Cartwright.
William Cartwright (1611-1643) must have been a most amiable man, agreeable University wit, and "florid and seraphical preacher". He passed much of his life at Oxford, being a student of Christ Church; he was an active military organizer when King Charles and the Court were at Oxford, he was Junior Proctor, lectured on the Metaphysics, was lamented by the King and University on his death, and was admired in his life by Dr. Fell.
His poems are mainly birthday odes, and complimentary addresses to ladies. In the person of Lady Carlisle he celebrated,
Masses of ivory blushing here and there,
and he wrote disdainfully of what is called "Platonic" Love. He also wrote a song called "The Ordinary".
Davenant.
Sir William Davenant (1606-1668) was more interesting as a man, and in his relations with greater men of letters, than as a poet. His vast "epic" "Gondibert," concerned with the heroic age of Lombardy, and written in quatrains of alternately rhyming decasyllabic lines, is a monument of misplaced ambition. Davenant's father was landlord of the Crown Inn, at Oxford, and Davenant did not discourage the legend that Shakespeare was his mother's admirer. At a very early age, Davenant wrote the briefest of elegiac odes on Shakespeare's death. His best lyric is
The lark now leaves his watery nest,
And climbing, shakes his dewy wings,
He takes this window for the east,
And to implore your light, he sings:
"Awake, awake, the Morn will never rise
Till she can dress her beauty at your eyes".
Davenant was of Lincoln College, Oxford; was one of the London wits, and is bantered by Suckling in "The Session of the Poets" for a sad misfortune. To Lombardy, Davenant turned, in 1629, for the topic of his tragedy of Albovine, a theme with which poets have rarely been successful. In 1638 Davenant was made Poet Laureate; he managed a theatre; in 1641 was accused of being engaged in a Cavalier enterprise, escaped to France, returned, was knighted (1643) for his services at the siege of Gloucester; failed, in 1646, to make Charles accept the terms of the Covenanters, and, after various loyal adventures, was placed in the Tower (1650). Milton is said to have pleaded for him, and he, later, for Milton. On the Restoration he was rewarded by the patent of a theatre, where he produced plays by no means Shakespearean.