"We saw thee in thy balmy nest,
Bright dawn of our eternal day.
We saw thine eyes break from the east,
And chase the trembling shades away.
We saw thee, and we blessed the sight:
We saw thee by thine own sweet light.
"She sings thy tears asleep, and dips
Her kisses in thy weeping eye;
She spreads the red leaves of thy lips
That in their buds yet blushing lie.
Yet when young April's husband-showers
Shall bless the faithful Maia's bed,
We'll bring the first-born of her flowers
To kiss thy feet and crown thy head:
To thee, dread Lamb! whose love must keep
The shepherds while they feed their sheep."
Sir William Davenant was another poet-convert to the Catholic Church, and his conversion took place nearly at the same time as Crashaw's. Like that poet, also, he was in the favor of Queen Henrietta Maria during her exile in France. His life was full of adventure. As a child, he was acquainted with Shakespeare, who frequented the Crown Inn in the Corn Market, Oxford, kept by his father. That father rose to be mayor, and William entered at Lincoln College. Leaving Oxford without a degree, he became page to the Duchess of Richmond, and subsequently was attached to the household of the poet, Lord Brooke. Exhibiting a decided talent for dramatic composition, he was employed to write masques for the court of Charles I. These light plays, of which Milton's Comus is the best specimen ever produced, were highly popular, and served for private theatricals in the mansions and castles of lords and princes. William Davenant had fame enough to be celebrated in his time, and to be made poet-laureate when Ben Jonson died; but his writings had not body of thought, original conception, or sweetness of expression enough to preserve them long from oblivion. His ballad, "My Lodging is on the Cold Ground," seems to have had more of the principle of life in it than anything else he wrote. During the Civil War, like many other authors, he flung aside his books, and girded on the sword. He was then known as General Davenant, and he negotiated in the king's name with his majesty's friends in Paris. Twice captured, and having twice escaped to France, he nevertheless returned, took part in the siege of Gloucester, and was knighted by the king for his services on that critical occasion. In 1646, we find him in France, in the service of the exiled Queen of England, attending Mass, and conforming to the discipline of the Catholic Church. Living in the Louvre with Lord Jermyn, he had once more leisure to cultivate his taste for poetry. There he began writing his longest poem, and a very tedious production it is.
But his versatile mind was now occupied by a new scheme. He promoted an emigration of colonists from France to Virginia, and, having embarked for the distant settlement, the ship in which he was sailing fell into the hands of one of Cromwell's cruisers. He was captured and taken to Cowes Castle, and is said to have escaped trial for his life through the kind intercession of his brother poet, Milton. It was not till after two years of imprisonment that he regained his liberty; and when at last he did so, all his efforts were directed to a revival of dramatic performances, which the austere Puritans had entirely suppressed. He succeeded at last in establishing a theatre, and, gaining support by degrees, he ultimately restored the regular drama. With the return of Charles II. his difficulties ended. King and people alike heaped their favors on him. He died at his house, in Lincoln's Inn Fields, in 1668, and was buried with distinction in Westminster Abbey. He was very handsome, of ready wit and a singularly fertile mind; but it is to be supposed that his attachment to the Catholic religion was not by any means a prominent feature in his character and career.
Like several of those already mentioned, John Dryden is but an imperfect link in the chain of English Catholic authors since the Reformation. It was not till a late period of his life that he entered the true church, but he lived long enough to impress on his works a decidedly Catholic stamp. Indeed, The Hind and the Panther, published in 1687, some months after his conversion, was looked upon as a defence of Catholicism. The hind represented the Roman Church, and the panther the Church of England. It was a singular circumstance, to which, so far as we have observed, attention has never been drawn, that three poets-laureate in succession, Ben Jonson, Sir William Davenant, and Dryden, were converts to Catholicity. The life of the last of these poets was too long and too eventful to allow of our recalling even the chief occurrences by which it was marked. Suffice it to say that before he was twenty-eight years old he had passed from Westminster School to Trinity College, Cambridge, and had acted as secretary to his kinsman, Sir Gilbert Pickering, who stood high in the Protector's favor, and went by the name of "Noll's Lord Chamberlain." On the death of Cromwell, Dryden wrote an elegy upon him, which was also a eulogy; and soon after the Restoration, he commenced writing for the stage coarse comedies and stilted tragedies. Married to a daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, he was appointed poet-laureate, with £200 a year. This was in 1670, the tenth year of the reign of his licentious majesty, Charles II.
When that sovereign expired (having been reconciled on his death-bed to the Catholic Church), Dryden eulogized him as he had eulogized Cromwell, and in the same poem turned with alacrity to the praises of James II. Nor was it long before he embraced the religion of the Duke of York. The motives which induced him to take this step have often been made the subject of debate. The authority of Lord Macaulay is constantly adduced in support of Dryden's venality and insincere conversion. But in opposition to this, it must be remembered that Dr. Johnson and Sir Walter Scott arrived at a different conclusion. The latter biographer of Dryden contends that the poet's writings contain internal evidence of his convictions having been in complete accordance with the step he took, and that many external circumstances contributed to make it easy for him to act in the way he thought right. Duty and interest are not always at variance; and if Dryden gained by the change in the first instance, when James II. was on the throne, he lost eventually many temporal advantages. Having refused to take the oaths of allegiance or forsake his religion, he was dismissed, under William III., from his offices of poet-laureate and historiographer; he had the mortification of seeing Shadwell, the dramatist, whom he had often ridiculed, promoted to wear his laurel; and for the rest of his life, he was more or less harassed by the ills of poverty. He educated his children in the faith which he had embraced, and they showed the strongest signs of heartfelt attachment to the person of the Sovereign Pontiff and the church of which he is the head. One of them entered a religious order, another was usher of the palace to Pope Clement XI. In writing to them both in September, 1697, Dryden said: "I flatter not myself with any manner of hopes, but do my duty and suffer for God's sake, being assured beforehand never to be rewarded, even though the times should alter.... Remember me to poor Harry, whose prayers I earnestly desire.... I never can repent of my constancy, since I am thoroughly persuaded of the justice of the cause for which I suffer." This is not the language of one who had sold himself for a pension of £100 a year. Dryden did not, like Chillingworth, return after a time to the Established Church. He died in the religion of his choice, and many of his poems, particularly the paraphrase of the Veni Creator, and the two odes on St. Cecilia's Day, breathe alike the devotion and the well-ordered ideas of a Catholic. There is much force in the closing line of this stanza:
"Refine and clear our earthly parts,
But, oh! inflame and fire our hearts!
Our frailties help, our vice control;
Submit the senses to the soul;
And when rebellious they are grown,
Then lay thy hand, and hold them down."
When Dryden, in The Hind and the Panther, describes the different Protestant sects, he very naturally gives the preference to the Church of England, and speaks of her with a becoming tenderness, she having been the church in which he was nurtured:
"The panther, sure the noblest next the hind,
And fairest creature of the spotted kind,
Oh! could her inborn stains be washed away,
She were too good to be a beast of prey!
How can I praise or blame, and not offend,
Or how divide the frailty from the friend?
Her faults and virtues lie so mixed that she
Not wholly stands condemned, nor wholly free.
Then like her injured lion (James II.) let me speak,
He cannot bend her, and he would not break.
If, as our dreaming Platonists report,
There could be spirits of a middle sort.
Too black for heaven, and yet too white for hell,
Who just dropped half-way down, nor lower fell;
So poised, so gently she descends from high,
It seems a soft demission from the sky."
Dryden's successor on the throne of letters in England was Alexander Pope, who was also a Catholic, though not a convert. His father, a linen merchant of Lombard Street, London, was a Catholic before him, and had been led to embrace the faith by a residence in Lisbon. His were the days of penal laws and various disabilities, among which was exclusion from the public schools and universities. Alexander's education, therefore, was private, and not of a first-rate kind. He may almost be called a self-taught man. He had seen Dryden when a boy, and he knew Wycherley, the dramatist, who is here mentioned because he was in the number of those who adopted the Catholic profession under the auspices of James II. Wycherley was, as Arnold calls him, "a somewhat battered and worn-out relic of the gay reign of Charles II." Macaulay has little respect for him, for the very reason that he could interest us—because he became a Catholic. He styles him "the most licentious and hard-hearted writer of a singularly licentious and hard-hearted school." But the gentle Charles Lamb was more indulgent to his memory and his works. "I do not know," he says, in the Essays of Elia, "how it is with others, but I feel the better always for the perusal of one of Congreve's—nay, why should I not add even of Wycherley's?—comedies. I am the gayer, at least, for it; and I could never connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves almost as much as fairyland."