has diversified his tragick action'. By comparing this with his Orphan it will appear that his images were by time become stronger, and his language more energetick. The striking passages are in every mouth; and the publick seems to judge rightly of the faults and excellencies of this play, that it is the work of a man not attentive to decency nor zealous for virtue; but of one who conceived forcibly and drew originally by consulting nature in his own breast. 13 Together with those plays he wrote the poems which are in the late collection, and translated from the French the History of the Triumvirate 3. 14 All this was performed before he was thirty-four years old; for quake.' The Spectator, No. 44. I remember how my heart quaked more than fifty years ago, when I saw the play at Sadler's Wells Theatre. In performance it is purged of these despicable scenes.' Biog. Dram. iii. 377. 'Il est désagréable qu'on ne nous ait pas traduit fidèlement cette Venise; on nous a privé d'un sénateur qui mord les jambes de sa maîtresse, qui fait le chien, qui aboie,et qu'on chasse à coups de fouet.' VOLTAIRE,Euvres, xlii.149. 'Johnson,' writes Northcote, 'in his peremptory manner pronounced that there was not forty good lines to be found in Venice Preserved. Goldsmith asserted that, notwithstanding, it was of all tragedies the one nearest equal to Shakespeare. "Poh!" said Johnson. "What stuff in these lines! 'What feminine tales hast thou been Of unair'd shirts, catarrhs and toothBythin-soled shoes? [Act iii. sc. 2].'" "True," said Goldsmith; "to be sure, that is very like to Shakespeare." S. Gwynne's Memorials of an Eighteenth Century Painter, p. 97. Goldsmith, in The Bee, No. 8, calls 'Otway, next to Shakespeare, the greatest genius England ever produced in tragedy.' Works, iii. 127. 'Who sees not that the Gravedigger in Hamlet, the Fool in Lear, have a kind of correspondency to, and fall in with, the subjects which they seem to interrupt, while the comic stuff in Venice Preserved, and the doggerel nonsense of the Cook and his poisoning associates in the Rollo of Beaumont and Fletcher, are pure irrelevant, impertinent discords.' LAMB, Poems, &c. 1888, p. 281. 'The comic scenes are particularly good. It is they alone which account for, and go near to justify the conspiracy; for we see in them how utterly unfit for government the Senate had become.' GOETHE, quoted in H. C. Robinson's Diary, 1869, i. 187. 2 They are, I think, all forgotten. [Yet here and there a line like, Angels are painted fair to look like you' (Venice Preserved, i. 1), may be said still to live.] 'When, in 1794, the Rev. Wm. Jackson fell in the dock from poison, previous to being sentenced to death for high treason, he pressed the hand of his counsel, muttering, "We have deceived the Senate." This, quoted from Venice Preserved, shows the deep impression that powerful play had produced. This incident is described in Secret Service under Pitt, p. 192.' N. & Q. 8 S. vi. 38. They are Pierre's dying words in the last act. 'Ours is a trophy which will not decay [Moor, With the Rialto; Shylock, and the And Pierre, cannot be swept or worn away The keystones of the arch! though all were o'er, [shore.' For us repeopled were the solitary BYRON, Childe Harold, iv. 4. 3 Histoire des deux Triumvirats, by S. de Broé. Otway's translation appeared the year after his death. he died April 14, 1685, in a manner which I am unwilling to mention. Having been compelled by his necessities to contract debts, and hunted, as is supposed, by the terriers of the law, he retired to a publick house on Tower-hill, where he is said to have died of want 2; or, as it is related by one of his biographers 3, by swallowing, after a long fast, a piece of bread which charity had supplied. He went out, as is reported, almost naked, in the rage of hunger, and, finding a gentleman in a neighbouring coffee-house, asked him for a shilling. The gentleman gave him a guinea, and Otway going away bought a roll, and was choaked with the first mouthful. All this, I hope, is not true; and there is this ground of better hope, that Pope, who lived near enough to be well informed, relates in Spence's memorials that he died of a fever caught by violent pursuit of a thief that had robbed one of his friends. But that indigence and its concomitants, sorrow and despondency, pressed hard upon him has never been denied, whatever immediate cause might bring him to the grave. Of the poems which the late collection admits, the longest is 15 The Poet's Complaint of his Muse 5, part of which I do not understand; and in that which is less obscure I find little to commend. The language is often gross, and the numbers are harsh. Otway had not much cultivated versification', nor much replenished his Ath. Oxon. iv. 170. 2 In a note at the end of The Tatler, May 9, 1710 (ed. 1789, iii. 169), is the following:-' At Drury Lane Theatre on Thursday, May 11, Caius Marius, a Trag. by T. Otway, acted at the Duke's Theatre. 4 to. 1680. Its ingenious author, after suffering severely for his want of oeconomy, died in a spunginghouse on Tower Hill, known by the sign of a Bull, about five years after the publication of this play at the age of 35.' Wood wrote of George Peele :'When or where he died I cannot tell; for so it is, and always hath been, that most poets die poor and consequently obscurely, and a hard matter it is to trace them to their graves.' Ath. Oxon. i. 688. 3 Cibber's Lives, ii. 334. This anecdote is not in the first edition. Spence had it, not from Pope, but Dennis, who was twentyeight when Otway died. 'Otway had an intimate friend (one Blackstone) who was shot; the murderer fled towards Dover, and Otway pursued him. In his return he drank water when violently heated, and so got a fever, which was the death of him.' Spence's Anec. p. 44. 'When he died he had about him the copy of a tragedy, which, it seems, he had sold for a trifle to Bentley the bookseller. I have seen an advertisement at the end of one of L'Estrange's political papers offering a reward to any one who should bring it to his shop.' GOLDSMITH, Works, iii. 128. He had written four acts only. See ib. n. for a copy of the advertisement in The Observator of Nov. 27, 1686. 5 Eng. Poets, xv. 175. Printed in 1680. Rochester calls him 'puzzling Otway. Ib. xv. 63. 7'Not but the tragic spirit was our mind with general knowledge. His principal power was in moving the passions, to which Dryden in his latter years left an illustrious testimony1. He appears, by some of his verses, to have been a zealous royalist, and had what was in those times the common reward of loyalty; he lived and died neglected2. But Otway fail'd to polish or refine, And fluent Shakespeare scarce effac'd a line.' POPE, Imit. Hor., Epis. ii. 1. 276. In his preface to Fresnoy's Art of Painting. JOHNSON. It was published in 1695. Dryden writes of the power of expressing the passions:-'We call it the gift of our Apollo-not to be obtained by pains or study, if we are not born to it; for the motions which are studied are never so natural as those which break out in the height of a real passion. Mr. Otway possessed this part as thoroughly as any of the ancients or moderns.' Works, xvii. .325; post, DRYDEN, 325. For Fresnoy see ib. 146. Otway in the Preface to Don Carlos (1676) alludes to Dryden :"Don Carlos never failed to draw tears from the eyes of the auditors; I mean those whose souls were capable of so noble a pleasure... though a certain writer, that shall be nameless (but you may guess at him by what follows), being asked his opinion of the play, very gravely cock'd, and cried :-'I'gad, he knew not a line in it he would be author of.'"" Malone's Dryden, i. 501. 'Otway has admirably succeeded in the tender and melting part of his tragedies.' ADDISON, The Spectator, No. 39. 'Tender' is the epithet often applied to Otway. In Gay's Three Hours after Marriage, 1717, pp. 19, 22, the writer of a tragedy and a player talk of the tender Otway'; 'the tenderness of Otway.' Thomson, in the Prologue to Tancred and Sigismunda, mentions 'soft Otway's tender woe.' Voltaire twice speaks of him as known in England as 'le tendre Otway.' Euvres, xlii. 129, 144. 'I once asked Dr. Johnson if he did not think Otway a good painter of tender scenes, and he replied, "Sir, he is all tenderness." DR. BURNEY, Hist. of Music, 1789, iii. 598 n. 'Otway has written but two tragedies, out of six, that are pathetic. I believe he did it without much design; as Lillo has done in his Barnwell. 'Tis a talent of nature rather than an effect of judgment to write so movingly.' POPE, Spence's Anec. p. 215. 'Otway's excellencies lay in painting directly from nature, in catching every emotion just as it rises from the soul, and in all the powers of the moving and pathetic.' GOLDSMITH, iii. 127. Borrow, joining Otway with Milton and Butler, says: They have left a fame behind them which shall never die.' Lavengro, 1888, p. 133. * Otway, dedicating Venice Preserved to the king's mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, wrote:'When I had enemies, that with malicious power kept back and shaded me from those royal beams whose warmth is all I have or hope to live by, your noble pity and compassion found me where I was far cast backward from my blessing; down in the rear of fortune; called me up, and placed me in the shine, and I have felt its comfort.' Hume ends his Hist. of England with the following sentence:-'Otway, though a professed royalist, could not even procure bread by his writings; and he had the singular fate of dying literally of hunger. These incidents throw a great stain on the memory of Charles, who had discernment, loved genius, was liberal of money, but attained not the praise of true generosity.' For the neglect of Butler see ante, BUTLER, 18, and of 'Dr. Hodges who, in the height of the Great Plague, continued in London,' see Boswell's Johnson, ii. 341 n. WALLER' EDMUND WALLER was born on the third of March, 1 1605, at Colshill in Hertfordshire 2. His father was Robert Waller, Esquire, of Agmondesham in Buckinghamshire, whose family was originally a branch of the Kentish Wallers3, and his mother was the daughter of John Hampden, of Hampden in the same county, and sister to Hampden, the zealot of rebellion". His father died while he was yet an infant, but left him an 2 yearly income of three thousand five hundred pounds, which, rating together the value of money and the customs of life, we may reckon more than equivalent to ten thousand at the present time. He was educated by the care I 6 'Waller,' wrote Johnson, 'never had any critical examination before.' John. Letters, ii. 68; ante, Cowley, I n. Among Johnson's authorities for this Life are the Life of Waller prefixed to his Poems upon Several Occasions, 1711, and Observations on some of Mr. Waller's Poems in Fenton's Works of Waller, 1729 (my references are to the edition of 1744). 'In the Life of Waller, Johnson gives a distinct and animated narrative of publick affairs in that variegated period, with strong yet nice touches of character; and having a fair opportunity to display his political principles, does it with an unqualified manly confidence, and satisfies his readers how nobly he might have executed a Tory History of his country.' Boswell's Johnson, iv. 39. He was born at Winchmorehill in the parish of Agmundesham, commonly called Amersam [now Amersham], in Bucks, on March 13, 1605-6.' Ath. Oxon. iii. 46. 'Though Coleshill be in Agmundesham 'tis in the county of Hertford.' Life, p. 3. Winchmoor Hill is close to Coleshill. 'He was baptized on March 9.' Cunningham's Lives of the Poets, i. 219. 3 For his grandfather's will see of his mother at Eaton, and 3 N.&Q. I S. v. 619. The Kentish Hampden's father, William by name, not John, and Waller's mother were children of Griffith Hampden. Hampden's mother was a daughter of Sir Henry Cromwell, the Protector's grandfather. Hampden therefore was first cousin to Oliver Cromwell and to Edmund Waller. Ath. Oxon. iii. 47 n. 'Waller derived his poetick witt from the Hamdens; severall of them have been poets.' AUBREY, Brief Lives, ii. 279. Johnson in his Dictionary defines zealot as 'one passionately ardent in any cause. Generally used in dispraise." 6 5 Life, p. 3. His paternall estate and by his first wife was 3,000 li. per annum.' Brief Lives, ii. 274. 'He sayes that he was bred under severall ill, dull, ignorant schoolmasters, till he went to Mr. Dobson at [High] Wickham, who was a good schoolmaster, and had been an Eaton scholar.' Ib. ii. 278. In the Life of Waller, p. 7, it is said he went to Eton. It is accepted at Eton that he was educated there; but, on inquiry, I cannot learn that there is any proof. removed afterwards to King's College in Cambridge'. He was sent to parliament in his eighteenth, if not in his sixteenth year2, and frequented the court of James the First, where he heard a very remarkable conversation, which the writer of the Life prefixed to his Works, who seems to have been well informed of facts, though he may sometimes err in chronology, has delivered as indubitably certain 3. 4. 'He found Dr. Andrews, bishop of Winchester, and Dr. Neale, 5 66 and Waller's political and poetical life began nearly together. In his eighteenth year he wrote the poem that appears first in his works, on the Prince's Escape at St. Andero, a piece which justifies the observation made by one of his editors, that he attained, by a felicity like instinct, a style which perhaps will 1823 |