Here be all new delights; cool streams and wells; Or gather rushes to make many a ring For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of love; 66 CESAR'S LAMENTATION OVER POMPEY'S HEAD. Oh thou Conqueror, Thou glory of the world once, now the pity; Egyptians, dare ye think your highest pyramids, No pyramids set off his memories, The fable of the loves of Endymion and Diana in the Carian Mount Latmos has always been a favourite with the poets. Cic. Tusc. Quest. i. 38. Shakespeare s Merchant of Venice, Act. V. Sc. i. See Keats' Endymion. ? Apollo. The moon sleeps with Endymion, Pompey having fled to Egypt after his defeat at Pharsalia, was murdered on the shore by the ministers of Ptolemy Dionysius, then a minor. Fletcher's verse is very frequently marked by double and triple terminations.-See Introduction to Weber's edition, pp. 90, 91. But the eternal substance of his greatness, Let's think this prison a holy sanctuary The poison of pure spirits, might, like women, May make it ours ?3 And here, being thus together, We're father, friends, acquaintance; We are, in one another, families; I am your heir, and you are mine; this place May take this from us; here, with a little patience, Crave our acquaintance; I might sicken, cousin, JOHN FORD. (1586-1639.) FORD is one of the most respectable of the second-class dramatic poets of the reigns of James and Charles I. He was of good birth; he devoted himself to the study of law, but does not appear to have practised at the bar. He was a man of a quiet and contemplative disposition. His tragic yre does not sound the heart-stirring tones of some of his cotemporaries; and he disfigures his plays by the interjection of attempts at comic underplots, for which his genius was totally unfitted. He is, however, elegant and harmo 1 On this passage Hazlitt remarks, "It is something worth living for to write or even read such poetry as this." 2 This drama is founded on Chaucer's Knight's Tale. The first act has been attributed to Shakespeare. Compare Shakespeare, Rich. II. Act I. Sc. 3. "All places," &c. Theobald proposes craze; Sympson, carve; Seward, reave; and Mason, cleare. The old text is not, however, inexplicable. Arcita may say-The envious disposition of ill men may crave their acquaintance in order to sow dissensions between them.-Weber. nious, and powerful in the delineation of the passion of love. He wrote eleven plays; and shared the authorship of several more with Dekker and others. 66 THE RIVAL MUSICIANS. ACT I. SC. 1. Menaphon, Amethus. Men. Passing from Italy to Greece, the tales To Thessaly I came, and living private, Without acquaintance of more sweet companions Amet. I cannot yet conceive what you infer Men. I shall soon resolve you. A sound of music touched mine ears, or rather, This youth, this fair-faced youth, upon his lute, Men. A nightingale, Nature's best skilled musician, undertakes The challenge; and, for every several strain The well-shaped youth could touch, she sung her own Upon his quaking instrument, than she, The nightingale, did with her various notes That such they were than hope to hear again. The dividing of a tone into small notes: "In your sweet dividing throat."-Carew. See p. 167. Men. You term them rightly; For they were rivals, and their mistress, Harmony. Whom art had never taught clefs, moods, or notes, Had busied many hours to perfect practice: To end the controversy, in a rapture Upon his instrument he plays so swiftly, So many voluntaries, and so quick, That there was curiosity and cunning, Concord and discord, lines of differing method, Amet. Now for the bird. Men. The bird, ordained to be Music's first martyr, strove to imitate These several sounds; which when her warbling throat And brake her heart! It was the quaintest sadness, To weep a funeral elegy of tears; That, trust me, my Amethus, I could chide Amet. I believe thee. Men. He looked upon the trophies of his art, This cruelty upon the author of it; Henceforth this lute, guilty of innocent blood, To an untimely end." And in that sorrow, GEORGE WITHER. (1588-1667.) WITHER was "the descendant of a family that had for many generations possessed the property of Manydowne in Hampshire" (Campbell). Being recalled from a short residence at Oxford University to hold the plough on his native acres, he felt an impulsive repugnance to this "cramping of his genius." The vivacity of his satire in "Abuses Whipt and Stript" procured him a residence in the Marshalsea. The fate of Wither's life was to have the prison for his muse. He is a "weft and stray" in the whirlwind of parties of the middle of the seventeenth century. Favoured by James I.; a 2 This tale, from the Latin of Strada, is a favourite of the poets. It was beautifully translated by Crashaw, who entitles it "Music's Duel."-See Retrospective Review, vol. i. p. 246. 1 Dashing. royalist in the beginning of the troubles of Charles I.; a military captain in the war against the Scotch Covenanters ; a major-general of Cromwell; saved, by a jest of Denham's, from execution by the royalists during his roundhead career; a monitor of Cromwell; a large profiter from confiscated royalist estates; a congratulator of Richard Cromwell's accession; an angry remonstrator against the disgorging of his spoils after the Restoration; a prisoner for just remonstrances against the illegal manner in which he was deprived of his fortune; a penman not to be silenced by age or prison-fetters :-these features constitute the physiognomy of Wither's varied life. A vein of honesty, or at least earnestness in present conviction, seems to run through his inconsistencies. He died in misery and obscurity at the age of seventy-nine. His literary life extends over about forty years of that period. His writings are, or rather if collected would be, voluminous. Wither's early pieces display the freshness and animation of truly poetical feeling; "but," says Campbell," as he mixed with the turbulent times, his fancy grew muddy with the stream." His diction is remarkable for its purely English character. Wither has, like many of his cotemporaries and predecessors, been comparatively lately excavated from the oblivion into which the eaprice of national taste had thrown him. For an excellent estimate of Wither, see Charles Lamb's Essays. -Alas! my Muse is slow: And though for her sake I'm crost, Though my best hopes I have lost, And knew she would make my trouble Ten times more than ten times double: I would love and keep her too, Spite of all the world could do. For, though, banish'd from my flocks, And confin'd within these rocks, Here I waste away the light, And consume the sullen night, And keeps many cares away. The eclogue is inscribed to his "truly beloved and loving friend, Mr William Browne, of the Inner Temple."-For Browne, see p. 168. 2 The "Shepherd's Hunting" was published while he was confined in the Marshalsea for the publication of "Abuses Whipt and Stript." |