genius the world ever saw was as moderately encouraged as any inferior playhouse droll might have been. She could laugh at Falstaff and Dame Quickly, and stimulate that humour in the author: and, to use her sister's words to Heywood, "our thanks for that." Edmund Spenser, also, was less indebted to her own taste, or even to her enormous appetite for flattery, than to Sir Philip Sidney's enlightened friendship, and to his introduction to her by Sir Walter Raleigh, for such favours as he received. These, however, were not small; and neither the Fairy Queen herself, (gigantic fairy!) nor her sage counsellor Cecil, is justly responsible for the unhappiness of Spenser. His pension of £50 a-year was but a portion of the emoluments he derived from court interest. That pension, which he received till his death in 1598, was no doubt an annuity assigned him as Queen's poet, though the title of laureate is not given in his patent, nor in that of his two immediate successors, Daniel and Ben Jonson. So far Malone is accurate.

Daniel's laudatory verse, whether he volunteered it or not, was acceptable to King James, and rewarded by a palace appointment. He was Gentleman Extraordinary, and one of the grooms to Queen Anne of Denmark. He was on terms of social intimacy with Shakspeare, Marlow, and Chapman, as well as with persons of higher social rank; and he had the honour to be tutor to the famous Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, who cansed a cenotaph to be erected to his memory at Beckington, near Frome, in his native county. He died in 1619.

The masques and pageants of his successor, Ben Jonson, prove that he held no sinecure from either of his royal masters; but in Charles the First he at least served a prince who could respect genius, and remember that the labourer is worthy of his hire. Jonson received, "in consideration of services of wit and pen already done to us and our father, and which we expect from him," £100 a-year and a tierce of Spanish canary, his best-beloved Hippocrene, out of the royal cellars at Whitehall.

On his decease, 1637, William Davenant was appointed poet-laureate, by patent, through the influence of

Henrietta Maria, though her husband had intended the reversion for Thomas May. This man was so disgusted that, forgetting many former obligations to Charles, who had a high and just opinion of his talents, he soon after turned traitor, and attached himself to the Roundheads. Davenant proved himself worthy of the preference, not only by his poetry, but by his steadfast gallant loyalty. He was son of an innkeeper at Oxford, but is said to have rather sanctioned a vague rumour that attributed his paternity to Shakspeare. At ten years of age he produced his first poem, a little ode in three sextains, "In remembrance of Master William Shakspeare." The first stanza has some feeling in it, the other two are puerile conceits, clever enough for so young a boy. When his sovereign was in trouble, he volunteered into the army, and was soon found eligible to no mean promotion. He was raised to the rank of lieutenant-general of ordnance, under the Duke of Newcastle, and was knighted for his services at the siege of Gloucester. His "Gondibert," begun in exile at Paris, was continued in prison at Cowes Castle, though he daily expected his death-warrant. But he was removed to the Tower of London to be tried by a high commission; and it is believed that his life was saved by the generous intervention of Milton, whom he subsequently repaid in kind, by softening the resentment of the restored government against him. Davenant, though perhaps a man of irregular life, and though, as a dramatist and playhouse manager, he proved any thing but allegiant to Shakspeare, and was active in communicating a depraved taste, was yet a man of brave, honest, and independent mind. It is curious that he should not only have disappointed May of the laurel when living, but that it should have been his chance to take his place in Poet's Corner when dead. The Puritans had erected a pompous tomb to May, which was savagely enough removed by the returned royalists. Near the same spot, in Westminster Abbey, is the monument to Dave

nant.

The Usurpation was not without its poets of far loftier reach than May,

It

though he, too, was no dwarf. would have been ridiculous in Cromwell to appoint a poet-laureate. The thing was impossible, though the flatteries of his kinsman, Waller, show that it was not the want of a subservient royalist gentleman of station, as well of talent, that made it so. Andrew Marvel, though he wrote such vigorous verse on Cromwell's victories in Ireland, would hardly have accepted the office, and what other Puritan would? But without the form, the Protector of the commonwealth had the reality in his Latin secretary, to whom Marvel was assistant. The lineal heir of the most ancient race of kings might have been proud of such a poet. The greatness of Milton might be a pledge to all ages of the greatness of Cromwell, unchallenged even by those who most detest grim Oliver of Hungtindon for "Darwent stream with blood of Scots imbrued," and "Worcester's laureate wreath." Here it is the poet who confers on the conqueror a laurel crown, of which the imperishable leaves, green as ever bard or victor wore, mitigate, though they do not hide, the evil expression on the casque-worn brow of the senex armis impiger, and give it a dignity that might abate the stoutest loyalist's abhorrence, but for one fatal remembrance, which forbids him to exclaim, "Nec sunt hi vultus regibus usque truces."

Sir William Davenant, who recovered the laureateship at the Restoration, and retained it till his death in 1668, was succeeded by Dryden. Glorious John, although he had hastily flattered Richard Cromwell's brief authority by an epicede on Oliver, was not rejected by the merry monarch, who could laugh at poets' perjuries as lightly as at those of lovers. During that disgraceful reign, the poet made it no part of his vocation and privilege to check the profligate humours brought into fashion by the court.

"Unhappy Dryden! in all Charles' days, Roscommon only boasts unspotted lays." At the revolution of 1688, the laureate was discrowned, as well as King James; and he condescended to revenge himself by Macflecnoe on his substitute Shadwell, as if he had not beforehand administered sufficient

chastisement to that miserable Og, in the bitter satire with which he supplied Tate for the second part of Absolom and Achitophel. One might pity Shadwell under the lash of such an enemy as Dryden, if his writings either in verse or prose entitled him to a grain of respect. Charles, sixth Earl of Dorset-himself an elegant wit and indifferent versifier, but the descendant and representative of a very illustrious poet, Sackville, the first Earl, author of the noble "Induction to a Mirror for Magistrates❞— vindicated his recommendation of Shadwell to the poet-laureateship," not because he was a poet, but an honest man." We suppose he meant that he had not oscillated between Popery and Reformation like Dryden, and that he was more honest, also, in a political sense, and less liable to suspicion as an adherent of the expelled monarch's heartless daughter, and her Dutch husband, the hero of the Boyne and Glencoe. But, in another and not unimportant sense, Shadwell was far from honest; for he was notorious for the ribaldry of his conversation. It has been asserted, while that fact was admitted, that, as an author before the public, he was a promoter of morality and virtue. Nothing can be more untrue. Of his many comedies, there is none which is not as rife in pollution as any of the grossest plays of the time. But their boasted humour is physic for the bane; for it is distilled" from the dull weeds that grow by Lethe's side." His comedies are five-act farces of wearisome vulgarity, and, though suffered in their day, were destined, as Pope leniently expresses it in the Dunciad,

"Soon to that mass of nonsense to return, Where things destroyed are swept to things unborn."

In "The Royal Shepherdess," however, a play in blank verse, altered by Shadwell from Fountain of Devonshire, there are some fine lines, so far above any thing known to be Shadwell's that we readily take him at his word in his preface, where, modest for once, he invites the reader, if he finds any thing good in the play, to set it down to Mr Fountain. The following lines are a favourable specimen, notwithstanding the breeding barrenness:

Shine o'er the poorer regions of the north."

Still better, where a king, in a vicious attempt upon an- innocent girl, has compelled her consent to a meeting at night. The queen, apprised of the design, personates the intended victim, and appeals to his conscience with an effect that he thus describes:--

"She only whisper'd to me, as she promised,
Yet never heard I any voice so loud:
And though the words were gentler far than
those

That holy priests do speak to dying saints,
Yet never thunder signified so much."

The songs in this piece are all by Shadwell, except, as he declares, the last but one, which is Fountain's, and the only one not below mediocrity. Shadwell had also the impudence to alter and corrupt "Timon of Athens,' and to produce the farrago on the stage as an improvement on the original. In the dedication he says, "It has the inimitable hand of Shakspeare in it; yet I can truly say, I have made it into a play." This "tun of man and kilderkin of wit" was admitted to a tomb in Westminster Abbey, an honour (?) said to have been denied to the remains of a noble poet, the author of "Don Juan." Yet Shadwell had also produced a "Don Juan." His tragedy of "The Libertine," the same hero, is ten times more indecent than the most objectionable parts of Byron's poem. But it is, indeed, also less noxious, for it has not a single attractive grace of fancy or feeling. A print of Shadwell, prefixed to Tonson's edition of his works, ludicrously bears out Dryden's description of the outer

man. He looks like an alehouse

Bacchus, or rather like one of those carnal cherubs whom the French call anges bouffis-his cheeks bulging out as if they were stuffed with apples from the forbidden tree. He died in December 1692, and was succeeded by

Nahum Tate, the psalmodist. Every one knows what sort of poet he was, and how the harp of Israel is but a Jew's harp in the hands of Tate and Brady. Yet some passages in his second part of "Absolom and

Achitophel" are not such feeble mimicries of the tone of his friend, Dryden, as might have been expected from so poor a performer. The praise of Asaph, glorious John himself, is lines:pleasing. It concludes with these

"While bees in flowers rejoice, and flowers in dew,

While stars and fountains to their course are true,

While Judah's throne and Sion's rock stand fast,

The song of Asaph, and the fame, shall last."

At his death in 1715, a year after the accession of George the First, the withering laurel recovered a little lustre on the brow of Nicholas Rowe, the translator of Lucan, and the pathetic dramatist of "The Fair Penitent," and "Jane Shore." His occasional verses were, of course, very respectable; and his only signal failure was when he attempted comedy. After the banter he incurred for his

play of "The Biter," he was so sensible that he was the biter bit, that he excluded it from his works, and made no second venture of the kind. Yet the man who could move an audience to tears, and who had so little comtried his powers of wit on them, was mand of their sympathies when he any thing but a lachrymist by temthat he should have thought "the perament. When Spence observed tragic Rowe too grave to write such things." Pope answered, "He! why, he would laugh all the day long! He would do nothing but laugh!" He survived the acquisition of the laurel only three years, dying at the age of forty-five.

Laurence Eusden, 66 bemused in beer," stumbled into his a parson much place, just in time to elaborate, singultu laborare, the Coronation Ode for George the Second. A specimen or two of his loyal suspirations may be as welcome as a hundred.

sire!

A dull, fat, thoughtless heir unheeded springs From a long slothful line of restive kings: But when a stem, with fruitful branches crown'd,

Has flourish'd, in each various branch renown'd,

His great forerunners when the last outshone,

Who could a brighter hope, or even as bright a son?"

He ends with a kick at the Stuarts: "Avaunt, degenerate grafts, or spurious breed! "Tis a George only can a George succeed."

If Charles Edward had known that, he might have saved himself a good deal of trouble.

Eusden died at his rectory in Lincolnshire in 1730. Colley Cibber wore the laurel with unblushing front for twenty-seven years from that date. His annual birth-day and new-year odes for all that time are treasured in the Gentleman's Magazine. They are all so bad, that his friends pretended that he made them so on purpose. Dr Johnson, however, often asserted, from his personal knowledge of the man, that he took great pains with his lyrics, and thought them far superior to Pindar's. The Doctor was especially merry with one ultra-Pindaric flight which occurs in the Cibberian "Ode for the New-Year 1750."

"Through ages past the muse preferr'd
Her high-sung hero to the skies;
Yet now reversed the rapture flies,
And Cæsar's fame sublimes the bard.
So on the towering eagle's wing
The lowly linnet soars to sing.
Had her Pindar of old
Known her Cæsar to sing,
More rapid his raptures had roll'd;
But never had Greece such a king!"

So proud was Cibber of that marvellous image of the linnet and eagle, that he repeated it in the "Natal Öde for 1753." In his last "New-year Ode," too, 1757, he again scolds Pindar for his sluggishness

"Had the lyrist of old

Had our Cæsar to sing, More rapid his numbers had roll'd; But never had Greece such a king, No, never had Greece such a king!" Those effusions are truly incomparable. Not only are they all bad, but not one of them in twenty-seven years contains a good line. Yet he was, happily for himself, more impenetrable to the gibes of the wits than a buffalo to the stings of mosquitoes. Of the here is one from the London Maganumerous epigrams twanged at him,

zine for 1737.

ON SEEING TOBACCO-PIPES LIT WITH ONE OF THE LAUREATE'S ODES.

"While the soft song that warbles George's praise

From pipe to pipe the living flame conveys, Critics who long have scorn'd must now admire,

For who can say his ode now wants its fire ?"

Dr Johnson honoured him with another, equally complimentary to Cibber and his Cæsar.

"Augustus still survives in Maro's strain, And Spenser's verse prolongs Eliza's reign; Great George's acts let tuneful Colley sing, For nature form'd the poet for the king." Yet Cibber, the hero of the Dunciad, was not a dunce, except in his attempts at verse; even Pope, who calls him "a pert and lively dunce," epithets rather incongruous, admits the merit of his "Careless Husband." His Apology for his own Life, too, is no it are both judicious and eloquent, parmean performance; some passages in ticularly his criticisms on Nokes and Betterton, and on acting in general. Though the most wretched of poetasters, he was an abler prose writer than half of his critics.

At his death, the laureateship was offered to Gray, with an exemption from the duty of furnishing annual odes, but he refused the office, as having been degraded by Cibber. It was then given, on the usual terms, to William Whitehead, who won even the approbation of Gray for the felicity with which he occasionally performed his task. What now appears most noticeable in Whitehead's odes is his prolonged and ludicrous perplexity about the American war. At the first outbreak he is the indignant and scornful patriot, confident in the power of the mother country, and threatening the rebels with condign punish

ment. As they grow more and more obstinate, he becomes the pathetic remonstrant with those unnatural children, and coaxes them to be good boys. When any news of success to the British arms has arrived, he mounts the high horse again, and gives the Yankees hard words, but not without magnanimous hints that the gates of mercy are not quite closed to repentance. Reverses come, and he consoles the king. Matters grow worse, and he is at his wit's-end. At last the struggle is over; he accommodates himself to the unpleasant necessity of the case, and sings the blessings of peace and concord.

Laureate odes, good or bad, are always fair game for squibs. Whitehead had his share of ridicule, but he had more courage than Gray, who was so painfully afflicted by the parodies of Lloyd and Coleman, that he almost resolved to forswear poetry. Whitehead retorted on his assailants with easy good-humour, in "An Apology for all Laureates, past, present, and to come," beginning,

"Ye silly dogs, whose half-year lays
Attend, like satellites, on Bays,
And still with added lumber load
Each birth-day and each new-year ode,
Why will ye strive to be severe ?
In pity to yourselves forbear;
Nor let the sneering public see

What numbers write far worse than he."

and ending,

"To Laureates is no pity due,
Encumber'd with a thousand clogs?
I'm very sure they pity you,
Ye silliest of silly dogs."

The next laureate, Thomas Warton, the historian of English poetry, is too well known and appreciated to require any lengthened notice here. In 1747 and 1748 he held the appointment of laureated poet, to which he was inaugurated, according to the ancient custom, in the common-room of Trinity College, Oxford. His duty was to celebrate a lady chosen as lady patroness, and Warton performed his task crowned with a wreath of laurel. In 1757, he was elected professor of poetry, as his father had formerly been in the same university. On the demise of Whitehead in 1785, the laureateship was conferred on him by command of George the Third. He was quizzed

as his predecessor had been, and, like him, laughed at the jesters; and he gradually turned their scoffs to approbation by his equanimity and the merit of his performances. Warton had not only the wit to be diverted by probationary odes in mockery of his own, which he valued at less than they were worth, but he had temper to endure the malignant scurrility of Ritson, in reference to more important labours, with no severer remark than that he was a black-lettered dog. Aportion of his later days was devoted to a labour of love- an edition of the juvenile poems of Milton, with copious notes. Though of sedentary college habits, and a free liver, he enjoyed vigorous health to the age of 62: he then broke down. He went to Bath with the gout, and returned, as he thought, in an improved condition. The evening of May 20, 1790, he passed cheerfully in the common-room, but, before midnight, he was stricken with paralysis, and the next day he was a corpse.

Henry James Pye, who was of a family of which the founder is stated to have come to England with the Conqueror, was likewise representative, by the female line, of the patriot Hampden. In 1784, he was returned to parliament as member for Berkshire. But the expense of the contest ruined him, and he was obliged to sell his estate; and even the slender salary of a laureate was not unacceptable when it fell in his way. Besides his official odes, he produced numerous works, epic, dramatic, and lyric, and also published several translations, and a corrected edition of Francis's Horace. The reader will be content if we pass all these with the remark that he was a respectable writer, a good London police-magistrate, and an honourable gentleman in a less equivocal sense than the parliamentary style. factor of annual odes for the court, he was, of course, scurvily used by the wags. The joke on "Pindar, Pye, et parvus Pybus," was once in every body's mouth. He died in 1813, and was succeeded by

As

Robert Southey, who held the office for thirty years; and this prolonged tenure of it, still longer than Cibber's, by a man of unimpeachable worth and distinguished genius, is a happy set-off