that, although on the 7th of April, 1642, the Kentish
petition in
favour of the Liturgy, &c. had been ordered by the House of Commons
to be burned by the common hangman (PARLIAMENTS AND COUNCILS
OF ENGLAND, 1839, p. 384), Boteler and Lovelace had the temerity,
on the 30th of the same month, to come up to London, and present it
again to the House. It was this which occasioned their committal.
In the VERNEY PAPERS (Camd. Soc. 1845, p. 175) there is the
following memorandum:--
"Captaine Lovelace committed to the Gatehouse ! Concerning
Sir William Butler committed to the Fleete ! Deering's
!
petition."
<2.6> "Gatehouse, a prison in Westminster, near the west end
of the Abbey, which leads into Dean's Yard, Tothill Street,
and the Almonry"--Cunningham's HANDBOOK OF LONDON, PAST AND
PRESENT. But for a more particular
account, see Stow's SURVEY,
ed. 1720, ii. lib. 6.
"The Gatehouse for a Prison was ordain'd,
When in this land the third king EDWARD reign'd:
Good
lodging roomes, and diet it affords,
But I had rather lye at home on boords."
Taylor's PRAISE AND VIRTUE OF A JAYLE AND JAYLERS,
(Works, 1630, ii. 130).
<2.7> By an inadvertence, I have
spoken of THOMAS, instead of
WILLIAM, Lovelace having perished at Caermarthen, in a note
at p. 125.
<2.8> It appears from the following copy of verses, printed
in Tatham's OSTELLA, 1650, 4to., that Lovelace made a stay
in the Netherlands about this time, if indeed he did not serve
there with his regiment.
UPON MY NOBLE FRIEND RICHARD LOVELACE, ESQ., HIS
BEING IN HOLLAND. AN INVITATION.
Come, Adonis, come again;
What distaste could drive thee hence,
Where so much delight did reign,
Sateing ev'n the soul of sense?
And though thou
unkind hast prov'd,
Never youth was more belov'd.
Then, lov'd Adonis, come away,
For Venus brooks not thy delay.
Wert thou sated with the spoil
Of so many
virgin hearts,
And
therefore didst change thy soil,
To seek fresh in other parts?
Dangers wait on foreign game;
We have deer more sound and tame.
Then, lov'd Adonis, come away,
For Venus brooks not thy delay.
Phillis, fed with thy delights,
In thy
absence pines away;
And love, too, hath lost his rites,
Not one lass keeps holiday.
They have changed their mirth for cares,
And do onely sigh thy airs.
Then, lov'd Adonis, come away,
For Venus brooks not thy delay.
Elpine, in whose sager looks
Thou wert wont to take delight,
Hath
forsook his drink and books,
'Cause he can't enjoy thy sight:
He hath laid his
learning by,
'Cause his wit wants company.
Then, lov'd Adonis, come away,
For friendship brooks not thy delay.
All the swains that once did use
To
converse with Love and thee,
In the language of thy Muse,
Have forgot Love's deity:
They deny to write a line,
And do only talk of thine.
Then, lov'd Adonis, come away,
For friendship brooks not thy delay.
By thy sweet Althea's voice,
We
conjure thee to return;
Or we'll rob thee of that choice,
In whose flames each heart would burn:
That inspir'd by her and sack,
Such company we will not lack:
That poets in the age to come,
Shall write of our Elisium.
<2.9> Peter, or rather PETRE House, in Aldersgate Street,
belonged at one time to the antient family by whose name it was
known. The third Lord Petre, dying in 1638, left it, with other
possessions in and about the city of London, to his son William.
(Collins's PEERAGE, by Brydges, vii. 10, 11.) When Lovelace was
committed to Peter House, and probably long before (MERCURIUS
RUSTICUS, ed. 1685, pp. 76-79), this
mansion was used as a house of
detention for political prisoners; but in Ward's DIARY (ed. Severn,
p. 167), there is the following entry (like almost all Ward's
entries, unluckily without date):--"My Lord Peters is an Essex man;
hee hath a house in Aldersgate Street,
wherein lives the Marquis
of Dorchester:" implying that at that period (perhaps about 1660),
the premises still belonged to the Petre family, though temporarily
let to Lord Dorchester. Another
celebrated house in the same
street was London House, which continued for some time to be the
town
residence of the Bishops of London. When it had ceased to be
an
episcopal abode, it was adapted to the purposes of an ordinary
dwelling, and, among the occupants, at a somewhat later period, was
Tom Rawlinson, the great book-collector. See Stow, ed. 1720, ii.
lib. iii. p. 121.
<2.10> How different was the conduct, under similar circumstances,
of the lady whom Charles Gerbier commemorates in his ELOGIUM
HEROINUM, 1651, p. 127. "Democion, the Athenian
virgin," he tells
us, "hearing that Leosthenes, to whom she was
contracted, was slain
in the wars, she killed herself; but before her death she thus
reasoned with herself: 'Although my body is untoucht, yet should I
fall into the imbraces of another, I should but
deceive the second,
since I am still married to the former in my heart.'"
<2.11> Wood's story about LUCASTA having been a Lucy Sacheverell,
"a lady of great beauty and fortune," may
reasonably be doubted.
Lucasta,
whoever she was, seems to have belonged to Kent;
the SACHEVERELLS were not a Kentish family. Besides, the
corruption of Lucy Sacheverell into Lucasta is not very obvious,
and rather
violent; and the
probability is that the author of
the ATHENAE was misled by his informant on this occasion.
The plate etched by Lely and engraved by Faithorne, which
is found in the second part of LUCASTA, 1659, can scarcely
be regarded as a
portrait; it was, in all
likelihood, a mere
fancy
sketch, and we are not perhaps far from the truth in our
surmise that the artist was nearly, if not quite, as much
in the dark as to who Lucasta was, as we are ourselves
at the present day.
<2.12> This is a mistake on the part of Wood, which (with many
others) ought to be corrected in a new
edition of the ATHENAE.
Lawes did not set to music AMARANTHA, A PASTORAL, nor any
portionof it; but he harmonized two stanzas of a little poem to be found
at p. 29 of the present
volume, and called "To Amarantha; that she
would dishevel her Hair."
<2.13> Hasted states that soon after the death of Charles I. the
manor of Lovelace-Bethersden passed by purchase to Richard Hulse,
Esq.
<2.14> On the title-page of this
portion of LUCASTA, as well as
on that which had appeared in 1649, the author is
expressly styled
RICHARD LOVELACE, ESQ.: yet in Berry's KENT GENEALOGIES, p. 474,
he is,
curiously enough, called SIR Richard Lovelace, KNT. It is
scarcely necessary to observe that the error is on Berry's side.
<2.15> The most
pleasinglikeness of Lovelace, the only one,
indeed, which conveys any just idea to us of the "handsomest man of
his time," is the picture at Dulwich, which has been twice copied,
in both instances with very
indifferent success. One of these
copies was made for Harding's BIOGRAPHICAL MIRROR. Bromley
(DICTIONARY OF ENGRAVED BRITISH PORTRAITS, 1793, p. 101) correctly
names F[rancis] Lovelace, the writer's brother, as the designer
of the
portrait before the POSTHUME POEMS.
<2.16> Winstanley, perhaps, intended some
allusion to these two
lost dramas from the pen of Lovelace, when he thus characterizes
him in his LIVES OF THE POETS, 1687, p. 170:--"I can compare no
man," he says, "so like this Colonel LOVELACE as SIR PHILIP SIDNEY,
of which latter it is said by one in an
epitaph made of him:--
'Nor is it fit that more I should acquaint,
Lest men adore in one
A Scholar, SOULDIER, Lover, and a Saint.'"
As to the
comparison, Winstanley must be understood to signify
a
resemblance between Lovelace and Sydney as men, rather than
as writers. Winstanley's
extract is from WITS' RECREATIONS,
but the text, as he gives it, varies from that printed by
the editor of the reprint of that work in 1817.
<2.17> Gunpowder Alley still exists, but it is not the Gunpowder
Alley which Lovelace knew, having been rebuilt more than once
since 1658, It is now a tolerably wide and airy court, without
any
conspicuous appearance of squalor. There is no tradition,
I am sorry to say,
respecting Lovelace; all such recollections
have long been swept away. When one of the old inhabitants
told me (and there are one or two persons who have lived here
all their life) that a great poet once resided thereabout,
I naturally became eager to catch the name; but it turned out
to be Dr. Johnson, not Lovelace, the latter of whom might have
been
contemporary with Homer for aught they knew to the contrary
in Gunpowder Alley. It appears from Decker and Webster's play
of WESTWARD HOE, 1607 (Webster's Works, ed. Hazlitt, i. 67),
that there was another Gunpowder Alley, near Crutched Friars.
<2.18> Hone (EVERY-DAY BOOK, ii. 561, edit. 1827), states,
under date of April 28, that "during this month in 1658
the
accomplished Colonel Richard Lovelace died IN THE GATEHOUSE
AT WESTMINSTER, whither he had been committed," &c. No authority,
however, is given for in
assertion so
wholly at variance with
the received view on the subject, and I am afraid that Hone has
here fallen into a mistake.
<2.19> Aubrey, in what are called his LIVES OF EMINENT MEN,
but which are, in fact, merely rough biographical memoranda,
states under the head of Lovelace:--"Obiit in a
cellar in
Long acre, a little before the restauration of his Matie.
Mr. Edm. Wyld,<<AN.1>> &c. had made collections for him,
and given him money.....Geo. Petty, haberdasher, in Fleet street,
carried xx to him every Monday morning from Sr....Many
and Charles Cotton, Esq. for....moneths, BUT WAS NEVER REPAYD."
Aubrey was certainly a
contemporary of Lovelace, and Wood seems
to have been
indebted to him for a good deal of information;
but all who are acquainted with Aubrey are probably aware that
he took, in many instances, very little trouble to examine for
himself, but accepted statements on hearsay. Wood does not,
in the case of Lovelace, adopt Aubrey's
account, and it is to
be observed that, IF the poet died as poor as he is represented
by both writers to have died, he would have been buried by the
parish, and, dying in Long Acre, the parochial authorities would
not have carried him to Fleet Street for sepulture.
<<AN.1>> P. xxiv. MR. EDM[UND] WYLD.
This gentleman, the friend of Aubrey, Author of the MISCELLANIES,
&c., and (?) the son of Sir Edmund Wyld, seems to have furnished
the former with a
variety of information on matters of current
interest. See Thoms' ANECDOTES AND TRADITIONS, 1839, p. 99.
He is, no doubt, the E. W. Esq., whom Aubrey cites as his