The language pure and ev'ry sentence weighed."
Sir William, a soldier of the first Charles's fighting time, a courtier, and vice-chamberlain to the Queen, in "Rowley's" days, was the author of four or five plays, one only of which deserves any notice here,—namely, his comedy of "Pandora." The heroine of this drama, resolving to cloister herself up from marriage, allows love to be made to her in jest, and, of course, ends by becoming a wife in happy earnest. The author had, at first, made a tragedy of "Pandora." The masters of the stage objected to it in that form; and, it being all the same to the complaisant Sir William, he converted his tragedy into a comedy!
Sir Robert Stapylton, himself a Douay student converted to Protestantism; a cavalier, who turned to a hanger-on at court—but who was always a scholar and a gentleman,—has received more censure than praise at the hands of a greater critic and poet than himself. Pepys took no interest in Stapylton's "Slighted Maid," even though his own wife's maid, Gosnell, had a part in it; and Dryden has remarked of it, with too much severity, that "there is nothing in the first act that might not be said or done in the second; nor anything in the middle which might not as well have been at the beginning or the end." Stapylton, like the wits of his time, generally wrote more weakly than he spoke. This was the case, too, with Tom Killigrew, of whom Scott remarks truly, in a very awkward simile (Life of Dryden), that "the merit of his good things evaporated as soon as he attempted to interweave them with comedy."
But who is this jaunty personage, so noisy at a rehearsal of one of his own indifferent plays? It is "Ned Howard," one of the three sons of the dirty Earl of Berkshire, the first Howard who bore that title, and whom Pepys saw one July day of 1666, serving the King with liquor, "in that dirty pickle I never saw man in, in my life." The daughter of this Earl was the wife of Dryden.
And what does Ned Howard say at rehearsal? The actors are making some objection to his piece; but he exclaims, "In fine,—it shall read, and write, and act, and print, and pit, box, and gallery it, egad, with any play in Europe!" The play fails; and then you may hear Ned in any coffee house, or wherever there is a company, proclaiming, by way of excuse, that "Mr. So-and-so the actor didn't top his part, sir!" It was Ned Howard's favourite phrase.
The old Earl of Berkshire gave three sons to literature, besides a daughter to Dryden; namely, Sir Robert, James, and this Edward. The last-named was the least effective. His characters "talk," but they are engaged in no plot; and they exhibit a dull lack of incident. The most of his six or seven dramas were failures; but from one of them, which was the most original, indecent, and the most decidedly damned, Mrs. Inchbald condescended to extract matter which she turned to very good purpose in her "Every one has his Fault." Edward Howard gratified the court-party in his tragedy of "The Usurper," by describing, under the character of Damocles the Syracusan, the once redoubted Oliver Cromwell: while Hugo de Petra but thinly veiled Hugh Peters; and Cleomenes is said to have been the shadow of General Monk. Lacy said that Ned was "more of a fool than a poet;" and Buckingham was of the same opinion.
James Howard came under Buckingham's censure too; and an incident in the "English Monsieur," which, if Pepys's criticism may be accepted, was a mighty, pretty, witty, pleasant, mirthful comedy, furnished the satirical touch in the "Rehearsal," where Prince Volscius falls in love with Parthenope, as he is pulling on his boots to go out of town. James Howard belonged to the faction which affected to believe that there was no popular love for Shakspeare, to render whom palatable, he arranged "Romeo and Juliet" for the stage, with a double denouement—one serious, the other hilarious. If your heart were too sensitive to bear the deaths of the loving pair, you had only to go on the succeeding afternoon to see them wedded, and set upon the way of a well-assured domestic felicity!
This species of humour was not wanting in Sir Robert Howard,—who won his knighthood by valour displayed in saving Lord Wilmot's life in that hot affair at Cropredy Bridge. Sir Robert has been as much pommelled as patted by Dryden. Buckingham dragged him in effigy across the stage, and Shadwell ridiculed the universality of his pretensions by a clever caricature of him, in the "Impertinents," as Sir Positive Atall. For the King's purpose, Howard cajoled the Parliament out of money; for his own purpose, he cajoled the King out of both money and place; and netted several thousands a year by affixing his very legible signature to warrants, issued by him as Auditor of the Exchequer. The humour which he had in common with his brother James, he exhibited, by giving two opposite catastrophes to his "Vestal Virgin," between which the public were free to choose. Sir Robert has generally been looked upon as a servile courtier; but people were astounded at the courage displayed by him in his "Great Favourite, or the Duke of Lerma;" in which the naughtiness of the King's ways, and still more that of the women about him, was shown in a light which left no doubt as to the application of the satire. His bombastic periods have died away in the echoes of them which Fielding caught in his "Tom Thumb;" but his comic power is strongly and admirably manifested in his "Committee," a transcript of Puritan life, which—applied to Quakers, for want of better subjects for caricature—may still be witnessed in country theatres, in the farce of "Honest Thieves." Like many other satirists, Sir Robert could not detect his own weak points. In his "Blind Lady," he ridicules an old widow in desperate want of a seventh husband; and at threescore and ten, he himself married buxom Mistress Dives, one of the Maids of Honour to Queen Mary.
Of comedies portraying national or individual follies, perhaps the most successful, and the most laughable, was James Howard's "English Monsieur," in which the hero-Englishman execrates everything that is connected with his country. To him an English meal is poison, and an English coat degradation. The English Monsieur once challenged a rash person who had praised an English dinner, and, says he, "I ran him through his mistaken palate, which made me think the hand of justice guided my sword." Is there a damp walk, along which the Gallo-Englishman passes—he can distinguish between the impressions previously left there by English or French ladies,—the footsteps of the latter being of course altogether the more fairy-like. "I have seen such bonne mine in their footsteps, that the King of France's maître de danse could not have found fault with any one tread amongst them all. In these walks," he adds, "I find the toes of English ladies ready to tread upon one another."
Later in the play, the hero quarrels with a friend who had found fault with a "pair of French tops," worn by the former. These boots made so much noise when the wearer moved in them, that the friend's mistress could not hear a word of the love made to her. The wearer, however, justifies the noise as a fashionable French noise: "for, look you, sir, a French noise is agreeable to the ear, and therefore not unagreeable, not prejudicial to the hearing; that is to say, to a person who has seen the world." The English Monsieur, as a matter of course, loves a French lady, who rejects his suit; but to be repulsed by a French dame had something pleasant in it; "'twas a denial with a French tone of voice, so that 'twas agreeable." Ultimately, the nymph bids him a final adieu, and the not too dejected lover exclaims to a friend: "Do you see, sir, how she leaves us; she walks away with a French step!"