The moral of this emblematical representation is sufficiently intelligible. By the introduction of the deities of the chace, of war, and of love, as governing the various changes of the seventeenth century, the poet alludes to the sylvan sports of James the First, the bloody wars of his son, and the licentious gallantry which reigned in the courts of Charles II. and James his successor.
James I. was inordinately attached to the sports of the chace: it was indeed the only manly passion which our British Solomon ever manifested; his dress was of the forest-green, and his only severity was in executing the game-laws[69]. Able hunters were the bribes by which the English courtiers endeavoured to secure his favour[70], while he was yet but king of Scotland; and, in England, his perpetual hunting expeditions were censured by his prelates[71], and their oppressive duration deprecated by his subjects, who, to render their complaints more palatable, contrived, upon one occasion, to make a favourite hound convey a hint of the burthen, which his long residence at a hunting seat imposed upon the neighbourhood[72]. Even in the most advanced state of his age and imbecility, when unable to sit on horseback without assistance, he contrived to pursue the chace by being laced or tied up in his saddle! When we add to this vehement passion for hunting, the spirit of extravagant dissipation, which discharged itself "in shows, sights, and banquetings, from morn to eve[73]," where even the ladies abandoned their sobriety, the age of James might well be characterised, as in the Masque,
A very merry, dancing, drinking,
Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking time.
To show how justly the middle part of the seventeenth century was characterised, as under the influence of Mars, we have only to mention the great civil war, which so long ravaged the whole kingdom.
The manners of the court of Charles II., so notoriously dissolute and licentious, when, as our author says in the Epilogue,
Whitehall the naked Venus first revealed,
amply vindicate Dryden for placing the period in which they were fashionable under the dominion of the queen of Cyprus.
The moral, by which the whole masque is winded up, was sadly true. The frivolity of James the First's sports would have been admitted by the sapient monarch himself—