SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT.
[CHAPTER X.]
PROFESSIONAL AUTHORS.
The men who took up dramatic authorship seriously as a vocation, during the last half of the seventeenth century, amount to something more than two dozen. They begin with Davenant and Dryden; include Tate and Brady,[58] Lee and Otway, Wycherley, Congreve, Cibber, and Vanbrugh; and conclude with Farquhar, and with Rowe.
I include Sir John Vanbrugh because he preferred fame as an author to fame as an architect, and I insert Congreve, despite the reflection that the ghost of that writer would daintily protest against it if he could. When Voltaire called upon him, in London, the Frenchman intimated that his visit was to the "author." "I am a gentleman," said Congreve. "Nay," rejoined the former, "had you been only a gentleman, you would never have received a visit from me at all."
Let me here repeat the names:—Davenant, Dryden, Shirley, Lee, Cowley, Shadwell, Flecknoe, Settle, Crowne, Ravenscroft, Wycherley, Otway, Durfey, Banks, Rymer, Tate, Brady, Southerne, Congreve, Cibber, Dilke,[59] Vanbrugh, Gildon, Farquhar, Dennis, and Rowe. The half dozen in italics were poets-laureate.
All of them were sons of "gentlemen," save three, Davenant, Cowley, and Dennis, whose sires were, respectively, a vintner, a hatter,[60] and a saddler. The sons, however, received a collegiate education. Cowley distinguished himself at Cambridge, but Davenant left Oxford without a degree, and from the former University Dennis was expelled, in March 1680, "for assaulting and wounding Sir Glenham with a sword."