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A LETTER SENT TO THE GOOD KNIGHT.
Thou hadst not been thus long neglected, But we, thy four best friends, expected, Ere this time, thou hadst stood corrected. But since that planet governs still, That rules thy tedious fustain quill ’Gainst nature and the Muses’ will; When, by thy friends’ advice and care, ’Twas hoped, in time, thou wouldst despair To give ten pounds to write it fair; Lest thou to all the world would show it, We thought it fit to let thee know it: Thou art a damn’d insipid poet! |
These literary satires contain a number of other “pasquils,” burlesquing the characters, the incidents, and the stanza, of the Gondibert: some not the least witty are the most gross, and must not be quoted; thus the wits of that day were poetical suicides, who have shortened their lives by their folly.
D’Avenant, like more than one epic poet, did not tune to his ear the names of his personages. They have added, to show that his writings are adapted to an easy musical singer, the names of his heroes and heroines, in these verses:—
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Hurgonil, Astolpho, Borgia, Goltha, Tibalt, Astragon, Hermogild, Ulfinor, Orgo, Thula. |
And “epithets that will serve for any substantives, either in this part or the next.”
Such are the labours of the idlers of genius, envious of the nobler industry of genius itself!—How the great author’s spirit was nourished by the restoratives of his other friends, after the bitter decoctions prescribed by these “Four,” I fear we may judge by the unfinished state in which “Gondibert” has come down to us. D’Avenant seems, however, to have guarded his dignity by his silence; but Hobbes took an opportunity of delivering an exquisite opinion on this Club of Wits, with perfect philosophical indifference. It is in a letter to the Hon. Edward Howard, who requested to have his sentiments on another heroic poem of his own, “The British Princes.”
“My judgment in poetry hath, you know, been once already censured, by very good wits, for commending ‘Gondibert;’ but yet they have not, I think, disabled my testimony. For, 414 what authority is there in wit? A jester may have it; a man in drink may have it, and be fluent over-night, and wise and dry in the morning. What is it? or who can tell whether it be better to have it, or be without it, especially if it be a pointed wit? I will take my liberty to praise what I like, as well as they do to reprehend what they do not like.”
The stately “Gondibert” was not likely to recover favour in the court of Charles the Second, where man was never regarded in his true greatness, but to be ridiculed; a court where the awful presence of Clarendon became so irksome, that the worthless monarch exiled him; a court where nothing was listened to but wit at the cost of sense, the injury of truth, and the violation of decency; where a poem of magnitude with new claims was a very business for those volatile arbiters of taste; an epic poem that had been travestied and epigrammed, was a national concern with them, which, next to some new state-plot, that occurred oftener than a new epic, might engage the monarch and his privy council. These were not the men to be touched by the compressed reflections and the ideal virtues personified in this poem. In the court of the laughing voluptuary the manners as well as the morals of these satellites of pleasure were so little heroic, that those of the highest rank, both in birth and wit, never mentioned each other but with the vulgar familiarity of nicknames, or the coarse appellatives of Dick, Will, and Jack! Such was the era when the serious “Gondibert” was produced, and such were the judges who seem to have decided its fate.