accused in their times), he went beyond him in shewing that same inclination towards an imaginative and deserted faith, which the studiers of Shakspeare have thought they discerned in his gentle treatment of friars and the cloister. But all this, being a mixture of the lively and melancholy, might have been produced by a proper conjunction of the Saturn and Venus of the Oxford inn. Shakspeare himself had not only Shakspeares for his progenitors. There were romantic friendships in those days, which shewed better for human nature than the neutralization of everything serious which came up in Charles the Second's time. Young Milton had Deodati for his friend; Cowley, his Hervey; Suckling professed a friendship for Carew. To a volume of miscellaneous poems, Davenant prefixed the following pretty inscription :-" IF THESE POEMS LIVE, MAY THEIR MEMORIES BY WHOM THEY ARE CHERISHED, Endimion Porter, Henry Jermin, LIVE WITH THEM." With these two gentlemen he had a fast friendship for life. The Defacement of his Beauty. We hardly know how to touch upon this point, without disturbing that pretended delicacy which, ignorant of nothing which it conceals, only serves to encourage hypocrisy and hinder the spirit of general investigation. We must vindicate ourselves by our zeal in behalf of that spirit, the only one fitted to blow over the whole world, and set it spinning clearly and healthily again. Davenant, at an early period of life, underwent a misfortune which must have been very mortifying to a handsome gallant. Aubrey does not mince the matter in his gossiping memorandums; but the biographers, naturally feeling the awkwardness and delicacy of the subject, have agreed upon a formula of insinuation very useful to all who come after them. They tell us, that he was so unfortunate as to carry the tokens of his irregular gallantry" in his face; adding, that it "affected him as little, or perhaps less, than it would any other man." Let us not believe them. Such an indifference is not natural; and it would not have been honourable. No man, especially a handsome man, and one in the daily receipt of 66 forget the authoress of his misfortune, but has introduced her in his Gondibert, as a black-eyed beauty of Verona.* He laughed, it is true, because others laughed; for some of the wits were unmerciful upon him; but imagine a young poet, handsome, triumphant, with ladies contending for his admiration, and a queen performing in his Masques (as Henrietta Maria did,) and then judge of the bitterness of heart with which his vanity must have received this unconcealable and ineffaceable wound. There is one good it may have done him. It may have set him upon trains of thought in behalf of physical and moral ill, or rather in opposition to the unequal claims and pedantries of supposed exclusive good, such as have been suggested to other acute, minds by some natural bodily defect. At all events, it is greatly to his honour (as it was to Shakspeare's, who is supposed to have been lame) that the disadvantage it put him to with the rest of the world, impaired nothing of his real spirit and good-nature, his character for cheerfulness and kindness being as indelible as his misfortune. Our author had no other reason to complain of the sex. His deformity was so far overlooked for the sake of his wit and good qualities, that it did not hinder him from marrying two wives in succession; at what period of his life, is not related: and the Queen was so little bent upon withdrawing her countenance, that in the year 1637, on the death of Ben Jonson, she procured for him the office of Poet Laureat. We must own, we could have dispensed with the undistinguishing fondness of his widow, who, to the folio We are told by these "particular fellows," that she was a handsome black girl in Axe yard, Westminster." Black, up to a late period, meant black eyes and hair. Sir Richard Steele, in the book of scandal (the New Atalantis) written by his quondam admirer Mrs Manley, is called a "black beau." Some of the said investigators have doubted, from a passage in Suckling, whether Davenant's misfortune was not occasioned in France. Others think the word France introduced only for the rhyme. The probability is, that it is metaphorical. "Will Dav'nant, asham'd of a foolish mischance, edition which she published of his works in 1673, prefixed a real likeness of him, with the laurel to make it worse. Nay, the laurel perhaps rather redeems than makes it worse, being the symbol of his accomplishments; but my lady Davenant might as well have left that matter to our imaginations. Davenant's Change of Religion; his Mission to Charles the First, # and Clarendon's invidious Remarks on it. On the decline of the King's forces, Davenant retired into France, where he was admitted into snch confidence by the Queen, (to whom he had recommended himself by embracing her religion), that he was sent on a special mission to her husband at Newcastle. This was in the summer of 1646. The change in his religion, which looks like the only insincere act of his life (for his works all but prove him to have been a freethinker, and he was regarded as one) was probably reconciled to his conscience by some niceties of construction,some compromise between letter and spirit, and a philosophical as well as poetical interpretation of a creed already halfpagan. The church of Rome as well as of Luther has had its Platonism; and if the Queen and his interest had not appeared to be the converters, Davenant, with Ficinus on one side of him, and the spirit that wrote 'Gondibert' on the other, might have startled Cudworth and More with a new tune on their spheres. Besides, it was very common in those unsettled times for persons to return to the creed of their ancestors. Davenant's mission to the King was to persuade him to give up the church. The poet had, in a manner, done it himself: the King knew him to be a man of great powers of reflection; and as he was in other respects agreeable to his Majesty, who delighted to shew his superiority in matters of taste over the austere notions of the Puritans, the Queen probably thought she could not have selected a better ambassador. Clarendon, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and out of favour with the Queen, thought otherwise; and he has given us to understand, that his Majesty was the of same opinion. He tells us, that Davenant (" an honest man, and a witty, but in all respects inferior to such a trust") finding the message he had brought with him of no effect, took upon himself to offer some reasons in aid of it. Among other things, says Clarendon, he told the King, that "it was the opinion and church. The other said, 'the Lord Colepepper was of the same mind.' The King said, 'Colepepper had no religion,' and asked "whether the Chancellor of the Exchequer was of that mind?' to which he answered, he did not know, for that he was not there, and had deserted the Prince; and thereupon said somewhat from the Queen, of the displeasure she had conceived against the Chancellor; to which the King said, The Chancellor was an honest man, and would never desert him, nor the Prince, nor the church, and that he was sorry he was not with his son, but that his wife was mistaken. Davenant then offering some reasons of his own, in which he mentioned the church slightingly, as if it were not of importance enough to weigh down the benefit that would attend the concession, his Majesty was transported with so much indignation, that he gave him a sharper reprehension than was usual for him to give to any other man, and forbid him to presume to come again into his presence. Whereupon the poor man, who had in truth very good affections, was exceedingly dejected and afflicted, and returned into France to give an account of his ill-success to those who sent him." Clarendon insinuates that the King was not pleased at having a messsge of this nature committed to the manager of his plays and revels. This may or may not have been the case, according as the fortune of the message turned out; neither do we mean to dispute the main issue of it, though Clarendon does not bring forward his authorities for the truth of the statement; but readers of the History of the Rebellion' will do well to observe, that besides the passion with which the writer is apt to colour all the statements in which he is personally concerned, agreeably to his hot and proud complexion, he is never more apt to do so than when the person he differs with is a man of intellectual pretensions like himself. Of all the men of wit whom he has occasion to mention as at all differing with his opinions, public or private, he contrives to say something disparaging. Ben Jonson he leaves off visiting when a young man, because he found him becoming too full of himself; that is to say, not sensible enough of the importance of his visitor. Milton he takes care never once to allude to through upon Dave out his history; and May's defection from the royal side he attributes to his mortification at the bestowal of the laurel Dave nant. Possibly he was right; but the opinion would have come with more probability from any one else. In short, Clarendon is not to be trusted when speaking of men of wit and talents on the other side of the question, nor even on his own. He cannot come in contact with Montrose, without evincing in his own feelings all the impatience and self-sufficiency which he is so ready to discern in the other. The least opposition chafed him; and his readiness to deal about him his charges of pride and envy and impertinence, is more than suspicious. Let the reader therefore take for as much as it is worth that tenderness mixed with candour, which some biographers have been so ready to take upon trust from one another in his treatment of his old friend Sir William. It is difficult to think that "the poor man," as he calls him, was not thinking of a man a great deal more to be pitied, when he wrote such stanzas as the following: "Nature too oft by birthright does prefer 7 Less perfect monarchs to an anxious throne;s The poem that contained this passage, was Davenant's occupa<tion on his return to France. The cavaliers there had then little to do but to beguile the chagrin of their exile; and Davenant sat down in the Louvre, where he lived with his friend Lord Jermyn, and finished the two first books of Gondibert. These, with an impaItience for fame more like a bold than a prudent soldier, he proceeded to publish without waiting for the rest; adding, to make his peril more conspicuous, the Preface addressed to Hobbes, and the philo **This was not for want of a burning sense of the part that Milton had acted in those times, but the reverse; for not to mention that a man like Clarendon must have known the powers as well as the politics of the great Defender of the English People, some letters have transpired, in which the minister, advising (if we remember) somebody against publishing or bringing forward some piece of writing, says that he knows no one whom it would please, "unless it be Mr Milton." We quote from memory, but are sure of the spirit of the passage. The consciousness and secret rage of it are evident. |