It is a sad example of that all too frequent inconsistency between a man's art and life that the best poem Flecknoe ever wrote should be To Silence:
Still-born Silence, thou that art
Floodgate of the deeper heart,
Offspring of a heavenly kind,
Frost oth' mouth and thaw oth' mind.
There is a certain absurd charm about this reckless mixture of conceits, a charm which would have melted Marvell's heart, if he had heard the piece, as it later melted Lamb's. For what is almost the first and the last time, Flecknoe's poetic method, which is the method of Marvell himself and of all the seventeenth-century metaphysicals reduced to the absurd, actually comes off. Only once again was he ever to produce anything faintly resembling poetry, and that is in this stanza about the ant:
That small republique too, at home,
Where thou'rt perhaps some magistrate—
Little think'st thou, when thou dost come,
There's greater in the world than that.
But this is exceptional; his average poetic level is exemplified by such lines as:
Now to the woodlands, now to th' champains, where
With subtile nets and pitfalls slyly made
She innocently silly fowls betrayed,
While the more lofty inhabitants oth' skies
Sh' allured to ground with brightness of her eyes,
or by that astonishing couplet on Phœbus, which runs:
From 's harnessing of 's horses in the East,
Unto 's unharnessing of them in the West.
From Rome Flecknoe carried his juvenile verses to Constantinople, to Portugal, to Brazil, to Flanders. But no amount of travel could cure him of his fatal habit of writing. Re-established in England after the Restoration, he turned an unlimited leisure to the worst account. He was the author of four plays, only one of which was put upon the stage, and that was duly damned. He contented himself by printing the others with a list of the actors he would have liked to see in the different parts, if he had been able to get them performed—a touching piece of naïveté which does much to endear him to us.