brought to them by "a throng of Intelligencers," the petulant wits with a provoking sense of their who make " patient observations" in the field, own littleness. the garden, the river, on every plant, and " every fish and fowl and beast." Near at hand is "Nature's Nursery," a botanical garden. We have also "a Cabinet of Death," "the monument of bodies," an anatomical collection, which leads to "the Monument of vanished Minds," as the poet finely describes the library. Is it not striking to find, says Dr. Aikin, so exact a model of the school of Linnæus ? This was a poem to delight a philosopher; and Hobbes, in a curious epistle prefixed to the work, has strongly marked its distinct beauties. Gondibert not only came forth with the elaborate panegyric of Hobbes, but was also accompanied by the high commendatory poems of Waller and Cowley; a cause which will sufficiently account for the provocations it inflamed among the poetieal crew; and besides these accompaniments, there is a preface of great length, stamped with all the force and originality of the poet's own mind; and a postscript, as sublime from the feelings which dictated it as from the time and place of its composition. In these, this great genius pours himself out with all that "glory of which his large soul appears to have been full," as Hurd has nobly expressed it". Such a conscious dignity of character, struck * Can one read such passages as these, without catching some of the sympathies of a great genius that knows itself? "He who writes an heroic poem, 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. A club of wits caballed, and produced a collection of short poems, sarcastically entitled "Certain Verses written by several of the Author's Friends, to be reprinted in the Second Edition of Gondibert, 1653." Two years after appeared a brother volume, entitled "The Incomparable Poem of Gondibert vindicated from the WitCombats of Four Esquires; Clinias, Dametas, Sancho, and Jack-Pudding†; with these mottos: “ Κοτέει καὶ ἀοίδος ἀοίδῳ. Vatum quoque gratia, rara est." Anglice, "One wit-brother Of these rare tracts, we are told by Anthony Wood, and all subsequent literary historians, too often mere transcribers of title-pages, that the second was written by our author himself. Would not one imagine that it was a real vindication, or at least a retort-courteous on these obliging friends? The irony of the whole volume has escaped their discovery. The second tract is a continuation of the satire: a mock defence, where the sarcasm, and the pretended remonstrance, are sometimes keener than the open attack. If, indeed, D'Avenant were the author of a continuation of a satire on himself, it is an act of felo de se no poet ever committed; a self-flagellation by an iron whip, where blood is drawn at every stroke, the most penitent bard never inflicted on himself. Would D'Avenant have bantered his proud labour, of abilities begins with inquiring whether we doubt ourselves." Such a composition is injured by mutilation. He here also alludes to his military character: "If thou art a malicious reader, thou wilt" Nor could I sit idle, and sigh with such as mourn remember my preface boldly confessed, that a main motive to the undertaking was a desire of fame; and thou mayest 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, 'tis narrowest where 'tis bred, and broadest afar off. "If thou, reader, art one of those who have been warmed with poetic fire, I reverence thee as my judge; and whilst others tax me with vanity, I appeal to thy conscience whether it be more than such a necessary assurance as thou hast made to thyself in like undertakings? For when I observe that writers have many enemies, such inward assurance, methinks, resembles that forward confidence in men of arms, which makes them proceed in great enterprise; since the right examination to hear the drum; for if the age be not quiet enough to be taught virtue a pleasant way, the next may be at leisure; nor could I (like men that have civilly slept till they are old in dark cities) think war a novelty." Shakespeare could not have expressed his feelings, in his own style, more eloquently touching, than D'Avenant. + It is said there were four writers. The Clinias and Dametas were probably Sir John Denham and Jo. Donne; Sir Allan Broderick and Will Crofts, who is mentioned by the club as one of their fellows, appear to be the Sancho and JackPudding. Will Crofts was a favourite with Charles II.: he had been a skilful agent, as appears in Clarendon. Howell has a poem "On some who, blending their brains together, plotted how to bespatter one of the Muses' choicest sons, Sir William D'Avenant." by calling it "incomparable?" And were it true, that he felt the strokes of their witty malignity so lightly, would he not have secured his triumph by finishing that Gondibert, "the monument of his mind?" It is too evident, that this committee of wits hurt the quiet of a great mind. As for this series of literary satires, it might have been expected, that since the wits clubbed, this committee ought to have been more effective in their operations. Many of their papers were, no doubt, more blotted with their wine than their ink. Their variety of attack is playful, sarcastic, and malicious. They were then such exuberant wits, that they could make even ribaldry and grossness witty. My business with these wicked trifles is only as they concerned the feelings of the great poet, whom they too evidently hurt, as well as the great philosopher who condescended to notice these wits, with wit more dignified than their own. Unfortunately for our "jeered Will," as in their usual court-style they call him, he had met with a foolish mischance," well known among the collectors of our British portraits. There was a feature in his face, or rather no feature at all, that served as a perpetual provocative: there was no precedent of such a thing, says Suckling, in "The Sessions of the Poets " 66 "In all their records, in verse or in prose, There was none of a Laureat who wanted a nose," Besides, he was now doomed "Nor could old Hobbes Defend him from dry bobbs." The preface of Gondibert, the critical epistle of Hobbes, and the poems of the two greatest poets in England, were first to be got rid of. The attack is brisk and airy. "UPON THE PREFACE. "Room for the best of poets heroic, This stroke, in the mock defence, is thus warded off, with a slight confession of the existence of "the mouse." "Why do you bite, you men of fangs To find men meat and stomach too. Among the personal foibles of D'Avenant, appears a desire to disguise his humble origin; and to give it an air of lineal descent, he probably did not write his name as his father had done. It is said he affected, at the cost of his mother's honour, to insinuate that he was the son of Shakespeare, who used to bait at his father's inn. These humorists first reduce D'Avenant to "Old Daph." "Denham, come help me to laugh, At old Daph, Whose fancies are higher than chaff.” 46 UPON FIGHTING WILL. “ The King knights Will for fighting on his side; A face well charged, though nothing in his shield. Of the malignancy of their wit, we must preserve one specimen. They probably harassed our poet with anonymous despatches from the Club: for there appears another poem on D'Avenant's anger on such an occasion: A LETTER SENT TO THE GOOD KNIGHT. "Thou hadst not been thus long neglected, Lest thou to all the world would show it, These literary satires contain a number of other "pasquils," burlesqueing the characters, the incidents, and the stanza, of the GONDIBERT: some not the least witty are the most gross, and must not be quoted; thus the wits of that day were poetical suicides, who have shortened their lives by their folly. envious of the nobler industry of genius itself!— the restoratives of his other friends, after the How the great author's spirit was nourished by bitter decoctions prescribed by these “Four,” I fear we may judge by the unfinished state in which Gondibert has come down to us. D'Avenant seems, however, to have guarded his dignity by delivering an exquisite opinion on this Club of his silence; but Hobbes took an opportunity of in a letter to the Hon. EDWARD HOWARD, who Wits, with perfect philosophical indifference. It is requested to have his sentiments on another heroic poem of his own, "The British Princes." My judgment in poetry hath, you know, been once already censured, by very good wits, for commending Gondibert; but yet they have not, I think, disabled my testimony. For, what authority is there in wit? A jester may have it; a man in drink may have it, and be fluent over night, and wise and dry in the morning. What is it? or who can tell whether it be better to have it, or be without it, especially if it be a pointed wit? I will take my liberty to praise what I like, as well as they do to reprehend what they do not like." The stately Gondibert was not likely to recover favour in the court of Charles the Second, where man was never regarded in his true greatness, but to be ridiculed; a court where the awful presence of Clarendon became so irksome, that the worthless monarch exiled him; a court where nothing was listened to but wit at the cost of sense, the injury of truth, and the violation of decency; where a poem of magnitude with new claims, was a very business for those volatile arbiters of taste; an Epic Poem that had been travestied and epigrammed, was a national concern with them, which, next to some new state-plot, that occurred oftener than a new Epic, might engage the monarch and his privy council. These were not the men to be touched by the compressed reflections and the ideal virtues personified in this poem. In the court of the laughing voluptuary the manners as well as the morals of these satellites of pleasure were so little heroic, that those of the highest rank, both in birth and wit, never mentioned each other but with the vulgar familiarity of nicknames, or the coarse appellatives of Dick, Will, and Jack! Such was the era when the serious Gondibert was produced, and such were the judges Such are the labours of the idlers of genius, who seem to have decided its fate. D'Avenant, like more than one epic poet, did not tune to his ear the names of his personages. They have added, to show that his writings are adapted to an easy musical singer," the names of his heroes and heroines, in these verses : Hurgonil, Astolpho, Borgia, Goltha, Tibalt, Astragon, Hermogild, Ulfinor, Orgo, Thula." And "epithets that will serve for any substantives, either in this part or the next." THE PAPER-WARS OF THE CIVIL WARS. The "Mercuries" and "Diurnals," archives of political fictions-" The Diurnals," in the pay of the Parliament, described by BUTLER and CLEIVELAND-Sir JOHN BIRKENHEAD excels in sarcasm, with specimens of his " Mercurius Aulicus"-how he corrects his own lies-Specimens of the Newspapers on the side of the Commonwealth. AMONG these battles of Logomachy, in which so much ink has been spilt, and so many pens have lost their edge-at a very solemn period in our history, when all around was distress and sorrow, stood forwards the facetious ancestors of that numerous progeny who still flourish among us, and who, without a suspicion of their descent, still bear the features of their progenitors, and inherit so many of the family humours. These were the MERCURIES and DIURNALS-the newspapers of our Civil Wars. The distinguished heroes of these Paper-Wars, Sir John Birkenhead, Marchmont Needham, and Sir Roger L'Estrange, I have elsewhere portrayed. We have had of late correct lists of these works; but no one seems as yet to have given any clear notion of their spirit and their manner. The London Journals in the service of the Parliament were usually the Diurnals. These politicians practised an artifice which cannot be placed among "the lost inventions." As these were hawked about the metropolis to spur curiosity, often languid from over-exercise, or to wheedle an idle spectator into a reader, every paper bore on its front the inviting heads of its intelligence. Men placed in the same circumstances will act in the same manner, without any notion of imitation; and the passions of mankind are now addressed by the same means which our ancestors employed, by those who do not suspect they are copying them. These Diurnals have been blasted by the lightnings of Butler and Cleiveland. Hudibras is made happy at the idea that he may be "Register'd by fame eternal, In deathless pages of DIURNAL." But Cleiveland has left us two remarkable effusions of his satiric and vindictive powers, in his curious character of "A Diurnal Maker," and "A London Diurnal." He writes in the peculiar vein of the wit of those times, with an originality of images, whose combinations excite surprise, and whose abundance fatigues our weaker delicacy. "A Diurnal-Maker is the Sub-Almoner of History; Queen Mab's Register; one whom, by the same figure that a North-country pedlar is a merchantman, you may style an author. The silly countryman who, seeing an ape in a scarlet coat, blessed his young worship, and gave his landlord joy of the hopes of his house, did not slander his compliment with worse application than he that names this shred an historian. To call him an Historian is to knight a Mandrake; 'tis to view him through a perspective, and, by that gross hyperbole, to give the reputation of an engineer to a maker of mousetraps. When these weekly fragments shall pass for history, let the poor man's box be entitled the Exchequer, and the alms-basket a Magazine. Methinks the Turks should license Diurnals, because he prohibits learning and books." He characterises the Diurnals as a puny chronicle, scarce pinfeathered with the wings of Time; it is a history in sippets; the English Iliads in a nutshell; the Apocryphal Parliament's book of Maccabees in single sheets." 44 But Cleiveland tells us, that these Diurnals differ from a Mercurius Aulicus (the paper of his party), -"as the Devil and his Exorcist, or as a black witch doth from a white one, whose office is to unravel her enchantments." The Mercurius Aulicus was chiefly conducted by SIR JOHN BIRKENHEAD, at Oxford, “commuCuriosities of Literature, 11th Edition, p. 56. nicating the intelligence and affairs of the court to the rest of the kingdom." Sir John was a great wag, and excelled in sarcasm and invective; his facility is equal to repartee, and his spirit often reaches to wit: a great forger of tales, who probably considered that a romance was a better thing than a newspaper *. The royal party were so delighted with his witty buffoonery, that Sir John was recommended to be Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. Did political lying seem to be a kind of moral philosophy to the feelings of a party? The originality of Birkenhead's happy manner consists in his adroit use of sarcasm: he strikes it off by means of a parenthesis. I shall give, as a specimen, one of his summaries of what the Parliamentary Journals had been detailing during the week. "The Londoners in print this week have been pretty copious. They say that a troop of the Marquess of Newcastle's horse have submitted to the Lord Fairfax. (They were part of the German horse which came over in the Danish There is a small poem, published in 1643, entitled, "The Great Assizes holden in Parnassus," in the manner of a later work, "The Sessions of the Poets," in which all the Diurnals and Mercuries are arraigned and tried. An impartial satire on them all; and by its good sense and heavy versification, is so much in the manner of GEORGE WITHER, that some have conjectured it to be that singular author's. Its rarity gives it a kind of value. Of such verses as Wither's, who has been of late extolled too highly, the chief merit is their sense and truth: which, if he were not tedious, might be an excellence in prose. Antiquaries, when they find a poet adapted for their purposes, conjecture that he is an excellent one. This prosing satirist, strange to say, in some pastoral poetry, has opened the right vein. Aulicus is well characterised: "hee, for wicked ends, Had the Castalian spring defiled with gall, With forged fictitious calumnies and tales- - He laboured hard for to bring in fleet t.) That the Lord Wilmot hath been dead five weeks, but the Cavaliers concealed his death. (Remember this!) That Sir John Urrey ‡ is dead and buried at Oxford. (He died the same day with the Lord Wilmot.) That the Cavaliers, before they have done, will HURREY all men into misery. (This quibble hath been six times printed, and nobody would take notice of it; now let's hear of it no more!) That all the Cavaliers which Sir William Waller took prisoners (besides 500) tooke the National Covenant. (Yes, all he took (besides 500) tooke the Covenant.) That 2000 Irish Rebels landed in Wales. (You called them English Protestants till you cheated them of their money.) That Sir William Brereton left 140 good able men in Hawarden Castle. ('Tis the better for Sir Michael Earnley, who hath taken the Castle.) That the Queen hath a great deafnesse. (Thou hast a great blister on thy tongue.) That the Cavaliers burned all the suburbs of Chester, that Sir William Brereton might find no shelter to besiedge it. (There was no hayrick, and Sir William cares for no other shelter §.) The SCOTTISH DOVE says (there are + Alluding to a ridiculous rumour, that the King was to receive foreign troops by a Danish fleet. Col. Urrey, alias Hurrey, deserted the Parliament, and went over to the King; afterwards deserted the King, and discovered to the Parliament all he knew of the King's forces.-See Clarendon. § This Sir William Brereton, or, as Clarendon writes the name, Bruerton, was the famous Cheshire knight, whom Cleiveland characterises as one of those heroes whose courage lies in their teeth. "Was Brereton," says the loyal Satirist, "to fight with his teeth, as he in all other things resembles the beast, he would have odds of any man at this weapon. He's a terrible slaughterman at a Thanksgiving dinner. Had he been cannibal enough to have eaten those he vanquished, his gut would have made him valiant." And in " Loyal Songs" his valiant appetite is noticed : "But, oh! take heed lest he do eat And Aulicus, we see, accuses him of concealing his bravery in a hay-rick. It is always curious and useful to confer the writers of intemperate times one with another. Lord Clarendon, whose great mind was incapable of descending to scurrility, gives a very different character to this potvaliant and hay-rick runaway; for he says, "It cannot be denied but Sir William Brereton, and the other gentlemen of that party, albeit their educations and course of life had been very dif |