On the 4th May, 1642, the House of Commons ordered Mr. Whittlock and others to prepare a charge against Mr. Lovelace and Sir William Boteler with all expedition; but nothing further is heard of the matter till the 17th June, When Lovelace<2.23> and Boteler petitioned the House separately for their release from custody. Hereupon Sir William was discharged on finding personal bail to the extent of <pounds>10,000, with a surety for <pounds>5000; and in the case of his companion in misfortune it was ordered, on the question, that "he be forthwith bailed upon GOOD security." This "good security," surely, did not reach the sum mentioned by Wood, namely, <pounds>40,000; but it is likely that the author of the ATHENAE is ONLY wrong by a cypher, and that the amount fixed was <pounds>4000, as it has been already suggested. Thus Lovelace's confinement did not exceed seven weeks in duration, and the probability, is that the sole inconvenience, which he subsequently experienced, was the loss of the bail.
The description left by Wood and Aubrey of the end of Lovelace can only be reconciled with the fact, that his daughter and heiress conveyed Kingsdown, Hever,<2.24> and a moiety of Chipsted, to the Cokes by marriage with Mr. Henry Coke, by presuming that those manors were entailed; while Lovelace Place, as well perhaps as Bayford and Goodneston, not being similarly secured, were sold to defray the owner's incumbrances. At any rate it is not, upon the whole, very probable that he died in a hovel, in a state of absolute poverty;<2.25> that he received a pound a week (equal to about <pounds>4 of our money) from two friends, Cotton and another, Aubrey himself admits; and we may rest satisfied that, however painful the contrast may have been between the opening and close of that career, the deplorable account given in the ATHENAE, and in the so-called LIVES OF EMINENT MEN, is much exaggerated and overdrawn.
It has not hitherto been remarked, that among the Kentish gentry who, from time to time, elected to change the nature of their tenure from gavelkind to primogeniture, were the Lovelaces themselves, in the person of Thomas Lovelace,<2.26> who, by Act of Parliament 2 and 3 Edw. VI. obtained, concurrently with several other families, the power of conversion. This Thomas Lovelace was not improbably the same, who was admitted a student of Gray's Inn in 1541; and that he was of the Kentish Lovelaces there is not much reason to doubt; although, at the same time, I am unable to fix the precise degree of consanguinity between him and Serjeant William Lovelace of Gray's Inn, who died in 1576, and who was great-grandfather to the author of LUCASTA. The circumstance that the real property of Thomas Lovelace aforesaid, situated in Kent, was released by Act of Parliament, 2 and 3 Edw. VI. from the operations of gavelkind tenure (assuming, as is most likely to have been the case, that he was of the same stock as the poet, though not an immediate ancestor,) seems to explain the following allusion by Dudley Lovelace in the verses prefixed by him to LUCASTA, 1649:—
"Those by the landed have been writ,
Mine's but a younger-brother wit."
As well as the subjoined lines by Lovelace in the poem entitled,
"To Lucasta, from Prison," (see p. 44 of present edition):—
"Next would I court my LIBERTY,
And then my birthright, PROPERTY."
There is evidence to prove that Lovelace was on intimate terms with some of the wits of his time, and that he had friendly relations with many of them—such as Hall, Rawlins, Lenton, and particularly the Cottons. John Tatham, the City Poet, and author of THE FANCIES THEATER, 1640, knew him well, and addressed to him some stanzas, not devoid of merit, during his stay abroad. In 1643, Henry Glapthorne, a celebrated dramatist and poet of the same age, dedicated to Lovelace his poem of WHITEHALL, printed in that year in a quarto pamphlet, with elegies on the Earls of Bedford and Manchester.<2.27> The pages of LUCASTA bear testimony to the acquaintance of the author with Anthony Hodges of New College, Oxford, translator of CLITOPHON AND LEUCIPPE from the Greek of Achilles Tatius (or rather probably from a Latin version of the original), and with other<2.28> members of the University.<2.29>
Although it is stated by Wood that LUCASTA was prepared for the press by Lovelace himself, on his return from the Continent in 1648, it is impossible to believe that any care was bestowed on the correction of the text, or on the arrangement of the various pieces which compose the volume: nor did his brother Dudley Posthumus, who edited the second part of the book in 1659, perform his task in any degree better. In both instances, the printer seems to have been suffered to do the work in his own way, and very infamously he has done it. To supply all the short-comings of the author and his literary executor at this distance of time, is, unfortunately, out of the power of any editor; but in the present republication I have taken the liberty of rearranging the poems, to a certain extent in the order in which it may be conjectured that they were written; and where Lovelace contributed commendatory verses to other works, either before or after the appearance of the first portion of LUCASTA, the two texts have been collated, and improved readings been occasionally obtained.
The few poems, on which the fame of Lovelace may be said to rest, are emanations not only of the stirring period in which he lived, but of the peculiar circumstances into which he was thrown at different epochs of his life. Lovelace had not the melodious and exquisite taste of Herrick, the wit of Suckling, or the power of Randolph (so often second only to his master Jonson). Mr. Singer has praised the exuberant fancy of Lovelace; but, in my thinking, Lovelace was inferior in fancy, as well as in grace, both to Carew and the author of HESPERIDES. Yet Lovelace has left behind him one or two things, which I doubt if any of those writers could have produced, and which our greatest poets would not have been ashamed to own. Winstanley was so far right in instituting a comparison between Lovelace and Sydney, that it is hard to name any one in the entire circle of early English literature except Sydney and Wither, who could have attempted, with any chance of success, the SONG TO ALTHEA FROM PRISON; and how differently Sydney at least would have handled it! We know what Herrick would have made of it; it would have furnished the theme for one more invocation to Julia. From Suckling we should have had a bantering playfulness, or a fescennine gaiety, equally unsuited to the subject. Waller had once an opportunity of realizing the position, which has been described by his contemporary in immortal stanzas; but Waller, when he was under confinement, was thinking too much of his neck to write verses with much felicity, and preferred waiting, till he got back to Beaconsfield (when his inspiration had evaporated), to pour out his feelings to Lady Dorothy or Lady Sophia. Wither's song, "Shall I wasting in Despair," is certainly superior to the SONG TO ALTHEA. Wither was frequently equal to Lovelace in poetical imagery and sentiment, and he far excelled him in versification. The versification of Lovelace is indeed more rugged and unmusical than that of any other writer of the period, and this blemish is so conspicuous throughout LUCASTA, and is noticeable in so many cases, where it might have been avoided with very little trouble, that we are naturally led to the inference that Lovelace, in writing, accepted from indolence or haste, the first word which happened to occur to his mind. Daniel, Drayton, and others were, it is well known, indefatigable revisers of their poems; they "added and altered many times," mostly for the better, occasionally for the worse. We can scarcely picture to ourselves Lovelace blotting a line, though it would have been well for his reputation, if he had blotted many.
In the poem of the LOOSE SARABAND (p. 34) there is some resemblance to a piece translated from Meleager in Elton's SPECIMENS OF CLASSIC POETS, i. 411, and entitled by Elton "Playing at Hearts."