LIFE OF SIR JOHN DENHAM. NEXT to those poets who have exerted an influence on the matter, should be ranked those who have improved the manner, of our song. So that thus the same list may include the names of a Chaucer and a Waller, of a Milton and a Denham-the more as we suspect none but a true poet can materially improve even a poetical mode, can contrive even a new stirrup to Pegasus, or even to retune the awful organ of Pythia. Neither Denham nor Waller were great poets; but they have produced lines and verses so good, and have, besides, exerted an influence so considerable on modern versification, and the style of poetical utterance, that they are entitled to a highly respectable place amidst the sons of British song. Sir John Denham, although thoroughly English both in descent and in complexion of mind, was born in Dublin in 1615. His father, whose name also was Sir John (of Little Horseley, in Essex), was, at the time of our poet's birth, the Chief Baron of Exchequer in Ireland. His mother was Eleanor More, daughter of Sir Garret More, Baron of Mellefont. Two years after the son's birth, the father, being made an English Baron of Exchequer, returned to his native country, and educated young John in London. Thence, at the age of sixteen, he went to study at Oxford, where he became celebrated rather for dissipation than diligence. He was, although a youth of imaginative temperament, excessively fond of gambling; and it was said of him, that he was more given to "dreams and dice than to study." His future eminence might be foreseen by some of his friends; but, in general, men looked on him rather as an idle and misled youth of fortune, than as a genius. Three years after, he removed to Lincoln's Inn, where he continued occasionally to gamble, and was sometimes punished for his pains, being plundered by more skilful or unscrupulous gamesters, but did not forget his studies. His conscience, on one occasion, aroused by a rebuke from a friend, awoke; and, to confirm the resolutions which it forced upon him, he wrote and published an "Essay on Gaming.' In this respect he resembles Sir Richard Steele when a young soldier, who, in order to cure himself of his dissipations, wrote and published "The Christian Hero"his object being, by drawing the picture of a character exactly opposite to his own, to commit himself irrevocably to virtue, and to break down all the bridges between him and a return to vice. It is, alas! notorious, that Steele's holiness turned out only to be a FIT, of not much longer duration than a morning headache, and that the "Christian Hero" remains not as a model to which its author's conduct was ever conformed, but as a severe, self-written satire on his whole career. And so with Denham. For some time he forsook the gambling-table, and applied his attention partly to law, and partly to poetry, translating, in 1636, the "Second Book of the Æneid; " but when his father died, two years afterwards, and left him some thousands, he rushed again to the dice-box, and melted them as rapidly as the wind melts the snow of spring. "In 1642 he broke out," as Waller remarks of him, "like the Irish Rebellion, threescore thousand strong, when nobody was aware, or in the least suspected it," in the play of "Sophy;" and, sooth to say, like that rebellion, his outbreak is lawless and irregular, as well as strong; as in that rebellion, too, there is a rather needless expenditure of blood. What Byron says of Dr Polidori's tragedy, is nearly true of "Sophy" "All stab, and everybody dies." Nothing can be more horrible and disgusting than many of the incidents. A father suspecting and plotting against a dear and noble son; a son deprived of sight by the command of a father, and meditating in his rage and revenge the murder of his own favourite daughter, because she is beloved by his father; and the deaths of both son and father by poison, administered through means of a courtier who has betrayed both. Such are the main hinges on which the plot of the piece turns. The versification, too, is exceedingly unequal; sometimes swelling into rather full and splendid blank verse, and anon shrinking up into lines stunted. and shrivelled, like boughs either touched by frost, or lopped by the axe of the woodman. Still there are in "Sophy" a force of style, a maturity of mind, an energy of declamation, and, here and there, an appreciation of Shakspeare—shewn in a generous though hopeless rivalry of his manner-which account for the reception it at first met with, and seem to have excited in Denham's contemporaries expectations which were never fulfilled. This uprise, as well as that of the Irish (which took place the year before it), turned out, on the whole, abortive. And yet what fine lines and sentiments are the following, culled from "Sophy" almost ad aperturam libri:— “Fear and guilt Are the same thing, and when our actions are not, The east and west Upon the globe, a mathematic point Only divides; thus happiness and misery, And all extremes, are still contiguous. More gallant actions have been lost, for want of being By being exactly virtuous. "Tis hard to be Exact in good, or excellent in ill; Our will wants power, or else our power wants skill. When in the midst of fears we are surprised With unexpected happiness, the first Of danger, like the shadow of our bodies, Is greater, then, when that which is the cause Is farthest off." The blinded prince's soliloquy, in the first scene of the fifth act, is worthy of Shakspeare. We must quote the following lines: |