[Page 98.] ’Tis not how witty, nor how free.
A year earlier, this had appeared in Wit’s Interpreter, 1655, p. 4 (1671, p. 108), entitled “What is most to be liked in a Mistress.” Robt. Jamieson quotes it, from Choyce Drollery, in his Pop. Bds., 1806, ii. 309. We believe it to be by the same author as the poem next following, and regret that they remain anonymous. Both are of a stately beauty, and recall to us those Cavalier Ladies with whose portraits Vandyck adorned many family mansions.
[Page 99.] She’s not the fairest of her name.
One clue, that may hereafter guide us to the authorship, we know the lady’s name. It was Freeman. This poem also had appeared a year earlier, at least, in Wit’s Interpreter, 1655, p. 55 (; 1671 ed., p. 161). Also in Wit and Drollery, 1661, p. 162; in Oxford Drollery, part ii. 1671, p. 87; and in Loyal Garland, 1686, as “The Platonick Lover” (reprinted by Percy Soc., xxix. 64). There should be a comma in fifth line, after the word Constancy. Various readings:—Verse 2, meanest wit; and yet a; 3, His dear addresses; walls be brick or stone.
[Page 100.] ’Tis late and cold, stir up the fire.
This Song, by John Fletcher, in his Lover’s Progress, Act iii. sc. 1., before 1625. The music is found in Additional MS. No. 11,608 (written about 1656), fol. 20; there called “Myne Ost’s Song, sung in ye Mad Lover [wrong: a different play], set by Robt. Johnson.” It re-appears in Wit and Drollery 1661, p. 212; in the Academy of Complements, 1670, p. 175, &c. It is the Song of the Dead Host, whose return to wait upon his guests and ask their aid to have his body laid in consecrated ground, is so humorously described. His forewarnings of death to Cleander are, to our mind, of thrilling interest. These scenes were Sir Walter Scott’s favourites; but Leigh Hunt, perversely, could see no merit in them. We believe that the tinge of sepulchral dullness in Mine Host enhances the vividness of the incidents, like the taciturnity of Don Guzman’s stony statue in Shadwell’s “Libertine.”
Thus the hundred-paged volume of Choyce Drollery, 1656,—“Delicates served up by frugall Messes, as aiming at thy satisfaction not saciety,”—comes to an end, with Beaumont and Fletcher. On them remembrance loves to rest, as the fitting representatives of that class of courtly gentlemen, poets, wits, and scholars, who were, to a great extent, even then, fading away from English society. To them had been visible no phase of the Rebellion, and they probably never conceived that it was near. Beaumont, with his statelier reserve, and his tendency to quiet musing, fostered “under the shade of melancholy boughs” at Grace-Dieu, had early passed away, honoured and lamented; a month before his friend Shakespeare went to rest: Shakespeare, who, having known half a century of busy life, felt contented, doubtless, to fulfil the wish that he had long before expressed, himself, almost prophetically:—
“Let me not live,”—
Thus his good melancholy oft began, ...