The last three lines naturally lead us to a consideration of the 'Resident's' dramatic works, written, as he says, to beguile the tedium of exile. Thomas Killigrew wrote eleven plays in all; and, according to Genest, strictly speaking wrote but two at Venice; but the four written at Naples, Rome, Turin and Florence, were probably completed before his return to Paris. Dibdin, in his 'History of the Stage,' points out that these plays are by no means original, tracing some of them to their sources, and calling them 'paste-and-scissors' affairs. But this is not their chief defect. I have, as I thought myself in duty bound, read one of them, and intend never to read another. How it was possible, even in that dissolute age—'never to be recalled,' as Macaulay says, 'without a blush'—for a man to sit down and deliberately write such obscene buffoonery, and dedicate it to ladies—some of whom were his own relations—I cannot imagine. Plays too, of which one, at least, 'The Parson's Wedding,' was to be performed wholly by women! and in which the words assigned to those who played the women's parts are scarcely less offensive than those supposed to be spoken by men![82] We find ourselves indeed 'surrounded by foreheads of bronze, hearts like the nether millstone, and tongues set on fire of hell.' I must add that they have scarcely a sparkle of that witty wickedness which one meets with in the writings of Sir Charles Sedley;—luckily they are dead, and they deserved to die! It is difficult to find an extract which is now presentable; and I can put my hand on no better specimen, on the whole, than this:
Walking.
'Fine Lady. I am glad I am come home, for I am weary of this walking; for God's sake whereabouts does the pleasure of walking lie? I swear I have often sought it till I was weary; and yet I could ne'er find it.'
Not all of the plays were performed; though 'The Parson's Wedding' certainly was, at the King's House, and Luellin told Pepys that it was 'an obscene, loose play.' 'Claracilla,' a 'tragi-comedy,' Pepys himself went to see on 4th July, 1661; he merely says, however, that when he first saw it, it was 'well acted.' On a second occasion, when he saw it performed at the Cockpit, he thought it 'a poor play.' He might, in my opinion, have said the same of them all; but they were nevertheless sumptuously printed. King Charles II.'s own copy is in the British Museum (644, m. 11), and a portrait of the author contemplating the huge pile of his precious productions is prefixed to the volume. The original of this portrait was painted by W. Sheppard, and splendidly engraved by William Faithorne; another portrait (also by Sheppard, according to Redgrave) is in the possession of Mr. J. Buller East, to whom it was presented, shortly before her death in 1819, by Frances Maria Killigrew, the last of her name. There is yet another portrait of Thomas Killigrew, which represents him, not, as Walpole says in his 'Anecdotes of Painting,' 'in a studious posture,' but stooping, worn out with his vicious life, with a gibbering monkey at his side, and clad in a tawdry dressing-gown, on which are represented the portraits of a host of the wantons of his acquaintance. The lines at the foot of this rare engraving by Bosse (British Museum, {669. f. 4}/90) are an even more savage caricature than the picture itself.
Of Tom Killigrew's early fondness for plays, Pepys' story will serve as an illustration. 'I would not forget,' he writes, 'two passages of Sir J. Minne's at yesterday's dinner, one being Thomas Killigrew's way of getting to see plays when he was a boy. He would go to the Red Bull, and when the man cried to the boys, "Who will go and be a devil, and he shall see the play for nothing?" then would he go in, and be a devil upon the stage, and so get to see plays.' Would it be going too far to say that throughout his connection with the stage he stuck to his youthful part? He talked, however, much better than he wrote; with Cowley the case was the reverse; hence Denham's epigram:
'Had Cowley ne'er spoke, Killigrew ne'er writ,
Combined in one they'd make a matchless wit.'
Pepys describes him as 'a merry droll, but a gentleman of great esteem with the King; he told us many merry stories;' again, that Killigrew was 'a great favourite with the King on account of his uncommon vein of humour;' though on one occasion, when the King went to the Tower of London, to see the Dunkirk money, the conversation of Killigrew and the others was but 'poor and frothy.' More than once, however, Tom Killigrew, to his credit, spoke out, and to the point, in a tone of which we have already heard something; and Pepys himself has thus chronicled it:
'Mr. Pierce did also tell me as a great truth, as being told it by Mr. Cowley (Abraham Cowley the poet), and who was by and heard it, that Tom Killigrew should publickly tel the King that his matters were coming into a very ill state; but that yet there was a way to help all. Says he, "There is a good, honest, able man that I could name, that if your Majesty would employ, and command to see all things well executed, all things would soon be mended; and this is one Charles Stuart, who now spends his time in employing his lips about the Court, and hath no other employment; but if you would give him this employment, he were the fittest man in the world to perform it."'
On another occasion, when even Charles reproached the 'chartered libertine' with his many 'idle words,' Killigrew did not shrink from retorting, with special significance, on the King, that, after all, 'idle promises and idle patents' were even worse.