<2.28> It has never, so far as I am aware, been suggested that the friend to whom Sir John Suckling addressed his capital ballad:—
"I tell thee, Dick, where I have been,"
may have been Lovelace. It was a very usual practice (then even more so than now) among familiar acquaintances to use the abbreviated Christian name in addressing each other; thus Suckling was JACK; Davenant, WILL; Carew, TOM, &c.; in the preceding generation Marlowe had been KIT; Jonson, BEN; Greene, ROBIN, and so forth; and although there is no positive proof that Lovelace and Suckling were intimate, it is extremely probable that such was the case, more especially as they were not only brother poets, but both country gentlemen belonging to neighbouring counties. Suckling had, besides, some taste and aptitude for military affairs, and could discourse about strategics in a city tavern over a bowl of canary with the author of LUCASTA, notwithstanding that he was a little troubled by nervousness (according to report), when the enemy was too near.
<2.29> From Andrew Marvell's lines prefixed to LUCASTA, 1649, it seems that Lovelace and himself were on tolerably good terms, and that when the former presented the Kentish petition, and was imprisoned for so doing, his friends, who exerted themselves to procure his release, suspected Marvell of a share in his disgrace, which Marvell, according to his own account, earnestly disclaimed. See the lines commencing:—
"But when the beauteous ladies came to know," &c.
ADDITIONAL NOTES.
<This is the original location of notes AN.1, AN.2, AN.3, AN.4, and AN.5. These notes have been moved to appropriate locations in the text.>
LUCASTA:
Epodes, Odes, Sonnets,
Songs, &c.