wee doe further hereby authorise and command them the said Thomas Killegrew and Sir William Davenant to peruse all plays that have been formerly written, and to expunge all prophanesse and scurrility from the same, before they be represented or acted. And this our grant and authority, made to the said Thomas Killegrew and Sir William Davenant, shall be effectual and remaine in full force and virtue, notwithstanding any former order or direction by us given, for the suppressing of playhouses and playes, or any other entertainments of the stage. Given, &c. "August 21, 1660." The two companies were speedily organized, one by the title of the King's Servants ; the other, under the patronage of the Duke of York, was called the Duke's Company. 134 SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. Killegrew had the former, Sir William Davenant the latter. Killegrew occupied, first the " Red Bull," in St. John's Street ; afterwards Gibbon's tennis-court, Vere Street, Clare-Market, and finally removed to the new Theatre Royal built for them in Drury Lane. Davenant, about March, 1662, established his company in a new theatre in Portugal Row, near Lincoln's Inn Fields ; and it was under his management that Betterton, who had already a good reputation, gave evidence of his extra- ordinary powers. The first piece he reproduced here was his " Siege of Rhodes," and this play appears to have been the one in which the female parts were first performed by women ; another important innovation some time before made in France and Italy, but for the adop- tion of which the stage in this country is indebted to the theatrical efforts of Davenant. In the patent granted to Davenant this year, the practice received the royal sanction, as the reader will perceive by the subjoined extract : " And for as much as many plays, formerly acted, do contain several profane, obscene and scurrilous passages ; and the women's parts therein have been acted by men in the habits of women, at which some have taken offence ; for the preventing these abuses for the future, we do hereby strictly command and enjoin, that from henceforth no new play shall be acted by either of the said companies, containing any passages offensive to piety and good man- ners, nor any old or revived play, containing any such offensive passages as aforesaid, until the same shall be corrected and purged, by the said masters or governors of the said companies, from all such offensive and scan- dalous passages as aforesaid. And we do likewise permit and give leave that all the women's parts to be acted in either of the said two companies, for the time to come, may be performed by women, as long as these recreations SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 135 which, by reason of the abuses aforesaid, were scandalous and offensive, may, by such reformation, be esteemed not only harmless delights, but useful and instructive repre- sentations of human life, to such of our good subjects as shall resort to the same." We are enabled to form some estimate of the profits of theatrical speculation at that period. The receipts were divided into fifteen shares, of which ten were allotted to Davenant. Of these, one was to provide dresses, scenery, &c., two were to be appropriated to the expenses of house- rent, buildings, &c., and the other seven to maintain the women, &c., and " in consideration of erecting and estab- lishing his actors to be a company, and his pains and expenses for that purpose for many years." The remain- ing five shares were divided among the company ; and Sir Henry Herbert tells us that Davenant drew from these ten shares 200 a week. During the competition of the two companies for public favour, it was usual for each to secure the " taking " poets by a kind of retaining fee, which, according to Gildon, seldom or never amounted to more than forty shillings a week. There is a petition of Killegrew extant complaining, that although Dryden received his pay with exemplary regularity, he was not very punctual with his work : nay more, that " Mr. Dryden has now, jointly with Mr. Lee (who was in pension with us to the last day of our playing and shall continue), written a play called ' CEdipus,' and given it to the Duke's Company, contrary to his said agreement, his promise, and all gratitude ; to the great prejudice and almost undoing of the company, they being the only poets remaining to us." Davenant's success was so great that his theatre was too small for his audience, and he commenced building a new one in Dorset Gardens, near Dorset Stairs, which he did not live to see completed, but into which his com- 136 SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. pany moved on November 9th, 1671, about three years after his death. The building stood fronting the river on the east side of Salisbury Court. It was taken down about 1730. He still retained his early partiality for Shakespeare, and displayed much ingenuity in bringing his pieces on the stage. " Romeo and Juliet " was not popular, so it was submitted to the amending hand of a fashionable author, who put it into a presentable shape, altered the catastrophe, and gave the drama a happy termination. The piece so improved was acceptable to the public, and had a run, and Davenant smuggled in the original by playing it on alternate nights with the more favoured modification by the Honourable James Howard. His efforts to divert the public diminished not with ad- vancing years. " The Rivals/' a comedy, " The Man's the Master," a comedy, " Macbeth," altered from Shake- speare, and "The Enchanted Island," an alteration of "The Tempest," in which he was assisted by Dryden, were produced in rapid succession. The troubles and vicissitudes of his life were over ; a popular dramatist and a successful manager, the favourite alike of the Court and the people, he died in the full tide of popularity and success at his lodgings in Lincoln's Inn Fields, April 7th, 1668, aged sixty-three. He was buried, two days afterwards, in the south transept of Westminster Abbey ; his entire company attended to pay their last tribute to his remains, and on his gravestone were inscribed the words : " rare Sir William Davenant !" It would be superfluous here to enter into any further examination of his character or abilities. While still young, he conceived a correct estimate of his own powers, found his proper place in life, and adhered to one definite purpose of action with a consistency and resolution, which SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 137 neither success nor adversity could weaken or overpower. He possessed invention, facility, an unrivalled sagacity in discerning the taste of the public, and tact in providing for its gratification. Hence, whether inventing for himself, or reconstructing the conceptions of others, he seldom failed of success ; for he knew precisely what was wanted, and readily debased or refined his material to the required standard. Calling to his aid "the music of Italy and the scenery of France," he undertook to restore the English stage ; but the dramatic, like the political restoration, was the commencement of a new era, rather than a revivification of the old existence. The spirit that brooded over our earlier stage was as hopelessly extinct as was the inner might and the pride that gave life to the dominion of the Tudor. The elder dramatist wrote for the stage, the more recent fitted his compositions to the stage. Each were exponents of the opinions, indices of the tastes of their respective times; but the former ruled as a master, and while reflecting and influ- enced by the changing phases of contemporary manners, moulded with plastic power the thoughts and opinions of his auditors, and dictated laws which they implicitly obeyed. The later dynasty meekly abnegated all inde- pendent action, content to give utterance to the popular feeling, and to register the ephemeral follies that swept across the surface of society. To investigate the causes of so fundamental a change, were to exceed the scope of this memoir. They intertwine with the springs of our political and social economy. Much vapid declama- tion has been expended on the degeneracy of the modern stage, but it requires no profound penetration to discover that its present condition is an unavoidable effect of our present state of civilization. Spasmodic efforts may be attempted at intervals to make it what it is not, but the influence it once possessed has passed from it for ever. 138 SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. A reference to " Gondibert," his most cherished pro- duction, awakens some sensation of melancholy. This poem, he fondly hoped was to transmit his name as a household word to unborn generations of Englishmen. His plays were written for temporary purposes. They were the exercise of the vocation he had selected for his honour and sustentation through life ; but in " Gondi- bert" he had indulged in higher aspirations, and had challenged the admiration of posterity. He would exalt virtue, teach future ages how to live, and fame should be his immortal reward. " He who writes an heroic poem," says he, in his postscript to that work, "leaves an estate entailed, and he gives a greater gift to posterity than to the present age ; for a public benefit is best measured in the number of receivers ; and our contemporaries are but few when reckoned with those who shall succeed. " If thou art a malicious reader, thou wilt remember my preface, boldly confessed, that a main motive to this undertaking was a desire of fame, and thou mayst likewise say, I may very possibly not live to enjoy it. Truly, I have some years ago considered that fame, like time, only gets a reverence by long running; and that, like a river, it is narrowest where it is bred, and broadest afar off; but this concludes it not unprofitable, for he whose writings divert men from indiscretion and vice, becomes famous, as he is an example to others' endea- vours : and exemplary writers are wiser than to depend on the gratuities of this world, since the kind looks and praises of the present age, for reclaiming a few, are not mentionable with those solid rewards in Heaven for a long and continual conversion of posterity." The dreary oblivion into which the work has fallen presents a touching comment on the vanity of all such enthusiastic anticipations. It has passed the ordeal of a SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 139 trying criticism, and the partial judgment of its ad- mirers has been overruled by the irreversible decree of time and opinion. It has great beauties, scattered like gems, here and there along the surface; but the grave faults which pervade the whole composition, more than eclipse their lustre. The fable is languid, the subject of no striking interest, the metre tiresome and monotonous, and the soberness of style we require in an epic vitiated by the quaintness and abruptness, the writers of that age so universally affected. But it has fancy, imagery, enlarged views of life and science, and abounds with striking apophthegms and deep moral re- flections, clothed in chaste and forcible language. We present the reader with the following extracts : Of a court he says : " There prosperous power sleeps long, though suitors wake." Of care : " She visits cities, but she dwells on thrones." Of the pious man, he " Served Heaven with praise, the world with prayer." " The laws, Men from themselves, but not from power, secure." " If you approve what numbers lawful think, Be bold, for numbers cancel bashfulness ; Extremes from which a King would blushing shrink, Unblushing senates act as no excess." Describing musical instruments, he says, all That joy did e'er invent, or breath inspired, Or flying fingers touch'd into a voice." Of a temple : ' This, to soothe Heaven, the bloody Clephes built, As if Heaven's King so soft and easy were, So meanly housed in heaven, and kind to guilt, That he would be a tyrant's tenant here." 140 SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. The library, which, in the House of Astragon, he places near the Cabinet of Death, he calls : " The monument of vanished minds." " Where they thought they saw The assembled souls of all that men held wise." Of law : " In little tomes these grave first lawyers lie, In volumes their interpreters below." Of polemics: " About this sacred little book did stand, Unwieldy volumes, and in number great ; And long it was since any reader's hand Had reach' d them from their unfrequented seat. " For a deep dust (which Time does softly shed, Where only time does come,) their covers bear, On which grave spiders streets of webs had spread , Subtle and slight, as the grave writers were. " In these, Heaven's holy fire does vainly burn ; Nor warms, nor lights, but is in sparkles spent ; Where froward authors, with disputes have torn The garment seamless as the firmament." Of the instruction that the pages of Gondibert receive from their lord, he thus speaks : " But with the early sun he rose, and taught These youths by growing Virtue to grow great ; Showed greatness is without it blindly sought, A desperate charge which ends in base retreat. " He taught them Shame, the sudden sense of ill ; Shame, nature's hasty conscience, which forbids Weak inclination ere it grows to will, Or stays rash will before it grows to deeds. " He taught them Honour, virtue's bashfulness, A fort so yieldless that it fears to treat ; Like power, it grows to nothing, growing less ; Honour, the moral conscience of the great. " He taught them Kindness, soul's civility, In which nor courts nor cities have a part ; For theirs is fashion, this from falsehood free, Where love and pleasure know no lust nor art. SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 141 " He taught them love of Toil, Toil which does keep Obstructions from the mind, and quench the blood; Ease but belongs to us, like Sleep, and sleep. Like Opium, is our med'cine, not our food." We conclude our extracts by the following quatrain : " Rich are the diligent, who can command Time, nature's stock ! and could his hour-glass fall, "Would, as for seed of stars, stoop for the sand, And by incessant labour gather all !" One incident in our poet's life deserves honourable mention. When imprisoned by the Parliament, as has been recorded, Milton is reported to have interceded for his release. The obligation was not unremembered. At the Restoration, that stern and unyielding apologist for regicide was in the most imminent danger. Davenant exerted all his great personal influence in his favour, and succeeded in securing his safety. This graceful and successful interposition in behalf of the immortal writer of " Paradise Lost," when all other claims to remembrance are forgotten, may still suffice to shelter from oblivion, and retain in men's affections, the name of Sir William Davenant. JOHN DRYDEN. TIIK life of Drvden has been given to the world by two of the greatest of English writers. The triumphs and sufferings of that literary career have been recorded by Dr. Johnson and Sir Walter Scott, and upon the genius and writings of this poet some of the best essays in the language have been penned. In succeeding such biographers there can be but little to perform, and yet how difficult that little! What remains for us but to compile from their narratives a short memoir of the Laureate ; and in doing so to avail ourselves of the few more recent materials that exist to collect some scattered notices and to add some criticism upon his genius and character ? It is trite to tell any well-informed reader that Dryden was satirist, dramatist, didactic poet, essayist, translator, controversialist, and critic ; that he was the monarch of his own age, and the idol of the first men of the next ; that his life is the history of half a century ; and that he is at once the glory and the shame of our literature. To classify the sons of genius has always been a difficult .101 IN DRYDKN. 143 task ; but to him has been justly assigned the first place in the second rank of our poets. We dare not compare even his rich endowments with Shakespeare*! almost omniscience of human character, and profound penetration into the mysteries of the human heart. Spenser must remain the Lord of Allegory. Still farther is Dryden removed from the celestial purity and holy grandeur of Milton. With the satirist and dramatist of the Restora- tion we cannot breathe the serene atmosphere of the Em- pyrean, listen to the voices of angel-visitant! of Eden, eliinl) the flaming battlements of the universe, or sit at the council-table of Heaven. It may be said of Dryden : " ITo was the Bard, who knew so well All the sweet windings of Apollo's slid! ;" but however sweet the notes, however brilliant the execu- tion, those strains will bear no comparison to- the holy harmonies in winch seerns to have- been echoed through all eternity the syrnphonious chorus of joy and rapture hymned by triumphant hierarchies on the morn of crea- tion. Without raising the question of the extent to which worth, moral or intellectual, be connected with birth, it may be remarked that Dryden was a man of what is called good family. His grandfather was a baronet. The poet was born in 1630, and his father Erasmus had no occa- sion on Scriptural ground to be ashamed to meet his enemy at the gates, for he had thirteen children besides John. Mr. Malone's industry has made some discoveries about some of them, but brought nothing very important to light. Perhaps the longevity of one was the most re- markable thing in connection with them. This was the sister who, in spite of her ancient lineage, stooped to marry a tobacconist, and lived to the age of ninety, surviving the poet twenty years. 144 JOHN DRYDEN. It is said that the family were Anabaptists, but great doubt hangs over the question. The destruction of a parish register leaves us to mere conjecture on the subject, and induces us to remark that those records have been so carelessly kept, even in later times, that much valuable in- formation is lost by the wanton negligence evinced in the custody of what are the title-deeds of the humbler classes of the community. There is no doubt that the poet's early opinions were tinged with Puritanism, and that he had some hopes of patronage and promotion while that party was in power. Tichmarsh was the place which lays claim to being the scene of his childish days. He was thence removed to Westminster, where he was placed on the foundation. This justly famous school was then under the management of Dr. Busby of flogging notoriety. We find that, as in the case of Ben Jonson and Camden, at the same place of education, the friendship between master and pupil was strengthened by time. Dryden sent his sons to Westminster ; and a letter, in which he wrote to the Doctor to complain of some harsh treat- ment which one of them had received, is most respectful in its language. It was here that he gave an early proof of his talents for versifying and translation, for he tells us in his preface to " Persius," that he had, when a boy at Westminster, translated the third satire, as a Thursday night's exercise, for the head master ; and he adds that the Doctor was still probably in possession of that and others of his earliest poetical essays. They are now, at the school, justly proud of " glorious John " as an " Old Westminster," and his name is still shown carved on a desk in the shell form, it is said, by his own hand. When the choice came, it fell to Dryden's lot to go up as scholar to Trinity, Cambridge, and not Christ Church, Oxford. What his feelings were at the time, we have no JOHN DRYDEN. 145 power of ascertaining ; but he doubtless afterwards regretted it, for in mentioning the two Universities in a prologue, he speaks with disparagement of his own, and of Oxford with affectionate admiration. At Cambridge, through some irregularities of conduct, he fell into dis- grace. It is doubtful whether he was expelled or fled to avoid expulsion. Shadwell, after they quarrelled, remind- ing Dry den of the incident, avers that it was in conse- quence of Dry den's traducing a young nobleman, who was his contemporary at College. Mr. Malone has shown that he was confined to his College, and "put out of Commons for his disobedience to the Vice-Master, and his contumacy in taking the punishment inflicted on him." It is, however, a well-established fact, that he took his Bachelor's degree, but he then left, and the degree of M.A. was afterwards conferred on him, not by his Univer- sity, but by the Archbishop of Canterbury. After leaving Cambridge, he took up his abode in Lon- don, and, if Shadwell is to be trusted, was in very needy circumstances ; lived in a lodging that had a window " no bigger than a pocket looking-glass, and dined at a three- penny ordinary, enough to starve a vacation tailor." He was, according to the account of a contemporary, very simply clad ; and one of his sources of income was to write prefaces for Herringman, the bookseller. His inte- rest lay entirely with the Puritan party. In 1658, on the death of Cromwell, he poured forth an elegy. Spratt, Waller, and other poets paid their tributes also, but Dryden's lines were good enough to create great expectations from future efforts of his Muse. This was the first poem that he published, except the well-known lines mentioned by Johnson on the death of Lord Hastings. Sir Gilbert Pickering, a kinsman of Dryden, was an influential man, from whose patronage the young poet hoped much. The Restoration banished all such expec- L 146 JOHN DRY DEN. tations. Sir Gilbert had been one of the Judges who had condemned Charles I. to death. When Charles II. re- turned, the knight sought safety in obscurity and retired into private life. Dryden, therefore, had nothing to look to in this quarter, and so he paid his homage to the rising sun, and produced " Astrea Redux," and added a " Pane- gyric on his Sacred Majesty." He now seems to have determined on devoting himself to a literary life. The theatres, so long closed by the austerity of the Puritans, became popular places of amusement when the Merry Monarch was restored. He planned and wrote a portion of " The Duke of Guise," but was dissuaded from finishing it by the advice of some friends. In the vindication of that play, which he published in the form of an appendix to it, he writes : " In the year of his Majesty's happy return, the first play I undertook was * The Duke of Guise,' as the fairest way which the act of indemnity had left of setting forth the rise of the late rebellion, and by exploding the villanies of it upon the stage, to caution posterity against the like errors." The play was afterwards acted in 1682. The first drama of Dryden's which was exhibited on the stage, was " The Wild Gallant," a comedy. It fully merits the depreciatory criticism of Pepys, who tells us that it was ill acted, and " so poor a thing as I never saw in my life, and so little answering the name that I could not, nor can tell at this time which was the Wild Gallant." It was patronised by Lady Castlemaine, to whom Dryden in consequence wrote some grateful verses, for which he has been ridiculed. It has the faults visible in many first attempts at humorous dramatic writing ; and it has faults peculiar to the particular circumstances under which it was produced. Dryden had but little dramatic power, an assertion which can be proved by instances from almost JOHN DRYDEN. 147 all his numerous plays, with scarcely an exception, and which is at once discoverable in this. The plot is weak, meagre, and ludicrously improbable. There are many smart things and broad and obvious jokes; but the dramatis persona carry on contests of wit with each other, in which the action does not proceed. Its gross obscenity was doubtless owing much to the manners of the times ; and how great the licence which prevailed is so well known to all acquainted with the history of those times, we need not enter upon the question. It is full, as most of the comedies of the next twenty years were, of constant allusions to the lowest vices, and the grossest sensuality. In the words of Sir Walter Scott, " the licence of a rude age was then revived by a corrupted one." Dryden was much influenced by his own times, and had not the courage or independence to write what was moral, when it was not likely to satisfy the morbid craving of the public. The comedies now attempted by him and others were quite unlike those of the Elizabethan era. Though Jonson was much admired and occasionally played, yet the comedy of character was not the model of any of these dramatic writers, except Shad well. They borrowed from the Spanish theatre, and aimed at intricacy of plot, sudden surprises, mistakes, disguises, and escapes. " The Wild Gallant " was considered by Dryden himself as a failure ; in the epilogue, he confesses that comedy is the most difficult kind of dramatic writing, though in his defence of his " Essay on Dramatic Poetry," written some years after, he makes some remarks which prove how low a view he took of his mission as a poet, and also the esti- mation in which he held his comic powers. " I confess," he writes, " my chief endeavours are to delight the age in which I live. If the humour of this be in low comedy, small accidents, and raillery, I will force my genius to obey L 2 148 JOHN DRYDEN. it, though with more reputation I could write in verse. I know I am not so fitted by nature to write comedy ; I want that gaiety of humour which is required to it ; my conversation is slow, dull, my humour saturnine and reserved. In short, I am none of those who endeavour to break jests in company or make repartees ; so that those who decry my comedies do me no injury, except it be in point of profit ; reputation in them is the last thing to which I shall pretend." That he had changed his mind, and adopted a higher view of the poet's duties a few years before his death, we see in his preface to the comedy written by his son John, from which we quote an extract, for the sake of its con- trast to the last. Speaking of his son, he says : " If it shall please God to restore him to me, I may perhaps inform him better of the rules of writing ; and if I am not partial, he has already shown that a genius is not wanting to him. All that I can reasonably fear is that the perpetual good success of ill plays may make him endeavour to please by writing worse, and by accommo- dating himself to the wretched capacity and liking of the present audience, from which Heaven defend any of my progeny. A poet indeed must live by the many ; but a good poet will make it his business to please only the few." In the year in which his first comedy was exhibited he wrote his verses to Lord Chancellor Hyde on " New Year's Day," and his satire on the Dutch. The versification of both poems, though it is vastly below the perfection which afterwards he arrived at, shows a wonderful mastery of the heroic metre, which had hitherto, however beautiful the image or profound the thought it conveyed, for the most part been rough and halting. His next production for the stage was " The Rival Ladies," a tragi-comedy, which is superior to " The Wild Gallant," and which was tolerably successful. JOHN DRYDEN. 149 He appears, about this period, to have made the acquaintance of Sir Robert Howard through Herringman, with whom Dryden lodged, and who was Sir Robert's publisher; and he and the aristocratic author joined in one of those literary partnerships which, especially in dramatic composition, have been so common. King Charles had, during his exile, contracted French tastes in. poetry and music, as well as in other matters, and he possessed an especial regard for the use of rhyme on the stage. Dryden, anxious to merit the royal favour, joined Sir Robert in the production of " The Indian Queen," which was acted before his Majesty with great applause. Pepys, though he censures the rhyme as breaking the sense, admits that it was well acted, and that he and Mrs. P. came home from the theatre " mightily contented." Evelyn has spoken eulogistically of the grandeur of the scenic decoration. Dryden soon followed it up by " The Indian Emperor," which is a continuation of the story, and forms a part of the plot of the former play. It would be superfluous here to pronounce any grave censure on what all critics have agreed to condemn. To us, accustomed to hear rhyming heroics made the vehicle of parody, burlesque, and bombast, in extravaganzas and travesties, it is difficult to imagine an audience either terror-stricken or melted into pity by sentiments conveyed in stilted heroics, tagged with rhymes. Where long descriptive passages occur, such a poet as Dryden could not but write poetry ; but when the dialogue is short and broken, the effect of rhyme is peculiarly absurd. In 1665, he wrote his lines " On the Victory over the Dutch." In this year the plague broke out, and was suc- ceeded by the fire. The theatres were closed from May, 1665, to Christmas, 1666. Dryden's intimacy with Sir Robert Howard had increased, and he spent the greater 150 JOHN DRYDEN. portion of this interval at Charlton, the seat of the Earl of Berkshire, Sir Robert's father. Here Dryden met, wooed, and married Lady Elizabeth, his friend's sister. There is no evidence to show in what light the family viewed the match. Lampoons written long after, dictated by the virulence of political hatred, asserted that the alliance took .place under circumstances not very creditable to either party. As no proof whatever was adduced in support of these ill-natured statements, all his biographers have con- sented to discredit or overlook them. The slander may have been suggested by the seeming inequality in the cir- cumstances of the two. But a moment's reflection will show that there was no vast disproportion between them. Dryden was of good and old, though not noble family, He had been educated at Westminster and Cambridge ; his prospects had been excellent before the Restoration ; and he had proved himself, by the verses he had pub- lished, and his successes on the stage, a man of genius and promise. As regards his personal qualifications, we need not wonder at Lady Elizabeth's choice, for if his portrait can be trusted, he must as a young man have possessed much manly beauty. It was not his first passion. While at Cambridge, he had paid his addresses to his cousin, Honor Dryden, who was an heiress as well as a beauty. There is still remaining one love letter, of his written to her from Cam- bridge. It is replete with figure and conceits, and with quite as much affectation, and not a tithe of the elegance of the early letters of Pope. She rejected him at the time ; but lived to regret her obduracy, for she died single, and was very proud, when Dryden had become famous, to show the love letter he had written her from the University. Previous to his marriage, he had also an amour with a pretty actress, Mrs. Reeves, who was for some time under JOHN DRYDEN. 151 his protection. His marriage, in the words of Scott, "interrupted, if it did not terminate his gallantries." His domestic life does not appear to have been very happy ; but no open fracas, as is the case of so many others of his brethren of the lyre, took place. A good supplement to the quarrels of authors would be the quarrels of authors with their wives. At Charlton, Dryden, in addition to the love and matrimony, employed himself on the "Essay on Dra- matic Poesy." This composition has justly acquired great fame. It forms an epoch in our literature, and is perhaps the first attempt at regular criticism. Ben Jonson's " Dis- coveries" had contained many observations on books, as well as men, displaying a critical power profound and philosophical, but this Essay is unique. In certain artistic effects, it is meant to imitate, and it strongly reminds us of "The Platonic Dialogue." The commencement, in which the speakers are represented as floating on the Thames together in their barge, and being drawn into the discussion by one accidental remark ; the dramatic nature of the discussion ; the manner in which, when it is concluded, they quit the barge at the foot of Somerset Stairs, and look back on the water upon which the moonbeams are playing; how they walked together to the Piazza, and then parted Eugenius and Lisideius to some pleasant appointment they had made, and Crites ,and Neander to their several lodgings; all impart to it something of the reality of the recorded conversations of Socrates with his disciples ; but the nature of dialogue is not well preserved, for each of the disputants delivers his opinions at such length, that it reads more like a series of orations than a colloquy. Though, from its beautiful style, its learning and grace, it is a charming production ; it would be tedious to attempt, by an analysis, to follow all the intricacies of 152 JOHN DRYDEN. argument which turn on the superiority of the ancients to the moderns, the question of the unities, and the propriety of rhyme in dramatic composition. Such topics criticism has long exhausted. The speakers represented under the classical names are Lord Dorset, Sir Charles Sedley, Sir Robert Howard, and Dryden himself. Sir Robert is represented under the name of Crites, and described as " a person of a sharp judgment, and somewhat too delicate in his taste, which the world hath mistaken in him for ill nature." He is put up in the dialogue to be knocked down. He first debates with Eugenius and Lisideius, and afterwards with Neander. The latter part of the dialogue turns on the propriety of rhyme in tragedy. Neander defends it, and Crites states certain objections which many years after Dryden would have approved. Indeed, on this point he is said to have so changed his opinion, that he stated that were he to begin his Virgil again he would write it in blank verse. In his dedication of " The Rival Ladies" to the Earl of Orrery, Dryden enters into an elaborate defence of rhyme in tragedy. Either this Essay, or as it is by some asserted, Dryden's connection with him by a marriage which he had been the means of bringing about, gave Sir Robert offence ; and in his preface to the Duke of Lerma, while bidding farewell to the stage, he makes an opportunity for assail- ing Dryden's sentiments on the question of rhyme. Dryden replied rather angrily in a defence of the Essay on Dramatic Poetry, and assailed his brother-in-law with great irony. In speaking of Sir Robert's writings, he says : " I cannot but give this testimony of his style, that it is extremely poetical, even in oratory, his thoughts elevated sometimes above common apprehension." Alluding to Sir Robert's abandoning dramatic poetry for state craft, he remarks : " The Muses have lost him, but the Commonwealth gains JOHN DRYDEN. 153 by it ; the corruption of a poet is the generation of a statesman." Before, however, these literary hostilities took place, Dryden had concluded the poem of " Annus Mirabilis," on which he had been employed at Charlton, and published it with an almost blasphemous dedication to the City of London, and a critical letter to Sir R. Howard. This is certainly the best of his earliest poems, and produced for him far more fame as a poet than any which had pre- ceded it. He thought highly of the subject, and ex- pressed himself with some confidence on the manner in which he had treated it. He writes to Sir Robert : " I have chosen the most heroic subject which any poet could desire ; I have taken upon me to describe the motives, the beginning, progress and successes of a most just and necessary war; in it the care, management and presence of a King; the conduct and valour of a royal admiral, and of two incomparable generals ; the invincible courage of our captains and seamen, and their glorious victories, the result of all. After this," he adds, " I have in the fire the most deplorable but withal the greatest argument that can be imagined, the destruction being so swift, so sudden, so vast and miserable as nothing can parallel in story." He next boasts, though with some slight mis- givings, of his accuracy in the use he had made of naval terms. It is difficult to see what can have induced .him against all rules of criticism, to have introduced tech- nicalities into poetry ; Johnson has censured them ; and Scott has agreed with him in condemning " the dialect of the dockyard." In speaking of his execution of the work, Dryden says : " And I am well satisfied, as they are incomparably the best subject I ever had, so also, that this I have written of them is much better than what I have performed on any other." Towards the conclusion, he defends himself against an accusation which had been 154 JOHN DRYDEN. brought against the lines he had written to the Duchess of York in the previous year. " I know," he writes, " I addressed them to a lady, and accordingly I affected the softness of expression, and the smoothness of measure rather than the height of thought, and in what I did endeavour, it is no vanity to say I have succeeded. / detest arrogance ; but there is some difference betwixt that and a just defence" The fault of the measure in which " The Annus Mirabilis" is written, is that it breaks the sense. Though well tuned to Elegy in the hands of Gray, it is ill suited for a continuous narrative poem. Dr. Johnson has made one or two quotations to praise. Mr. Macaulay has done so to criticise and condemn. There are only two stanzas to which we would invite attention. The first has a pathos and simplicity not to be found elsewhere in the poem, which is rather to be admired for its strength and fire, than its sweetness. " The careful husband had befcn long away, Whom his chaste wife and little children mourn, Who on their fingers learn to tell the day On which their father promised to return." The other is in a higher strain. " Till now, alone the mighty nations strove, The rest at gaze, without the lists did stand, And thundering France, placed like a painted Jove, Kept idle thunder in his lifted hand." In 1667, "The Maiden Queen," a tragi-comedy, was. given by Dry den to the stage, and was a favourite with Charles "ll. He next revived, with alterations, " The Wild Gallant," which was now more successful than at its first repre- sentation. It was after this that he and his predecessor in the laurel, Sir W. Davenant, set about the alteration of " The Tempest." The addition which they made to the plot of JOHN DRYDEN. 155 Shakespeare is too well known to require any comment on it here. It appears that it was to Sir William's fertile fancy that we owe the counterpart of Shakespeare's Miranda in Antonio. Dry den tells us " that as he was a man of quick and piercing imagination, he soon found that somewhat might be added to the design of Shake- speare, of which neither Fletcher nor Suckling had ever thought. And, therefore, to put the last hand to it, he designed the counterpart of Shakespeare's plot, namely, that of a man who had never seen a woman ; that by this means those two characters of Innocence and Love might the more illustrate and commend each other. This excel- lent contrivance he was pleased to communicate to me, and to desire my assistance in it. I confess that from the very first moment it so pleased me, that I never writ anything with more delight." He then proceeds to pay a tribute to the abilities of his coadjutor, which we have quoted in the Life of that Poet. The remarks of Dryden which we have given above, speak plainly enough the taste of the age. It may be added, that at the end of the Preface, Dryden couples the name of Shakespeare and Sir W. Davenant almost as if equals. That with such an opinion of Shakespeare they were not likely to improve on him is probable enough, and Sir W. Scott has remarked with true severity, that " Miranda's simplicity is converted into indelicacy, and Dorinda talks the language of prostitution before she had even seen a man." It was brought out at the Duke's Theatre, and as the scenery was under the management of Sir W. Davenant, with a grandeur which we should now deem very simple, but which had at that time never before been witnessed on the stage. It was crowned with com- plete success. His next dramatic composition was " Sir Martin Mar-all," an imitation of " L'Etourdi" of Molire. It 156 JOHN DRYDEN. was highly successful, owing much to the comic talents of Nokes the actor, of whose playing in this piece Gibber has left us some account. Next followed " Evening Love, or the Mock Astrologer." It was to see this play that Pepys tells us, " my wife and Deb went, thinking to spy me there, but did not." Pepys himself went on the afternoons of the 20th and 22nd, and pronounces it " very smutty, and nothing so good as ' The Maiden Queen' and ' The Indian Emperor.' ' Evelyn condemns it more strongly, " as a foolish plot and very profane." " It affected me," he says, " to see how much the stage was degenerated and polluted by the licentious times." Herringman, the printer and pub- lisher with whom we have before said Dryden once lodged, informed Pepys that Dryden himself admitted that this was but a fifth-rate play. Poor as it is, it has not even the praise of originality, for it is chiefly borrowed from a play of Corneille, who borrowed his from Calderon. He next wrote " The Royal Martyr," which he dedi- cates to the Duke of Monmouth, in a preface in which he lauds the Duke's personal charms. " Youth, beauty, and courage (all which you possess in the height of their perfection), are the desirable gifts of Heaven ; and Heaven is never prodigal of such treasures but to some uncommon purpose. So goodly a fabrick was never framed by an Almighty Architect for a vulgar guest. He shewed the value which he set upon your mind when he took care to have it so nobly and so beautifully lodged. To a graceful fashion and deportment of body you have joined a winning conversation, and an easy greatness derived to you from the best and best beloved of Princes. And with a great power of obliging, the world has ob- served in you a desire to oblige, even beyond your power. This, and all that I can say on so excellent and large a JOHN DRYDEN. 15? subject, is only History ; in which Fiction has no part ; I can employ nothing of poetry in it, any more than I do in that humble protestation which I make to continue ever your Grace's most obedient and most devoted servant." Dryden having now by his plays, poems, and prose writings acquired much popularity, produced those two very remarkable dramas, the first and second parts of " The Conquest of Granada." He prefaced them by an essay on heroic plays, in which he defends the stilted and bom- bastic style of these dramas, and endeavours to support his view by parallels from Homer, and criticisms from Horace. He concludes with a confident allusion to his success. " But I have already swept the stakes ; and with the common good-fortune of prosperous gamesters, can be content to sit quietly ; to hear my fortune cursed by some, and my faults arraigned by others ; and to suffer both without reply." When he wrote this, he did not know that " The Rehearsal" was in preparation. He was now in the zenith of his fame. Among noble friends and patrons, he numbered the Duke of Ormond, Lord Rochester, the Duke of Newcastle, Lord Clifford, the Earl of Dorset and Sir Charles Sedley. It was at this time that he spent in noble society those convivial nights which he alludes to in the dedication of " The Assigna- tion," when writing to Sir C. Sedley, and speaking of the Roman poets of the Augustine age, he says: "They imitated the best way of living, which was to pursue an innocent and inoffensive pleasure; that which one of the ancients called Eruditam Voluptatem. We have? like them, our genial nights; where our discourse is neither too serious nor too light; but always pleasant, and for the most part instructive : the raillery neither too sharp upon the present, nor too censorious on the absent ; and the cups only such as will raise the 158 JOHN DRYDEN. conversation of the night, without disturbing the business of the morrow." But his companions were not only among the great. He enjoyed the friendship of Cowley, Waller, Denham and Davenant. To Milton he was known but little, and Butler was the only wit of the day who was his enemy. Fortune rains down all her favours on us at once, and so his income as well as his fame was at this time increased. When James Howell died, the office of royal historiographer became vacant, and it had not been filled up. It was now Conferred on Dryden, together with the laureateship, which had not been bestowed since the death of Davenant. Dryden was appointed on the 18th of August, .1670. The salary of the two offices amounted to 200, with the annual butt of canary, and the grant bore a retrospect to the death of Davenant. The letters patent are to be seen in Scott's Life of the Poet. The office is said to be given " to John Dryden, Master of Arts, in consideration of his many acceptable services theretofore done to his present Majesty, and from an observation of his learning and eminent abilities, and his great skill and elegant style both in verse and prose." Scott computes that in this time Dry den's in- come derived from these appointments, as well as theatrical and literary sources, must have averaged between 600 and 700 per annum, equal in those days to an income of three times that amount now. Dryden was not long destined to enjoy his wealth or fame uninterruptedly. His income was very soon somewhat cur- tailed by the burning down of the theatre, and enemies were rising up stimulated to hatred by envy and jealousy. George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, had long strenu- ously opposed the rhyming tragedies, and had, in fact, risked his personal safety by attempting to interrupt one of the dramas of the Hon. Edward Howard, a brother JOHN DRYDEN. 159 of Sir Robert. This gay and profligate nobleman gained the assistance of Butler, the author of " Hudibras," who, in Scott's words, " while himself starving, amused his misery by ridiculing his contemporaries," of Spratt, after- wards Bishop of Rochester, and of Martin Clifford, after- wards Master of the Charter-House. Their facetiae were not meant at first to be levelled at Dryden personally ; for Bilboa, the chief personage in this amusing farce, was first intended to represent Davenant and Sir Robert Howard. It was written in 1664, but not played till 1671 ; for the fire and plague for some time closed all the theatres, and Davenant's death obliged its author to remodel it, and put Dryden in his place. The first night it was played, and a vehement opposition was attempted, Dryden and his friends, the Earl of Orrery, Sir Robert Howard, and others who had written in that style, were present, and clamorous enough against it. It was, however, in spite of all attempts to interrupt, tri- umphantly successful. Parodies from almost every one of his plays must have tried Dryden's temper, but he bore it all with good-nature ; and ultimately reaped an ample revenge when he elaborated the character of Zimri in his great political satire. After the effect produced by " The Rehearsal," Dryden did not immediately venture upon a heroic tragedy, but produced " Marriage-a-la-Mode," a tragi-comedy, which was highly successful. " The Assignation, or Love in a Nunnery," was his next dramatic composition, and most deservedly failed. " Amboyna," his next drama, was written to excite the feel- ings of the nation against the Dutch. Scott most justly says of it, that " the story is too disgusting to produce the legitimate feelings of pity and terror which a tragedy should excite : the black-hole of Calcutta would be as pleasing a subject. The character of the Hollanders, as there repre- sented, is too grossly vicious and detestable to give the least 160 JOHN DRYDEN. pleasure. They are neither men, nor even devils, but a sort of lubbar-fiends, compounded of cruelty, avarice, and brutal debauchery ; like Dutch swabbers possessed by demons." Dryden next made a monstrous and ludicrous at- tempt to alter " Paradise Lost " into a five act drama, in rhyme. He has prefixed to it " an apology for heroic poetry and poetic licence," in which there is one passage which may to some slight extent make redemption for the audacity of the attempt. " I cannot," he writes, " without injury to the deceased author of * Paradise Lost/ but acknowledge that this poem has received its entire founda- tion, part of the design, and many of the ornaments, from him. What I have borrowed will be so easily discerned from my own production, that I shall not need to point the reader to the places ; and truly, I should be sorry for my own sake, that any one should take the pains to compare them together ; the original being undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems, that either this age or nation has produced." This opera (for it is rather that than any other kind of p!ay) stands in perhaps the same relation to " Paradise Lost " that the metrical versions of the Psalms do to the original, or a travestie of a Greek tragedy to the classic drama itself. Scott truly observes, that " Eve is some- what of a coquette, even in the state of innocence, and the absurd expression, ( dissolved in hallelujahs/ provoked from a facetious critic a parody of ' anchovies dissolved in sauce.' ' It is said that Dryden called on the aged poet, and asked his leave to make this monstrous alteration. He appears to have been either startled by this irreverent essay, or to have thought it expedient to abandon a style in which lesser wits bid fair to rival him ; for his taste soon changed, and " Aurungzebe " was his last rhyming play. JOHN DRYDEN. 1 6 1 It was at this time that his quarrel with Settle and Rochester took place. That jealous, fickle, and profligate nobleman at first patronized Dryden, then set up Settle, and afterwards Otway. Not content with having neglected Dryden, he took offence with him upon the false suppo- sition that he had written all or the greater part of Lord Mulgrave's " Essay on Satire/' in which Lord Rochester is attacked ; and in a letter to a friend, he threatens the infamous revenge which he ultimately adopted. " You write me word," he says, " that I'm out of favour with a certain poet whom I have admired for the disproportion of him and his attributes. He is a rarity which I cannot but be fond of, as one would be of a hog that could fiddle, or a singing owl. If he falls on me at the blunt, which is his very good weapon in wit, I shall forgive him, if you please ; and leave the repartee to Black Will with a cudgel." Accordingly, as Dryden was returning from Will's Coffee-house to his own house in Gerard Street, through Rose Street, Covent Garden, he was attacked and severely beaten by some dastardly ruffians who were doubtless the employes of Rochester. A reward of 50 was offered in the " London Gazette" for the discovery of his cowardly assailants, but to no purpose. It was soon after the production of- " Aurungzebe," that Dryden contemplated undertaking an epic poem, and hesitated in his choice of a subject between the story of King Arthur and Edward the Black Prince. He was wearied with wasting his powers on the stage, and he was anxious to build up some enduring monument of his genius by industry congenial to his taste. But this was impossible while he had to supply the wants of life by his pen. In his dedication of " Aurungzebe" to the Earl of Mulgrave, he complains that he wants patronage to help him in the effort. He informs him that the " un- settledness of his condition" had hitherto prevented his M 162 JOHN DRYDEN. making the attempt. " As," he writes, " I am no suc- cessor to Homer in his wit, so neither do I desire to be in his poverty. I can make no rhapsodies, nor go a begging at the Grecian doors, while I sing the praises of their ancestors. The times of Virgil please me better, because he had an Augustus for his Patron ; and to draw the allegory nearer you, I am sure I shall not want a Maecenas with him. 'Tis for your Lordship to stir up that remembrance in his Majesty, which his many avocations of business have caused him, I fear, to lay aside." But the patronage was not granted to him, and the- subject which he would most probably have selected, was seized on and marred by Sir Richard Blackmore. Since Dry den wrote " Aurungzebe," three years had elapsed, in which he had paid especial attention to the subject of versification, and made preparation for the work on English Prosody which he then contemplated writing. He, during this period, made Shakespeare his constant study, and this worked a most salutary change in his aesthetical and critical views. Notwithstanding, how- ever, this revolution in his taste, he again set about what he had before attempted, an alteration of Shakespeare ; but upon this occasion without a coadjutor, and with greater success. " All for Love, or the World well Lost," is an adaptation of " Antony and Cleopatra," and in some respects Dryden has improved it as an acting play. Sir W. Scott admits that, " in discarding a number of unin- teresting characters, the plan of Dryden's play must une- quivocally be preferred to that of Shakespeare in point of coherence, unity, and simplicity." But Sir Walter goes a step farther, in which we cannot follow him, and insti- tutes a comparison, favourable to Dryden, between the two descriptions of the voyage of Cleopatra down the Cydnus. JOHN DRYDEN. 163 But while Dryden had abandoned rhyme, and accepted Shakespeare as a model and an exemplar, his taste in comedy had not proportionately improved. In the same year in which " All for Love" was played with the highest success, he wrote a comedy entitled " Limberham, or the Kind Keeper," which is his most stupid and most objectionable play. His object was, it appears, to attack " the crying sin of keeping." But the satire was unfortunately as gross or grosser than the vices it sought to denounce the remedy was worse than the disease; and "Limberham," after having been scarcely tolerated for three nights, was driven off the stage. It certainly deserved no better fate, for it is one tissue of obscenity from first to last. Every man is an adulterer, every woman an adulteress, the whole plot turns on the grossest immorality, and the scenes are laid in places which it is not decent to name ; there is not a grace of sentiment, or a pulse of love to disguise or elevate the indecent intrigues. It is full of contretemps, surprises and escapes ; there are a few smart and laughable witticisms, but not the slightest success in the delineation of character. Dryden endeavours to defend it in the following plausible way : " The crime for which it suffered was that which is objected against the Satires of Juvenal and the Epigrams of Catullus, that it expressed too much of the vice which it decryed. Your Lordship knows what answer was returned by the elder of those Poets, whom I last men- tioned, to his accusers : " ' Castum esse decet pium Poetam Ipsum ; versiculos nihil necesse est Qui turn denique habent salem ac leporem Si sint molliculi, et parum pudici.' " There is, however, a vast distinction, to which self-love blinded Dryden, between the healthy and earnest coarseness of Juvenal or the wit of Catullus, and the profane pruriency M 2 164 JOHN DRYDEN. of this tiresome comedy. Dryden was not daunted by the failure of this piece ; but with the assistance of Lee, soon after produced " CEdipus," and soon after alone fitted " Troilus and Cressida," which, as Scott remarks, was left by Shakespeare in a " state of strange imperfection," for the stage. Soon after this he gave to the world his best comedy " The Spanish Friar." It is his last dramatic composition, except " The Duke of Guise" and " The Masque of Albion and Albanius," which he produced before the Revolution ; and it was meant to have a strong political influence. Dryden himself ascribed it to Lord Haughton, as a Protestant play to a Protestant patron. It was conse- quently the work to which, after Dryden's conversion to the Roman Catholic religion, contemptuous allusions were, by his enemies, constantly made. It is difficult to estimate what effect it produced at Court, except that we know that it so offended the Duke of York that, after his accession, he never permitted it to be played. To the King himself it may have been obnoxious, but at that time he had given power into the hands of the Protestant party, and Dryden had almost grown callous to Court favour, as he had neither been encouraged in his projected epic, nor even received his official salary of late. Lord Mulgrave also had fallen into disgrace, and the protege had suffered with the patron. Dryden's income was therefore, at this period, far narrower than when we before spoke of it ; for we have seen what plays he had written during a long interval, in which he had occupied himself solely with dramatic com- position, and it is stated we think with accuracy that he never received more than a hundred pounds for any one play. He was destined, however, for a time to leave the stage, and mixed up with the political passions of the day to add to our literature those satirical poems by which he has JOHN DRYDEN. 165 immortalized his name, and which will, to the latest posterity, vindicate his genius, though his dramas be neglected and forgotten. Every reader will remember that just at this period of the poet's life there raged most fiercely the contest between the supporters of the Duke of York and the followers of Monmouth and Shaftesbury. It was an age of squibs, and all the rhyming talent, though it was only such as was possessed by Shadwell, Settle, and the like, was on the Whig side. Dry den, as Laureate, was expected to come to the rescue ; and though he had of late been neglected by the Court, he was conciliated by kind words and fair promises. He was not wanting on the occasion, and in November, 1681, appeared the greatest satire in our language " Absalom and Achitophel." Neither the plan or style of the poem were entirely new, but it is so vastly superior to the lucubrations which may have suggested it, that it does not require the praise of novelty to enhance its merits. After the criticisms of Addison, Johnson, Sir W. Scott, and so many others, it is needless to enter into any dis- cussion of its merits. A depreciatory and unfair criticism from a writer of eminence should perhaps here be quoted. No less a man than Schlegel, in his Lectures on Dramatic Poetry, makes the extraordinary assertion, that Dryden, " from his influence in fixing the laws of versification and poetical language, especially in rhyme, has acquired a reputation altogether disproportionate to his true merit." He ventures also to doubt " whether his translations of the Latin Poets are not manneristical paraphrases, and whether his political allegories (now that party-interest is dead) can be read without the greatest weariness." It would appear from this, that even German industry cannot avail to save a man who attempts a vast subject in his teaching, from being occasionally shallow and unjust. If his charge against the translations have something of 166 JOHN DRYDEN. truth in it, this depreciation of the satirical writings of Dryden becomes absurd, when it is remembered that no English classic is more read by all educated men ; and that although a foreigner may find some difficulty in diverting himself with a poetical discussion of past English politics, or in comprehending satire clothed in allegory, the history of those times is too full of momentous interest to us, to permit our neglect of such a work as "Absalom and Achitophel," even supposing we were not attracted to it by the charms of wit and sarcasm expressed in a rich and melodious versification. Whatever be now the verdict of German critics, the poem at the time answered the purpose for which it was intended with triumphant success. Dryden was soon again called on to succour the Court with his pen. The Whigs celebrated the release of Shaftesbury from the Tower by striking a medal with the rising sun upon it and the word " Lsetamur." The King himself, upon this occasion, suggested the subject and the method of treat- ment to Dryden. " If I was a poet," said his Majesty, " and I think I am poor enough to be one, I would write a poem on such a subject ;" and he went on to plan " the medal," and Dryden wrote it according to the royal in- structions and received a hundred broad pieces as his reward. These two poems, as might have been expected, pro- voked numerous violent satires and libels full of furious indignation from the other party. They are as endless as the titles are eccentric and abusive. One reverend con- troversialist having informed his readers, with much show of learning, that Achitophel in the original meant the brother of a fool, Dryden, who never missed an oppor- tunity of showing his dislike to priests, said of him : " I half suspect he went no farther for his learning than the Index of Hebrew names and etymologies which is JOHN DRYDEN. 167 printed at the end of some of our English Bibles. If Achitophel signify the brother of a fool, the author of that poem will pass with his readers for the next of kin ; and perhaps it is the relation that makes the kind- ness. Whatever the verses are, buy them, I pray you, out of pity ; for I hear the conventicle is shut up, and the brother of Achitophel out of service." Dryden had waged hostilities with Settle. He was now brought into collision with Shadwell, with whom he had before been on seemingly good terms, in spite of some diversity of tastes. " MacFlecnoe," the bitterest personal invective that has ever been penned, was the result of this quarrel. We shall say more of this contest in the life of that poet. Dryden spared him neither in verse or prose. On Shadwell's publishing " Reflections on the Pretended Parallel in the Play called 'The Duke of Guise/" Dryden speaks of him thus : " Og may write against the King if he pleases, so long as he drinks for him, and his writings will never do the Government so much harm, as his drinking does it good ; for true subjects will not be much perverted by his libels ; but the wine- duties rise considerably by his claret. He has often called me an atheist in print; I would believe more charitably of him, and that he only goes the broad way, because the other is too narrow for him." It was at this time that Dryden wrote his biographical preface to the translation of Plutarch's Lives, which then appeared, and translated at the King's request Maim- bourg's " History of the League." He was also em- ployed in writing " Albion and Albanius," to celebrate Charles's victory over the Whigs. When that monarch died, and James II. ascended the throne, Dryden im- mediately wrote his " Threnodia Augustalis," in which 168 JOHN DRYDEN. he profusely panegyrized the late King and his successor. The death of Charles II. was lamented in almost as many poems as had hailed his restoration. On the melancholy event, verses Latin and English were copiously poured forth. Afra Behn among others, vented a Pindaric Ode. Dryden, who on other occasions has shown that the Poetry of Sorrow was not beyond his reach, failed lamentably when he bewailed the death of a Prince whom, while he hints that he had been a niggard patron, he yet overwhelms with epithets of praise. There has been a highly edifying controversy about the correctness of the use of the word " Augustalis." Doctors have disagreed, and we cannot decide, but the poem is as uninteresting as the dispute. It is a prosaic, frigid, and bombastic attempt to give a circumstantial account of the King's death. A perusal of it is intolerable after reading the perfect prose description of Mr. Macaulay. The best passage is that in which he describes Charles's patronage of the poets : " The officious Muses came along, A gay, harmonious quire, like angels, ever young." But there is a lurking sarcasm in the lines " Though little was their hire, and light their gain, Yet somewhat to their share he threw, Fed from his hand, they sung and flew Like birds of Paradise, that lived on morning dew." In contrast to these, we must quote one couplet more, which contains a very choice conceit : " Ere a Prince is to perfection brought He cost Omnipotence a second thought." Before we read this, we had imagined that a vast number of kings had been made by " Nature's journey- men." Dryden also finished " Albion and Albanius," with JOHN DRYDEN. 169 slight alterations, one addition being the apotheosis of the late King. It is an opera ; and the music was composed by Monsieur Grabut, a Frenchman, who, in consequence of the rage which then existed for everything French, was preferred to Purcell. Its sixth representation was interrupted by the arrival of the news of the landing of Monmouth in the West ; the audience immediately dis- persed, and the play, which involved the theatre in a heavy loss for the expenses of dresses and scenery, was never revived. It was soon after this that Dryden made that change of faith to which we have before alluded,* and which has been so lengthily discussed by almost all his biographers. It is an excellent opportunity for advocacy, and nothing is easier than to take a side. At the time he was, of course, welcomed as a sincere convert by his own party, and hooted at and called hard names by his opponents. His conversion, or perversion, Dr. Johnson and Sir W. Scott have, probably from political bias and a charitable sym- pathy with a man of genius, sought to palliate. Mr. Macaulay has, on the other hand, taken, we think, a more correct but severer view. It becomes, of course, a ques- tion of motive, and one, therefore, which it is simply impossible to settle. As Dr. Johnson, in speaking of it, observes : " Inquiries into the heart are not for man we must now leave him to his Judge." The circumstances under which he made the change are, as we have before said, most suspicious. James had turned a deaf ear to the sonorous panegyric in the " Threnodia Augustalis," with which Dryden had wel- comed his accession. His return for it had been neglect, and to neglect he had added insult and injury, for with a niggard and sordid parsimony he had robbed him of the Tierce of Canary, granted in the letters patent. * Life of Ben Jonson. 170 JOHN DRYDEN. James did not care for poets at all, and a Protestant poet could sing nothing that could please him. So bigotted was he to his own creed, that mere political partizanship, however earnest or able, would not suffice. Nothing, therefore, remained for Dryden but to turn Papist ; and he accordingly did so. This is the view expressed in language clearer and more forcible in Mr. Macaulay's " History of England." By others, it is asserted that Dryden, at this particular time, was induced to read the controversy between the rival Churches, and that he was sincerely convinced by the Romish disputants, that his making this change at a moment when it was to his advantage, was a matter of accident rather than of design. Dr. Johnson states the case for Dryden with exquisite clearness and plausibility. " That conversion will always be suspected that apparently concurs with interest. He that never finds his error till it hinders his progress towards wealth or honour, will not be thought to love Truth only for herself. Yet it may easily happen that information may come at a com- modious time ; and as truth and interest are not, by any fatal necessity, at variance, that one may by accident intro- duce the other. When opinions are struggling into popularity, the arguments by which they are opposed or defended become more known ; and he that changes his profession would perhaps have changed it before, with the like opportunities of instruction. This was the then state of Popery. Every artifice was used to show it in its fairest form ; and it must be owned to be a religion of external appearance sufficiently attractive." As has been observed, the most prominent characteristic of the man was his aversion to priests of all religions. The moment he broke away from the fetters of his early con- nection with Puritanism, he seems to have disliked that system, as a man who is a free-thinker must do. When he JOHN DRYDEN. 171 joined the communion of the Church of Rome, he vented his dislike to the class upon such as Milbourne and others who attacked him. Indeed, when, at Pepys' suggestion, he versified the good Parson of Chaucer, it would seem that Dryden's contempt for the clergy of that day had some fair foundation ; for Pepys, in a gossipping letter, in which he invites the poet to come and " partake of a cold chicken and a salad," thanks him for the exquisite paraphrase of Chaucer, " hoping," he adds, " from this your copy of the good Parson, some amends made me for the hourly offence I bear with from the sight of so many lewd originals." From the earnestness and the beauty of the lines in which, in " The Hind and Panther," he has assigned the reason for his change of creed, we might be induced to believe that, like many men of late years, with intellects subtle and refined, and a conscientiousness morbidly sen- sitive, he had sought refuge from doubts and difficulties in the bosom of the Church which so boldly asserts its claim to infallibility ; but we are bound to remember the character of the man, the character of the age in which he lived, the then intimate connection between religious and political parties, the advantages which he gained by taking that step, and lastly the suspicious vehemence with which the new convert became a violent controversialist. To quote against him some lines of his coadjutor Tate, from the second part of " Absalom and Achitophel :" " For renegadoes, who ne'er turn by halves, Are bound in conscience to be double knaves ; So this Prose-Prophet took most monstrous pains, To let his masters see he earned his gains." So Dryden, in addition to " The Hind and Panther," which is one of the most beautiful pieces of reasoning in verse in any language, translated the life of St. Francis Xavier, and rushed into controversies with Stillingfleet, in which he was, of course, worsted. 172 JOHN DRYDEN. His industrious advocacy of newly-adopted opinions was soon cut short by the flight of his Papist patron, King James, and the triumph of Protestantism in the accession of William and Mary. The laurel was stripped from his brow, and placed on that of his antagonist, Shadwell. We find him, therefore, again poor, and though not friendless, with many powerful enemies, and once more compelled to have recourse to the stage, which he so hated, to compensate the loss of income inflicted on him by " the glorious Revolution." In the preface to " Don Sebastian," the play which he now wrote, and which was not, as he tells us, " huddled up in haste," but carefully elaborated, he describes himself as " an author whose misfortunes have once more brought him on the stage," and adds : " While I continue in these bad circumstances (and truly I see very little probability of coming out), I must still be obliged to write ; and if I may still hope for the same kind usage, I shall the less repent of that hard necessity." " Don Sebastian," perhaps, take it all in all, is his best drama. It was not at first very successful; but after some alterations and curtailments, became an established favourite. " Amphitryon" was next played with great applause, the opera of " King Arthur" followed ; " Cleomenes" was " coldly received ;" and his last play, " Love Triumphant," was, like his first, a failure. And so he made his exit from the boards. We now find him a veteran litterateur, helped by the bounty of some generous friends and patrons, employing his two sons, Congreve, Creech, Tate and others, to translate under his direction ; and meanwhile, political and religious hostility to him softening by time, exercising a dictatorship over the literary republic. As our space has precluded us from giving more than incidental criticisms JOHN DRYDEN. 173 of some of his works, so it will not permit us to chronicle with precision the events of the last seven or eight years of his life. We must ask our readers to picture to them- selves John Dryden as pre-eminently the first poet and greatest literary man of his era, spending his morning at his house in Gerard Street editing miscellanies for Tonson, translating Virgil, paraphrasing Chaucer and Bocaccio ; and spending his afternoon at his club, where his chair was reserved for him by the fireside in winter, in summer in the balcony, and where, to a faithful band of admirers and disciples, he laid down the law on all questions of contemporaneous criticism. We should think of him in all the relations of life : as a husband, not as loving as he should have been, making long sojourns in the country while his wife was in town, and telling Lady Elizabeth, when she wished herself a book that she might enjoy more of his company, that he would prefer her being an almanack, that he might change her once a year. As a father, we find him writing to Busby about his boys at Westminster, remonstrating most respectfully with the flogging head-master about the treat- ment which one of the lads had received, writing a preface to the comedy of his son John, and corresponding most affectionately with them all. His friends consisted of those persons of rank and fortune at whose country seats he translated an " /Eneid," or wrote a preface, and of those literary associates and satellites who gathered round him at the Club. Here at Will's Coffee-house it was, that if he gave a rising young man a pinch from his snuff-box, the patronized aspirant was deemed to have taken a degree in literature and wit. Here it was that Southerne and Congreve spoke to him with confidence and familiarity, while Sir Henry Shere, Movie, Motteaux, Walsh and Dennis did honour to him with a more distant deference. It was here that 174 JOHN DRYDEN. Pope,* with boyish enthusiasm, gazed full of reverent admira- tion on the poet, who was at once his exemplar and his idol. It was probably here that Dryden, after he had read some of the bombastic and obscure Pindaric Odes, which the youthful genius had sent to him, told Swift, with great candour, what Swift never forgave, that he would never be a poet. His relations to his publisher Tonson are worth a brief notice. Sometimes we find Dryden thanking him for his presents of fruit and wine, and writing to him about his snuff and sherry as Byron did to Murray about his tooth- powder. Then again he is quarrelling with Tonson, writing to him to accuse him of meanness and rapacity, abusing Tonson himself, and, among others, one Richard Bentley, who, as Dryden writes to Tonson, " has cursed our Virgil so heartily," and launching anathemas against the whole tribe of publishers. " Upon trial," he says, " I find all your trade are sharpers, and you not more than others ; therefore, I have not wholly left you." There is also the rather well-known anecdote of our poet begging Lord Bolingbroke, who was calling on him to outstay Tonson : "I have not completed the sheet which I promised him," said Dryden to his Lordship, " and if you * Pope, in writing to Wycherley, speaks of Dryden thus : " I -was not so happy as to know him : ' Virgilium tantum vidi.' Had I been born early enough, I must have known and loved him ; for I have been assured, not only by yourself, but by Mr. Congreve and Sir W. Trumbull, that his personal qualities were as amiable as his poetical, notwithstanding the many libellous misrepresentations of them, against which the former of these gentlemen has told me he will one day vindicate him. I suppose these injuries were begun by the violence of party, but it is no doubt they were continued by envy at his success and fame : and those scribblers who attacked him in his latter times, were only gnats in a summer's evening, which are never very troublesome but in the finest and most glorious season ; for his fire, like the sun's, shined clearest towards its setting." In strange contrast to this, Gray, in one of his letters, writes : "Dryden was as disgraceful to the office (of Laureate) from his character, as the poorest scribbler could have been from his verses." JOHN DRYDEN. 175 leave me unprotected, I shall suffer all the rudeness to which his resentment can prompt his tongue." " It was probably," says Scott, " during the course of these bickerings with his publisher, that Dry den, incensed at some refusal of accommodation on the part of Tonson, sent him three well-known coarse and forcible satirical lines, descriptive of his personal appearance : " ' With leering looks, bull faced, and freckled fair, With two left legs, and Judas colour'd hair, And frowzy pores, that taint the ambient air/ " ' Tell the dog/ said the poet to the messenger, ' that he who wrote these can write more.' But Tonson, per- fectly satisfied with this single triplet, hastened to comply with the author's request, without requiring any further specimen of his poetical powers." During these few years, though he was between the age of fifty and sixty, Dryden's intellect appears to have been in its greatest vigour. His was not that precocious genius which displays a promising blossom, and yields no fruit. One of his smallest successors has said of him in a couplet not, for Eusden, unusually limping : " Great Dryden did not early great appear, Eaintly distinguished in his thirtieth year ;" and his sun having shone brightly in its meridian, set also in lustre. The account he gives of his faculties a few years before his death is interesting. In one of his letters he writes: "By the mercy of God I am already come within twenty years of his number (speaking of an old gentleman of fourscore and eight), a cripple in my limbs, but what decay is in my rnind my readers must determine. I think myself as vigorous as ever in the faculties of my soul, excepting only my memory, which is not impaired to any great degree ; and if I lose not more of it, I have no great reason to complain. What judgment I had increases rather than diminishes; and thoughts, such as 176 JOHN DRYDEN. they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or reject, to run them into verse, or to give them the other harmony of prose. I have so long studied and practised both, that they are grown into a habit, and become familiar to me." In a letter to Mrs. Stewart, a painter and poetess of great personal attractions, after indulging in some very gallant observations, he gives a less confident account of his powers. He writes : " Madam, old men are not so insensible to beauty as it may be you young ladies think. For your part, I must needs acknowledge that your fair eyes had made me your slave before I received your fair presents. * * I am still dragging on, always a poet, and never a good one. I pass my time with Ovid, and sometimes with our old poet Chaucer, translating such stories as best please my fancy ; and intend besides them to add some of my own, so that it is not impossible, but ere the summer be passed, I may come down to you with a volume in my hand, like a dog out of the water with a duck in his mouth." All readers of his life will rejoice to find that if formerly what Mr. Hallam calls Dryden's " coarseness of mind" had induced him to make even Juvenal more gross, in the latest years of his life he repented of this, and en- deavoured to make some amends for the fault. In his preface to the " Fables," after discussing the merits of Ovid, Bocaccio, Chaucer, and others, he makes an especial boast of having avoided Dan Chaucer's improprieties, and adds : " But I will no more offend against good manners. I am sensible, as I ought to be, of the scandal I have given by my loose writings ; and make what reparation I am able, by this public acknowledgment." It was at this period that he produced " Alexander's Feast," justly called by Mr. Macaulay the noblest ode in the language. We are sorry to find Mr. Hallam speaking JOHN DRYDEN. 177 of it in the following terms : " Few lines are highly poetical, and some sink to the level of a drinking song. It has the defects, as well as the merits, of that poetry which is written for musical entertainment." It was very differently esteemed in Dryden's day, and we hope Mr. Hallam is in a minority now. Dryden himself writes to Tonson : " I am glad to hear from all hands that my Ode is esteemed the best of all my poetry by all the town. I thought so myself when I writ it ; but being old, I mistrusted my own judgment." He went, it is said, on one occasion, even farther than this ; for, on a young Templar* venturing at Will's Coffee-House to speak of its merit and success, Dryden replied : " You are right, young gentleman : a nobler ode never was produced, nor ever will." Here Sir Walter Scott, with wonted generosity and kindness of heart, remarks : " This singularly strong expression cannot be placed to the score of vanity. It was an inward con- sciousness of merit, which burst forth, probably almost involuntarily, and, I fear, must be admitted as prophetic." Take it as a whole, we cannot in ours, or perhaps in any lite- rature, find its equal. We shall in Gray and Collins seek it in vain. The odes which in merit most nearly approach it are Coleridge's " On the Departed Year," and that sublime and magnificent poem of Wordsworth, " Inti- mations of Immortality from Recollections of Childhood." But they are so unlike, that it is impossible to compare them. Some inaccurate stories have been told of Dryden's finishing it at a sitting ; and it is said that Lord Boling- broke (then Mr. St. John) found him in the morning, trembling with agitation after the long vigil, and exhausted by the intellectual agony with which he had produced this splendid lyric. The probable state of the case, as his biographers have agreed, is, that while the fine frenzy of imagination was on him, he penned the rough draft, and * The father of Lord Chief Justice Marlay. See Scott and Malone. N 178 JOHN DRYDEN. that it cost him more days to correct, than it did hours to compose. There is every reason to believe that Dry den, especially at this period, wrote with marvellous rapidity. It is the more likely, inasmuch as he was certainly " one of those writers in whom the period of imagination does not precede, but follow the period of observation and reflection."* Mr. Hallam, so cold and severe a critic on the ode we are speaking of, admits that Dryden had " rapidity of conception and readiness of expression. He never loiters about a single thought or image, never labours about the turn of a phrase. The impression upon our minds that he wrote with exceeding ease is irresistible, and I do not know that we have any evidence to repel it." No wonder if his long practice in the heroic couplet had now made it his most natural utterance. In it he had written numerous tragedies, prologues, epilogues, satires, and didactic poems. No wonder that he trans- lated Virgil in a far shorter time than Pope paraphrased Homer. It is to be regretted that Dryden did not seize on the Greek, and leave the Latin epic to his more refined and polished follower. In a letter he says of this very point: "My thoughts at present are fixed on Homer, and by my translation of the first ' Iliad/ I find him a poet more according to my genius than Virgil, and consequently hope I may do more justice to his more fiery way of writing, which as it is liable to some faults, so is it capable of more beauties, than the exactness and sobriety of Virgil." But however vigorous were his mental powers, his bodily frame was now too much shattered for him to continue so vast an undertaking as an English version of Homer. He was also now busy with the " Fables," and was waging war with Blackmore, Milbourne and Collier. If ever * Macaulay. JOHN DRYDEN. 179 literary veteran died in harness, it was the lot of Dryden to do so. Within twenty days of his decease, he wrote a prologue and epilogue to Fletcher's comedy of "The Pilgrim," at that time revised by Vanbrugh, and played at the Drury Lane Theatre. Though he had long suffered from chronic diseases, it was not directly from one of these that he died. A slight wound in the foot, neglected, became a gangrene. Amputation was advised ; but Dryden would not consent, and mortification, as had been by the surgeon predicted, taking place, he died at three in the morning, on Wednes- day, May 1st, 1700. Preserving his faculties almost to the very moment of his departure, he took an affectionate farewell of his friends and family, and died with calm- ness and resignation, a member of the Roman Catholic Church. His friends were preparing a private funeral, when Lord Jeffries, Charles Montague, and other men of rank and fortune insisted upon his remains being honoured by public interment. The body was embalmed at Physicians' Hall, and lay in state there for twelve days, after which a Latin oration was pronounced over it by Dr. Garth. It was then carried with much pomp and ceremony to Westminster Abbey, and laid between the graves of Chaucer and Cowley.* The reader must have gathered from this short memoir our view of the character of Dryden. But we may in a few words repeat it. The first fact of his nature is, that he was a man of great genius. The next, that he was a man of good heart. There is nothing deep or lofty in his moral being to command our reverence. We sorrow over his difficulties and trials, and rejoice in his prosperity, t * A false and ludicrous story about Dry den's funeral will be found in all Lives of the Poet. It is too well known to be related in so brief a sketch as this. N 2 180 JOHN DRYDEN. because we feel that his intellect and industry deserved success, and know that he was doomed to many of the sufferings which genius has so often endured. It is hut fair also to remember that many of his faults were the faults of his age that he was not more violent against antagonists than they against him, not more licentious in his writings than many of his contemporaries and that the exaggerated flattery in his dedications was the fashion of the day. It is important also to remember the view which he himself took of this subject. In writing to the Earl of Rochester, he says : " Because I deal not in satire, I have sent your Lordship a prologue and epilogue which I made for our players when they went down to Oxford. I hear they have succeeded, and by the event your Lordship will judge how easy 'tis to pass anything upon a University, and how gross flattery the learned will endure." Dr. Johnson did not suppose that Dryden ever laughed in his sleeve at the fine things he said to nobles as well as to learned bodies. He remarks : " Of this kind of meanness he never seems to decline the practice, or lament the necessity : he considers the great as entitled to enco- miastick homage, and brings praise rather as a tribute than a gift, more delighted with the fertility of his invention than mortified by the prostitution of his judgment. It is indeed not certain, that on these occasions his judg- ment much rebelled against his interest. There are minds which easily sink into submission, that look on grandeur with undistinguishing reverence, and discover no defect where there is elevation of rank, and affluence of riches." If Dryden unmercifully attacked some of his contem- poraries, and called hard names, we must remember that courteous controversy was not then in fashion, and that he did not escape his share of rancorous abuse. Indeed, he was fully repaid in scurrility, though the wit was mostly JOHN DRYDEN. 181 on his side of the question. And Dryden manifested much fun and good humour in his attacks on his most vehement enemies. We might instance some of his sarcasms against Shadwell, and we might add such a remark as the follow- ing on Shaftesbury : " I have not so much as an un- charitable wish against ' Achitophel/ but am content to be accused of a good-natured error, and to hope with Origen that the devil himself may at last be saved." It is strange to observe what a similarity there is between the calumnies which he and Pope provoked by their satiric vein. They were both arraigned as unsound in politics and religion, as mere versifiers, and accused of tricking their subscribers with bad translations of the two epics. They were both called apes, asses, frogs, cowards, knaves and fools. The mention of Pope's name suggests a few brief observations on the points of comparison and contrast in their several writings. As far as their morality is con- cerned, if it be the duty of the satirist to attack vice and expose folly in the main, to make the bad his enemies rather than his enemies bad, we must assign to Pope a higher place than we can to Dryden. If, also, wit, irony, ridicule, be rather than indignant invective and earnest declamation the proper voice of satire, then too, on this ground, must we give to Pope the pre-eminence. Take almost any passages from their writings, and we shall find that such are their distinguishing characteristics as sati- rists. The satire of Pope, is a burnished Damascus blade. It glitters while it wounds, but the wound is incurable. Whereas that of Dryden is a huge mace, wielded with the strength of a giant, and sometimes raised to kill a dwarf. In attempting to estimate the character and career of this Poet, must we not admit that there is neither in the tone or the other anything sublime or noble to stir our enthusiasm or excite our love ? We cannot dwell on his memory as we do on that of Shakespeare and of some of 182 JOHN DRYDEN. Shakespeare's contemporaries. We cannot look back on him with the mingled exultation and sorrow which moves our hearts when we think of the blind prophet who uttered thoughts too pure and holy for a generation which knew him not, and in the midst of which he moved a stranger and a pilgrim. On the page of the annals of letters the name of Dryden will stand as one of our greatest literary men bold, brilliant, versatile, comprehensive as one who aided our language in its development, and has given dignity, grace, and harmony to our versification. He was not one of those master spirits who enrich by their genius the thought of the world, and are " the unacknowledged legislators of mankind." Still less to the satirist and dramatist of the Restoration, was " That sublimer inspiration given, Which glows in Shakespeare's or in Milton's page, The pomp and prodigality of Heaven." THOMAS SHADWELL. THOMAS SHADWELL was a descendant of the younger branch of a Staffordshire family of great antiquity. He was born at the paternal seat, Santon Hall, in Norfolk, about 1640. His father had been a member of the Middle Temple, but having declined to compete for the more splendid prizes of the law, his ambition was satisfied with the performance of the lowlier, though important duties, connected with the local magistracy. He was in the commission of the peace for the counties of Middlesex, Norfolk and Suffolk. He espoused the side of the King during the times when loyalty was something more than lip-homage, and exhausted his patrimony through his devotion to the royal cause. The subject of this memoir was sent to Caius College, Cambridge, where his father had graduated before him, and afterwards to the Middle Temple, in the hope that his success at the bar might be a means of restoring the shattered fortunes of the house. Shadwell, however, felt little inclination to undergo the drudgery necessary for advancement in that most arduous of all the professions, and he deserted his law-books for others more congenial to his tastes. After a few years ] 84 THOMAS SHADWELL. spent at the Temple, he made the tour of the Continent, and on his return home became acquainted with several of the literary men of the day. His firsts attempts in verse were lamentably bad, and he never achieved any reputation as a poet ; but he made the theatre his study, and first attracted attention by a comedy entitled " The Sullen Lovers, or the Impertinents." This piece, which was acted by the Duke of York's company, and printed in 1668, was, like most first productions, a mere reflex of the writer's peculiar studies. An extract from the preface will show the principle upon which it was put together, and the author he proposed as his model. " I have endeavoured," he writes, " to represent variety of humours which was the practice of Ben Jonson, whom I think all dramatic poets ought to imitate, though none are like to come near, he being the only person that appears to me to have made perfect representations of human life. Most other authors in their lower comedies content themselves with one or two humours at most, and those not near so perfect characters as the admirable Jonson always made, who never wrote comedy without seven or eight excellent humours. I never saw one except that of Falstaff that was in my judgment comparable to any of Jonson's considerable humours." His admiration of Jonson was excessive. In another place, he observes of him that " he was incomparably the best dramatic poet that ever was or I believe ever will be ; and I had rather be author of one scene in his best comedies, than of any play this age has produced." In his epilogue to " The Humorists," he also writes of his favourite thus : " The mighty Prince of Poets, learned Ben, Who alone dived into the minds of men, Saw all their wand'rings, all their follies knew, And all their vain fantastic passions drew. ***** THOMAS SHAD WELL. 185 'Twas he alone true humours understood, And with great wit and judgment made them good." And in the dedication prefixed to his play, " The Vir- tuoso," he explains humour to be " Such an affectation as misguides men in knowledge, art, or science, or that causes defection in manners or morality, or perverts their minds in the main actions of their lives." Shadwell borrowed freely both from contemporary and preceding writers. The groundwork of " The Libertine," " The Miser," " Bury Fair," and " The Sullen Lovers," he took from Moliere. " The Adelphi " of Terence gave him a hint for some passages in his " Squire of Alsatia," while he intimates that Shakespeare was under obligations to him for having first made a play of his "Timon of Athens." This hallucination respecting Shakespeare was common to authors, critics and the public of that time, and though indicating the immature or distorted taste that Shadwell had in common with his contemporaries, is no proof whatever, as has been alleged, of assurance or self- conceit. His plays show great powers of observation, and make us well acquainted with the manners of his age. The public thought highly of them, and the Earl of Rochester, no bad critic, said : " Of all our modern wits, none seem to me Once to have touched upon true comedy, But hasty Shadwell and slow Wycherley. ShadwelTs unfinished works do yet impart Great proofs of force of genius, none of art, With just bold strokes he dashes here and there, Showing great mastery with little care." But our dramatist had little skill in discerning the more hidden complexities, or in pourtraying the nicer shades of human character he saw very little below the surface, though his method was based upon the right foundation. In this respect, he contrasts his own plan of writing with 186 THOMAS SHADWELL. that of his stately antagonist, Dryden, who, richly gifted as he was, was totally destitute of the dramatic faculty. Driven by pecuniary considerations to the exercise of a craft for which he had no aptitude, to cloak his own defects, he had extolled wit and sprightliness of expres- sion, qualities in which he excelled, above the more laboured attempt of depicting character ; and some slight sparring on this topic appears to have been the commencement of that fierce antagonism which the malevolence of satire has gibbeted to undying remembrance. One misfortune of "hasty" Shadwell was his facility. His tragedy of " Psyche" was written in five weeks, and some of his plays in less than a month. We are involun- tarily reminded of a bon-mot of Sheridan, " that easy writing is hard reading ;" and tragedies dashed off at a heat are not likely to take any permanent hold on the public mind. He wrote altogether seventeen plays ; and of his poetical works, the principal are a complimentary poem on the arrival of King William III., one on Queen Mary, and a translation of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal. Much time has been spent in the attempt to exhume these pieces from the public libraries of the metropolis, but without success ; and if they yet slumber there, it would still be a thankless office to invade their dusty repose. The following is a list of his plays : " The Sullen Lovers, or the Impertinents." A comedy acted at the Duke's Theatre, and dedicated to the Duke of Newcastle. The plot taken from Moliere's play, " Les Facheux." " The Humorists." A comedy attacking the follies of the time. This play met with some opposition on its first appearance. " The Royal Shepherdess." A tragi-comedy printed in 1669 an adaptation, by Shadwell, of a play written by a person of the name of Fountain, in the time of Charles II., THOMAS SHADWELL. 187 called "The Reward of Virtue." It was never acted until this adoption and alteration by Shadwell. Pepys witnessed its performance, and had no very high opinion of its merits, as the reader will perceive by the following extract from his " Diary :" " 25 Feb., 1669.To the Duke of York's house, and there before one, but the house infinite full, where, by- and-bye, the King and Court come, it being a new play, or an old one new vamp'd by Shadwell, call'd 'The Royall Shepherdesse,' but the silliest for words and design and everything else that I ever saw in my whole life, there being nothing in the world pleasing in it but a good martiall dance of pikemen, where Harris and another do handle their pikes in a dance to admiration ; but I was never less satisfied with a play in my life." " The Virtuoso," a comedy dedicated to the Duke of Newcastle, and printed in London, 1676. Gerard Lang- baine observes of this play, that no one will deny it its due applause, as the University of Oxford, who, he says, may be allowed to be competent judges of comedy, had signified their approval of it. " Psyche," acted at the Duke's Theatre, and dedicated to the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth. This met with much disfavour, and was Shadwell's first attempt at a rhyming play. In it, he borrowed largely from the French " Psyche" and Apuleius' " Asinus Aureus." "The Libertine," a tragedy printed in 1676, and dedi- cated to the Duke of Newcastle. This has been regarded as one of his best plays. Music and poetry have since exhausted their resources in giving immortality to the ^worthless character, the hero of this piece, whom all Europe is intimate with as Don John, Don Giovanni, or Don Juan. In the preface, he says : " The story from which I took the hint of this play is famous all over Spain, Italy, and France. It was first put into a Spanish 188 THOMAS SHADWELL. play, as I have been told, the Spaniards having a tradition (which they believe) of such a vicious Spaniard as is represented in this play. From them the Italian come- dians took it, and from them, the French ; and four several French plays were made upon the story. " I hope the readers will excuse the irregularities of the play, when they consider the extravagance of the subject forced me to it. I have been told by a worthy gentleman, when first a play was made upon this story in Italy, he had seen it acted there by the name of 'Ateista Fulminato,' in churches on Sundays, as a part of devotion ; and some, not of the least judgment and piety here, have thought it rather a useful moral than an encouragement of vice." What must be our idea of the purity of that religion or the morality of that system which can countenance the performance of " Don Juan" in church on Sunday as a part of devotion ? We present the reader with a few of the dramatis persons of this portion of the Papal Church Service : DON JOHN. The Libertine, a rash, fearless man, guilty of all vice. LEONORA. Don John's mistress, abused by him, and yet follows him for love. MARIA. Abused by Don John, and following him for revenge. Six women, all wives to Don John, &c. Later in the preface we are told that the town was not unkind to it, and then follows a flourish about the rapidity with which it was written. "There being no act in it," says Shadwell, " which cost me above five days' writing, and the last two, the playhouse having great occasion for a play, were both written in four days, as several can testify." There is no more merit in quick writing than in quick digestion, and this parade of facility only sinks the author in our esteem, as it is either an affectation or a falsehood. Labour is the necessary condition of excellence, THOMAS SHADWELL. 189 and the greatest master-pieces in every department of art or science have been the result of the most toilsome study. Much, however, depends on an author's habit of compo- sition. Some writers put on paper every thought as it originates ; others, without any mechanical aid, select and combine in their own minds, and there compose the inde- pendent whole; so that the act of writing is the mere transcription of what has already been carefully elaborated. " Epsom Wells," a comedy, was printed in London in 1676, and dedicated to the Duke of Newcastle. This play won the praise of St. Evremont, and Shadwell tells us he was more fond of it than of any he ever wrote. " The History of Timon of Athens, the Man-hater." In the dedication of this play to the Duke of Bucking- ham, Shadwell writes : " It has the inimitable hand of Shakespeare in it, which never made more masterly strokes than in this. Yet I can truly say I have made it into a play." "The Miser," taken from Moliere's "Avare," and dedicated to the Earl of Dorset. "A True Widow." A comedy, dedicated to Sir Charles Sedley, and which had the benefit of his cor- rection. The prologue to this play was written by Dryden. " The Lancashire Witches, and Teague O'Divelly the Irish Priest." A partizan production, which excited some opposition. " The Woman Captain," dedicated to Lord Ogle, son of the Duke of Newcastle. " The Squire of Alsatia." A comedy, founded on *The Adelphi" of Terence, dedicated to the Earl of Dorset. "Bury Fair," dedicated to the Earl of Dorset, and founded partly on the Duke of Newcastle's " Triumphant Widow," partly on Moliere's " Precieuses Ridicules." 190 THOMAS SHADWELL, "The Amorous Bigot," with the Second Part of "Teague O'Divelly," dedicated to the Earl of Shrews- bury. " The Scourers," borrowed in part from a play of Sir George Etheredge. " The Volunteers, or the Stock-Jobbers." A comedy, dedicated by his widow to the Queen. Shadwell is now principally remembered as the an- tagonist of Dry den, and the consequent object of some of the most bitter satire in the English language. He was to the author of " MacFlecnoe" what Gibber was to Pope. In both cases the quarrel arose, as far as we can judge, from the most insignificant causes; a heedless piece of satire, or a momentary qualm of jealousy, which gradually strengthened into disgust, and was inflamed by opposition into the most rancorous hostility : while in Dry den's case " political hatred gangrened a wound inflicted by literary rivalry." Now the actors are dust, how petty to us appear those fierce contentions which once formed a prominent topic of popular interest. Dryden and Shadwell; Pope and Gibber ; Bentley and Boyle ; the list might be indefinitely multiplied. The struggle, which, when some great prin- ciple of politics or morals is the subject of the strife, ennobles in our eyes the unflinching combatants, only degrades when the violence and the rancour result from the soreness of wounded vanity, or the malice of blighted anticipation. Infinitely grander in this respect stands out the character of Sir Walter Scott, who envied not the success of contemporaries, nor slighted rising talent, nor heeded attacks forgotten now because then unheeded, nor handled the weapon of satire, which is as dangerous to the offended as the offender. Dryden and Shadwell were once on friendly terms, as, in 1676, in the preface to "The Humorists," the former THOMAS SHADWELL. 191 is thus alluded to. " And here I must make a little digres- sion, and take liberty to dissent from my particular friend, for whom I have a very great respect, and whose writings I extremely admire ; and though I will not say his is the best way of writing, yet I am sure his manner of writing is much the best that ever was." They had even joined in worrying a brother of the craft, Elkanah Settle, the last Poet-Laureate to the city of London, and author of " A Panegyric on the Loyal and Honourable Sir George Jefferies, Lord Chief Justice of England, 1633." But the bond of union was frail, they had little in common in their literary tastes, and in politics they stood in direct opposition to each other. In the prologue to " The Vir- tuoso," Shadwell glanced at the " Aurungzebe," of Dryden, which had been acted with success that season ; and in the dedication, dated 26th June, 1676, in a sneering allu- sion to Dryden's pension, he says : " Had I as much money and as much time for it, I might perhaps write as correct a comedy as any of my contemporaries." However, two years afterwards, we find Dryden writing an epilogue for Shad well's play of " The True Widow," so that the mighty war smouldered long before it burst forth into a blaze. Shadwell's political spleen prompted him to write " The Lancashire Witches," intended to throw ridicule on the Tory party, and he fiercely attacked " The Medal," a satire of Dryden's, published in 1681, on the notorious Shaftesbury. He was likewise concerned in the attack on "The Duke of Guise," in 1683; and Dryden, in his vindication of that play, mentions that Shadwell had repeatedly called him atheist in print. The poet, irritated almost to madness by the unceasing attacks that were made upon him from all quarters, at length singled out Shadwell from the host of his assailants, and poured on his head the full vial of his wrath. He launched into the world two satires, each published within a month of the 192 . THOMAS SHADWELL. other ; first, the " MacFlecnoe," filling originally only a sheet and a half, and sold for two-pence, in which he ridiculed the poetical character of his victim ; while as Og, in the second part of " Absalom and Achitophel," ShadwelPs abilities as a political writer are held up for perpetual reprobation. The literary quarrels of those times were waged with an animus., and were attended with effects which in our day we find it hard to credit. Hunt, who assisted Shadwell in his attack on "The Duke of Guise," was obliged to fly the country ; while the latter, in the dedication of his " Bury Fair" to the Earl of Dorset, refers to " those worst of times, when his ruin was designed and his life was sought, and for near ten years he was kept from the exercise of that pro- fession which had afforded him a competent subsistence." Dry den, the greatest of the poets who have worn the laurel, was the only one who was forcibly deprived of it, when the Revolution of 1688 transferred it to the brows of Shadwell. On its being represented to the Earl of Dorset, through whose influence the appointment, as well as that of historiographer was conferred, that there were other authors whose merits better entitled them to the honour ; that discriminating nobleman replied that " he did not pretend to determine how great a poet Shadwell might be, but was sure he was an honest man ;" honesty being then literally synonymous with Whiggism. Even with this justification, the appointment was hardly fair, as if such was the qualification for the office, there were many men in Church and State who had shown more zealotry in the cause even than Shadwell. He did not long enjoy his honours, as he died suddenly at Chelsea, in November, 1692, in the fifty-second year of his age. The report that his death was caused by an over-dose of laudanum, was authoritatively contradicted by Brady, who preached his funeral sermon. THOMAS SHADWELL. 193 He was corpulent and unwieldy in person, addicted to sensual indulgence, a boon companion, and a clever con- versationalist. Lord Rochester said that " if Shadwell had burnt all he wrote, and printed all he spoke, he would have had more wit and humour than any other poet." His plays denote much observation of life, quickness in perceiving foibles, and skill in depicting them, the charac- ters are well sustained, and they will even now amuse in the perusal. Brady, in his funeral panegyric says of him, that " he was a man of great honesty and integrity, and inviolable fidelity and strictness in his word ; an unalterable friend- ship wherever he professed it, and however the world might be mistaken in him, he had a much deeper sense of religion than many who pretended more to it. His natural and acquired abilities made him very amiable to all who conversed with him, a very few being equal in the becoming qualities which adorn and set off a complete gentleman : his very enemies, if he has now any left, will give him this character, at least if they knew him so thoroughly as I did." We will conclude this memoir with the following extracts from the satires of Dry den; and the reverse of the medal from the epilogue to Shadwell's play of " The Volunteers," which came out after his death, leaving to the reader the task of adjusting the due proportions of blame and praise; pre- mising, however, that all the talent is exerted in deepening the lines of the unfavourable side. Flecnoe addressing Shadwell, says : f Shadwell alone my perfect image bears, Mature in dullness from his tender years ; Shadwell alone of all my sons is he, Who stands confirmed in full stupidity, The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, But Shadwell never deviates into sense ; O 194 THOMAS SHADWELL. Some beams of wit on other souls may fall, Strike through and make a lucid interval ; But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray, His rising fogs prevail upon the day. " But let no alien Sedley interpose, To lard with wit thy hungry Epsom prose. " Thou art my blood, where Joiison has no part What share have we in nature or in art ? When did his muse from Fletcher scenes purloin, As thou whole Etheridge dost transfuse to thine ? But so transfused, as oil and waters flow, His always floats above, thine sinks below. " A tun of man in thy large bulk is writ, But sure thou'rt but a kilderkin of wit ; Like mine, thy gentle members feebly creep, Thy tragic muse gives smiles, thy comic sleep." In the person of Og, Shadwell's political merits are descanted upon. " Now stop your noses, readers, all and some, For here's a tun of midnight work to come, Og from a treason-tavern rolling home. When wine has given him courage to blaspheme, He curses God, but God before cursed him ; And if man could have reason, none has more That made his paunch so rich, and him so poor. " But though Heaven made him poor, with reverence speaking, He never was a poet of God's making. The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull, With this prophetic blessing : Be thou dull. Drink, swear, and roar : forbear no lewd delight Fit for thy bulk do anything but write. Eat opium, mingle arsenic with thy drink, Still thou may'st live, avoiding pen and ink. I see, I see, 'tis counsel given in vain, For treason, botched in rhyme, may be thy bane. Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck, 'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck. " A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull, For writing treason, and for writing dull. To die for faction is a common evil, But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil. THOMAS SHADWELL. 195 " I will not rake the dunghill of thy crimes, For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes ? But of King David's foes be this the doom, May all be like the young man, Absalom.* And for my foes, may this their blessing be, To talk like Doeg,f and to write like thee." The following is an extract from the Epilogue. " Shadwell, the great support o' the comic stage, Born to expose the follies of the age. To whip prevailing vices, and unite Mirth with Instruction, Profit with Delight. For large ideas and a flowing pen, First of our times, and second but to Ben. Shadwell, who all his lines from Nature drew, Copied her out and kept her still in view ; Who ne'er was bribed by Title or Estate, To fawn and flatter with the Rich and Great. To let a gilded vice or folly pass, But always lash'd the villain and the ass. " Crown you his last performance with applause, Who love like him our liberties and laws. Let but the c honest' party do him right, And their loud claps shall give him fame, in spite Of the faint hiss of grumbling Jacobite." * The Duke of Monmouth. f Settle. o 2 NAHUM TATE. IT is amusing, if not edifying, to observe the manner in which all works of general reference, save a very few, repeat in regular succession the idlest inventions, and the clumsiest distortions of fact. In literary history this is especially the case, and we can trace in dictionary after dictionary, life after life, note upon note, some blunder copied with slight variations by book-makers, who lacked the honest industry to investigate, or the ingenuity to detect falsehood. So because Tate was put into the " Dunciad," and War- burton sought to crush him, he has ever since been treated as a malefactor and impostor. In " The Pictorial History of England" he is described as " the author of the worst alteration of Shakespeare, the worst version of the Psalms of David, and the worst continuation of a great poem." Now it nevertheless does so happen, that his alteration of " King Lear" kept possession of the stage for nearly a century, and that Dr. Johnson admits that when an attempt was made to play the tragedy as Shakespeare wrote it, the public decided in favour of Tate ; that in NAHUM TATE. 197 seeking to dwarf the sublimity of Hebrew poetry by English rhyme and metre, he has only failed where every one else has done so ; that his Version of the Psalms has for more than a hundred and fifty years been used in our Churches ; that it was in itself no small thing to be Dryden's coadjutor ; and that the parts of the continuation contributed by Tate have such merit, that Sir Walter Scott, not prone to be charitable towards him, is compelled to conjecture that they underwent the revision of Dryden. He was doubtless only a second-rate man ; but does he deserve to be damned in one sentence as a tenth-rate scribbler by those who very probably have read but a small portion of his works ? In another compilation,* full of inaccuracies, he is assailed with acrimony, and treated with contempt. That he was the friend of Dryden, the protege of Dorset, and Laureate for a quarter of a century, even those writers so hasty and indiscriminate in their censures will not deny. We may perhaps show that, however extravagant in tragedy, he was as a dramatist tolerably successful in comedy, farce, and opera ; that he has done some good service as an English Psalmodist, and that he is not utterly unworthy of a brief, if not a eulogistic memoir. Nahum Tate's grandfather and father were both clergy- men. It is to be regretted that he did not adopt the hereditary profession. Coleridgef has declared that all literary men should have some source of income besides the pen ; and there is no lack of instances to show that first as well as second-rate men of letters may live and die in indigence ; and that in one age refuge may be sought in the Mint, in another in the Insolvent Court. His father, Dr. Faithful Teat, (for in this way was the name spelled until Tate adopted the English orthography of the Irish mal-pronunciation) was minister of Ballyhays. He * Lives of English Dramatists. Larduer's Encyclopaedia, f Biog. Liter. 198 NAHUM TATE. was educated at Winchester, but expelled from that school ; and became the author of some poems and theological works. During some disturbances in Ireland, he gave information against a party of rebels, who wreaked their vengeance by robbing him on his way to Dublin ; while a part of the gang simultaneously plundered his house, and treated his family with such severity that three of his children died from the cruelties inflicted on them. After residing some time in the lodgings of .the Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, he was appointed to preferment in Kent, but finally returned to Dublin. He is supposed to have been inclined to Puritanical opinions; but the surmise may have arisen from the fact of his giving his children (which was the fashion with this party) scriptural names. Nahumwas born at Dublin in 1652. He was for some time at Belfast under the tuition of a master whose name was Savage, and he matriculated at the age of sixteen, at ' Trinity College, Dublin. Of his university career nothing whatever is known. He appears to have determined on not adopting a profession, and came up to London to seek his fortune as a literary man. He was so fortunate as to gain the friendship of Dryden and the patronage of Dorset, His earliest production was a volume of poems in 1677. It consists of a great many verses on subjects the most heterogeneous. One composition laments " the present corrupted state of Poetry," and is, doubtlessly, a striking example of the decay of which it complains. There are some erotic lays replete with the quaintest and most elaborate conceits. The last stanza of a poem called " The Tear," reminds us, of (but we must not compare it with) Mr. Rogers' simple and beautiful lines on the same subject. Tate's are : " It shall be so. I will convert This tear to a gem tis feasible ; For laid near Julia's frozen heart NAHUM TATE. 199 'Twill to a diamond congeal ; And yet, if I consider well, These tears of Julia can forbode no ill The frost is breaking, when such drops distil." But the booksellers who catered for the taste of the small reading public of that day did not remunerate our poet very liberally for these effusions; so he betook himself, at once, to the stage, then the best source of income to authors. His first production was " Brutus of Alba, or the Enchanted Lovers/' a tragedy. It was dedicated to the Earl of Dorset with the usual amount of flattery, and the poet tells his patron that to lay this tragedy at his feet transports him more than the greatest success on the stage could have done. The play was originally to have been called " Dido and ^Eheas," but Tate with much modesty feared to attempt " any character drawn by the incom- parable Virgil." The plot is founded on an old story told by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who gives the descent of the Welsh Princes from Brutus the Trojan. This Brutus, according to him, came from Troy to Albion, killed a race of giants who occupied this country, and then built London. Tate applies the incidents of the fourth book of the ^Eneid to this fabulous hero ; and as it is his first and most original drama, the reader may be amused by a short account of the plot, which is interesting from its daring absurdities. The scene is laid at Syracuse. Brutus, Prince of the Dardan forces, has been cast by a storm on the shore of Sicily. He is brought into the presence of the Queen of Syracuse, who at once falls hopelessly in love with him. With him is his son Locrinus, who signalizes himself by slaying in a quarrel a young Syra- cusan, the son of Soziman. Brutus, with much mag- nanimity, gives up his son to justice ; but upon the youth 200 NAHUM TATE. explaining to her Majesty that he was entirely in the right, and the dead man entirely in the wrong, she instantly pardons him, and makes Soziman, who is described as a designing lord, her secret enemy. Brutus is so much distracted with grief for the loss of his friend Assaracus, who has on his voyage suffered shipwreck, that he cannot at first reciprocate the royal regard. Meanwhile, two ambassadors arrive from Agrigentum to demand the Queen in marriage for their lord and master, offering the alternative of war in case of a refusal. Her Majesty valorously and haughtily spurns the proposal. Soziman, however, resolves in a soliloquy that the tyrant of Agri- gentum shall have the Queen's person while he allots to himself the sceptre of Syracuse. In the midst of all this, the lost friend, Assaracus, arrives. Brutus is in ecstasies of joy. Then ensues a tender scene between the Queen and her confidante Amarante, in which the royal lady confesses the soft impeachment of being over head and ears in love with Brutus. So ends Act I. In Act ii., the Agrigentine ambassadors and Soziman intrigue, and a plan is arranged by which Soziman is to be put in possession of the throne of Syracuse, on the condition of the Queen being delivered up into the hands of the King of Agrigentum. Meanwhile, her charms have won her another lover in Assaracus, who declares his passion in a very rough and blustering style, informing her that he has been so unfortunate as to have become enamoured of her, that he is very sorry for it, and hopes she will in no way encourage his advances. She replies that she will endeavour to be as reserved as he wishes, but confesses in a soliloquy that she cannot but admire the odd grace of his surly passion. Brutus and Assaracus are both invited to join her Majesty in a hunting expedition. Next follows an interview between Brutus and the Queen, NAHUM TATE. 201 who is surprised by him while doing homage at the tomb of her departed husband. Brutus declares his passion. She is irresolute, and exclaims : " What can I give, when charity to you Is perjury to my deceased Argaces ?" In Act in., Ragusa, a sorceress, is in league with Soziman to ruin the virtue and constancy of the Queen. She has four female attendants, who are coarse imitations of the witches in " Macbeth." In this act, the super- natural element is introduced to a terrific extent. Ragusa and her haggard satellites conspire with Soziman, and it is agreed that the Queen and Prince shall be driven to seek refuge from a storm in the same cavern, and that then a philtre, administered by Soziman, shall work its dread effects. The sports begin, the storm is raised, they fly for shelter to the same cavern, and with, of course, the same result as in the case of Dido and ^Eneas " Prima et Tellus et pronuba Juno Dant sigmim ; fulsere ignes, et conscius aether Connubiis ; summoque ulularunt vertice Nymphse, Ille dies primus leti primusque malorum Causa fuit." Act iv. The Queen pours out her grief to Amarante, and informs her of her ruin. She holds a dagger in her hand, with which, she informs her confidante, she contemplates stabbing Brutus. He, however, enters and succeeds in soothing her. She throws away the dagger, and there ensues much kneeling, weeping, and fainting. Assaracus, meanwhile, having overcome his passion for the Queen, reproaches Brutus with his delays, reminds him of the oracle which urged him to go to Albion, and pleads the cause of his son Locrinus, whom he represents as cheated out of his hopes of an empire. A stormy interview is ended by Assaracus stabbing himself to prove 202 NAHUM TATE. the sincerity of his sentiments. Brutus is so affected by this desperate act, that he gives orders for the sailing that night. The Queen enters, and asks whether it is his intention to fly from her, observing, that although he may leave her without destroying his peace of mind, that her's is gone for ever. He answers : " You call him happy whom the damn'd would pity ! Despairing ghosts that yell in lightless flames Would stand aghast to hear my sufferings told. Reflect, and grow more patient of damnation 1" He then adds that go he must, and she, as a matter of course, swoons. In the last act, the Queen raves about the perjury of Brutus. Amarante requests her Majesty to be tranquil, and declares that if she is not, she will commit suicide. The Queen is quieted. A conference next takes place between Ragusa and Soziman. She gives him a bracelet to wear which she has previously poisoned. To Ragusa it is announced by a spirit, whom she summons from the vasty deep, that she is doomed to perish that night, but she is consoled by the additional intelligence that it will be one of horrific deeds and disasters. Brutus is driven back by a storm, and there is another terrible parting scene between himself and his royal innamorata. Soziman has, in the interval, discovered that he has been poisoned by the bracelet. He goes off the stage in a fury, tearing his hair. The Queen is in agonies of grief, but is soothed by music, and dies. Amarante at this, stabs herself and dies also. The venom of the poisoned bracelet racks the frame of Soziman, and he rushes on, tearing his clothes, stabs himself, and, to use his own language, plunges " headlong to eternal deeps." At this conjuncture of affairs, the ambassadors from Agrigentum again arrive. They find all their plans frustrated. One exclaims " Prodigious !" while the other NAHUM TATE. 203 confesses that he is " lost in confusion." It is really a very bustling tragedy. There are in it only 1 Natural death, 1 Murder, 1 Poisoning, 3 Suicides, And there is much thunder and lightning, rage, fury, and bombast throughout. There are horrors enough for a French novel, and it might be revived at a transpontine theatre with great effect. To speak of it in language applied to a different kind of composition : daggers, flames, and poison " dance through its pages in all the mazes of metaphorical confusion. These are the com- panions of a disturbed imagination the melancholy madness of poetry without its inspiration."* In 1680, he produced "The Loyal General," the pro- logue to which was written by Dry den. Like that great poet, he prefixes to his plays dissertations, which are rather essays on some questions of criticism than prefaces properly so called. The introduction to "The Loyal General" contains some remarks on Shakespeare, which, though they may seem to possess little novelty now that the subject is exhausted, yet show that it was out of no want of respect and admiration for Shakespeare that Tate ventured to alter some of his plays. On the question of the amount of Shakespeare's learning, he asserts that he possessed more than by common report is granted him. He adds : " I am sure he never touches on a Roman story, but the persons, the passages, the manners, the circum- stances are all Roman. And what relishes yet of a more exact knowledge, you do not only see a Roman in his hero, but the particular genius of the man without the least mistake of his character, given him by the best historians. You find his Antony, in all the defects and * Letter of Junius to Sir W, Draper. 204 NAHUM TATE. excellencies of his mind, a soldier, a reveller, amorous, sometimes rash, sometimes considerate, with all the various emotions of his mind. His Brutus, again, has all the constancy, gravity, morality, generosity ima- ginable, without the least mixture of private interest or irregular passion. He is true to him even in the imi- tation of his oratory, the famous speech which he makes him deliver, being exactly agreeable to his manner of ex- pressing himself ; of which we have this account : ' Facultas ejus erat militaris et bellicis accommodata tumultibus.' ' "The Loyal General" was succeeded by "The Sicilian Usurper," which is an alteration of " King Richard II." of Shakespeare. It was on political grounds suppressed. Tate some years afterwards published it ; and in a prefatory epistle in vindication of himself, he says : " I fell upon the new modelling of this tragedy (as I had just before done on the history of King Lear), charmed with the many beauties I discovered in it, which I knew would become the stage ; with as little design of satire on present transactions as Shakespeare himself, that wrote this story before this age began. I am not ignorant of the position of affairs in King Richard II. 's reign: how dissolute the age, and how corrupt the court, a season that beheld ignorance and infamy preferred to office, and power exercised in oppressing learning and merit; but why a history of these times should be suppressed as a libel on ours, is past my understanding. 'Tis sure the worst compliment that was ever paid to a prince." As Tate has here alluded to his alteration of " King Lear," a few words may be here said on that subject. The crime of mutilating the works of Shakespeare cannot be magni- fied ; but we must impute this seeming arrogance rather to the age than to the individual who attempted it. There appears to have been an impression at this time, that in taste and refinement they had so outstripped the culti- NAHUM TATE. 205 vation of the Elizabethean era, that it was necessary to tame the extravagancies of Shakespeare's rude imagination. Davenant and Dryden had both set Tate the example. In altering " King Lear," Tate omitted the part of the Fool and introduced a love plot between Edgar and Cordelia. Tate's alteration, as has been before observed, maintained possession of the stage for a considerable time. Colman rejected most that Tate had added. Garrick did the same. When Kemble remodelled it in 1 809, he reintroduced many of Tate's lines which had been rejected by Colman and Garrick. In speaking of this, the author of " The History of the English Stage," remarks, " When Shakespeare met John Kemble in the Elysian fields he said to him, ' I thank you heartily for your performance of my Coriolanus, Hamlet, Brutus, &c. but did you never hear the good old proverb : The cobbler should not go beyond his last ? Why would you tamper with the text of my plays ? Why give many of my characters names which I never dreamed of? Above all, what could induce you to restore such passages of Tate as even Garrick had rejected when he revised King Lear. St. Laurence never suffered more on his gridiron than I have suffered from the prompt-book.' ' Whatever alterations and restorations were occasionally made, it was not until at Drury Lane, in 1823, that the entire fifth act was played as Shakespeare wrote it. Here an unfortunate accident for a time baffled its success. Cordelia was impersonated by Mrs. West. Kean, who played Lear, was scarcely strong enough to carry her. This tempted the risibility of the house, and pit, boxes, and gal- lery joined in a laugh which lasted until the curtain fell. Tate in his dramatic compositions has manifested no great desire to win the praise of originality. One success- ful play was more remunerative than many fulsome dedica- tions. To amuse the theatre-goers, therefore, was the object of Tate and others and they accordingly plun- 206 NAHUM TATE. dered the plots of their predecessors as unblushingly as we now prey on those of our Gallic contemporaries. In the nine dramatic pieces which he has left behind him, he borrowed from Ben Jonson, Fletcher, Dekker, and others besides his alteration of Shakespeare. They had no brilliant success more than one was a de- cided failure, but others were frequently played and remained stock pieces. His " Duke and no Duke," was last played at the Hay market, in 1797. Into his " Richard II." Tate introduced some songs, one of which is the following : " Retired from any mortal's sight, The pensive Damon lay, He blest the discontented night, And cursed the smiling day : The tender sharers of his pain, His flocks no longer graze, But sadly fixed around the swain, Like silent mourners gaze. " He heard the musick of the wood, And with a sigh reply* d ; He saw the fish sport in the flood, And wept a deeper tide. In vain the summer bloom came on, For still the drooping swain, Like autumn winds was heard to groan, Out wept the winter's rain. " Some ease, said he, some respite give. Ah, mighty powers ! Ah, why Am I too much distress' d to live, And yet forbid to die ? Such accents from the shepherd flew, Whilst on the ground he lay, At last so deep a sigh he drew, As bore his life away." A song in " Cuckold's Haven " supplied Charles II. with a quotation, on an occasion mentioned by Mr. P. Cuningham in his charming story of " Nell Gwynne." The King was dining at the Guildhall. The courtiers and NAHUM TATE. 20 7 citizens drank as deep as was then the fashion. The Lord Mayor in his cups waxing practically facetious, Charles dismissed his suite without ceremony, and sought to extricate himself from the wine-inspired familiarities of the civic dignitary by stealing off to his coach. He was pursued ; his Lordship seized him by the hand and said, " Sir, you shall stay, and take another bottle." The merry Monarch quoted from Tate : " He that is drunk is as great as a king." and went back to finish the wine. In the play, at the end of Act n., there is another song equally in praise of Bacchus, which illustrates the political influence of the theatre, and the Support that it strove to give to the throne. " How great are the blessings of Government made, By the excellent rule of our Prince, Who, while trouble and cares do his pleasure invade, To his people aU joy does dispense : And while he for us is carking'and thinking, We have nothing to mind but our shops and our trade, And then to divert us with drinking. " For him we derive all our pleasure and wealth, Then fill me a glass ; nay, fill it up higher, My soul is athirst for his Majesty's health, And an Ocean of drink can't quench my desire ; Since all we enjoy to his bounty we owe, 'Tis fit all our bumpers like that should o'erflow." No materials exist, or if they do the authors of this work have failed to discover them, which would enable us to give any accurate or trustworthy account of the in- cidents of Tate's life. As dramatist we have spoken of him. Let the reader next look at him under the aspect of Laureate and psalmodist. Tate succeeded on the demise of Shadwell in 1692. His appointment by Lord Jersey, after the accession of Queen Anne, is recorded in the following form of words : 208 NAHUM TATE. " These are to certify that I have sworn and admitted Nahum Tate into ye place and quality of Poet-Laureate to her Majesty in ordinary, to have, hold, and exercise and enjoy the said place together with all rights, profits, privileges, and advantages thereunto belonging, in as full and ample manner as any Poet- Laureate hath formerly held and of right ought to have held and enjoyed the same. " Given under my hand this 24th day of Dec r " in the first year of her Majesty's reign. " JERSEY." During this reign the appointment was placed in the gift of the Lord Chamberlain, and Tate was re-appointed in 1 7 1 4. In his position as Laureate little can be said to his honour. His excuse we find in what we know of the literary men of that era. He was, as Mr. Macaulay says, in morals something between a beggar and a pander. In times of sudden change, it is scarcely probable that we should find the life of a necessitous man of letters, free from the inconsistency which blemished the careers of even the rich and noble. Tate was nearly five-and-twenty years a Poet-Laureate. He eulogized the memory of Charles II. ; hailed the accession of James; welcomed William more enthusiastically ; panegyrised Mary and Anne, living and dead ; and wrote one official ode for George I. Dry den and Waller, however, before him, had exhausted fancy in lauding Cromwell, and at the Restoration were lavish of their praise on the Merry Monarch. To say good things on a great occasion, was all they aimed at. Conscience and consistency were quite out of the case. It is difficult to discover by what interest Tate gained the appointment, for he had eulogized Charles and James, and had been the friend and coadjutor of the deposed Dry den. His Christian name may possibly have recom- mended him or his father's puritanical leaning have NAHUM TATE. 209 been remembered. It seems more likely, however, attri- butable to the fact that his poverty was known, that he had a little interest, that he possessed the necessary amount of pliancy for a court poet, and that there were no for- midable rivals in the field. Pope was only at this time four years old, and even with his precocity had not yet " lisped in numbers." Swift had written one or more of his Pindaric Odes, but they had merited the discouraging remark of his relation Dryden, and had been sufficiently rewarded by the King teaching him in Sir W. Temple's garden, how to cut asparagus in the Dutch way. Handsome provision had been made for Mon- tague and Prior. Garth had only just passed his examina- tion, and become a fellow of the College of Physicians, and the world had not yet seen the Dispensary. Butler had died in poverty twelve years before ; and that poverty, in Tate's words, was a greater satire on the age than his writings. Otway had shared the same wretched fate. And the sweet numbers of Waller were silent. Tate was as good as any of the poetasters of the day, and as a voluminous versifier, and an industrious dramatic author, had been much before the public. Any detailed account of his laureate lucubra- tions would be superfluous. They are very numerous, and may be found in the library of the British Museum with much pomp of large type and gorgeous binding. The brevity of each poem is its chief recommendation. He flattered the throne, rejoiced in all court appointments, wrote elegies when great men died, advised the Parliament, and celebrated the victories of Prince George of Denmark, and of Marlborough. There is a couplet in his poem on the " sacred memory" of Charles II., which is worthy of one of his successors, Eusden. The grief is terrific. " To. farthest lands let groaning winds relate, And rolling Oceans roar their master's fate." " The death of Queen Mary," says Johnson, " produced p 210 NAHUM TATE. a subject ; perhaps no funeral was ever so poetically at- tended." Tate is not mentioned by the Doctor as one of the tuneful mourners, but his strain is louder and loftier than usual. He apotheosizes her in these lines. " With robes invested of celestial dyes, She towr's, and treads the Empyrean Skies ; Angelick choirs, skill' d in triumphant song, Heaven's battlements and crystal turrets throng-. The signal's given, the eternal gates unfold Burning with jasper, wreath' d in burnish'd gold, And myriads now of naming minds .1 see Pow'rs, Potentates, Heaven's awfull Hierarchy In gradual orbs enthron'd, but all divine Ineffably those sons of glory shine." By one of his official poems, written at a particular crisis in the reign of William III. he excited much bitter attack from opponents. Many of our readers will remember the history of the Kentish Petition. This bold document requested the Parliament then sitting to attend to public affairs and not their " own private heats," and besought them to turn their attention to the supplies, and enable the King to defend the country, and protect our allies. The gentlemen who presented it were Justinian Champ- neys, Sir Thomas Culpepper, William Culpepper, William Hamilton, and David Polhill. The House of Commons felt that so bold a measure must be as boldly resisted. They treated this document as a libel, and gave these five gentle- men into the custody of the sergeant-at-arms. On their remonstrating with him on the illegality of the arrest, that officer informed them in language highly indecorous, that he did not care for the law. They remained under his charge for five days, and were then lodged in Gate House Prison. This arbitrary act occasioned much discontent and disturbance. Many pamphlets were written on both sides of the question, De Foe being one of the ablest advocates of the petitioners. The popular feeling was against the Parliament, and they were at length libe- NAHUM TATE. 211 rated. Tate took the royal and popular view of the case against the House of Commons, and wrote a poem called "The Kentish Worthies." For this he was severely assailed. In " The History of Faction," we read : " Nor had they reason to think that the court would discoun- tenance them in such practices ; for the Poet-Laureate, who is a sworn servant to the Crown, was ordered to write a poem called ' The Kentish Worthies,' which he otherwise durst not have done." Another writer tells us :* " And to complete the show (the liberation of the petitioners), that it might look somewhat majestic, the ballad-maker of Whitehall was ordered to compose some lines to the laud and praise of the five Kentish Worthies, which he did with like success as when he and the parson (Dr. Brady), rebelled against King David, and broke his lute, and murdered his psalms." Tate's Laureate Odes are not more meritorious than his other official poetic offerings. The one for the year 1705 is preserved. It was performed to music before her Majesty, on the 1st of January. The grand chorus with which it concludes runs thus : " While Anne and George their empire maintain Of the land and the main, And a Marlborongh fights Secure are the rights Of Albion and Europe in Piety's reign." Whatever envy among contemporaneous, or contempt among later writers, Tate's official eminence provoked, he had his share of eulogy as well. In some lines prefixed to his " Miscellanea Sacra," the writer thus addresses him : " Long may the laurel nourish on your brow, Since you so well a Laureate's duty know, Eor virtue's rescue daring to engage Against the tyrant vices of the age." * " Account of some late designs to create a misunderstanding between the King and the people," quoted in Wilson's Life of De Foe. p 2 212 NAHUM TATE. In contrast to such writings as called forth this praise, Tate has been guilty of -some offences. The fact that he rendered into English the second Satire of Juvenal, in what is called " Dryden's Translation," should perhaps screen Dryden from some of the censure which has been cast on him for coarseness. Tate contributed also to " Miscellaneous Poems," published by Tonson, and edited by Dryden, an English version of one of Ovid's loosest elegies. This publication chiefly consisted of poems, original and translated, by " the most eminent hands." The nature of some of its contents, is quite sufficient to show that the taste of the reading public was not a whit purer than that of the habitues of the theatre. At the end of the fourth volume, there is a long translation by Tate of a composition of a very singular kind. It is the celebrated Latin poem on a medical subject by " that famous Poet and Physician, Fracastorius, Englished by Mr. Tate." There are some prefatory lines to Dr. Thomas Hobbs, and a life of the renowned medico-poet-philanthropist. In this memoir, the world is informed that Fracastorius was born at Verona, that he was specially and providentially pre- served in childhood to write his great poem, for that while in his mother's arms, she was struck dead by lightning, while he remained unscathed ; that he lived to rival Pliny and Catullus, and outstrip all his contemporaries in learning and poetry ; that he studied under Peter Pomponatius, and became so devoted a student that Polybius and Plutarch were scarce ever out of his hands ; that when not employed in literary avocations he was occupied in curing disorders, and that in the intervals of his professional exertion, while the pestilence he so vividly describes, was raging in the city he found leisure to compose these undying verses, which no less a man than Sanazarius is driven in despair to admit excelled his own poem " De Partu Virginis," which was a labour of twenty years. It is also recorded NAHUM TATE. 213 that Fracastorius died of apoplexy at seventy, having contracted many friendships, and having deservedly no enemy. To criticise either the Latin or English would take us beyond our limits. Tate appears to have been compelled to work for the booksellers, as a translator of prose as well as verse. In 1686, he published, under the title of " Triumphs of Love and Constancy," a translation of the " ^Ethopics" of Heliodorus. This work is the earliest and best Greek romance, and narrates what are called " The Heroic Amours of Theagenes and Chariclea." Its author was born at Emesa, in Syria, and lived at the end of the fourth century, under the reign of Theodosius and his sons. He wrote the " ^Ethiopics " in his youth, and upon his being appointed Bishop of Tucca, it is said, that a provincial Synod decreed that the author must burn his romance or lay down his bishopric. Heliodorus chose the latter alternative. The whole story, however, sounds very apocryphal ; and its improbability is heightened by the fact that, although as a love story it offends against modern notions of delicacy, its tendency is to exalt virtue. It was twice translated into English before Mr. Tate and his coadjutor, who is described as a person of quality, undertook it. A version has since been given by Mr. Payne in 1792. The Greek manuscript was strangely preserved. Although well known in earlier, it was in modern times, almost forgotten, until, at the sacking of Ofen, in 1526, the manuscript was found in the library of Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, and as it was decorated and illuminated it attracted the cupidity of a soldier who brought it into Germany, where falling into the hands of Vincentius Opsopaeus, it was printed at Basil in 1534. Tate also published a translation from the French of " The Life of the Prince de Conde." We must, however, 214 NAHUM TATE. forget what he had meanwhile been doing in his poetical capacity. In 1697, he produced a short poem called "The Innocent Epicure, or the Art of Angling." It is of the didactic kind, and lays down minute directions for fishing. It is tedious and prosaic, and the rhymes are careless and faulty. " Panacea," a poem on tea, in 1700, was a more successful effort of his Muse. The subject may appear to us a strange one, but tea was then a novelty and a luxury. It was sold in a liquid state. In Dryden's " Wild Gallant " it is spoken of as a morning draught for those who had drank too deeply overnight. Pepys tells us: "I sent for a cup of tea (a Chinese drink), of which I had never drank before." In 1664, the East India Company purchased two pounds and two ounces to pre- sent to the King. Its virtues were then very highly estimated, and they are celebrated in this poem with Tate's utmost power. The versification is excellent, but as a whole, from its plan and subject, it is uninteresting. This effort, his partnership with Dryden, his trans- lations, and the success of one volume of poems, which had gone through two editions, seemed to have increased the fame of the Laureate. By a poetical friend he is thus addressed : " The British Laurel by old Chaucer worn, Still fresh and gay did Dryden's brow adorn, And that its lustre may not fade on thine, Wit, fancy, judgment, Tate, in thee combine." It remains that we should look on Tate as Psalmist. And we shall see that he made much recompense for his few former offences against morality in pandering to the taste of the age, by his later writings, which tend to support the cause of religion and virtue. The times were mending a little, and some check seems to have been given to the open profligacy which characterized the period of the Restoration. In the Reformed Churches abroad, NAHUM TATE. 215 Protestantism and Psalmody had gone hand in hand together. A want was now felt in the English Church. The Old Version, written by Sternhold, and altered by Hopkins and others, sometimes for the better, oftener for the worse, had been in general use from the time of its publication. It was now thought that the advance our language had made, demanded a version more in accordance with the taste of the age, and that smoothness of versifi- cation which was more and more aimed at by our poets. Hence we exchanged the rugged strength and occasional doggrel of Sternhold and Hopkins for the more level mediocrity of Brady and Tate. What brought about the literary partnership, which has been so often made a target for the shafts of sarcasm, we have no means of ascertaining or conjecturing, unless it were the tie of a common nationality. Dr. Nicholas Brady was Tate's fellow-countryman. He was educated at Westminster, and showed very early a talent for writing verse. He was an active politician and a popular preacher, and took a busy part in the Revolution of 1688, for which at the time he severely suffered. He lived, however, to be rewarded for his exertions, for at his death, in 1726, he was the incumbent of three benefices. He outlived his coadjutor eleven years, and could, with a better grace, have preached the funeral sermon of the unfortunate Psalmodist than that of sack-drinking Shadwell, whose name, until heard from the pulpit, had been mainly associated with taverns and theatres. Dr. Brady, however, could have quoted a precedent for his funeral oration ; for the praises of Nell Gwynne had been sounded from the pulpit. They at first printed a version of twenty Psalms, as an "Essay," as they termed it, and in the following year appeared the completed work, " A New Version of the Psalms of David," fitted to the tunes used in churches, by N. Brady, D.D., Chaplain in Ordinary to Her Majesty, 216 NAHUM TATE. and N. Tate Esq., Poet-Laureate. In a pamphlet entitled : " A brief and full account of Mr. Tate and Mr. Brady's ' New Version of the Psalms/ by a true son of the Church," the Royal Sanction is copied. " At the Court of Kensington, Deer. 3rd, 1696. Present, the King's most excellent Majesty in Council Upon the humble petition of Nicholas Brady and Nahum Tate this day read at the Board, setting forth that the Petitioners have, with their utmost care and industry, compleated a New Version of the Psalms of David in English Metre, fitted for pub- lick use ; and humbly praying His Majesty's Royal allow- ance that the said Version may be used in such congre- gations as shall think fit to receive it ; His Majesty, taking the same into his royal consideration, is pleased to order in Council that the said New Version of the Psalms in English Metre be, and the same is hereby allowed, and permitted to be used in all Churches and Chapels and Congregations as shall think fit to receive the same." Dr. Compton, Bishop of London, sent out circular letters of recommendation to all the clergy of his 'diocese. The version has been eulogised by Basil Kennet and others ; but Bishop Beveridge has censured it for faults which it would now be difficult to discover. " There are," he says, " many such new phrases and romantic expressions in the new version, which are taken up by our present poets, and being now in fashion may serve well enough in other places, but can by no means suit with a divine poem, much less with one inspired by God him- self." It encountered much prejudice and provoked some controversy. Tate undertook its defence, and published, in 1710, "An Essay for Promoting Psalmody." It is dedicated to Queen Anne. The style is quaint and florid. Psalmody is boldly personified and apostrophized as a goddess, a princess, a charmer. Parts of the treatise are written in a strain of rapture, and with the tone of a man NAHUM TATE. 21? of warm and sincere piety. He complains that while psalmody has been much cultivated in all the Reformed Churches it has been neglected in ours, and he attributes the decay into which it has fallen very much to the apathy " of our quality and gentry." " You may hear them," he says, " in the responses and reading psalms ; but the giving out a singing psalm, seems to strike 'em dumb." He next extols Praise in occupying a devotional rank higher than Prayer, and supports his view by some beautiful lines from the " Gondibert" of his Laureate predecessor Davenant. " For Prayer the Ocean is, where diversely Men steer their course, each to a different coast, "Where oft our interests so discordant be, That half beg winds by which the rest are lost. " Praise is devotion Jit for mighty minds, The differing World's agreeing sacrifice." These raptures about the superior nature of Praise from one who had written a version of the Psalms, remind \is forcibly of the clerk of a small country church in Wales, who, inasmuch as by playing a violoncello and singing lustily, he produced what is called in the 100th psalm "awful mirth," was so gratified with the success of his musical efforts, that he informed the rector one Sunday with an air of cheerful confidence, that although prayer and preaching were perhaps necessary, praise was the noblest part of divine worship. The rector's reply is an answer to Tate and to the rural musi- cian, and is a good comment on the lines of Davenant : " If your prayers are not accepted, your praises will never be heard." Tate then proceeds, in his treatise, to show what were the faults of the old version, and to lament the prejudices which obstruct the attempt to produce one better fitted for purposes of devotion. "You must," he writes, 218 NAHUM TATE. " expect the first outcry against any new version of the Psalms from the ignorance amongst some of our common people, who, because they found the old singing psalms bound up with their Bibles, take it for granted that these English metres, as well as the matter, were compiled by King David. Nay, some have supposed a greater person was the composer of these metres. For instance, the late Bishop of Ely upon his first using of his brother Dr. Patrick's new version in family devotion, observed (as I have heard himself relate the passage) that a servant maid of a musical voice was silent for several days together. He asked her the reason, whether she were not well or had a cold, adding that he was much delighted to hear her, because she sung sweetly and kept the rest in tune. 4 1 am well enough in health/ answered she, ' and have no cold, but if you must needs know the plain truth of the matter, as long as you sang Jesus Christ's psalms, I sung along with ye, but now you sing psalms of your own invention, you may sing by yourselves.' ' Tate concludes his essay with a rhapsody, from which we give a brief extract. " O Queen of Sacred Harmony, how powerful are thy charms. Care shuns thy walks, Fear kindles with courage, arid Joy sublimes into ecstasy. What ! shall stage syrens sing and Psalmody sleep ! Theatres be thronged, and thy temples empty ! Shall thy votaries abroad find heart and voice to sing in the fiery furnace of persecution, upon the waters of affliction, and our Britons sit sullenly silent under their vines and fig-trees ?" To expend any criticism on this version of the Psalms would scarcely be less absurd, than to gravely endeavour to discover by internal evidence which were contributed by Brady and which by Tate. In "Miscellanea Sacra," published in 1698, there is a rendering of the 104th Psalm by him which is excellent. Nothing but want of NAHUM TATE. 219 space prevents our inviting criticism to it by a long quo- tation. To sum up his merits as a psalmodist, it may be said of him that he has only failed where others have done so ; for are not all attempts, save a few by eminent poets, scattered here and there in literature, rather parodies than paraphrases ? The sorrow and the triumphs which shook the strings of the royal harp are breathed in such strains of poetry as speak with divine eloquence in the unfettered rhythm of our version ; but the sublimity is dwarfed by the exact- ments of metre, and the music faintly and falsely echoed by the jingle of rhyme. In 1713, Tate undertook the management of a well- meaning publication, which was as short-lived as many such have been, and, strange to say, as one of the same name started in London within the last four years. " The Monitor," for so was it called, was to appear on alternate days, and the first number was issued on March 2nd, 1713. It was " intended for the promoting of Religion and Virtue, and the suppression of vice and immorality, in pursuance of Her Majesty's most gracious Direction." The undertaking not only enjoyed royal patronage, but was encouraged by many of the nobility, bishops, and clergy. But in spite of all this, and the moderate price (one penny per number), it struggled unsuccessfully for but a short time. They were sent to the subscribers' houses on the terms of twelvepence a month, " sixpence on the receipt of the first paper, and sixpence more when the twelfth paper is delivered." We are informed that through the contribution of some pious persons, some schools were to be supplied with them, " the masters of which will oblige their scholars to get the Poems by heart as part of their exercise." These scholars merit our sincerest sympathies. The publication commences 220 NAHUM TATE. with an " Essay on Divine Poesie." Then follows an exhortation to the youth of Great Britain, which endea- vours to carry out the principle which the paper professed, viz., " to establish them in the principles of Religion and Virtue, and fortify them against the attacks of Vice." The swearer and the gambler are denounced in two separate numbers. " The Witch of Endor" is the subject of a sublime dialogue, full of pious profanity. Another is a description of " The Upright Man," and is a bom- bastic paraphrase of Horace's "justum et tenacem pro- positi virum." The stern stoicism of the character is depicted in a couplet, which prophetically expresses a phrase of modern slang " Though whirl' d by storms the racking clouds are seen, His unmolested breast is all serene" In the number for April 6th, a prose notice is added, which contains an anecdote not in the least a-propos to the subject of the paper, but referring to a matter which has been alluded to in a former part of this work. " We shall beg the reader's pardon for mentioning a passage told us by a gentleman of our society, almost forty years since, by Mr. Dryden, who went, with Mr. Waller in company, to make a visit to Mr. Milton, and desire his leave for putting his ' Pa- radise Lost' into rhyme for the stage. f Well, Mr. Dryden,' says Milton, * it seems you have a mind to tagg my points, and you have my leave to tagg 'em ; but some of 'em are so awkward and old-fashioned, that I think you had as good leave 'em as you found 'em.' ' : In the last number but one, we are told that those " who particularly approve of these Divine subjects, seem anxious that enter- taining ones may be mixed with them, and that to meet this want, some gentlemen of the brightest parts are setting upon such a work." Whether "The Oracle" ever appeared, we know not ; but next day " The Monitor" died. NAHUM TATE. 221 And so ends the literary career of Nahum Tate. Of his private life and habits, little can be ascertained. He was, we are told, of a downcast look, and very silent in company ; but he has also been described as a " free and fuddling companion." He has been praised for his integrity and modesty. There is nothing to justify Dr. Johnson's surmise that he was ejected from his office at the accession of George I. The date of Howe's appointment is 1715, and it was in this year that Tate died in the Mint, Southwark, where he had taken refuge from his numerous creditors. He appears to have been very industrious with his pen, but in worldly matters imprudent and unfortunate. His case is one among a thousand which prove the necessity of such institutions as the Athenaeum Institute and the Guild of Literature and Art. Patronage was of some avail to Tate and other necessitous men of letters ; but when improvidence has not even patronage to fall back upon, as is now the case, there would seem to be greater need for co-operative providence. Had Tate lived in these days, his life would doubtless have been very badly written by a near relative, and the minutest details of his existence chronicled with precision. There was no such lust for biography when he died in the Mint. But gibbeted by the sarcasms of Pope, he has been much misrepresented by those who copied the sar- casms without reading his works. Sir Walter Scott, who doubtless knew them, gives a mention of him, severe, but fairer than that of many other writers. " He is one of those second-rate bards," he says, " who, by dint of pleonasm and expletive, can find smooth lines if any one will supply ideas." Neither he nor Shadwell deserve the treatment they have suffered even at the hands of recent writers. Miss 222 NAHUM TATE. Strickland calls the latter " the loathsome Laureate,'* Religious and political prejudice can see nothing but what is detestable in the poet of the court of William and Mary. We are more surprised to read in Southey's " Life of Cowper" " Nahum Tate, of all my prede- cessors, must have ranked the lowest of the Laureates if he had not succeeded Shadwell." Could Southey, with all his varied book lore, have been ignorant of the verses of Eusden ? and is he not in this estimate somewhat polite and merciful to his immediate predecessor, Pye ? NICHOLAS ROWE. NICHOLAS ROWE was born at his maternal grand- father's seat, Little Beckford, in Bedfordshire, in 1673. The family from which he descended had long been settled at Lamerton in Devonshire, and the arms they bore had been won for them by a crusader from whom Rowe could trace his descent in a direct line. His father was the first of the house who neglected the cultivation of the ancestral estate, allured by the more brilliant temptations of professional life. He entered at the Middle Temple rose to the degree of serjeant-at-law, and now lies in the Temple Church. Rowe was first sent to a private school at Highgate, from whence he was removed to West- minster, then flourishing under the rod of Dr. Busby. In 1688 he was elected a king's scholar. He gave early indications of superior ability, and no boy's faculties were allowed to lie dormant under the Doctor's energetic, though kind-hearted, supervision. His academical exercises we are told were above the average merit, and were produced with little labour. At sixteen, his father removed him from Westminster to the Middle Temple, and at that 224 NICHOLAS ROWE. early age he commenced with great resolution the study of the law. He had already made considerable progress in the acquisition of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, and had dabbled in poetry. The way in which he applied himself to his legal studies showed that his mind was capable of grasping a large conception, his powers of application were great, and under the superintending advice of his father he might have become a legal luminary. But when he was but nineteen years of age his father died, and accident, indolence, or constitutional bias gave a different direction to his career. He turned aside from the prospects of wealth and eminence that were opening upon him, declined the patronage of Treby, Lord Chief Justice, and devoted himself unreservedly to the cultivation of his literary tastes. He first came forward as a candidate for poetical fame in his twenty-fifth year, when his tragedy, " The Ambi- tious Step-mother," was acted at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. It is a sacred piece, taken from the first Book of Kings, the story turning upon the establish- ment of Solomon upon the throne. This performance exhibits great strength and sweetness of diction, and a loftiness of sentiment, conspicuous in all the after writings of Rowe, while the characters are maintained with dis- crimination, and when we reflect that Betterton, Booth, Mrs. Barry, and Mrs. Bracegirdle exerted their rare and varied powers in its representation, we cease to wonder at its decided success. This was followed by " Tamerlane," a political play, acted at the same theatre in 1702. Rowe always regarded this production with the fondest affection, and doubtless it excited the noisiest applause. He had always been a stanch supporter of the Hanoverian suc- cession, and the imaginary virtues with which he encum- bered Tamerlane were intended as a compliment to the reigning King, William III. Tamerlane was performed NICHOLAS ROWE. 225 by Betterton, and Bajazet, Emperor of the Turks, in whom it was presumed Louis XIV. was exhibited, by Verbruggen. It was for a time regularly acted every 4th of November, the anniversary of the landing of William III. ; but at length, when that King was dead and the two monarchies were at peace, the impropriety of such a distorted caricature of a great, though rival Sovereign, became manifest even to national prejudice, and the repre- sentation was discountenanced. In the following year appeared " The Fair Penitent," the plot taken almost entirely from " The Fatal Dowry " of Massinger. This tragedy was so popular until within a very recent period, that it seems unnecessary to make any observations on its merit. The great fault of the play is that the action terminates with the fourth act. One of the characters, Lothario, was the foundation of the Lovelace of Richardson, which was more familiar to the readers of a past age than " Pendennis " or " Mr. Pickwick " are to those of the present. A ludicrous incident happened in connection with the performance of this play the first season it was brought out. Lothario, after he is killed by Altamont in the fourth act, lies dead on the stage in the last. Such a situation is of course filled by one of the underlings in a theatre. Powell played Lothario, and Warren, his man, claimed the right of lying for his defunct master, and flattered himself he performed the part in a superior manner. One evening, the fifth act began as usual, and was proceeding successfully, when, about the middle of the distressful pourtrayal, Powell, behind the scenes, called aloud for his man, quite forgetful of the important part he was performing. Warren, from his bier upon the stage, answered instantly, " Here, Sir !" Powell, who was of an impatient temper, annoyed at his non-appearance, vociferated with an insulting expression : " Come here Q 226 NICHOLAS ROWE. this moment, or I'll break every bone in your skin !" Warren, terrified, jumped up with all his funereal appen- dages about him, which unfortunately were tied fast to the handles of the bier. The audience burst out into a roar. This only frightened him ; he tugged away, threw down Calista (Mrs. Barry), and overwhelmed her with the table, lamp, book, bones, and all the paraphernalia of the charnel- house. He succeeded at last in breaking away from his trammels, and rushed off the stage ; and the play at once ended, amid shrieks of laughter. Even the stately Betterton relaxed from his gravity, " Smiled in the tumult and enjoy'd the storm." But he prudently withdrew the play for the remainder of the season. In 1706, a strange fancy came over our poet. He was of an hilarious disposition, always ready for a laugh, and this propensity he probably mistook for comic power. He accordingly produced his comedy of " The Biter" (a cant term for one who hoaxes), and the dreary production failed ignominiously. Rowe was not at all prepared for such a catastrophe, and himself keenly enjoyed its repre- sentation, laughing immoderately at the exquisite jokes with which he fancied it abounded. In the same year he produced the tragedy of " Ulysses," which was acted at the theatre in the Hay- market, and dedicated to the Lord Godolphin. It was successful at the time, and the character of Penelope, which Mrs. Barry personated, was finely drawn ; but it has not escaped the neglect which has attended all attempts in England to give novelty or variety to the stories of the Pagan mythology. " The Royal Convert," acted in 1708, did not meet with much success, though the part of Rodogune, a Saxon Princess, is finely con- ceived and eminently tragical. Gibbon intimates that NICHOLAS ROWE. 22? Procopius might have afforded Rowe the hint for this character. Our dramatist had always been an admirer of Shake- speare, and in 1709 he edited his plays, to which he prefixed a life of the poet ; Betterton having visited Stratford to collect whatever traditionary matter to the purpose still existed. The edition is without notes, but the text received a careful revision, and contributed to that gradual revolution in public taste which in our day will acknowledge neither rival nor second to the " sweet swan of Avon." Rowe was not so entirely devoted to his books and his plays as to be inattentive to matters of more worldly import, and when the Duke of Queensbury was made Secretary of State, he consented to act as his under-secre- tary. The Duke died when he had held his appointment but three years, and he then made some advances to the famous Harley, Earl of Oxford, and a story is told, which places either the urbanity of that minister or the percep- tion of the poet in a somewhat unfavourable light. When he attended to present his respects to the Earl, who was then Lord High Treasurer, he was received with great affability, and in the course of conversation the Earl asked if he understood Spanish. Rowe, with the prospect of some mission to the Peninsula starting involuntarily to his mind, replied in the negative, but hoped in a very short time to be able to understand and speak it with facility. He instantly retired to a country farm-house, applied himself with unremitting assiduity to the language, and at the end of a few months waited again on the Earl, to acquaint him with the success of his industry. " Are you sure," said that nobleman, " you understand it thoroughly ?" Rowe answered in the affirmative. " Then," replied the Earl, " how happy are you, Mr. Rowe, in being able to enjoy the pleasure of reading 'Don Quixote' in the Q 2 NICHOLAS ROWE. original !" The mortified Whig retired, and waited for better times. In 1714 he produced "Jane Shore," in which Gibber took a part, written professedly in imitation of Shake- speare ; though, as Dr. Johnson very justly remarks, in what he thought himself an imitator of Shakespeare it is not easy to conceive. The piece, however, was frequently acted, and with success. In the following year he produced his last, though by no means his best tragedy, " Lady Jane Grey." A friend of his, a Mr. Smith, of Christ Church, Oxford, whom he terms a very learned and ingenious gentleman, had meditated writing a play on this subject, but died, leaving some papers filled with notes, though in a state of great confusion. Rowe took up the idea, but could only avail himself of one scene, which is that in the third act, in which Lord Guildford persuades Lady Jane to accept the crown. The preface to this piece, the only one he ever wrote, concludes thus: "I shall turn this, my youngest child, out into the world with no other provision than a saying, which I remember to have seen before one of Mrs. Behn's: " Va ! mon enfant, prend ta fortune." The accession of George I. (1716) brought Rowe an auspicious gale of worldly success. He was made Poet- Laureate. " I am afraid," says Johnson, " by the ejection of poor Nahum Tate, who died in the Mint, where he was forced to seek shelter by extreme poverty." He likewise became a land surveyor of the Customs in the port of London. The Prince of Wales nominated him Clerk of his Council ; and Parker, the Lord Chancellor, on the very day he received the seals, appointed him without solicitation Secretary of the Presentations. He was revolving a tragedy on the story of the " Rape of Lucretia," when death over- NICHOLAS ROWE. 229 took him on the 6th of December, 1718, in the forty-fifth year of his age. He was buried on the 19th in West- minster Abbey, near Chaucer ; and his old schoolfellow, Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster, read the funeral service over him. A monument was erected to his memory by his widow, and Pope wrote the following epitaph, which was subsequently altered, though not improved. " Thy relics, Howe, to this fair urn we trust, And, sacred, place by Dryden's awful dust. Beneath a rude and nameless stone he lies, To which thy tomb shall guide inquiring eyes. Peace to thy gentle shade, and endless rest ! Bless' d in thy genius in thy love too blest ! One grateful woman to thy fame supplies What a whole thankless land to his denies." He was twice married, his first wife was a daughter of Mr. Parsons, an auditor of the revenue ; his second, of Mr. Devenish, a gentleman in Dorsetshire. He left a son by the former, and a daughter by the latter. His translation of Lucan's " Pharsalia," which he lived long enough to complete, though not to publish, was found among his papers after his death, and published by Dr. Welwood, with a short memoir prefixed, from which we make the follow- ing extract of his character, drawn with a slightly partial hand. " His person was graceful and well made, his face re- gular and of a manly beauty. He had a quick and fruitful invention, a deep penetration and a large compass of thought, with singular dexterity and easiness in making his thoughts to be understood. He was master of most parts of polite learning, especially the classical authors, both Greek and Latin, understood the French, Italian, and Spanish languages, and spoke the first fluently, and the other two tolerably well. He had a good taste in philo- sophy, and having a firm impression of religion upon his 230 NICHOLAS ROWE. mind, he took great delight in divinity and ecclesiastical history. " His conversation was pleasant, witty, and learned, with- out the least tincture of affectation or pedantry ; and his inimitable manner of diverting and enlivening the company made it impossible for any one to be out of humour when he was in it. Envy and detraction seemed to be entirely foreign to his constitution ; and whatever provocations he met with at any time, he passed them over without the least thought of resentment or revenge.'* Pope bears testimony to the vivacity of his disposition. In one of his letters he writes thus : " Mr. Rowe accom- panied me, and passed a week in the forest. I need not tell you how much a man of his turn entertained me ; but I must acquaint you there is a vivacity and gaiety of disposition almost peculiar to him, which makes it im- possible to part from him without that uneasiness which generally succeeds all our pleasures." Our author had his weaknesses, however, as the following trifling anecdote will show. Strolling one day into the famed coffee-house, " The Cocoa Tree," in St. James's Street, he saw Garth in conversation with two noblemen ; and sitting down nearly opposite, attempted to catch the Doctor's eye. Garth perceived his drift, and was obtusely blind to all his advances. At length Rowe summoned a waiter, and sent him to ask Garth for his snuff-box, a valuable one, the gift of some foreign prince. The box was sent, but the lender still appeared absorbed in con- versation. The request was repeated two or three times with no better success. At length Garth drew out a pencil, wrote on the lid the two Greek characters, p. g. (fie, Rowe), and then sent it across. Rowe rose and left the room in high dudgeon. He translated the first book of Quillet's " Callipcedia," and the golden verses of Pythagoras. NICHOLAS ROWE. 231 His powers of elocution were great, and Mrs. Oldfield used to say that the best instruction for an actress was to hear Rowe read her part in any new play. The biography of such a writer would scarcely seem complete without some slight mention of the actors whose efforts were essential to the popularity of his works. Plays whose chief merit lies in the melody of their versi- fication and in their external structure, depend for their success less upon their intrinsic merit than upon the degree of ability with which they are represented on the stage. Rowe's characters are few, and he was peculiarly fortunate in his actors. Betterton, Booth, and Verbruggen, were generally included in the cast, while Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Bracegirdle invariably performed the female parts, of which very few of his plays had more than two. We append, therefore, the following brief notices of those eminent performers who contributed in such an important degree to our poet's reputation. THOMAS BETTERTON was born at Westminster in Au- gust, 1635. He was apprenticed to Rhodes, the bookseller at Charing Cross, who, in the company he collected pre- vious to the Restoration, had for his principal actors Bet- terton and Kynaston, another of his apprentices, both of whom eventually became prodigies in their art. In 1663, the former married Mrs. Saunderson, who, according to one report, was the first actress that trod the boards in this country. She excelled in Shakespearian characters, and her Lady Macbeth was one of the finest perform- ances the stage has witnessed. An outline of the principal events in Betterton's life is elsewhere incidentally given in this work. His joining Davenant's company, succeeding to the principal share of the management, proposing the coalition of the two com- panies, then heading the revolt, and afterwards transferring 232 NICHOLAS ROWE. his licence to Sir John Vanbrugh. His private character was exemplary in the highest degree. He was kind- hearted, charitable, modest, and sincere. Though his salary was never large, he, with a prudence rare in his profession, contrived to save a moderate competence, which, when about to enjoy the reward of his life's labours, he lost in a commercial speculation, through the culpable persuasion of a friend. That friend, however, he frankly forgave, took charge of his helpless daughter on his death, and reared her as his own. Oppressed by age and infirmities, he had to return to the stage ; and the last character he played was Melan- tius, in " The Maid's Tragedy." He was then suffering under a severe attack of the gout, but took a repellent medicine, which enabled him to walk in slippers ; and he acted with all the fire of his youth and the success of his manhood. But the ringing applause of that evening was his death-knell. The distemper returned with aggravated virulence, and in three days he was no more. He has generally been esteemed as the ablest actor this country has produced. His impersonation of Hamlet has been the theme of universal praise, and no one, before or since, ever approached so near that wondrous ideal. His first interview with the Ghost, a scene generally so tame and ineffective, he managed with such consummate art so profound was the awe and terror depicted in his countenance that a shudder would run through the audience as though they also felt the presence of the terrible phantom. And so thoroughly could he identify himself with his part, that, though of a sanguine com- plexion, he was frequently seen to turn ashy pale through the intensity of his emotion when his father's spirit again enters, and interrupts the dialogue with his guilty mother. Yet such perfection cost many a labo- rious effort. His figure was not good, his voice was NICHOLAS ROWE. 233 thick and low, and his actions ungainly ; but against all these disadvantages he struggled, and achieved so great success. BARTON BOOTH was honourably descended, and re- ceived his education at Westminster. His first predi- lection for the stage was excited by the applause he received, when a Westminster scholar, on acting Pam- philus, in the " Andrea" of Terence. The inclination ripened into a passion, and when at Cambridge, he boldly defied all consequences, and ran off with a company of strolling players. The distress of his family on hearing of his misconduct was excessive. His mother was attacked with fever, his father became almost frenzied, but all was forgotten when the scapegrace returned home hungry and wet, without money and without clothes. The ill success of his first adventure, however, failed to damp his ardour. He again decamped, appeared on a stage in Bartholomew Fair, and then went over to try his fortune in Ireland. At Dublin, the first character he attempted was Oronooko, and he was well received, though a ludicrous incident moved the audience to laughter when they ought to have been melted into tears. The evening was warm. Booth, forgetful of his blackened face, wiped himself with his handkerchief; and with his visage most grotesquely streaked, returned to the stage, and was astounded at the roar that greeted his re-appearance. He remained in Ireland two .years ; and his success and pertinacity induced his friends to relent in their opposition to his choice. About 1701, he returned to London, and was introduced to Betterton ; and when his former schoolfellow Rowe brought out his " Ambitious step-mother," Booth played the part of Artaban. He now progressed rapidly, was soon esteemed only in- ferior to Betterton, and when that great actor died, sue- 234 NICHOLAS ROWE. ceeded him in his principal characters. He was extremely forcible in depicting the passions of rage and grief, and ex- celled in personating Othello and Jaffier. In private life he was somewhat licentious. He married the daughter of Sir William Barkham, and after her death formed a liaison with Miss Mountfort, whom he deserted for Miss Saintlow, the lady he afterwards married. Miss Mountfort sank into a fit of despondency, and mental derangement ensued. A strange story is related of her while in this state. Ophelia had been one of her favourite characters ; and one day, hearing that " Hamlet" was to be performed that evening, she escaped from her keeper, hid herself in the theatre, and pushed on the stage before the actress who was to play that part. There was an actual Ophelia before the spectators, and the way in which she sang her wild snatches of song must have been only too truthful. There is no account of the effect of this incident upon the audience. Whatever pleasure there may be in witnessing such scenes, must consist in a consciousness of the illusion : the sad reality could only cause unmitigated pain. Booth was the fortunate man selected to play Cato in Addison's famous play, and the auspicious circumstance was the crowning event in his career. It filled his purse, overwhelmed him with popularity, and introduced him to a share in the management of the theatre ; but it spoilt him as an actor, and he became so negligent that, while playing Othello one evening, a message was sent to him from a private box, to ask if he was acting merely for his own amusement. In private life he was cheerful, generous, fond of conviviality, though somewhat diffident. In person he was short but well-made, with an air of dignity and the great advantage of large muscles, so that the play of his features was distinctly discernible even in the gallery. NICHOLAS ROWE. 235 He died in May, 1733, in the fifty-third year of his age, bequeathing all his property to his widow ; a sum, however, considerably less than the portion she had brought to him on her marriage. JOHN VERBRUGGEN. The date of this actor's life or death is uncertain. He was hanging about Drury Lane at the time that Gibber was seeking employment there. On the death of Montfort, he succeeded him in his part of Alexander, and was so successful, that he assumed the appellation as a surname for some years. In person he was tall and well-made, with a slight malformation in his knees, which gave him a shambling gait. This defect, however, he turned to his advantage, and rendered posi- tively becoming on the stage. His principal characters were Bajazet, Oronooko, Edgar in " King Lear," Arta- xerxes in "The Ambitious Step-mother," Loveless in " The Relapse," Wilmore in " The Rover," Cassius, and others. The acting of Verbruggen has been contrasted with that of Betterton as the realization of untutored nature in opposi- tion to the perfection of art. However false such a descrip- tion may be, yet it conveys a tolerably accurate idea of their respective styles. Two of the most exquisite pieces of acting ever beheld on the stage were Verbruggen and Betterton as Cassius and Brutus ; and Verbruggen and Mrs. Bracegirdle as Wilmore and Helena in Mrs. Afra Behn's play of " The Rover." In the latter piece, Verbruggen's " untaught airs, and the smiling repartees" of Mrs. Bracegirdle, had an extraordinary effect upon the audience, who appeared in constant fear that the performers were in earnest, and that each moment they would quit the stage. He married Mi's. Montfort, a beautiful woman, and a most accomplished actress. 236 NICHOLAS ROWE. MRS. BARRY. A stately person, a graceful carriage, a me- lodious and powerful voice, and a well-trained understand- ing constituted Mrs. Barry's inducements to try her fortune on the stage. She was the daughter of Edward Barry, a barrister, afterwards called Colonel Barry, from his having raised a regiment of horse for the service of King Charles. His ruin was involved in that of his royal master, and his family were compelled to trust to their own exertions for their future subsistence. Lady Dave- nant, who had known the Colonel in his prosperous days, took charge of his daughter Elizabeth, superintended her education, and in the year 1673 obtained her admission into the Duke's company. After a year's trial, her talents were deemed so inferior, and her progress was so slow, that she was discharged as being a burden on the troupe. Through Lady Davenant's interest, she obtained a further trial, and received a second aud a third dismissal for the same reasons. Such rebuffs might have daunted the most sanguine rnind, but Mrs. Barry had resolved to succeed and did. Her principal defect was in the ear ; but by the most untiring assiduity she so far perfected that organ, as to bring it into unison with her other extraordinary faculties, and when Otway brought his "Alcibiades" on the stage, she was included in the cast, and reaped the reward of her labours in the unexpected applause she commanded. Her spirited performance of Mrs. Lovitt, in Etheredge's " Man of the Mode" extorted universal commendation, and in 1 680, her Monimia in Otway 's " Orphan" fixed her future fame. Her Belvidera in " Venice Preserved," and her Isabella in Southerne's " Fatal Marriage," were exhibitions of the highest art ; and the epithet of " famous" was so universally applied to her, that it became her distinguishing title. She was equally eminent in depicting the wildest passion and the most winning tenderness. Her outbursts of resentment or NICHOLAS ROWE. 237 despair were terrible to witness ; but when she attuned her voice to the utterance of love, or pity, or virgin sorrow, she laid, as it were, a spell on her audience, and melted or soothed them with the easy mastery of some superior being. Her private life accorded not with the superiority of her public merits, and there seems little reason to doubt her criminal connection with the notorious Earl of Rochester. Though we cannot palliate, yet we may drop a veil over the errors of a beautiful and gifted woman, exposed to severe temptation ; and regret that genius should ever stoop to vitiate its fairest title to respect. She died on the 7th of March, 1713, aged fifty-three, and was buried in the churchyard of Acton. MRS. BRACEGIRDLE. But few records remain of the career and the triumphs of Mrs. Bracegirdle. The time and place of her birth are alike uncertain. Her powers as an actress were of the highest order, and her forte lay in genteel comedy. She excelled in male characters, " and her gait or walk," says her biographer, " was free, manlike, and modest in breeches." For years she was a reigning toast, and dramatic writers vied with each other in studying her powers, and in adapting their pieces to her peculiar ex- cellencies. She was included in all the plays of Rowe and Congreve, who each endeavoured to captivate the heart of their idol by love speeches placed in the mouths of her fictitious~adorers on the stage. Her figure was finely proportioned. She was of a dark complexion, with dark brown hair and eyebrows, black eyes, and a most expressive countenance. In private life she was gentle, modest, and charitable. Though sur- rounded by admirers, scandal has not fastened on any impropriety in her behaviour ; and " her virtue had its reward both in applause and specie." She retired from 238 NICHOLAS ROWE. the stage about thirty years before Garrick appeared, induced in a measure by the more general approbation with which a younger rival (Mrs. Oldfield) acted some of her favourite characters. She died on the 12th of September, 1748, after having lived to an advanced age, and was buried in the cloisters of West- minster Abbey. REVEREND LAURENCE EUSDEN. SHADWELL was the first of the second-rate laureates under whose dynasty the wits were in opposition. But his plays manifest considerable ability, and he was a brilliant conversationalist. Tate enjoyed a good reputation among contemporaries. Rowe was a first-rate translator, and a man of genius and taste. We must now descend a great many steps, ay, almost to the bottom of the ladder. Horace Walpole has observed that nations are most commonly saved by the worst men in them, and so the Laureateship was in this instance preserved and handed down by perhaps our worst poet. In a small biographical dictionary he is described as no " inconsiderable versifier," and a writer must be in the last state of the " lues Boswelliana," did he give any lengthened account of works which had so justly merited oblivion, or were he very enthusiastic in speaking of the Rev. Laurence Eusden. Of good Irish family, and the son of Dr. Eusden, of Spotisworth, in Yorkshire, he was educated at Trinity College, Cam- bridge, entered holy orders, and was chaplain to Lord 240 REV. LAURENCE EUSDEN. Willoughby de Broke. At Howe's death, December 17] 8, Eusden was appointed his successor. The Duke of Newcastle was Lord Chamberlain at the time. The " versifier " had won the favour of that nobleman, by a poem addressed to him on his marriage with Lady Hen- rietta Godolphin. He had, however, other claims to the office of "the birthday fibber," for, besides propitiating the Lord Chamberlain by his far-fetched flatteries of him and his bride, he had published a poetical epistle to Mr. Addison, on the accession of the King to the throne. It is a tedious panegyric on George II. That monarch, he tells us, was, as a child, marvellously precocious; as a man, glorious from his heroic exploits. The banks of the Rhine are said to echo his praises. He had given names to mountains by his warlike deeds. The eulogy termi- nates with this sublime couplet : " Streams which in silence flowed obscnre before, Swell' d by thy conquests, proudly learn'd to roar." He had also, in 1717, followed this up with three poems of a similar character. The first, " Sacred to the Memory of the Late King," is an apotheosis of George I. The second, another laudation of George II., and as full of fulsome fustian as the former one. Take, for example, the four following lines : " Hail, mighty Monarch ! whom Desert alone Would, without Birthright, raise up to the throne ; Thy virtues shine peculiarjjr nice, Ungloom'd with a confinity to vice." The third is to the Queen, and teems with servile adulation and tiresome triplets. His appointment has very justly filled with indignation contemporaneous and succeeding writers. It is asserted by some, that no better man would accept office. More correctly is it stated by others that he owed his prefer- REVEREND LAURENCE EUSDEN. 241 inent to his unblushing flatteries of royalty and to the favour of the Lord Chamberlain. At any rate he did not escape the usual quantity of sarcasms, which have ensued on even fairer appointments to the laurel. Pope put him into "The Dunciad." Qpoke, the translator of Hesiod, who has himself a place in Pope's great satire, assailed him in " The Battle of the Poets," a clever poem, which deserves to be better known than it now is. The author was a man of considerable ability, a poet, scholar, and political pamphleteer. He is the man of whom Dr. Johnson said, that he lived twenty years on a translation of Plautus, for which he was always taking in subscrip- tions. It is also told of him, that he once presented Foote to a club, with* the following introduction : " This is the nephew of the gentleman who was lately hung in chains for murdering his brother." " The Battle of the Poets," though different in plan, may have been suggested to Cooke by the Frogs, of Aristophanes, or " The Re- hearsal." It is a contest of the poets of his day for precedence. Hermes is sent to invite them to the struggle. " He spoke, and Hermes, quick at his command, Conveyed the message to the Muse's land, All thank' d the God for his indulgence shown, For all were certain of the Laurel Crown." Then follows an invocation, quite after the epic fashion ; and throughout a mock-heroic dignity is sustained in a very diverting manner. * Pope is thus described : " First on the plain a mighty General came, In merit great, but greater still in fame, In shining arms advanced, and Pope his name. A ponderous helm he wore, adorn' d with care, And for his plume Belinda's ravish'd hair. Arm'd at all points the warrior took the field, With Windsor's forest painted on his shield." R 242 REVEREND LAURENCE EUSDEN. The Second Book opens with the attack on our Laureate versifier : " While in the Camp retir'd both armies lay, Some panting, others fearful of the day, Eusden, a laurell'd Bard by fortune rais'd, By very few been read, by fewer prais'd, From place to place forlorn and breathless flies, And offers bribes immense for strong allies. In vain he spent the day the night in vain, For all the Laureate and his bribes disdain. With heart dejected he return'd alone, Upon the banks of Cham to make his moan, Resolv'd to spend his future days in ease, And only toil in verse himself to please ; To fly the noisy Candidates of Fame, Nor ever court again so coy a Dame." Eusden has not been spared in prose or verse. Oldmixon, who was in all probability chagrined at not being preferred to the Bays himself, speaks thus of him in his " Art of Logic and Rhetoric :" " That of all the galimatias he ever met with, none came up to the verses of this poet, which have as much of the Ridiculum and Fustian in them as can well be jumbled together, and are of that sort of nonsense which so perfectly confounds all ideas that there is no distinct one left in the mind." Again he tells us " that the putting the Laurel on the head of one who writ such verses, will give futurity a very lively idea of the judgment and justice of those who bestowed it." The Duke of Buckingham made his appointment the subject of some amusing stanzas, called, in the third edition of that nobleman's * works, published in 1740, " The Election of a Poet-Laureat," but better known as "The Session of the Poets." A few of the verses we must quote: " A famous Assembly was summoned of late, To crown a new Laureat came Phoebus in state, With all that Montfaucon himself could desire, His Bow, Laurel, Harp, and abundance of Fire. REVEREND LAURENCE EUSDEN. 243 "At Bartlemew Fair ne'er did Bullies so justle, No country Election e'er made such a bustle : From Garret, Mint, Tavern, they all post away, , Some thirsting for Sack, some ambitious of Bay." Pope, Prior, Gibber, and Durfy arrive. Then " Lampooners and Criticks rush'd in like a tide, Stern Dennis and Gildon came first side by side, Apollo confess'd that their lashes had stings, But Beadles and Hangmen were never chose Kings." There follows a description of Steele ; and then " Lame Congreve, unable such things to endure, Of Apollo begg'd either a crown or a cure ; To refuse such a writer Apollo was loth, And almost inclin'd to have granted him both." The Duke next describes his own arrival : " When Buckingham came he scarce car'd to be seen, Till Phoebus desir'd his old friend to walk in, But a Laureat Peer had never been known, The Commoners claim'd that place as their own. " Yet if the kind God had been e'er so inclin'd To break an old rule, yet he well knew Ms mind, Who, of such preferment, would only make sport, And laugh'd at all suitors for places at Court." Apollo is so perplexed by the various conflicting claims of the congregated Bards, that in despair he confers the laurel on a spectator, described as "A hater of verse, a despiser of plays," And while all stand astounded at the election, this nodus is untied by the sudden advent of our " not incon- siderable versifier :" "At last rush'd in Eusden, and cried, who shall have it But I the true Laureat, to whom the King gave it ? Apollo begg'd pardon, and granted his claim, But vowed, that till then, he had ne'er heard his name." And so the squib goes off. Before Eusden gave the world the poems which have R 2 244 REVEREND LAURENCE EUSDEN. been mentioned as probably gaining for him this office, he published in 1714 a set of verses, which he had written and recited at the Public Commencement at Cambridge. When it is remembered that these limping heroics were spoken to an audience, partly composed of ladies, and chiefly addressed to them, their licence seems astonishing. Any extract we might give, would in this age of refine- ment infallibly place this work in the Index Expurgatorius of all fathers of families. And yet these prurient lines which we dare not quote, but which the curious may see in the Library of the British Museum, were specially composed and repeated for the edification and amusement of some of the noblest and fairest of our great-great- grandmothers. In 1718, Eusden addressed a poem to Her Royal Highness on the birth of a Prince. He soon after produced an " Ode for the New Year." In 1722 three pieces followed ; one to the Lord Chancellor on his being created Earl of Macclesfield ; the second to Lord Parker on his return from his travels ; the third to that nobleman on his matrimonial alliance with Mrs. Mary Lane. What the character of these lucubrations is, some idea may be formed from the nature of their subjects. The warmth of admiration and fervour of flattery is always above fever- heat : the merit below zero. In Nicholl's select collection his best poems are to be found, and among them some of his translations. Had he employed himself in giving versions of a few of the master-pieces of antiquity, he would have merited a better fame than can be acquired by feeble flat- teries of kings and nobles. In translation, he displays some command of language and smoothness of versifi- cation. He assisted in a version of Ovid's " Metamor- phoses," in which Dryden, Congreve, Addison, Tate, and others were his coadjutors. The whole of one book is by his hand, and so is the story of " Venus and Adonis" in REVEREND LAURENCE EUSDEN. 245 the tenth. Early in life, he had gained the esteem and patronage of Lord Halifax by translating into Latin his poem " On the Battle of the Boyne." He also gave a Latin version of Lord Roscommon's " Essay on Trans- lated Verse." He contributed to "The Guardian" two translations from Claudian. In " The Spectator" he wrote a " Letter on Idols." Little is known of the life of Eusden ; he appears to have retired to the living of Coningsby in Lincolnshire, where he took to drinking and translating Tasso. Gray, in a letter to Mason, writes : " Eusden was a person of great hopes in his youth, though at last he turned out a drunken parson." However much " bemused with beer," his inebriety did not altogether obstruct his literary labours, for he left behind him a manuscript translation of Tasso, with a Life of that Poet. He died September 27, 1730. The reader will, we fear, agree with us that more than enough has been said of this versifier. Though a clumsy courtier, his flatteries gained for him in that era patronage. In the present one, his powers of puffery would have been turned to a different account. He might have exhausted imagination in celebrating the virtues of blacking, or the praises of cheap clothing. COLLEY GIBBER. COLLEY GIBBER was eminent among his contemporaries as an actor, a dramatic writer, and a successful theatrical manager ; to us he is better known as the hero of " The Dunciad." He was born in Southampton Street, Strand, the 6th of November, 1671. His father, Caius Gabriel Gibber, or Cibert, a statuary by profession, was a native of Flensburg, in the Duchy of Holstein. He settled in England a short time previous to the Restoration, and became carver to the King's closet. To him we owe the bas-relief on the monument on Tower Hill, and the figures of Melancholy and Raving Madness at Bethlehem Hos- pital. He was twice married ; his second wife was a member of one of those families whose fortunes were wrecked through their faithful adherence to the cause of the Stuarts, and her grandfather, Sir Anthony Colley, at the close of the civil war, found his patrimony diminished from 3000 to 300 a-year. Colley Gibber was the fruit of this second marriage. When about ten years old he was sent to the free school of Grantham, in Lincolnshire, where he remained COLLEY GIBBER. 24? five years, and the slender stock of classical learning he there acquired, received little increase from study in after life. At school he was noted for conceit, carelessness, and quickness. He once received punishment for a bad theme, while his master, at the same time, announced that in parts it far exceeded in merit any that his competitors had produced. At the coronation of King James II. the school petitioned for a holiday ; the request was granted, provided an ode were first composed on the event. The boys were disheartened, but Gibber undertook the task and completed it in half an hour. His vanity, however, was so offensive on the occasion, that his schoolfellows excluded him from a pastime in which he was most desirous to participate. In 1687 his father took him from school, and sent him to stand at the election of scholars at Winchester, where, through the descent on the mother's side from the founder, William of Wykeham, he trusted to have ob- tained his admittance. Good easy man ! His soul must have been too much absorbed in his art, to have had time to contemplate the peculiarities of English man- ners. " Had he," says Gibber, " tacked a direction to my back and sent me by the carrier to the mayor of the town, to be chosen Member of Parliament there, I might have had just as much chance to have succeeded in the one as the other." A friendless boy presenting himself, without interest or recommendations, at the door of any of our munificent foundations for indigent scholars, would not be likely to excite much consideration. This, however, would result from the coldness and pride of our national charac- ter, and if there was blame on this occasion it lay not with the institution but with the father. The refusal taught him a lesson, and the second son profited by the mishap of the elder. He exerted himself; the present of a statue of the founder was convincing 248 COLLEY GIBBER. as to his worth; and the younger brother became a scholar at Winchester, and died a fellow of New College. The want of academical training is visible in the whole future career of Gibber, and his moral character suffered by being thrown, thus undisciplined, among the shift- ing quicksands of London life. The instant he heard of his failure, he hastened back to London, intent on spending an evening at the theatre before giving an account of himself at home. As he gazed upon the mimic scene, and heard the burst of applause that greeted each favourite actor, his heart heaved with emo- tion, and he pined to share that tinsel splendour and that empty approbation. He longed to become an actor, but suppressed, he says, " the bewitching ideas of so sublime a station," through dread of his father's displeasure. Fearing the temptation might become too strong if he remained within its immediate influence, he wrote to his father, requesting he might not have to wait another year for an election at Winchester, when he might only encoun- ter a second disappointment, but proceed at once to the University. His father, who was occupied at Chatsworth, under the Earl of Devonshire, seemed inclined to accede to his wishes, and as he had some years before made some sculptures for Trinity College, he trusted his acquaintance with some of the Heads of Houses might be of service in settling young Colley at Cambridge. Some months, however, elapsed, and to put a stop to his idleness in London, he was summoned to Chatsworth. On reaching Nottingham he found his father in arms, under the Earl, who had raised some troops in favour of William, Prince of Orange. As the old sculptor could make but an indifferent soldier, his son was readily accepted as his substitute, and he entered upon his new career with high glee. " At this crisis," he remarks, with his customary conceit, " it will be observed that the fate of COLLEY GIBBER. 249 King James, and of the Prince of Orange, and of myself were all at once upon the anvil." He had had but a few days to admire himself in his gay costume, when news arrived that, on the defection of the Prince of Denmark, the Princess Anne, fearing her father's resentment, had withdrawn herself by night from London, and was hasten- ing towards Nottingham ; and the report that two thou- sand of the King's dragoons were in hot pursuit, threw the new levies into a state of painful consternation. They scrambled to arms, and advanced with precipitation along the London road. Before they had proceeded many miles they met the Princess journeying leisurely in a coach, attended only by Lady Churchill, afterwards the famous Duchess of Marlborough, and Lady Fitzhardinge. The recruits, on being assured that no dragoons were in pur- suit, turned gallantly back; and escorted Her Highness into Nottingham, with a calm consciousness of superior valour. In the evening, the nobility and principal personages in the neighbourhood supped with the Princess. There being some dearth of attendants, Gibber's services were re- quested, and the post assigned to him was to wait on the Lady Churchill. Fifty years later, Gibber, in language of inflated exaggeration, described the effect the lofty Sarah's beauty produced upon his heart that evening. " All my senses were collected into my eyes, which, during the whole entertainment, wanted no better amusement than of stealing now and then the delight of gazing on the object so near me." Nor does the lapse of half a century seem to have chilled the warmth of his admi- ration. " A person," says he, " so attractive ; a husband so memorably great ; an offspring so beautiful ; a fortune so immense ; and (a title, which when royal favour had no higher to bestow, she could only receive from the Author of nature) a great-grandmother without grey hairs ! 250 COLLEY CIBBER. These are such consummate indulgences that we might think Heaven has centred them all in one person, to let us see how far, with a lively understanding, the full possession of them could contribute to human happiness/' On the establishment of the new dynasty, Gibber was one of the first who accepted a discharge. " Of all the comedians who have appeared on the stage in my memory/' says Chesterfield, in after years, " no one has taken a kicking with such humour as our excellent Laureate," and the sarcasm will tend to explain how so short a campaign served to dissipate his martial predilec- tions. His father's patron was now in high favour at court, and Gibber, at his instigation, drew up a petition to that nobleman, asking him for some appointment. The duke (for he had been rewarded with this advance in the peerage) told his father to send him to London, and indirectly undertook to provide for him. He waited there five months, and had some prospect of employment in the office of the secretary of state; but having now an opportunity of indulging his theatrical tastes, his inclina- tion towards the stage increased in intensity till it assumed the shape of an absorbing passion. " I saw no joy in any other life than that of an actor," says he ; " 'twas on the stage alone I had formed a happiness preferable to all that camps or courts could offer me, and there was I determined, let father and mother take it as they pleased, to fix my non ultra." Accordingly, he appended himself to the company at Drury Lane, then the only theatre open in London. The patentees had established a harsh though wholesome regulation, to the effect that no novice should receive pay before undergoing a probation of six months. Master Colley, as he was called, waited full three quarters of a year in anxious suspense, but no one in authority deigned to notice him. At length he was fixed upon to carry COLLEY GIBBER. 251 a message on the stage, and he could not control his emotion at having at last an opportunity of distin- guishing himself. As the eventful moment approached, however, he grew so timid, and in the end acquitted himself so ill, that the whole scene was disconcerted by his awkwardness. Betterton asked angrily who the fellow was that had so bungled. " Master Colley," was the reply. " Master Colley, then forfeit him." " Why, Sir, he has no salary," said the prompter. "No?" said Betterton, " then put him down ten shillings, and forfeit him five." This, Gibber tells us, he thought " a most plentiful accession, and himself the happiest of mortals. Not Alexander himself," says he, " nor Charles XII. of Sweden, when at the head of their victorious armies, could feel a greater transport in their bosoms, than I did then in mine, when but in the rear of this troop of comedians." The first part in which he obtained any decided success was in the Chaplain, in Otway's play of " The Orphan." He was almost overpowered with delight on the occasion, and the praise of Goodman at rehearsal took away his breath, and drew tears from his eyes. A most extra- ordinary story is told of this Goodman. Finding his salary as an actor too small to satisfy the demands of his appetites, he boldly took to the highway, as a means of increasing his income-. Being convicted of his crime, he was fortunate enough to obtain a pardon from King James. Goodman was so impressed with this instance of the royal clemency, that years afterwards, in 1696, he offered to assassinate William III., in order to testify his gratitude ! Gibber's success was assured by an event which brought him forward in a prominent part. The Queen had com- manded " The Double Dealer" to be played. Kynaston was to act the part of Lord Touchwood, but before the evening of representation arrived, that eminent actor fell ill and was unable to perform. By Congreve's advice, 252 COLLEY GIBBER. his part, after much misgiving, was assigned to Gibber, and the author's judgment was vindicated by the bril- liant way in which Gibber depicted the character. His salary was thereupon increased to twenty shillings a-week. He was not two-and- twenty when he thought himself prosperous enough to marry. Miss Shore was the object of his choice. Her father was so enraged at the match, that he squandered most of his property in building a retreat on the Thames, afterwards known as Shore's Folly, but which has long since been pulled down. He was reconciled to them, however, before he died, and left them some poor remnant of his once handsome fortune. Gibber's income at this juncture consisted of 20 a-year allowed by his father, and twenty shillings a-week, his salary as an actor. " To complete his fortune," he now tells us, " he turned poet." His constitutional hilarity of disposition bore him up through all his difficulties ; but the managers were tardy in appreciating his merits, and his advance was slow. On the secession of Betterton, Mrs. Barry and others, to the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, he received an increase of pay, to keep him from following in the train of the disaffected. The company by this rupture was reduced to the most grievous straits, as they had to withstand the competition of those who had hitherto proved their chief source of attraction. One part of the tactics of the rival theatres was to play the same pieces against each other, and thus try to outdo each other in the public favour by superiority of acting. The play that was first chosen to exhibit the respective merits of the anta- gonists, was Congreve's " Old Bachelor." Powell was to mimic Betterton in Heartwell, and, after some hesitation, the part of Fondlewife was entrusted to Gibber. Dogget had acquired great popularity in that character so great, in- deed, that the part and the actor were inseparably connected COLLET GIBBER. 253 in the public mind. Gibber, instead of striking out a new line for himself, which might jar with the public conception of the part, attempted the most minute imi- tation of Dogget, in voice, manner, face, and deportment. And so perfect was the resemblance, that many for some time thought it was Dogget himself on the stage, and the sight of that veteran actor in the pit, afforded no small gratification to the vanity of the successful copyist. Still the verdict of the public was not responded to by the manager. If Gibber asked for a part different to what he had been accustomed to play, he was met with the chill rebuff that " it was not in his way." A remonstrance of his, in reply to some such observation, is worthy the attention . both of actors and managers. " I thought," said he, " anything naturally written ought to be in any one's way that pretended to be an actor." This was thought then, as no doubt it would be now, an instance of conceit ; and it is because the truth of this remark is not sufficiently recognised, that we see so much comic power degenerating into buffoonery, and authors pandering to an actor's oddities instead of studying truth and nature. In 1695, Gibber offered a play of his own, called " Love's Last Shift," which, through the intervention of Southerne, author of " Oronooko," was brought out in January of this year. This piece was afterwards translated into French, under the whimsical heading of "La derniere chemise de 1'amour." Southerne, though he thought highly of the play, had a less favourable opinion of the author's powers as an actor. " Young man, I pronounce thy play a good one," was his observation. " I will answer for its success if thou dost not spoil it by thy own action." Gibber had given him- self the part of Sir Novelty Fashion, which was written to ridicule the tone of foppery then prevalent. The piece gave proofs of such ability, that Lord Dorset, the then 254 COLLEY GIBBER. 4 Lord Chamberlain and no bad judge in such matters said that " it was the best first play that any author, in his memory, had produced ; and for a young fellow to show himself such an actor and such a writer in one day was something extraordinary." Sir John Vanbrugh was so pleased with the play and the actor, that he wrote his " Relapse" as a sequel to it, and requested the principal character, Lord Foppington, might be given to Gibber. It may seem strange that our hero, a man of slight principle, should, as an author, commence his career as a reformer of the immorality of the stage. Writing from reading, rather than from observation, he contrived to extract purity from impurity ; and with materials bor- rowed from Etheredge and other licentious writers, pro- duced a play in which, contrary to the prevalent fashion, propriety was not made ridiculous. Vanbrugh, however, true to the older instincts, in his " Relapse," endeavoured to neutralize the wholesome effect of such a production ; and, with much wit and pleasantry, to degrade virtue from her novel elevation. Gibber, in the meantime, was unceasing in his efforts to gain applause as an actor, and his long and patient study obtained its deserved success. He appeared, with consi- derable approbation, in the characters of lago, Wolsey, Richard III., and others; but in tragic parts he never attained the excellence he had exhibited in comedy. His voice was deficient in depth and volume ; and so im- portant is voice in tragedy, that it may be doubted whether all other qualifications will not go for nothing if that one be wanting. In 1697, he produced "Woman's Wit, or the Lady in Fashion," which was but coolly received. His first play seems to have exhausted his stock of reading and observa- tion, which he had not had as yet sufficient time to replenish. His next effort, " Xerxes," a tragedy, was likewise a failure. COLLEY GIBBER. 255 In a paper in " The Tatler," Steele has a sly joke on the pre- mature fate of this play. Among the items in a theatrical inventory are " The imperial robes of Xerxes, never worn but once." In fact, our author evidently mistook his powers if he expected to excel in tragedy, for which neither his studies nor the original constitution of his mind, in the least degree, fitted him. In the following year (1700), he had a salve for his wounded vanity in the great success of his new comedy of "Love makes the Man, or the Fop's Fortune," which was brought out at Drury Lane. In the same year, he altered Shakespeare's " King Richard III." for the stage ; but the licenser cut out the whole of the first act, not allowing " the small indulgence of a speech or two, that the other four acts might limp on with a little less absurdity." This slashing application of the knife was occasioned by the zeal of the Master of the Revels for the existing order of things, fearing lest the people might be reminded by the miseries of King Henry VI. of the con- dition of their exiled King James ; so firm, at that time, was Whig reliance in the vaunted popularity of the glorious Revolution. The division among the players, which we shall enter into more particularly in a succeeding page, had been attended with serious results to both parties. Free trade in the drama was, by no means, a successful experiment in those days ; and the miseries to which the two com- panies were reduced by their competition has been gra- phically depicted by Gibber himself, who was one of the sufferers. The actors were seldom paid more than half their nominal salaries, and sometimes performed for six weeks together without receiving a day's pay ; and Gibber, in these straits, found the proceeds of his pen a most welcome supply. " It may be observable, too," says he, " that my muse and my spouse were equally prolific, 256 COLLEY GIBBER. that the one was seldom the mother of a child, but in the same year the other made me the father of a play. I think we had a dozen of each between us, of both which kinds some died in their infancy, and near an equal number of each were alive when I quitted the theatre." In 1703, his comedy, " She would and she would not, or the Kind Impostor," was brought out at Drury Lane ; and, in the following year, he produced " The Careless Husband," which, it is generally conceded, is by far the best of his productions. Pope has adverted to the high esteem in which this piece was held in his Imitations from Horace : " The people's voice is odd ; It is, and it is not, the voice of God. To Gammer Gurton if it give the bays, And yet deny The Careless Husband praise." This work is a master-piece in its way, and presents, perhaps, the most favourable specimen of Gibber's genius. Congreve used to say of him, that his plays had many things that looked like wit but were not wit. Certainly he was deficient in that unrivalled felicity, which could dispose each gem in the setting that would best set off its lustre ; but, on the other hand, his dialogue gained in ease, and, if less striking, was more natural, and did not seem a mere vehicle for the introduction of choice sayings. "The Careless Husband" owes little to plot or incident. The characters are not such as would at first sight excite much interest, and the broader features of comedy are wanting. The manners are those of fashionable life, which are apt to pall when continued unrelieved through a lengthened performance, and the whole dramatis per- sona are but seven ; but there is a polish and a grace pervading the whole composition which charms the spectator ; and the attention is kept alive, and curiosity COLLEY CIBBER. 25? excited throughout, to a degree which evidences the hand of a master. In 1706 he again attempted a tragedy, and brought out his " Perolla and Isadore," which ran a week and then sank into oblivion. His two comedies, " The Double Gallant, or the Sick Lady's Cure," and " The Lady's Last Stake, or the Wife's Resentment," followed during the subsequent year. The former of these two plays, through caprice or mis- management, was not a favourite on its first appearance ; but on its revival two years afterwards, its merits were better appreciated, and it became a stock play. The latter showed talent, but this perpetual harping on the same string began to tire. The follies of fashionable life admitted not of much variety, and Gibber detecting the changing senti- ments of his auditors, turned to other sources of interest. Owen Swiney had now taken the theatre in the Hay- market, upon some understanding with Rich, the most influential of the patentees of Drury Lane. Rich had excepted to his engaging Gibber, but without avail, as, on some dispute between the two, Gibber, thinking him- self ill-used, left Rich and joined Swiney. The two theatres, however, coalesced in the following year, when as his friend, Colonel Brett, had obtained a share in the patent, Gibber returned to Drury Lane. This was the Brett who married the Countess of Macclesfield, the reputed mother of Savage. In 1709, on the suspension of the privileges of the patent by the Lord Chamberlain, Gibber, in conjunction with Wilks, Dogget, and Mrs. Oldfield, returned to the Haymarket, where two years afterwards he obtained a share in the management ; and his vanity, his most prominent characteristic through life, was in a flutter of excitement on the occasion. He became joint patentee of Drury Lane, being associated with Collier, Wilks, and Dogget. s 258 COLLEY GIBBER. His conduct as a manager presents the brightest side of his character. The judgment and resolution he dis- played, strange in one of so mercurial a temperament, the mismanagement he corrected, the difficulties he overcame by his marvellous equanimity and perseverance, and the strict punctuality he observed in all pecuniary engage- ments, constituted him, in the opinion of one well com- petent to judge, " a character of as singular utility to the theatre as any that ever existed." We embrace so tempting an opportunity to suspend the narrative, in order to present to the reader a rapid sketch of theatrical history from the time of Davenant to the final retirement of Gibber. As we have observed in a preceding memoir, at the Restoration two companies were established by royal letters patent. In the dearth of existing dramatic talent, their principal resource lay in the older writers, and parti- cularly in the works of Shakespeare, Jonson, Massinger, and Fletcher, with the understood proviso that the two theatres should never bring out the same play at the same time. In the rivalry of competition, Davenant, probably during a temporary depression, called in auxiliary aid, and by opera, masque, and spectacle, outran his competitor in public favour. Killegrew took up the same weapons, and angry altercations arose between the two companies, while both seemed on the verge of ruin. In 1684, Betterton, who had succeeded Davenant in the management, to put a stop to these dissensions, pro- posed a union. A suspension of hostilities was agreed upon, and the companies united under Davenant's patent. This, with the dormant one of Killegrew, had all the proper- ties of personal estate. Davenant bequeathed it to his son Charles ; he assigned it to his brother Alexander, who sold it to Christopher Rich, a lawyer. From Rich it went COLLEY CIBBER. 259 to his son, who devised it to his four daughters, of whom it was purchased by Colman and others. At the junction of the two companies, they performed at Drury Lane under the title of the King's Company, and cheered themselves with the flattering assurance of comfortable success. In this, however, they were speedily deceived. The management, freed from the spur of com- petition, grew lax and negligent, audiences decreased, and while the patentees dictated their own terms to the actors, they were unable to enjoy their monopoly in peace among themselves. Of the twenty shares into which the profits were divided, ten had been appropriated to the proprietors, and the remaining ten, in certain proportions, to the actors. The proprietors who took the one moiety were likewise ten in number. These, impelled by whim or necessity, sold their shares or parts of their shares ; and thus money- lenders and speculators were introduced into the manage- ment, who obtruded their voices and gave their votes on matters of which they knew absolutely, nothing. The natural consequences ensued, receipts diminished, and the incompetent managers revenged their own folly on the helpless actors by diminishing their quota of the profits. Betterton, who to save the two companies from ruin, had planned the coalition, now perceived that the remedy had become worse than the disease, and abetted by the principal performers, he, through the medium of Lord Dorset, represented their case to the consideration of King William III. The patentees, secure in their fancied rights, by the advice of Rich, maintained that by law no other patent could be granted. This assumption was stigmatized by the opposite party as a slight on the Prerogative; and the lawyers consulted by Betterton, unanimously gave as their opinion, that the grants of Charles interfered not in the slightest degree with the power of any succeeding Prince to confer similar privileges s 2 260 COLLEY GIBBER. at discretion. The patentees saw their error, and made overtures of reconciliation. At this crisis Queen Mary died, and the closing of the theatre gave Betterton time to mature his designs. The opposite party, in the meantime, were not idle ; they doubled the salaries of their actors, and beat up for recruits in all quarters. The principal performers, how- ever, felt that the cause of Betterton was their own; they had an audience of the King, who promised them his protection, and were empowered by royal licence to open a theatre for themselves. Subscriptions were instantly set on foot to provide the necessary funds ; there was no lack of popular sympathy, and they established themselves in the Tennis Court in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The patentees were necessarily beforehand, and com- menced the campaign with Mrs. Behn's " Abdelazar, or the Moor's Revenge," the prologue to which was Gibber's first attempt in literature. In about a fortnight's time, such was the incredible diligence of Betterton, the rival house opened (April 13th, 1695) with Congreve's "Love for Love," and the success of this play was so unpre- cedented, that it sufficed of itself to keep the theatre afloat during the whole season. Various devices were resorted to by the Drury Lane company to win back public favour. Rich, chagrined at the preference given to the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields by persons of distinction, and calculating on the influence servants possessed over the actions of their masters, resorted to the unworthy expedient of opening the gallery free to footmen and others, who had before been excluded altogether from the house. " If he did this to get applause," says Gibber, " he certainly succeeded, for it often thundered from the full gallery above, while the thin pit and scanty boxes below were in a state of perfect serenity." The privilege once accorded, became COLLEY GIBBER. 261 a most formidable nuisance, and was with difficulty abolished. Another device of this crafty lawyer was to admit " fast men" behind the scenes, sometimes on payment of money, sometimes gratis ; and the same authority observes that, " the inconveniences of the custom we found so intolerable, when we afterwards had the stage in our hands, that at the hazard of our lives we were forced to get rid of them." The tide of public favour, however, at first ran strongly with Betterton, but gradually " the novelty of encouraging merit wore off." The Drury Lane company, likewise, conscious of inferior talents, exerted themselves with the greater diligence ; the actors and actresses were younger, and more ambitious of distinction. Gibber, Southerne, and Vanbrugh wrote for them; while Betterton's company, too confident in their merit and experience, flushed with success, grew slothful and negligent, and were in turn neglected. Finding their popularity on the wane, they accused the capriciousness of the public, the public recriminated on their supineness, and when they followed the example of Drury Lane, in only paying the actors and employes as receipts fell in, their condemnation was unreserved. It was about this time that Collier's famous book appeared. Posturing and tumbling now became fashionable frivoli- ties, in which the two theatres condescended to a degrading rivalry, Vanbrugh, for some cause unexplained, deserted Drury Lane, and projected a new theatre to be built in the Hay market, with a more especial view in its con- struction to the requirements of opera and spectacle. The necessary powers were obtained, and the theatre was built in 1705. It opened with operas, the principal performers singing in Italian, the rest singing and reciting in English. 262 COLLEY CIBBER. The situation of the theatre, however, was disadvantageous. Drury Lane, being near the city and the Inns of Court, the principal support of the theatres, felt the benefit of the propinquity. A walk along the ill-paved and worse- lighted Strand, was then a formidable undertaking, and cabs had not been invented. In the following year Betterton, sinking in years, and finding his affairs in an unprosperous state, induced his fellows to dissolve partnership, and advised them to put themselves under Congreve and Vanbrugh at the Hay- market. Congreve declined the labour of management, Vanbrugh was unequal to it, and was desirous of amal- gamating with Drury Lane. Rich, at the latter theatre, by incessant scheming, had absorbed nearly the whole pro- prietorship into his own hands. When he heard that Van- brugh's new theatre was in the market, he grasped at that likewise, but, in his cunning, overreached himself. Under a formal verbal agreement, which he intended as a blind, he empowered one Swiney, whom he regarded as his tool, to treat with Vanbrugh as in his name, intending to take advantage of or to reject the bargain, according to the issue of the speculation. Swiney treated for it with Van- brugh, and purchased it, ingratiated himself with several actors, was joined by Gibber and others, and then boldly pressed Rich to fulfil at once his part of the contract. This led to a rupture, and the credit of ingenuousness and fair dealing lay in public estimation with Swiney. Rich, instead of having an accomplice, had raised up a competitor. The last remaining partner of any importance at Drury Lane had been Sir Thomas Skipwith. He, disgusted with Rich's meddling propensities, had presented his share to Colonel Brett. Brett began at once to busy himself at the theatre, and, being a man of fashion, endeavoured to raise the tone of the place. By Gibber's COLLEY GIBBER. 263 advice, he proposed a partnership between the two theatres, which, through his interest with the Vice-Chamberlain, he was enabled to carry into effect. The terms were, that the performances at Drury Lane should be kept distinct, so that the former should confine itself to the drama, and spectacle and opera should be relegated to the latter. The agreement lasted but a year, for Rich, who delighted in confusion, and was jealous of all interference, opposed Brett in all his plans, frightened him by imaginary liabilities brought by fictitious claimants, and Skipwith was induced to resume his gift. Rich, now autocrat of the theatrical world, began to torment the actors, who, as there was no hostile theatre to take refuge in, were obliged to submit to his per- verseness ; everything fell into confusion, and the manager was happy. The actors complained to the Lord Cham- berlain, who issued an order to close the house. Mean- while Swiney's powers were enlarged, and he treated with the ejected actors for the production of plays at the Haymarket. Gibber's influence had been strongly, though secretly at work through all these shifting circumstances. He had a marvellous keenness of vision, where his own interests were concerned, and possessed, or assumed an unruffled equanimity, which blinded all suspicion of his designs. He pursued his aim with that patient pertinacity which can almost compel success, and he now reaped the reward of his clear-sightedness. Rich's power was annihilated, an independent and powerful company was formed, and the Haymarket opened under the man- agement of Wilks, Dogget, Mrs. Oldfield, and Gibber. Mrs. Oldfield soon retired upon a special allowance, and Gibber, by playing off his intractable coadjutors the one against the other, and making himself the referee upon all occasions of dispute, obtained the great object of his ambition, the entire and actual management. 264 COLLEY CIBBER. Rich had hired Drury Lane, on the condition that he should pay 3 a-night while the house was open. As the house was now closed, and the payment of rent sus- pended, the proprietors, without cancelling his lease, granted another to one Collier, a lawyer, M.P. for Cornwall. By his interest at Court, he obtained a sepa- rate licence ; and flourishing this lease and licence against Rich's lease and patent, he seized the occasion of a night of public rejoicing, and with a mob at his heels, broke into the house, and violently ejected the rightful tenant. In these prosaic times, how curiously do we look back upon those roystering days of tumultuous licence. This dashing feat actually overwhelmed Collier with popu- larity ; and by the aid of Miss Santlowe's acting in " The Fair Quaker of Deal," his house filled nightly. Rich bowed, with a forced composure, to these strange and adverse circumstances, and turned his attention else- where. Upon the dissolution of Betterton's company, he had taken a lease of the house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, in order that no one else might open it ; and he now fell back upon that property, and undertook to rebuild it. He died, however, before its completion, though his son afterwards opened it, and enjoyed there a prosperous career. It stood behind the present College of Surgeons, and the principal entrance was in Portugal Street. Here Quin played all his characters. Here Fenton produced his " Mariamne ;" and Miss Lavinia Fenton, the original Polly Peachum, by her wit and sprightliness, here fascinated a ducal heart, and became afterwards Duchess of Bolton. Giffard, from Goodman's Fields, took it on lease in 1732. In 1756, it was transformed into a barrack. It was next converted into a china repository, and was taken down in August, 1848, to make room for the improvements in connection with the Royal College of Surgeons. COLLET GIBBER. 265 Gibber, at the Haymarket, was now sanguine in the anticipation of success; hut unexpected circum stances balked his well-grounded expectations. Sache- verell's trial became the all-absorbing topic of interest, and Collier's success at Drury Lane materially interfered with his receipts. Eventually, however, the tide turned. Collier, as soon as his speculation began to fail, and Swiney's to succeed, coolly proposed an exchange, with the restoration of the old agreement, that Drury Lane should be appropriated to drama and the Haymarket to opera and spectacle. He succeeded in compelling the acceptance of this unfair proposal ; when finding matters not at all mended by the change, he again audaciously availed himself of his enormous interest at Court to reverse his own imperious arrangement. A fresh mandate was issued, Swiney was obliged to return to the Haymarket, and, in consequence, to retire to Boulogne, and expiated, by a twenty years' exile, Collier's tyranny and mismanagement. Everything went wrong, till Collier was bribed to abstain from interfering in any way with either of the theatres. He was paid 700 a-year to remain idle ; and the three actors Gibber, Wilks, and Dogget began their celebrated management. The part- nership commenced in 1711. Gibber's tactics were those of a consummate general. Resigning the vulgar ambition of ostentatious power, he aimed to control, and direct its secret springs ; and the perverse and self-opiniated co-managers were made unconsciously the mere puppets to work out his schemes. The obstinacy and tenacity of purpose of Wilks, the frowardness and meddling industry of Dogget, became mere instruments in his hands, which he pointed and used with consummate tact; but in nothing was his address more apparent or his efforts more laudable than in the financial department. Dogget was parsimonious, Wilks 266 COLLEY GIBBER. inclined to expense. Gibber made the propensity of each a check on that of the other, and was himself so bent on equity and fair dealing, that, for the first time, perhaps, in theatrical management, for the space of twenty years, every tradesman's bill was paid directly it was sent in ; and although, by a somewhat unusual arrangement, no written agreement was ever entered into with the actors, and the sums appended to their names on the pay-list were their only security, yet every one connected with the theatre received their dues without disputes, and with exemplary punctuality. Every Monday morning all claims were liquidated before a penny of the receipts were touched, and the managers could, in addition, afford to double the salaries of all their actors. All was now smooth sailing, consequently there is little to record. One feature in the management may deserve the attention of contemporary actors and managers. These men all, perhaps, exceeding in abilities any actors of the present day never declined to take an insigni- ficant part to strengthen the general cast of a play. Starring was not then the supercilious folly of every successful actor. The company accordingly worked toge- ther better, the gratification of the public was increased, while the actor himself gained in the variety and extended range of his powers. In 1714, Dogget, in a huff, retired to make way for Booth, who had acquired universal popularity by his performance of Cato, in Addi- son's play. At the accession of George I., Gibber, with wary keen- ness, perceived a chance of ridding himself of Collier. Their licence being held at pleasure, on Queen Anne's death a renewal became necessary. Sir Richard Steele had great influence at Court, especially with the Duke of Marlborough. He had always manifested a strong predi- lection for the theatre, and had frequently eulogised the COLLEY GIBBER. 267 actors in his papers in " The Tatler." Gibber resolved to play off Steele against Collier, and succeeded. Steele applied to the Duke, and through his influence, obtained a licence in the names of himself, Gibber, Wilks, and Booth; and, as with the change of ministers Col- lier's influence vanished, he was quietly thrown over- board. Young Rich opened the new house in Lincoln's Inn Fields under his father's patent. Gibber preferring the permanency of a patent to the more temporary security of a licence, thought the present a favourable opportunity to apply for a similar privilege. He represented the case to Steele, and Steele obtained a patent for his own life and three years afterwards, which he assigned to Gibber, Wilks, and Booth, confirming their right in the entire property, reserving to himself a quarter of the profits. The patent was dated 19th Jan. 1715. The race was now between Gibber and the younger Rich. Gibber started with his usual skill and confidence, but suffered a temporary check by a clever though malicious ruse of his antagonist. A report was actively circulated that the edifice in Drury Lane was insecure, as the foundations were sinking. The rumour obtained such credit that the actors had to play to empty benches ; and until an architect had formally surveyed the building, and published a written attestation of its security, Rich's company reaped the fruits of their audacious calumny. As soon as Gibber gained upon his antagonist, Rich fell back upon artificial aid, and introduced those pantomimic performances which still retain possession of the stage. Gibber likewise, though much against his conscience, made auxiliaries of Pantaloon and Columbine, and the old game of Davenant and Killegrew was played over again. Rich, however, whose performances as Harlequin are still fmaous in theatrical annals, completely captivated the galleries, 268 COLLEY CIBBER. and might have realized a handsome competence had not mismanagement always kept him poor. The personages of the pantomime, though of recent introduction in this country, are of almost immemorial antiquity in their native Italy. Their expressive gestures were the delight of the ancient Romans, and disarmed the gravity of statesmen and philosophers. Through the changing manners of successive centuries, their characters underwent various modifications. In later times Harlequin especially degenerated from his early sprightliness and humour, until the comic muse of Goldoni re-invested him with his present attractions. We present an extract on this subject from the memoirs of that entertaining writer, which, we feel assured, no reader will blame for its length. " Comedy, which has at all times been the favourite spectacle of civilized nations, had shared the fate of the arts and sciences, and been swallowed up in the ruin of empires, and the decline of letters ; but the germ of comedy was never quite extinct in the fertile imagination of the Italians. The first who laboured to revive it being disappointed, during a dark age, in skilful writers, had the boldness to compose plans, to divide them into acts and scenes, and to utter as impromptus, conversations, thoughts, and pleasantries which were previously con- certed. Those who could read (and the rich were not of the number) observed that the comedies of Plautus and Terence always contained fathers who were dupes, debauched sons, amorous girls, lying valets, and corrupt maid-servants; and, traversing the different cantons of Italy, they took their fathers at Venice and Bologna, their valets at Bergamo, their enamoured youths and maids, and their soubrettes in the states of Rome and Tuscany. " We must not wait for written proofs of this reasoning, because we are speaking of an age in which writing was COLLEY GIBBER. 269 nearly unknown ; but I prove my assertion in this manner. The pantaloon has always been a Venetian, the doctor a Bolognese, and the harlequin and clown have ever been from Bergamo ; from these places the actors took those comic characters which are known to us by the name of the four Italian masks. I advance these remarks not entirely from my own conception ; I am in possession of a manuscript of the fifteenth century, in good preservation, bound in parchment, which contains a hundred and twenty subjects or canvases of Italian pieces, called comedies .of the art, and of which the principal basis consists invariably of a pantaloon, a Venetian merchant ; the doctor, a lawyer of Bologna ; Brighella and Harlequin, valets of BeBgamo ; the first quick and active, the other heavy. Their antiquity and permanent existence prove their origin. With regard to their employment, the pantaloon and the doctor, whom the Italians call the two old men, represent the part of fathers or other venerable characters. The first is a merchant, because Venice was in those ancient times the richest and most extensive commercial country in Italy. He has ever preserved the ancient Venetian costume. The black robe and woollen bonnet are yet worn at Venice ; while the red waistcoat, breeches cut like drawers, and red stockings and slippers represent exactly the dress of the ancient inhabitants of the Adriatic lagoons ; and the beard, which was a great ornament in those distant ages, has been carried to a grotesque extreme in these latter days. The second old man, called the doctor, has been selected from the legal profession for the purpose of contrasting the learned with the commercial man ; and he is from Bologna because an university existed in that city, which, with all the ignorance of the time, yet adhered to the charges and emoluments of professors. His dress preserves the ancient costume of the bar of Bologna, which is nearly the same to this hour ; and the singular 270 COLLEY GIBBER. mask which covers the forehead and nose, has been imitated from a wine mark which deformed the face of a lawyer in those days. This tradition yet exists among the amateurs of the comedy of art. The Brighella and Harlequin, called in Italy the two Zanies, have been bor- rowed from Bergamo. The adroitness of the first, and the extreme heaviness of the second, are proofs of this assertion ; because in no other country do we find these two extremes in the class of the people. Brighella repre- sents an intriguing, roguish, dishonest valet. His dress is a kind of livery ; and his tawny mask is a satire on the complexion of the inhabitants of those lofty mountains, scorched by the heat of the sun. The Harlequins also have their different names ; but they are always natives of Bergamo, heavy and clownish, and their dress represents a poor devil, who picks up pieces of different stuffs and colours to mend his clothes. The hat corresponds with their beg- gary, and the tail of a hare, with which it is decorated, is to this day the usual ornament of the peasants of Bergamo." In this country the functions of the two last-mentioned characters have been reversed. The harlequin is the active personage, and the brighella is the clown or servant. In 1720, Steele opposed some ministerial measure, and offended thereby the Duke of Newcastle. That nobleman, who was then all-powerful, summoned the patentees, and in a peremptory manner, required the resignation of 'their patent, offering to grant them a licence in its stead, which of course it would have been in his power to suspend at pleasure. The managers stoutly refused compliance. The Duke became angry, and threatened to close the theatres, but had the good sense to take no further notice of the matter. Dennis, a Whig, took up the cudgels in behalf of his patron, and with the usual consistency of his party, thus alludes to the liberties of Englishmen when they happen to COLLEY GIBBER. 2?1 be actors. The language is as elegant as the sentiments are generous. " Actors in England," he writes, " have always been looked upon as vagabonds and rogues by statute, unless they have been under the protection of our kings, or some of our English peers ; yet in this last case I have been credibly informed that for great mis- demeanours they have been sent to Whitehall, and whipped at the porter's lodge, and I have heard Joe Haines (a celebrated actor) more than once ingenuously own that he had been twice whipped there. If Gibber in the days of King James, or King Charles L, had dared to treat a Lord Chamberlain with half the insolence that he has lately done the present, his bones would have been as bloody as his head is raw." A few years after this incident Gibber figured in West- minster Hall as the defendant in a chancery suit, and acquitted himself with unusual adroitness and ability. Steele's improvidence had reduced him to frequent pecu- niary straits, and he had found it convenient to borrow various sums of money from his co-patentees. His appli- cations occurring, however, at continually lessening in- tervals, it was resolved to refuse all further advance until existing accounts could be arranged. Steele conceived such grave displeasure at this, that he entirely neglected his duties at the theatre, and left his share of the work to be performed by the rest at their convenience. The remaining managers accordingly undertook his duties, and appropriated to themselves 1 13s. 4d. a day each, as compensation for their additional labour. This ar- rangement was acted upon during the space of three years when Steele's creditors interfered. His affairs by this time were completely in the hands of the lawyers, and at their instance he was induced to file a bill in chancery to contest the right of the managers to retain any portion of his share of the profits. The cause came on for 272 CCLLEY CIBBER. hearing in 1726 before Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls. Gibber pleaded his case in person, and obtained the applause of all who heard him, and what, perhaps, he scarcely valued as much, a verdict in his favour. The triumph was the more flattering as the two opposite counsel were both men of note, who each afterwards suc- cessively rose to be Lord Chancellor of England. In 1728, " The Beggar's Opera," written in ridicule of the Italian opera, and the effect of which was popularly said to make Rich gay and Gay rich, was brought out at Lincoln's Inn Fields. The play had been offered to Gibber, but by an oversight, committed occasionally by shrewd men of experience, he had declined it. The hint of the piece had been given by Swift, but Congreve, Pope, and Swift all doubted whether it would fail or succeed. During the first act they were still hesitating, when they heard the Duke of Argyll, who was in the next box, exclaim : " It will do, it must do, I see it in the eyes of them." Pre- sently a burst of applause approved the keenness of the Duke's perception, and the enthusiasm increased till the fall of the curtain. The mania this piece excited through- out the country is incomprehensible. Ladies learnt the songs; scenes from it were painted on their fans, and adorned the walls of their houses, and the Italian opera was for a while exploded. From this period Drury Lane declined. Steele died in the following year ; Mrs. Oldfield in 1730. Booth fell ill; and in 1731 Wilks, too, died. These accumulated mis- fortunes so affected the reputation and efficiency of the theatre, that, though it made a vigorous effort, it never recovered its position until Garrick, some years afterwards, brought new powers into the field, and resuscitated the system that Gibber had so prosperously carried out. In 1732 the patent expired, and Gibber .without much trouble obtained its renewal for twenty-one years, in behalf of COLLEY CIBBER. 27 3 Booth, Mrs. Wilks, and himself. Booth sold a half of his share to a man named Highmore, who knew nothing of theatrical matters ; Mrs. Wilks appointed one Ellis to act for her, who was equally unqualified, and Gibber foreseeing nothing but ruin, closed with an offer of Highmore, and sold his share for 3000 guineas. About this time, like- wise, a rage for theatrical speculation sprang up. Odell built a theatre in Goodman's Fields, in 1729; Giifard another in 1732, and Rich opened the theatre in Covent Garden on the 7th of December of the same year. Fielding, with his Great Mogul's Company, took the Haymarket, and the ferocious satires of that extraordinary writer induced the government to pass the celebrated bill limiting the number of theatres, and obliging all managers to submit their pieces to the supervision of a licenser. We now recur to Gibber's dramatic career. After the comparative failure of his last play,* he was meditating what new line he could take up, when an event occurred which he had the skill to avail himself of, and he adroitly made a public calamity minister to his private benefit. The rebellion in Scotland, in favour of the Pretender, gave him the cue, and he accordingly made a formal and vigorous attack on Jacobitism in his play, "The Non- Juror," founded on the "Tartuffe," of Moliere. His success was great, although such success depends more on the temper of the audience than the merit of the piece, and is always one-sided ; for, though he pleased many, he offended many, who could still remain faithful to their earlier predilections. He acquired, however, a noisy popu- larity. Lintot, the publisher, gave him a hundred guineas for the copyright, an unprecedented price at that time ; and on presenting a copy to King George I. his magna- nimity did not restrain him from pocketing 200 as the reward of his triumph over the fallen. * See page 257. T 274 COLLEY GIBBER. In 1730, he was dignified by the laurel. The appoint- ment was owing, not to any poetical merit he may have manifested, but to the fact of his having proved himself a sound Whig, by writing " The Non-Juror." The ridicule poured upon him on this occasion was unsparing, and it was not diminished by the publication of his successive Birth-day Odes. " Well, said Apollo, still 'tis mine To give the real Laurel ; For that, my Pope, my son divine, Of rivals ends the quarrel. " But guessing who should have the luck To be the Birth-day fibber, I thought of Dennis, Tibbald, Duck, But never dreamed of Gibber." His enemies had been on the increase for some years past, and persecuted him with a pertinacity and bitterness of which we fortunately have no instance in the present day. Periodical publications attacked him with unre- mitting industry. Attempts were made at the outset to stifle plays which eventually, by their continued popu- larity, proved their adaptation to the public taste, and the merciless satire of Pope selected him as its choicest victim. It is difficult now to detect the causes of such rancorous hostility, as there appears little in his genius or character to warrant it. In a letter to Pope, he gives the following account of the origin of that poet's ill-feeling towards him, and, as the assertion was suffered to go forth without contradiction, we may assume that from so contemptible a cause arose that long enduring contention. " The play of ' The Rehearsal/ " says Gibber, " which had lain some few years dormant, being by his present Majesty (then Prince of Wales) commanded to be revived, the part of Bays fell to my share. To this character there had always been allowed such ludicrous liberties of observation upon anything new or remarkable in the state COLLEY GIBBER. 2?5 of the stage as Mr. Bays might think proper to take. Much ahout this time, then, the 'Three Hours After Marriage' had been acted without success, when Mr. Bays, as usual, had a fling at it ; which in itself was no jest, unless the audience would please to make it one. But however, flat as it was, Mr. Pope was mortally sore upon it. This was the offence : In this play, two coxcombs being in love with a learned virtuoso's wife, to get unsus- pected access to her, ingeniously send themselves as two presented rarities to the husband, the one curiously swathed up like an Egyptian mummy, and the other slily covered in the pasteboard skin of a crocodile ; upon which poetical expedient, I, Mr. Bays, when the two kings of Brentford came from the clouds into the throne again, instead of what my part directed me to say, made use of the words : ' Now, Sir, this revolution I had some thought of introducing by a quite different contrivance ; but my design taking air, some of your sharp wits, I found, had made use of it before me ; otherwise I in- tended to have stolen one of them in the shape of a Mummy, and the other in that of a Crocodile !' Upon which, I doubt, the audience, by the roar of their applause, shewed their proportionable contempt of the play they belonged to. But why am I answerable for that ? I did not lead them by any reflection of my own into that con- tempt. Surely, to have used the bare words Mummy and Crocodile was neither unjust nor unmannerly. Where, then, was the crime of simply saying there had been two such things in a former play ? But this, it seems, was so heinously taken by Mr. Pope, that in the swelling of his heart, after the play was over, he came behind the scenes, with his lips pale and his voice trembling, to call me to account for the insult ; and accordingly fell upon me with all the foul language that a wit out of his senses could be capable of. How durst I have the impudence to treat T 2 276 COLLEY CIBBER. any gentleman in that manner, &c. Now let the reader judge by this concern who was the true mother of the child ! When he was almost choked with the foam of his passion, I was enough recovered from my amazement to make him, as near as I can remember, this reply : ' Mr. Pope, you are so particular (distinguished) a man, that I must be ashamed to return your language as I ought to do ; but since you have attacked me in so monstrous a manner, this you may depend upon, that as long as the play continues to be acted, I will never fail to repeat the same words over and over again/ Now, as he accord- ingly found I kept my word for several days following, I am afraid that he has since thought that his pen was a sharper weapon than his tongue to trust his revenge with ; and however just cause this may be for his so doing, it is, at least, the only cause my conscience can charge me with." The play thus glanced at with such fatal effect, was a miserable performance, the joint production, as it was surmised, of Gay, Arbuthnot and Pope, which deservedly failed on the first night of representation. Pope, however, had previously sneered at Gibber in his epistle to Arbuthnot, and in the First Part of "The Dunciad." In 1740, when Gibber published his apology, he made the following characteristic allusion to the attacks of the satirist : " When," says he, " I find my name in the satirical works of this poet, I never look upon it as any malice meant to me, but profit to himself. For he considers that my face is more known than most in the nation, and therefore a lick at the Laureate will be a sure bait, ad captandum vulgus, to catch little readers." The passage nettled Pope, and he attacked Gibber again in the Fourth Book of " The Dunciad," representing him as the darling of the Goddess of Dulness. " Soft in her lap her Laureate son reclines." COLLEY CIBBER. 277 Gibber's equanimity was disturbed, and he published the letter from which we have made the above extract, entitled, " A Letter from Mr. Gibber to Mr. Pope, inquiring into the motives that might induce him, in his satirical works, to be so frequently fond of Mr. Gibber's name." This was replied to in an anonymous pamphlet, with the remarkable title of "A Blast upon Bays, or a New Lick at the Laureate ; containing remarks upon a' late tattling per- formance ;" hut Gibber was not entirely without champions, as one man warmly took up his cause in a letter with the motto : " Tu ne cede mails sed contra audentior ito." Throughout the whole quarrel, Gibber had by far the best of it, both in temper, discretion, and the justice of his cause. His warm recognition of his antagonist's great abilities, contrasts with the asperity and the want of candour in Pope, in refusing to recognize any talent in one of the most successful dramatists of the day. " That Gibber," says the former, " ever murmured at your fame, or that he was not always, to the best of his judgment, as warm an admirer of your writing as any of your nearest friends could be, is what you cannot by any one fact or instance disprove. How comes it then, that in your works you have so often treated him as a dunce or an enemy ? Did he at all intrench on your sovereignty in verse, because he had now and then written a comedy that succeeded ?" The blows that the combatants dealt upon each other, fell with more telling effect on Pope's sensitive organiza- tion than on the thicker self-sufficiency of his antagonist. Pope, though he attempted to disguise his agony, was tortured by the wanton levity and shamelessness of his opponent. Dr. Johnson says : " I have heard Mr. Richardson relate that he attended his father on a visit, 278 COLLEY CIBBER. when one of Gibber's pamphlets came into the hands of Pope, who said : ' These things are my diversion.' They sat by him while he perused it, and saw his features writhen with anguish, and young Richardson said to his father, when they returned, that he hoped to be preserved from such diversion as had been that day the lot of Pope." Whereas Gibber could enjoy his own castigation, and would read to his friends the lines pointed at himself, interspersing them with humorous observations, which were as amusing to his auditory as they would have been galling to their object. Pope now meditated a new edition of " The Dunciad," and was spurred on to the undertaking by another pamphlet, entitled "The Egotist, or Colley on Gibber," which Mr. Disraeli regards as Gibber's " Supplement to his Apology." In the latter end of 1743 "The Dunciad" appeared, in its altered and final state. Theobald had been dethroned from his painful pre-eminence, and Gibber raised to his place. Pope, in this instance, allowed his irascibility to cloud his judgment, and thus marred the whole design of the poem. Theobald, as its hero, was perhaps in his place, but to make Gibber the hero of dul- ness, was preposterous. He was without doubt open to attack in innumerable points, but he possessed one quality in which his superiority could enable him to laugh at all detraction, and that was the very reverse of dulness. The poem was accompanied by a long Discourse of Richard Aristarchus, intended as a reply to Gibber's attacks, written by Warburton, in which he aimed his blow at two anta- gonists at once, ridiculing Bentley in his manner, and Gibber in his matter. This called forth another letter from Gibber, which was the final effort in the strife. Though the wonderful superiority of talent in Pope made the contest so unequal from the first, yet Gibber kept the laugh on his side throughout ; and it may be COLLEY CIBBER. 2? 9 doubted whether the satire of Pope has not, in the estimation of posterity, injured his own character and reputation more than Gibber's. Still, with all his levity and vivacity, our hero could not be quite obtuse to the keen point of such a missile. " After all," says Mr. Disraeli, " one may perceive that, though the good-humour of Gibber was real, still the immortal satire of Pope had injured his higher feelings. He betrays his secret grief at its close, while he seems to be sporting with his pen ; and though he appears to confide in the falsity of the satire, as his best chance for saving him from it, still he feels that the caustic ink of such a satirist must blister and spot wherever it falls." He quitted the stage the same year in which he was appointed Poet-Laureate. The following ten years he employed in drawing up his memoirs, which he published under the title of " An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Gibber," a life which Fielding said he lived only to apologize for. This work has been the most popular of all his productions, and has obtained the praise of men of such diverse tempers as Horace Walpole and Dr. Johnson; the former terming it " Gibber's inimitable treatise on the stage," while Johnson pronounces it to be " very entertaining." It is a rambling book of gossip, written in a slovenly style, but filled with interesting notices of the most eminent actors and actresses of his time. They, too, were performers of no ordinary merit ; and such a work, on its first appearance, must have exceeded in interest any novel or romance. His character, as there uncon- sciously depicted by himself, presents little to excite our sympathy, still less our esteem. His inordinate vanity represses any impulse of admiration his talents might excite ; and that utter abnegation of all self-respect, 280 COLLEY CIBBER. strange in one who had risen by his own unaided effort, affords room only for contempt or pity. Writing of the Earl of Chesterfield, he says : " Having often had the honour to be the butt of his "raillery, I must own I have received more pleasure from his lively manner of raising the laugh against me, than I could have felt from the smoothest flattery of a serious civility." English literature presents few instances of such abject toadyism. Still he had talents, and let them receive their tribute of admi- ration ; he did a service to his generation, and let him have his meed of praise. He was a patient reformer of inveterate abuses. By his writings he elevated the morality of the stage, and by his policy he improved its manage- ment. His private life stands in unfavourable contrast with his public career. Witty and unprincipled, clever and vain, he lived only to amuse and be amused ; a genuine comic actor, with no depth of feeling or strength of character ; undepressed by misfortune, but elated with success ; fond of his bottle, fond of his jest, fond likewise of the rattle of the dice. Though undeserving the excessive depreciation he has suffered, a candid impartiality will refuse to connect any flattering encomium with his name. Whatever the debt contemporaries may owe, they who make it their chief business to cater to the public amusement merely, have little claim upon a succeeding generation ; and his works having answered their purpose, will be solely valuable to the literary or historical student, as indicative of the taste of a period he neither disgraced nor adorned. In height he was of the middle size, with a fair complexion, and a carriage easy, though not graceful. His voice was shrill, painfully so when he raised it to an unusual pitch ; but his attitudes were strikingly expres- COLLEY GIBBER. 281 sive. On the stage he seemed to put on the character he was acting, and every limb and gesture spoke the part as truthfully as the words he uttered. Instances of care- lessness, however, were not (infrequent. Once, when acting as Sir Courtly Rice, a part he had played a hundred times, he quite lost himself; so, making a ceremonious bow to the lady with whom he was acting, he drawled out, " your humble servant, Madam," then with quiet assurance walked across the stage, and said to the prompter, " Well, what next ?" From the time of his retirement from the management of Drury Lane till his death, he took no prominent part in theatrical matters; but occasionally appeared on the stage, and would receive as much as 50 a night for his services. There was a rising actress, in whose career he took a warm and lively interest, and that was Mrs. Woffington : the witty, the volatile, the beautiful Peg Wof- fington, President of the Beefsteak Club; who, at the jocund noon of night, after having melted an audience into tears by her touching impersonation of innocence and sorrow, might be seen at the head of the board, brandish- ing the foaming pewter, giving as the toast, " Here's to liberty, confusion to all order." He delighted to play Fondlewife to her Lsetitia in Congreve's " Old Bachelor;" and Swiney, likewise, in his old age, after his twenty years residence abroad, became one of her danglers, and left her a handsome legacy at his death. In 1745, Gibber appeared as Pandulph, in his tragedy " Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John," and his last publication was an essay on the character of Cicero, then a popular topic, owing to Dr. Middleton's celebrated life of that orator. He died December 12th, 1757, in the eighty-seventh year of his age. He had conversed with his servant at six o'clock in the morning, and appeared in 282 COLLEY CIBBER. his usual health, at nine he was found quite dead. Of his many children, two only acquired any notoriety, his son Theophilus, who was a great profligate, but a tolerable actor, and, like his father, excelled in the characters of fops and old men, and his youngest child Charlotte. A witticism of the son has been preserved. The father once meeting him dressed in the extreme of foppery, surveyed him curiously for some minutes, and then said, with great disdain : " Indeed, The, I pity you." " Don't pity me, Sir," replied the son, " pity my tailor." The career of his daughter Charlotte was so eccentric, replete with such singular vicissitudes, that we cannot resist devoting a paragraph to her memory. She seemed to labour under a deficiency in some one faculty, which more than neutralized the unusual activity of all the rest. Ardent, intelligent, and persevering, her conduct ever bordered on the extravagant ; a Lola Montes in her day, though with greater virtue, and, therefore, not so fortunate as to win the favour of kings and guardsmen. The principal materials of this sketch are to be found in a narrative written by herself, and dedicated to herself, to which she affixed the following appropriate motto : " This tragic story, or this comic jest, May make you laugh or cry, as you like best." In very early life she gave indications of an excitable temperament, and an unruly will. Among her juvenile pranks, she relates how one morning, when but four years old, she got up early, put on her father's wig, dressed herself as well as she could in male attire, and mimicing the paternal strut, went out to receive the obeisances of the passers-by : how, on another occasion, her father was awoke by deafening acclamations, and on looking out of the window, beheld his hopeful daughter making a tri- COLLEY CIBBER. 283 umphal entry into the village, sitting astride upon an ass, and attended by a retinue of screaming urchins, whom she had bribed to take part in the procession. At eight years of age she was sent to school, and devoted herself to her studies with passionate vehemence. The needle, woman's ordinary weapon against inactivity, she could never learn to manage ; but every masculine pursuit or amusement had for her an irresistible attraction. She would hunt, shoot, ride races, dig, drink beer, do anything, in short, that a young lady ought not to do. At fourteen, she went to live with her mother at a house near Uxbridge. There she became a capital shot, would rise early, spend the whole day at her sport, and return home, laden with spoil. Her gun, at the suggestion of a good-natured friend, was soon taken away from her, and she revenged herself by attempting to demolish the chimneys of the house, by firing at them with a huge fowling-piece that had hung over the kitchen mantel-piece. To the gun succeeded the curry-comb, and she became an adept in all the mysteries of the stable. She next applied herself to the study of physic, obtained some drugs, and with formal gravity practised among those poor people who were credulous enough to swallow her concoctions. Her next employment was gardening, which she pursued with her usual enthusiasm, and after two or three hours hard work would not allow herself rest even for her meals, but with some bread and bacon in one hand, and a pruning knife in the other, continue unremittingly her self-imposed labour. At this time her father was abroad, and the man who acted in the double capacity of groom and gardener, was for some irregularity dismissed. Charlotte was in ecstasies, as she was now arch-empress of his two-fold domain, and unceasing were her manoeuvres to prevent the engagement of a successor. The dismissed servant having been seen straying near the house one evening, suspicions 284 COLLEY GIBBER. were aroused, which Charlotte skilfully inflamed by her dark suggestions, and then boldly undertook the defence of the leaguered house. The plate was carried up into her room, which she garnishe'd with all the weapons of war the establishment could afford, and then sent the household to bed. After a long vigil, to her great mor- tification, no attack was made, universal silence prevailed, when luckily a cur began to bark. Up went the window, and volley after volley was poured into the unoffending void, while her mother and the domestics lay below in trembling consternation. While still a girl, she married Mr. Charke, an eminent composer on the violin, but he was a worthless libertine, and after the birth of a daughter, they separated. She then obtained an engagement on the stage, and relates with childish simplicity, how for a whole week she did nothing but walk from one end of the town to the other, to read her name on the bills. Her success was such as to justify expectations of her becoming a most accomplished actress, and as Lucy in " George Barnwell," she attracted considerable attention ; but she soon quarrelled with the manager, and afterwards satirized him in a farce she wrote, termed " The Art of Management." She then tried a new sphere, and opened a shop in Long Acre, as oil-woman and grocer, and her whole soul was absorbed in the fluctuations of sugar. The shop did not pay, and she quitted it to become the proprietress of a puppet-show, by which she lost all she had, and was arrested for a debt of seven pounds. Her release was effected by the con- tributions of some acquaintances, when she dressed herself in male attire, and assumed the name of Mr. Brown. Under this disguise, she engaged the affections of a young heiress, to whom, in order to escape a private marriage urged by the amatory damsel, she was compelled to disclose her secret. Shortly afterwards, she exhibited her valorous spirit by knocking a man down with a cudgel for having COLLEY GIBBER. 285 fabricated some story at her expense. She next obtained a situation as valet-de-chambre to a nobleman, where she appears for a short time to have known something like comfort ; but on being dismissed from this place, she became extremely reduced, her child fell ill, and ruin stared her in the face. A timely supply from a friend relieved her from her more immediate necessities, and with some small remainder she set up as an itinerant sausage- seller. This, like her other avocations, did not prove remunerative ; and we next hear of her as a singer at some musical enter- tainment, then as a performer at Bartholomew fair, then as assistant to a master of legerdemain. She next, by means of some advances made by an uncle, opened a public-house in Drury Lane, the first she saw 7 vacant, which of course failed ; and her next employment was as a waiter in a tavern at Marylebone. Here she made herself so useful that a kinswoman of the landlady intimated that her hand would not be refused if applied for, and the captivating waiter to escape a second involuntary marriage, was obliged again to reveal the secret of her sex. She next engaged herself to manage Punch at a puppet-show, and afterwards joined a band of strolling players. Tired of wandering, it would seem, she settled at Chepstow, and opened a pastry-cook's shop. When she had built her oven, she had not where- withal to heat it, and when she had obtained the fuel, she was without the necessary materials for her trade ; but every obstacle gave way before her ingenuity and perse- verance. After a short trial, she removed her business to Pell, a place near Bristol, received a small legacy, with which she paid off her debts, and commenced life afresh. She wrote a short tale for a newspaper, and obtained there- by a situation as corrector of the press ; but her earnings at this toilsome occupation being insufficient to support her, she obtained employment as prompter at the theatre at Bath. She afterwards returned to London, and kept a 286 COLLEY GIBBER. public-house at Islington, but as we bere lose tbe aid of her narrative, her movements at this epoch are uncertain. She finally had recourse to her pen for subsistence, and began the publication of her memoirs. Her next production was a novel, and a graphic picture has been given of her home at this period. When the publisher with a friend called for the purpose of purchasing her manuscript, she was living in a wretched hut near the Clerkenwell prison. The furniture consisted of a dresser extremely clean, ornamented with a few plates ; and a fractured pitcher stood underneath it. A gaunt domestic guarded the establishment, while on a broken chair by the grate sat the mistress in her strange attire. A monkey was perched on one hob, a cat on the other, at her feet lay a half-starved cur, and a magpie chattered from her chair. The remains of a pair of bellows laid upon her knees served as a desk, her ink- stand was a broken teacup, and her solitary pen was worn to the stump. On her visitors seating themselves on a rough deal board, for there was not a second chair in the room, she began with her beautiful, clear voice to read from the manuscript before her, and asked thirty guineas for the copyright. The grim handmaiden stared aghast at the enormity of the demand. The iron-hearted publisher pro- posed five pounds, but finally doubled the sum, and offered in addition fifty copies of the work. The bargain was struck, and the authoress was left in temporary affluence. From this time Mrs. Charlotte Charke disappears from our view, and she died shortly afterwards on the 6th of April, 1760. So strange a story coulfl hardly be paralelled from the wildest pages of romance. Through an infinite variety of endeavours, success never once shone upon her path, and old age found her in a state of the most abject penury. After so fitful a fever, how welcome must have been the advent of repose. WILLIAM WHITEHEAD. To those who are giving to contemporaries some mention of an age that is past, and of names well-nigh forgotten, it is a hard task to judge how much it may be worth a struggle to save from the wreck of oblivion. If heroes have perished, because no song of poet hymned their daring deeds, has not the fame of poets themselves been oftentimes perilled by their biographers? William Mason, the author of " Caractacus," wrote a memoir of his friend Whitehead, which has been condemned by Boswell as a mere dry narrative of facts. The world has been content to forget the book and its subject ; and but for the brief biographical notice of Mr. Campbell, how few would know anything of Colley Gibber's immediate successor. And yet the author of " The Roman Father," and of " Creusa" has much in his "writings more worthy of perusal, much in his literary history more deserving of record, than many of the poetasters whose names the genius of Johnson has saved from that silent sentence of forgetfulness which time so sternly passes upon mediocrity. It is as difficult not to regret, as it is easy to account 288 WILLIAM WHITEHEAD. for, this general ignorance of all save our greatest writers. The history of our literature is biographical. Its annals teach by examples. - And so we speak of the age of Dryden, and of Pope, and of Johnson, as if the literature of each of the eras was represented by these men alone, and there was no work for others to do in it. The long line of light is shed through the dark centuries by the great stars. Where they shine at distant intervals the heaven is blacker, but need we close our eyes to the twinklings of those lesser fires, without whose ray the interspace were darkness ? W. Whitehead was born in the parish of St. Botolph's, in the town of Cambridge. He was the son of a baker, whose notoriety for worldly waste and mismanagement has been perpetuated by the nickname of " Whitehead's Folly" being given to a few acres of land, on which he expended large sums of money " in ornamenting rather than culti- vating." Mr. Mason has penned an elaborate apology for the poet's humble parentage, and Mr. Campbell has ridi- culed Mr. Mason for a defence so needless. William was the second son ; his elder brother John was educated for the Church, and, by the interest of Lord Montfort, obtained the living of Penshore in the diocese of Worcester. The baker's taste for model farming so involved him, that he died considerably in debt ; and the subject of this memoir, from the profits of his theatrical writings, most honourably discharged the claims of his creditors. Mr. Mason speaks of this conduct of his friend with exultation, and for once indulges a facetious vein in terming it " a rare instance of poetical justice." Whitehead was at first sent to a school in Cam- bridge, and thence removed to Winchester. Mr. Mason quotes an account given of him by Dr. Balguy, who, as Canon of Winchester Cathedral, had enjoyed opportunities of procuring some information in reference to Whitehead's WILLIAM WHITEHEAD. 289 school career. He very early showed his taste for poetry, and is said to have written a comedy at sixteen. Through life he was a good reader and reciter of poetry, and early evinced some histrionic talent; for in the winter of 1732, he took a female part in the " Andrea" of Terence, and also gained much applause by his impersonation of Marcia in " Cato." Some proof of his early poetical powers is given by an anecdote told of a visit of Pope to the school in 1733. The veteran satirist was staying at the Earl of Peter- borough's, near Southampton, and was taken by his Lordship to Winchester to see the College. The Earl gave on the occasion ten guineas, to be disposed of in prizes to the boys, and Pope set as a subject for English verse " Peterborough." Whitehead was one of six who gained prizes. His successful essays in verse were confined to his mother-tongue ; for in Latin epigrams and verses he was deficient. We are told, however, that he was em- ployed to translate into Latin the first epistle of the " Essay on Man." Next to his poetical and histrionic tastes, his school-days have been chiefly mentioned as the time when he formed some of those friendships with the great which were ultimately of much advantage to him. At Winchester he was the associate of Lord Drumlanrig, Sir Charles Douglas, Sir Robert Burdett, Sir Bryan Broughton, and other boys of patrician birth. For this, and his long residence in the house of Lord and Lady Jersey, he has not escaped the charge of toadyism. Mr. Macaulay has called him "the most successful tuft-hunter of his day." One of his biographers suggests that his delicacy of mind and body may have led him to such companions, in preference to boys of coarser habits. The apology is more amiable than sagacious. Though he may possibly have preferred such u 290 WILLIAM WHITEHEAD. society, on grounds less culpable and more disinterested, there was doubtless a mixture of prudence and vanity in his selection of his friends. A boy of his parentage was flattered by the friendship of the great. And he lived in days when, unless a poor man had transcendent parts, he could not prosper without patronage. ."Principibus placiusse viris hand ultima laus est," was a line in those days much quoted, and very freely translated ; and though Whitehead lived in what has been called called the transition age, from the protection of patrons to that of the public, many men will be found in that era, and later too, who, in dedications and else- where, have laid themselves open to the charge of toadyism, as much as ever he did. We should also remember, that a boy of such humble birth would scarcely have been received as an equal by the sons of gentlemen ; and if he was to be a dependent at all, he doubtless preferred being so among the greatest. In September, 1735, he stood among the candidates for New College, but was placed so low on the roll that he was not sent up. Being superannuated, he was com- pelled to leave Winchester. He returned to his mother at Cambridge, and now derived more advantage from his humble extraction, than from his own abilities, or his aristocratic school-friendships. Mr. Thomas Pyke, a baker at Cambridge, had founded some scholarships at Clare Hall. Whitehead's claim, as the orphan son of a man of the founder's vocation, was admitted, and he entered as a sizar. His career as an author commenced at the University ; for as a student little is known of him, except that he was industrious and economical, and enjoyed the friendship of Hurd, Stebbing, Ogden, and other distinguished contemporaries. He wrote some verses in 1736, as did many other young men at both WILLIAM WHITEHEAD. 291 Universities, on the marriage of the Prince of Wales. But his first poem, which attracted any attention, was his epistle, " On the Danger of Writing Verse," which may indeed be said to point its own moral, and belongs to that class of composition of which Dr. Johnson has observed, that he would rather praise than read. We hear, however, that it was generally admired, and that Pope himself spoke of it with commendation. Smooth verse of average merit, from a very young man at College, striving by his pen to supply his necessities, was not likely to provoke hostile criticism, especially when there was nothing in it bold, new, or heterodox, to jar against prevailing tastes and prejudices ; and imitation is flattery so delicate and sincere, that Pope would doubtless encourage even a faint echo of his own matchless lines from an admirer and disciple. In 1739 he took his Bachelor's degree. In 1742 he was elected a Fellow of his College, and the following year was made Master of Arts. It was now his intention to take orders. That he was about to embrace this profession with no higher motive than a wish to gain a competence, which might enable him to pursue his literary avocations, we have some reason to believe. He was actuated by no very high or holy impulse, for he speaks, in a fragment of verse to a friend, with great levity of his professional prospects : " Whether in wide-spread scarf and rustling gown, My borrow'd Rhetoric soothes the saints in Town, Or makes in country pews soft matrons weep, Gay damsels smile and tir'd Churchwardens sleep." Before, however, he took this step, he was offered by Lord Jersey the place of domestic tutor to his son, Lord Villiers. He not only relinquished, at Lord Jersey's request, all idea of entering on the clerical profession, but he ultimately gave up his Fellowship, in order to keep his u 2 292 WILLIAM WHITEHEAD. position in that family. After the publication of his poem, " On the Danger of Writing Verse," he wafc not idle with his pen, but gave to the world, in 1743, "Atys and Adrastus," " A Letter of Anne Boleyn to Henry VIIL," and " An Essay on Ridicule." There is a manifest improvement in all these on his first production. After all, however, he but feebly imitates Pope. Some who lack originality, seem to atone for it by the force of their language. By this they cheat the indiscriminating, and therefore the majority of readers, into admiration. But this showy talent, much at a premium in these days, White- head, in his poems, does not display. His thoughts are not original, and they are expressed in obscure, meagre, and sometimes ungrammatical language. He now entered the family of Lord Jersey, and at this time he appears to have been a frequent habitue of theatres, and to have turned his thoughts to dramatic composition. His first production was a ballad farce, called " The Edinburgh Ball," in which the young Pre- tender is ridiculed. Had it ever seen the light, posterity might have been tempted to connect with this triumph over the fallen, his appointment to the laurel, but it was neither printed nor performed. He next employed himself on a tragedy, and produced "The Roman Father," in imitation of Corneille's " Les Horaces." Mr. Campbell ob- serves " that Mason has employed a good deal of criticism to show that the piece would have been better if the artist had bestowed more pains upon it." It turns on the well- known story, told with such graphic power in the first book of Livy. Those who remember that beautiful narra- tive, will feel convinced that no drama could place it in a clearer or more picturesque light before them. In the tale itself there is not material for a five act play; and where Whitehead has added or altered, he has not im- proved. WILLIAM WHITEHEAD. 293 The scene is laid at Rome. There are six dramatis persona; onrf two women, Horatia and a confidential friend, Valencia. The armies are encamped opposite to each other. Horatia is full of apprehension for her lover, Curiatius, one of three twin Alban brethren, and distracted between her duty to her betrothed and her brother Hora- tius. Meanwhile, the encamped hosts lay aside their arms and conclude a truce, but as glory must have its victims, the contest is to lie between three of either army. The Horatii and Curiatii are represented as personal friends, and, during the truce, joking amicably in each other's tents. The lots are cast. The three twin brothers are to be arrayed against each other. News first reaches Horatia and her father that the Horatii are chosen as the champions of their country. He rejoices ; she is full of fears for her brother. Next arrives the intelligence that the Curiatii are to do battle on the Alban side. The agony of Horatia may be well imagined and might have been finely described. The father arms his son Horatius, and sends him forth with prayers for victory. His sister supplicates him to decline the conflict. Its results are well known. After her lover's death, Horatia provokes her brother by her taunts until he draws his sword and wounds her; and these taunts are so violent that his conduct appears almost excusable. This is neither true to the story nor natural, There is something super- romantic in her wishing to die by the hand that had slain her lover, when that hand is her brother's. She, how- ever, does not die by the wound inflicted; but, as Mr. Campbell tells us, directions are given in one edition, for stripping the bandages from off her wounds, and she perishes from loss of blood. This is assuredly a stage horror which Horace would have prescribed, as certainly as he did the banquets of Thyestes, or the butcheries of Medea. There are very few lines in the play worthy of extract. 294 WILLIAM WHITEHEAD. It is tolerably well adapted for acting, but we may owe this to Garrick almost as much to the author, for when he accepted the play, he exercised his discretion very freely, and was unsparing in his use of the knife. On the stage it was fairly successful. The following year, 1750, he published his " Hymn to the Bristol Spring," an imitation of some of the hymns of Homer and Callimachus. It is written in blank verse, and is better than the heroics he had given to the world while at Cambridge. At the same time appeared " The Sweepers." This is a dismal attempt at a humorous poem in blank verse, into which is introduced a pathetic tale of seduction. A very beautiful maiden, who delights in the name of Lardella (one much better used in "The Rehearsal"), is a sweeper in Seven Dials. She aspires to a crossing in Whitehall, and having attained the object of her ambition, she there attracts the gaze of a licentious lordling, by whom she is ruined, deserted ; and we are told that " In bitterness of soul she cursed in vain : Her proud betrayer, curs'd her fatal charms, And perish'd in the streets from which she sprang." There are, doubtless, seducers among the aristocracy ; but Lardella's sad history, if not ludicrously improbable, is, at any rate, ludicrously told. In addition to his dramatic and poetic compositions, he appears, at this time, to have written three papers for " The World." This periodical numbered among its contributors, Lord Chesterfield, Lord Bath, Sir Charles Hanbury, Horace Walpole, Soame Jennings, Mr. Cam- bridge, Mr. Coventry ; its editor was Mr. Thomas Moore. The first of Whitehead's is humorous, and in ridicule of the prevalent taste of that day for Chinese articles of every kind. The second is on " Contemporary Romances," which he lashes severely for their shallow pretensions, their WILLIAM WHITEHEAD. 295 inaccuracy, and indecency. The third laments the effemi- nacy of the agfc. Encouraged by the success of his former drama, he employed himself on one which very much exceeds it in merit. As in a former case, he had grounded his play on one written by another. So now, too timid to construct a new plot, he therefore took his subject from the " Ion" of Euripides ; " and," as Mr. Campbell says, " with bold and sometimes interesting alterations." Whitehead himself says of it : " The subject of the following scenes is so ancient, so slightingly mentioned by the historians, and so fabulously treated by Euripides in his tragedy of c Ion,' that the author thought himself at liberty to make the story his own. Some glaring circumstances he was obliged to adhere to, which he has endeavoured to render probable." The " Ion," though it has incurred the critical censure of Schlegel for some improbabilities and repetitions, is one of the most beautiful of the dramas of Euripides. A short account of that play in connection with the " Creusa" of Whitehead, may not prove unacceptable to the reader the coincidence of the name, and our admira- tion of it as perhaps the most beautiful classical drama in the language, will compel us also to pay a passing tribute to the " Ion" of Sir Thomas Talfourd. The story, as told by Euripides, runs thus : Creusa, daughter of Erectheus, King of Athens, falls a victim to the licentious passion of Apollo, and bears a child, whose birth she conceals, and whom she exposes. He is, however, found, and brought up as servant to the god at the temple. After this, Creusa is married to Xuthus, a military stranger. They are childless, and go to the Oracle at Delphi to make inquiries (v. 66.) : jjKovfft Trpog fjiavTEi 'ATrdXXwvoc epwn TTCU'^W*'' Aofr'ete c rr) 296 WILLIAM WHITEHEAD. rour' iXavvei, KOV \e\rj6ev, we yap eiffeXOovTi iiavrtiov roS TOV avrov irdifia, KCU Tretyv KEIVOV ff(f>e Qrjcrei, pyrpOG os iXdby yvwtrdrj Kpeovo-r;, KO.I yapot re Aoliov KpVTrrot yivutvrat, irals r e-^r) T "And here to Loxias' Oracle are come Yearning for children. Nor doth God forget^ But helpeth on the matter to this end. For when old Xuthus to the sacred shrine Cometh, t'will give up to him his own son His origin revealing, so the youth May hie him to his mother's home, and there Be recognised by her Apollo's loves Be kept in sacred secresy and Ion Gain all things fitting his estate and birth." % When Creusa appears at the Oracle, Ion meets her, and asks her for what purpose she comes ? She is reminded of the scene of her early amour with the god, and ex- claims (v. 251.) : Gfwv* Tt &/ra ; Trot diKrjv afoi(TofJLv, el T&V Kpa.Toi)VT