Davenant's career in office was unfortunate. There is reason to doubt whether, even before the rebellion broke out, his salary was regularly paid him. During the Civil War he exchanged the laurel for a casque, winning knighthood by his gallant carriage at the siege of Gloucester. Afterward, he was so far in the confidence of Queen Henrietta Maria, as to be sent as her envoy to the captive king, beseeching him to save his head by conceding the demands of Parliament. When, the errand proving abortive, the royal head was lost, Davenant returned to Paris, consoled himself by finishing the first two books of his "Gondibert," and then, despairing of a restoration, embarked (in 1650) from France for Virginia, where monarchy and the rights of Charles II were unimpaired. Fate, however, had not destined him for a colonist and backwoodsman. His ship, tempest-tossed, was driven into an English port, and the poet was seized and carried close prisoner to London. There the intervention of Milton, the Latin Secretary of the Council, is said to have saved his life. He was kept in the Tower for at least two years longer, however. The date of his release is uncertain, but, once at liberty, Davenant returned ardently to his former pursuits. A license was procured for musical exhibitions, and the phrase "musical exhibitions" was interpreted, with official connivance, as including all manner of dramatic performances. To the Laureate and to this period belongs the credit of introducing scenery, hitherto restricted to court masques, into the machinery of the ordinary drama. The substitution of female for male actors, in feminine characters, was also an innovation of this period. And as an incident of the Laureateship there is still another novelty to be noted. There is no crown without its thorns. The laurel renders the pillow of the wearer as knotty, uneasy, and comfortless as does a coronal of gold and jewels. Among the receipts of the office have been the jokes, good and bad, the sneers, the satire of contemporary wits,such being the paper currency in which the turbulent subjects of the laurel crown think proper to pay homage to their sovereign. From the days of Will Davenant to these of ours, the custom has been faithfully observed. Davenant's earliest assailants were of his own political party, followers of the exiled Charles, the men whom Milton describes as "perditissimus ille peregrinantium aulieorum grex." Theseamong them a son of the memorable Donne, Sir John Denham, and Alan Broderickunited in a volume of mean motive and insignificant merit, entitled, "Verses written by Several of the Author's Friends, to be reprinted with the Second Edition of Gondibert." This was published in 1653. The effect of the onslaught has not been recorded. We know only that Davenant, surviving it, continued to prosper in his theatrical business, writing most of the pieces produced on his stage until the Restoration, when he drew forth from its hiding-place his wreath of laurel-evergreen, and resumed it with honor.
A fair retrospect of Davenant's career enables us to select without difficulty that one of his labors which is most deserving of applause. Not his "Gondibert," notwithstanding it abounds in fine passages,notwithstanding Gay thought it worth continuation and completion, and added several cantos,notwithstanding Lamb eulogized it with enthusiasm, Southey warmly praised, and Campbell and Hazlitt coolly commended it. Nor his comedies, which are deservedly forgotten; nor his improvements in the production of plays, serviceable as they were to the acting drama. But to his exertions Milton owed impunity from the vengeance otherwise destined for the apologist of regicide, and so owed the life and leisure requisite to the composition of "Paradise Lost." Davenant, grateful for the old kindness of the ex-secretary, used his influence successfully with Charles to let the offender escape.18 This is certainly the greenest of Davenant's laurels. Without it, the world might not have heard one of the sublimest expressions of human genius.
Davenant died in 1668. The laurel was hung up unclaimed until 1670, when John Dryden received it, with patent dated back to the summer succeeding Davenant's death. Dryden assures us that it was Sir Thomas Clifford, whose name a year later lent the initial letter to the "Cabal," who presented him to the king, and procured his appointment.19 Masques had now ceased to be the mode. What the dramatist could do to amuse the blasé court of Charles II. he was obliged to do within the limits of legitimate dramatic representation, due care being taken to follow French models, and substitute the idiom of Corneille and Molière for that of Shakspeare. Dryden, whose plays are now read only by the curious, was, in 1670, the greatest of living dramatists. He had expiated his Cromwellian backslidings by the "Astraea Redux," and the "Annus Mirabilis." He had risen to high favor with the king. His tragedies in rhyming couplets were all the vogue. Already his fellow-playwrights deemed their success as fearfully uncertain, unless they had secured, price three guineas, a prologue or epilogue from the Laureate. So fertile was his own invention, that he stood ready to furnish by contract five plays a year,a challenge fortunately declined by the managers of the day. Thus, if the Laureate stipend were not punctually paid, as was often the case, seeing the necessitous state of the royal finances and the bevy of fair ladies, whose demands, extravagant as they were, took precedence of all others, his revenues were adequate to the maintenance of a family, the matron of which was a Howard, educated, as a daughter of nobility, to the enjoyment of every indulgence. These were the Laureate's brightest days. His popularity was at its height, a fact evinced by the powerful coalitions deemed necessary to diminish it. Indeed, the laurel had hardly rested upon Dryden's temples before he experienced the assaults of an organized literary opposition. The Duke of Buckingham, then the admitted leader of fashionable prodigacy, borrowed the aid of Samuel Butler, at whose "Hudibras" the world was still laughing,of Thomas Sprat, then on the high-road to those preferments which have given him an important place in history,of Martin Clifford, a familiar of the green-room and coffee-house,and concocted a farce ridiculing the person and office of the Laureate. "The Rehearsal" was acted in 1671. The hero, Mr. Bayes, imitated all the personal peculiarities of Dryden, used his cant phrases, burlesqued his style, and exposed, while pretending to defend, his ridiculous points, until the laugh of the town was fairly turned upon the "premier-poet of the realm." The wit was undoubtedly of the broadest, and the humor at the coffee-room level; but it was so much the more effective. Dryden affected to be indifferent to the satire. He jested at the time taken20 and the number of hands employed upon the composition. Twenty years later he was at pains to declare his perfect freedom from rancor in consequence of the attack.
There, is much reason to suspect, however, that "The Rehearsal" was not forgotten, when the "Absalom and Achitophel" was written, and that the character of Zimri gathered much of its intense vigor and depth of shadow from recollections of the ludicrous Mr. Bayes. The portrait has the look of being designed as a quittance in full of old scores. "The Rehearsal," though now and then recast and reënacted to suit other times, is now no otherwise remembered than as the suggester of Sheridan's "Critic."
Upon the heels of this onslaught others followed rapidly. Rochester, disposed to singularity of opinion, set up Elkanah Settle, a young author of some talent, as a rival to the Laureate. Anonymous bardings lampooned him. Mr. Bayes was a broad target for every shaft, so that the complaint so feelingly uttered in his latter days, that "no man living had ever been so severely libelled" as he, had a wide foundation of fact. Sometimes, it must be owned, the thrusts were the natural result of controversies into which the Laureate indiscreetly precipitated himself; sometimes they came of generous partisanship in behalf of friends, such friends, for example, as Sir Robert Howard, his brother-in-law, an interminable spinner of intolerable verse, who afflicted the world in his day with plays worse than plagues, and poems as worthless as his plays. It was to a quarrel for and a quarrel against this gentleman that we are indebted for the most trenchant satire in the language. Sir Robert had fallen out with Dryden about rhyming tragedies, of which he disapproved; and while it lasted, the contest was waged with prodigious acrimony. Among the partisans of the former was Richard Flecknoe, a Triton among the smaller scribbling fry. Flecknoeblunderingly classed among the Laureates by the compiler of "Cibber's Lives of the Poets"was an Irish priest, who had cast his cassock, or, as he euphuistically expressed it, "laid aside the mechanic part of priesthood," in order to fulfil the loftier mission of literary garreteer in London. He had written poems and plays without number; of the latter, but one, entitled "Love's Dominion," had been brought upon the stage, and was summarily hissed off. Jealousy of Dryden's splendid success brought him to the side of Dryden's opponent, and a pamphlet, printed in 1668, attacked the future Laureate so bitterly, and at points so susceptible, as to make a more than ordinary draft upon the poet's patience, and to leave venom that rankled fourteen years without finding vent.21 About the same time, Thomas Shadwell, who is represented in the satire as likewise an Irishman, brought Sir Robert on the stage in his "Sullen Lovers," in the character of Sir Positive At-all, a caricature replete with absurd self-conceit and impudent dogmatism. Shadwell was of "Norfolcian" family, well-born, well-educated, and fitted for the bar, but drawn away from serious pursuits by the prevalent rage for the drama. The offence of laughing at the poet's brother-in-law Shadwell had aggravated by accepting the capricious patronage of Lord Rochester, by subsequently siding with the Whigs, and by aiding the ambitious designs of Shaftesbury in play and pamphlet,labors the value of which is not to be measured by the contemptuous estimate of the satirist. The first outburst of the retributive storm fell upon the head of Shadwell. The second part of "Absalom and Achitophel," which appeared in the autumn of 1682, contains the portrait of Og, cut in outlines so sharp as to remind us of an unrounded alto-rilievo: