The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 10, August, 1858

A veil with visionary trappings hung,
And o'er his Virgin Queen the fairy-texture flung."[9 - WARTON: Birthday Ode, 1787.]

Samuel Daniel was not only a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, but more decidedly so of her successor in the queendom, Anne of Denmark. In the household of the latter he held the position of Groom of the Chamber, a sinecure of handsome endowment, so handsome, indeed, as to warrant an occasional draft upon his talents for the entertainment of her Majesty's immediate circle, which held itself as far as possible aloof from the court, and was disposed to be self-reliant for its amusements. Daniel had entered upon the vocation of courtier with flattering auspices. His precocity while at Oxford has found him a place in the "Bibliotheca Eruditorum Præcocium." Anthony Wood bears witness to his thorough accomplishments in all kinds, especially in history and poetry, specimens of which, the antiquary tells us, were still, in his time, treasured among the archives of Magdalen. He deported himself so amiably in society, and so inoffensively among his fellow-bards, and versified his way so tranquilly into the good graces of his royal mistresses, distending the thread, and diluting the sense, and sparing the ornaments, of his passionless poetry,–if poetry, which, by the definition of its highest authority, is "simple, sensuous, passionate," can ever be unimpassioned,–that he was the oracle of feminine taste while he lived, and at his death bequeathed a fame yet dear to the school of Southey and Wordsworth. Daniel was no otherwise Laureate than his position in the queen's household may authorize that title. If ever so entitled by contemporaries, it was quite in a Pickwickian and complimentary sense. His retreat from the busy vanity of court life, an event which happened several years before his decease in 1619, was hastened by the consciousness of a waning reputation, and of the propriety of seeking better shelter than that of his laurels. His eloquent "Defense of Rhyme" still asserts for him a place in the hearts of all lovers of stately English prose.

Old Michael Drayton, whose portrait has descended to us, surmounted with an exuberant twig of bays, is vulgarly classed with the legitimate Laureates. Southey, pardonably anxious to magnify an office belittled by some of its occupants, does not scruple to rank Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton among the Laurelled:–

"That wreath, which, in Eliza's golden days,
My master dear, divinest Spenser, wore,
That which rewarded Drayton's learned lays,
Which thoughtful Ben and gentle Daniel bore," etc.

But in sober prose Southey knew, and later in life taught, that not one of the three named ever wore the authentic laurel.[10 - See his British Poets, from Chaucer to Jonson, Art. Daniel. Southey contemplated a continuation of Warton's History, and, in preparing for that labor, learned many things he had never known of the earlier writers.] That Drayton deserved it, even as a successor of the divinest Spenser, who shall deny? With enough of patience and pedantry to prompt the composition of that most laborious, and, upon the whole, most humdrum and wearisome poem of modern times, the "Polyolbion," he nevertheless possessed an abounding exuberance of delicate fancy and sound poetical judgment, traces of which flash not unfrequently even athwart the dulness of his magnum opus, and through the mock-heroism of "England's Heroical Epistles," while they have full play in his "Court of Faëry." Drayton's great defect was the entire absence of that dramatic talent so marvellously developed among his contemporaries,–a defect, as we shall presently see, sufficient of itself to disqualify him for the duties of Court Poet. But, what was still worse, his mind was not gifted with facility and versatility of invention, two equally essential requisites; and to install him in a position where such faculties were hourly called into play would have been to put the wrong man in the worst possible place. Drayton was accordingly a court-pensioner, but not a court-poet. His laurel was the honorary tribute of admiring friends, in an age when royal pedantry rendered learning fashionable and a topic of exaggerated regard. Southey's admission is to this purpose. "He was," he says, "one of the poets to whom the title of Laureate was given in that age,–not as holding the office, but as a mark of honor, to which they were entitled." And with the poetical topographer such honors abounded. Not only was he gratified with the zealous labors of Selden in illustration of the "Polyolbion," but his death was lamented in verse of Jonson, upon marble supplied by the Countess of Dorset:–

"Do, pious marble, let thy readers know
What they and what their children owe
To Drayton's name, whose sacred dust
We recommend unto thy trust.
Protect his memory, and preserve his story;
Remain a lasting monument of his glory:
And when thy ruins shall disclaim
To be the treasurer of his name,
His name, that cannot fade, shall be
An everlasting monument to thee."

The Laureateship, we thus discover, had not, down to the days of James, become an institution. Our mythical series shrink from close scrutiny. But in the gayeties of the court of the Stuarts arose occasion for the continuous and profitable employment of a court-poet, and there was enough thrift in the king to see the advantage of securing the service for a certain small annuity, rather than by the payment of large sums as presents for occasional labors. The masque, a form of dramatic representation, borrowed from the Italian, had been introduced into England during the reign of Elizabeth. The interest depended upon the development of an allegorical subject apposite to the event which the performance proposed to celebrate, such as a royal marriage, or birthday, or visit, or progress, or a marriage or other notable event among the nobility and gentry attached to the court, or an entertainment in honor of some distinguished personage. To produce startling and telling stage effects, machinery of the most ingenious contrivance was devised; scenery, as yet unknown in ordinary exhibitions of the stage, was painted with elaborate finish; goddesses in the most attenuated Cyprus lawn, bespangled with jewels, had to slide down upon invisible wires from a visible Olympus; Tritons had to rise from the halls of Neptune through waters whose undulations the nicer resources of recent art could not render more genuinely marine; fountains disclosed the most bewitching of Naiads; and Druidical oaks, expanding, surrendered the imprisoned Hamadryad to the air of heaven. Fairies and Elves, Satyrs and Forsters, Centaurs and Lapithae, played their parts in these gaudy spectacles with every conventional requirement of shape, costume, and behavior point-de-vice, and were supplied by the poet, to whom the letter-press of the show had been confided, with language and a plot, both pregnant with more than Platonic morality. Some idea of the magnificence of these displays, which beggared the royal privy-purse, drove household-treasurers mad, and often left poet and machinist whistling for pay, may be gathered from the fact that a masque sometimes cost as much as two thousand pounds in the mechanical getting-up, a sum far more formidable in the days of exclusively hard money than in these of paper currency. Scott has described, for the benefit of the general reader, one such pageant among the "princely pleasures of Kenilworth"; while Milton, in his "Masque performed at Ludlow Castle," presents the libretto of another, of the simpler and less expensive sort. During the reign of James, the passion for masques kindled into a mania. The days and nights of Inigo Jones were spent in inventing machinery and contriving stage-effects. Daniel, Middleton, Fletcher, and Jonson were busied with the composition of the text; and the court ladies and cavaliers were all from morning till night in the hands of their dancing and music masters, or at private study, or at rehearsal, preparing for the pageant, the representation of which fell to their share and won them enviable applause. Of course the burden of original invention fell upon the poets; and of the poets, Daniel and Jonson were the most heavily taxed. In 1616, James I., by patent, granted to Jonson an annuity for life of one hundred marks, to him in hand not often well and truly paid. He was not distinctly named as Laureate, but seems to have been considered such; for Daniel, on his appointment, "withdrew himself," according to Gifford, "entirely from court." The strong-boxes of James and Charles seldom overflowed. Sir Robert Pye, an ancestor of that Laureate Pye whom we shall discuss by-and-by, was the paymaster, and often and again was the overwrought poet obliged to raise

"A woful cry
To Sir Robert Pye,"

before some small instalment of long arrearages could be procured. And when, rarely, very rarely, his Majesty condescended to remember the necessities of "his and the Muses' servant," and send a present to the Laureate's lodgings, its proportions were always so small as to excite the ire of the insulted Ben, who would growl forth to the messenger, "He would not have sent me this, (scil. wretched pittance,) did I not live in an alley."

We now arrive at the true era of the Laureateship. Charles, in 1630, became ambitious to signalize his reign by some fitting tribute to literature. A petition from Ben Jonson pointed out the way. The Laureate office was made a patentable one, in the gift of the Lord Chamberlain, as purveyor of the royal amusements. Ben was confirmed in the office. The salary was raised from one hundred marks to one hundred pounds, an advance of fifty per cent, to which was added yearly a tierce of Canary wine,–an appendage appropriate to the poet's convivial habits, and doubtless suggested by the mistaken precedent of Chaucer's daily flagon of wine. Ben Jonson was certainly, of all men living in 1630, the right person to receive this honor, which then implied, what it afterward ceased to do, the primacy of the diocese of letters. His learning supplied ballast enough to keep the lighter bulk of the poet in good trim, while it won that measure of respect which mere poetical gifts and graces would not have secured. He was the dean of that group of "poets, poetaccios, poetasters, and poetillos,"[11 - Jonson's classification. See his Poetaster.] who beset the court. If a display of erudition were demanded, Ben was ready with the heavy artillery of the unities, and all the laws of Aristotle and Horace, Quintilian and Priscian, exemplified in tragedies of canonical structure, and comedies whose prim regularity could not extinguish the most delightful and original humor–Robert Burton's excepted–that illustrated that brilliant period. But if the graceful lyric or glittering masque were called for, the boundless wealth of Ben's genius was most strikingly displayed. It has been the fashion, set by such presumptuous blunderers as Warburton and such formal prigs as Gifford, to deny our Laureate the possession of those ethereal attributes of invention and fancy which play about the creations of Shakspeare, and constitute their exquisite charm. This arbitrary comparison of Jonson and Shakspeare has, in fact, been the bane of the former's reputation. Those who have never read the masques argue, that, as "very little Latin and less Greek," in truth no learning of any traceable description, went to the creation of Ariel and Caliban, Oberon and Puck, the possession of Latin, Greek, and learning generally, incapacitates the proprietor for the same happy exercise of the finer and more gracious faculties of wit and fancy. Of this nonsense Jonson's masques are the best refutation. Marvels of ingenuity in plot and construction, they abound in "dainty invention," animated dialogue, and some of the finest lyric passages to be found in dramatic literature. They are the Laureate's true laurels. Had he left nothing else, the "rare arch-poet" would have held, by virtue of these alone, the elevated rank which his contemporaries, and our own, freely assign him. Lamb, whose appreciation of the old dramatists was extremely acute, remarks,–"A thousand beautiful passages from his 'New Inn,' and from those numerous court masques and entertainments which he was in the daily habit of furnishing, might be adduced to show the poetical fancy and elegance of mind of the supposed rugged old bard."[12 - Lamb's Works, and Life, by Talfourd, Vol. IV. p. 89.] And in excess of admiration at one of the Laureate's most successful pageants, Herrick breaks forth,–

"Thou hadst the wreath before, now take the tree,
That henceforth none be laurel-crowned but thee."[13 - Hesperides, Encomiastic Verses.]

An aspiration fortunately unrealized.

It was not long before the death of Ben, that John Suckling, one of his boon companions

"At those lyric feasts,
Made at 'The Sun,'
'The Dog,' 'The Triple Tun,'
Where they such clusters had
As made them nobly wild, not mad,"[14 - Herrick, ubi supra.--To the haunts here named must be added the celebrated Mermaid, of which Shakspeare was the Magnus Apollo, and The Devil, where Pope imagines Ben to have gathered peculiar inspiration:– "And each true Briton is to Ben so civil, He swears the Muses met him at The Devil." Imitation of Horace, Bk. ii. Epist. i.]

handed about among the courtiers his "Session of the Poets," where an imaginary contest for the laurel presented an opportunity for characterizing the wits of the day in a series of capital strokes, as remarkable for justice as shrewd wit. Jonson is thus introduced:–

"The first that broke silence was good old Ben,
Prepared with Canary wine,
And he told them plainly he deserved the bays,
For his were called works, while others' were but plays;

"And bid them remember how he had purged the stage
Of errors that had lasted many an age;
And he hoped they did not think 'The Silent Woman,'
'The Fox,' and 'The Alchymist' outdone by no man.

"Apollo stopt him there, and bid him not go on;
'Twas merit, he said, and not presumption,
Must carry it; at which Ben turned about,
And in great choler offered to go out;

"But those who were there thought it not fit
To discontent so ancient a wit,
And therefore Apollo called him back again,
And made him mine host of his own 'New Inn.'"

This jeu d'esprit of Suckling, if of no value otherwise, would be respectable as an original which the Duke of Buckinghamshire,[15 - Election of a Poet-Laureate, 1719, Works, Vol. II.] Leigh Hunt,[16 - Feast of the Poets, 1814.] and our own Lowell[17 - Fable for Critics, 1850.] have successfully and happily imitated.

In due course, Laureate Jonson shared the fate of all potentates, and was gathered to the laurelled of Elysium. The fatality occurred in 1637. When his remains were deposited in the Poet's Corner, with the eloquent laconism above them, "O Rare Ben Jonson!" all the wits of the day stood by the graveside, and cast in their tribute of bays. The rite over, all the wits of the day hurried from the aisles of Westminster to the galleries of Whitehall to urge their several claims to the successorship. There were, of the elder time, Massinger, drawing to the close of a successful career,–Ford, with his growing fame,–Marmion, Heywood, Carlell, Wither. There was Sandys, especially endeared to the king by his orthodox piety, so becoming the son of an archbishop, and by his versions of the "Divine Poems," which were next year given to the press, and which found a place among the half-dozen volumes which a decade later solaced the last hours of his royal master. There were the names, in the junior class, of Tom Carew, noted for his amatory songs and his one brilliant masque,–Tom Killigrew, of pleasant humor, and no mean writer of tragedy,–Suckling, the wittiest of courtiers, and the most courtly of wits,–Cartwright, Crashaw, Davenant, and May. But of all these, the contest soon narrowed down to the two latter. William Davenant was in all likelihood the son of an innkeeper at Oxford; he was certainly the son of the innkeeper's wife. A rumor, which Davenant always countenanced, alleged that William Shakspeare, a poet of some considerable repute in those times, being in the habit of passing between Stratford-on-the-Avon and London, was wont to bait and often lodge at this Oxford hostelry. At one of these calls the landlady had proved more than ordinarily frail or the poet more than ordinarily seductive,–who can wonder at even virtue stooping to folly when the wooer was the Swan of Avon, beside whom the bird that captivated Leda was as a featherless gosling?–and the consequence had been Will Davenant, born in the year of our Lord 1605, Shakspeare standing as godfather at the baptism. A boy of lively parts was Will, and good-fortune brought those parts to the notice of the grave and philosophic Greville, Lord Brooke, whose dearest boast was the friendship in early life of Sir Philip Sidney. The result of this notice was a highly creditable education at school and university, and an ultimate introduction into the foremost society of the capital. Davenant, finding the drama supreme in fashionable regard, devoted himself to the drama. He also devoted himself to the cultivation of Ben Jonson, then at the summit of renown, assisting in an amateur way in the preparation of the court pageants, and otherwise mitigating the Laureate's labors. From 1632 to 1637, these aids were frequent, and established a very plausible claim to the succession. Thomas May, who shortly became his sole competitor, was a man of elevated pretensions. As a writer of English historical poems and as a translator of Lucan he had earned a prominent position in British literature; as a continuator of the "Pharsalia" in Latin verse of exemplary elegance, written in the happiest imitation of the martyred Stoic's unimpassioned mannerism, he secured for British scholarship that higher respect among Continental scholars which Milton's Latin poems and "Defensio pro Populo Anglicano" presently after confirmed. Of the several English writers of Latin verse, May stands unquestionably in the front rank, alongside of Milton and Bourne,–taking precedence easily of Owen, Cowley, and Gray. His dramatic productions were of a higher order than Davenant's. They have found a place in Dodsley's and the several subsequent collections of early dramas, not conceded to the plays of the latter. Masque-making, however, was not in his line. His invention was not sufficiently alert, his dialogue not sufficiently lively, for a species of poetry which it was the principal duty of the Laureate to furnish. Besides, it is highly probable, his sympathies with rebellious Puritanism were already so far developed as to make him an object of aversion to the king. Davenant triumphed. The defeated candidate lived to see the court dispersed, king and Laureate alike fugitive, and to receive from the Long Parliament the place of Historiographer, as a compensation for the lost bays. When, in 1650, he died, Cromwell and his newly-inaugurated court did honor to his obsequies. The body was deposited in Westminster Abbey; but the posthumous honor was in reserve for it, of being torn from the grave after the Restoration, and flung into a ditch along with the remains of three or four other republican leaders.

Davenant's career in office was unfortunate. There is reason to doubt whether, even before the rebellion broke out, his salary was regularly paid him. During the Civil War he exchanged the laurel for a casque, winning knighthood by his gallant carriage at the siege of Gloucester. Afterward, he was so far in the confidence of Queen Henrietta Maria, as to be sent as her envoy to the captive king, beseeching him to save his head by conceding the demands of Parliament. When, the errand proving abortive, the royal head was lost, Davenant returned to Paris, consoled himself by finishing the first two books of his "Gondibert," and then, despairing of a restoration, embarked (in 1650) from France for Virginia, where monarchy and the rights of Charles II were unimpaired. Fate, however, had not destined him for a colonist and backwoodsman. His ship, tempest-tossed, was driven into an English port, and the poet was seized and carried close prisoner to London. There the intervention of Milton, the Latin Secretary of the Council, is said to have saved his life. He was kept in the Tower for at least two years longer, however. The date of his release is uncertain, but, once at liberty, Davenant returned ardently to his former pursuits. A license was procured for musical exhibitions, and the phrase "musical exhibitions" was interpreted, with official connivance, as including all manner of dramatic performances. To the Laureate and to this period belongs the credit of introducing scenery, hitherto restricted to court masques, into the machinery of the ordinary drama. The substitution of female for male actors, in feminine characters, was also an innovation of this period. And as an incident of the Laureateship there is still another novelty to be noted. There is no crown without its thorns. The laurel renders the pillow of the wearer as knotty, uneasy, and comfortless as does a coronal of gold and jewels. Among the receipts of the office have been the jokes, good and bad, the sneers, the satire of contemporary wits,–such being the paper currency in which the turbulent subjects of the laurel crown think proper to pay homage to their sovereign. From the days of Will Davenant to these of ours, the custom has been faithfully observed. Davenant's earliest assailants were of his own political party, followers of the exiled Charles, the men whom Milton describes as "perditissimus ille peregrinantium aulieorum grex." These–among them a son of the memorable Donne, Sir John Denham, and Alan Broderick–united in a volume of mean motive and insignificant merit, entitled, "Verses written by Several of the Author's Friends, to be reprinted with the Second Edition of Gondibert." This was published in 1653. The effect of the onslaught has not been recorded. We know only that Davenant, surviving it, continued to prosper in his theatrical business, writing most of the pieces produced on his stage until the Restoration, when he drew forth from its hiding-place his wreath of laurel-evergreen, and resumed it with honor.

A fair retrospect of Davenant's career enables us to select without difficulty that one of his labors which is most deserving of applause. Not his "Gondibert," notwithstanding it abounds in fine passages,–notwithstanding Gay thought it worth continuation and completion, and added several cantos,–notwithstanding Lamb eulogized it with enthusiasm, Southey warmly praised, and Campbell and Hazlitt coolly commended it. Nor his comedies, which are deservedly forgotten; nor his improvements in the production of plays, serviceable as they were to the acting drama. But to his exertions Milton owed impunity from the vengeance otherwise destined for the apologist of regicide, and so owed the life and leisure requisite to the composition of "Paradise Lost." Davenant, grateful for the old kindness of the ex-secretary, used his influence successfully with Charles to let the offender escape.[18 - This story rests on the authority of Thomas Betterton, the actor, who received it from Davenant.] This is certainly the greenest of Davenant's laurels. Without it, the world might not have heard one of the sublimest expressions of human genius.

Davenant died in 1668. The laurel was hung up unclaimed until 1670, when John Dryden received it, with patent dated back to the summer succeeding Davenant's death. Dryden assures us that it was Sir Thomas Clifford, whose name a year later lent the initial letter to the "Cabal," who presented him to the king, and procured his appointment.[19 - Dedication of the Pastorals of Virgil, to Hugh, Lord Clifford, the son of Sir Thomas.] Masques had now ceased to be the mode. What the dramatist could do to amuse the blasé court of Charles II. he was obliged to do within the limits of legitimate dramatic representation, due care being taken to follow French models, and substitute the idiom of Corneille and Molière for that of Shakspeare. Dryden, whose plays are now read only by the curious, was, in 1670, the greatest of living dramatists. He had expiated his Cromwellian backslidings by the "Astraea Redux," and the "Annus Mirabilis." He had risen to high favor with the king. His tragedies in rhyming couplets were all the vogue. Already his fellow-playwrights deemed their success as fearfully uncertain, unless they had secured, price three guineas, a prologue or epilogue from the Laureate. So fertile was his own invention, that he stood ready to furnish by contract five plays a year,–a challenge fortunately declined by the managers of the day. Thus, if the Laureate stipend were not punctually paid, as was often the case, seeing the necessitous state of the royal finances and the bevy of fair ladies, whose demands, extravagant as they were, took precedence of all others, his revenues were adequate to the maintenance of a family, the matron of which was a Howard, educated, as a daughter of nobility, to the enjoyment of every indulgence. These were the Laureate's brightest days. His popularity was at its height, a fact evinced by the powerful coalitions deemed necessary to diminish it. Indeed, the laurel had hardly rested upon Dryden's temples before he experienced the assaults of an organized literary opposition. The Duke of Buckingham, then the admitted leader of fashionable prodigacy, borrowed the aid of Samuel Butler, at whose "Hudibras" the world was still laughing,–of Thomas Sprat, then on the high-road to those preferments which have given him an important place in history,–of Martin Clifford, a familiar of the green-room and coffee-house,–and concocted a farce ridiculing the person and office of the Laureate. "The Rehearsal" was acted in 1671. The hero, Mr. Bayes, imitated all the personal peculiarities of Dryden, used his cant phrases, burlesqued his style, and exposed, while pretending to defend, his ridiculous points, until the laugh of the town was fairly turned upon the "premier-poet of the realm." The wit was undoubtedly of the broadest, and the humor at the coffee-room level; but it was so much the more effective. Dryden affected to be indifferent to the satire. He jested at the time taken[20 - There were some indications that portions of the farce had been written while Davenant was living and had been intended for him. Mr. Bayes appears in one place with a plaster on his nose, an evident allusion to Davenant's loss of that feature. In a lively satire of the time, by Richard Duke, it is asserted that Villiers was occupied with the composition of The Rehearsal from the Restoration down to the day of its production on the stage:–"But with playhouses, wars, immortal wars,He waged, and ten years' rage produced a farce.As many rolling years he did employ,And hands almost as many, to destroyHeroic rhyme, as Greece to ruin Troy.Once more, says Fame, for battle he prepares,And threatens rhymers with a second farce:But, if as long for this as that we stay,He'll finish Clevedon sooner than his play."               The Review] and the number of hands employed upon the composition. Twenty years later he was at pains to declare his perfect freedom from rancor in consequence of the attack.

There, is much reason to suspect, however, that "The Rehearsal" was not forgotten, when the "Absalom and Achitophel" was written, and that the character of Zimri gathered much of its intense vigor and depth of shadow from recollections of the ludicrous Mr. Bayes. The portrait has the look of being designed as a quittance in full of old scores. "The Rehearsal," though now and then recast and reënacted to suit other times, is now no otherwise remembered than as the suggester of Sheridan's "Critic."

Upon the heels of this onslaught others followed rapidly. Rochester, disposed to singularity of opinion, set up Elkanah Settle, a young author of some talent, as a rival to the Laureate. Anonymous bardings lampooned him. Mr. Bayes was a broad target for every shaft, so that the complaint so feelingly uttered in his latter days, that "no man living had ever been so severely libelled" as he, had a wide foundation of fact. Sometimes, it must be owned, the thrusts were the natural result of controversies into which the Laureate indiscreetly precipitated himself; sometimes they came of generous partisanship in behalf of friends, such friends, for example, as Sir Robert Howard, his brother-in-law, an interminable spinner of intolerable verse, who afflicted the world in his day with plays worse than plagues, and poems as worthless as his plays. It was to a quarrel for and a quarrel against this gentleman that we are indebted for the most trenchant satire in the language. Sir Robert had fallen out with Dryden about rhyming tragedies, of which he disapproved; and while it lasted, the contest was waged with prodigious acrimony. Among the partisans of the former was Richard Flecknoe, a Triton among the smaller scribbling fry. Flecknoe–blunderingly classed among the Laureates by the compiler of "Cibber's Lives of the Poets"–was an Irish priest, who had cast his cassock, or, as he euphuistically expressed it, "laid aside the mechanic part of priesthood," in order to fulfil the loftier mission of literary garreteer in London. He had written poems and plays without number; of the latter, but one, entitled "Love's Dominion," had been brought upon the stage, and was summarily hissed off. Jealousy of Dryden's splendid success brought him to the side of Dryden's opponent, and a pamphlet, printed in 1668, attacked the future Laureate so bitterly, and at points so susceptible, as to make a more than ordinary draft upon the poet's patience, and to leave venom that rankled fourteen years without finding vent.[21 - It is little to the credit of Dryden, that, having saved up his wrath against Flecknoe so long, he had not reserved it altogether. Flecknoe had been dead at least four years when the satire appeared.] About the same time, Thomas Shadwell, who is represented in the satire as likewise an Irishman, brought Sir Robert on the stage in his "Sullen Lovers," in the character of Sir Positive At-all, a caricature replete with absurd self-conceit and impudent dogmatism. Shadwell was of "Norfolcian" family, well-born, well-educated, and fitted for the bar, but drawn away from serious pursuits by the prevalent rage for the drama. The offence of laughing at the poet's brother-in-law Shadwell had aggravated by accepting the capricious patronage of Lord Rochester, by subsequently siding with the Whigs, and by aiding the ambitious designs of Shaftesbury in play and pamphlet,–labors the value of which is not to be measured by the contemptuous estimate of the satirist. The first outburst of the retributive storm fell upon the head of Shadwell. The second part of "Absalom and Achitophel," which appeared in the autumn of 1682, contains the portrait of Og, cut in outlines so sharp as to remind us of an unrounded alto-rilievo:–

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;
Round as a globe, and liquored every chink,
Goodly and great he sails behind his link.
With all his bulk, there's nothing lost in Og,
For every inch that is not fool is rogue ....

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 in thy drink,
Still thou mayst live, avoiding pen and ink.
I see, I see, 'tis counsel given in vain;
For treason botched in rhyme will be thy bane ....