Near this fortunate doctor, honoured by kings, lived Sir John Finett, a wit and a song-writer, of Italian extraction. He became Master of the Ceremonies to Charles I., and wrote a pedantic book on the treatment of ambassadors, and other questions of precedency, of the gravest importance to courtiers, but to no one else. He died in 1641.
Two doors from Mayerne and five from Finett, from 1622 to 1634, lived Daniel Mytens, the Dutch painter. On Vandyke’s arrival Mytens grew jealous and asked leave to return to the Hague. But the king persuaded him to stay, and he became friendly with his rival, who painted his portrait. There are pictures by this artist at Hampton Court. Prince Charles gave him his house in the lane for twelve years at the peppercorn rent of 6d. a year.
Next to Sir John Finett lived Sir Benjamin Rudyer, and on the same side Abraham Vanderoort, keeper of the pictures to Charles I., and necessarily an acquaintance of Mytens and Vandyke.
Carew Raleigh, son of the great enemy of Spain, and born in the Tower, lived in this lane, on the west side, from 1636 to 1638, and again in 1664. This unfortunate man spent all his life in writing to vindicate his father’s memory, and in efforts to recover his Sherborne estate. In 1659, by the influence of General Monk, he was made Governor of Jersey.
The chivalrous wit, Sir John Suckling, dwelt in St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields in 1641, the year in which he joined in a rash plot to rescue Strafford from the Tower. He fled to France, and died there in poverty the same year, in the thirty-second year of his age. Suckling had served in the army of Gustavus Adolphus, and was famous for his sparkling repartee. There is an exquisite quaint grace about his poem of “The Wedding,” which has its scene at Charing Cross.
Dr. Thomas Willis, a great physician of his day, who died here in 1678, was grandfather of Browne Willis, the antiquary. Dr. Willis was a friend of Wren, and a great anatomist and chemist. He mapped out the nerves very industriously, and in his Cerebri Anatome forestalled many future phrenological discoveries.[442]
In the same year that eccentric charlatan, Sir Kenelm Digby, was living in the lane. The son of one of the gunpowder conspirators, and the “Mirandola” of his age, he was one of Ben Jonson’s adopted sons.[443] He was generous to the poets; he understood ten or twelve languages; he shattered the Venetian galleys at Scanderoon; he studied chemistry, and professed to cure wounds with sympathetic powder. He held offices of honour under Charles I., in France became a friend of Descartes, and after the Restoration was an active member of the Royal Society. He was born, won his naval victory, and died on the same day of the month. Ben Jonson, in a poem on him, calls him “prudent, valiant, just, and temperate,” and adds quaintly—
“His breast is a brave palace, a broad street,
Where all heroic ample thoughts do meet,
Where Nature such a large survey hath ta’en,
As others’ souls to his dwelt in a lane.”
I cannot here help observing that the ridiculous story about Ben Jonson in his old age refusing money from Charles I., and rudely sending back word “that the king’s soul dwelt in a lane,” must have originated in some careless or malicious perversion of this line of the rough old poet’s.
“Immortal Ben” wrote ten poems on the death of Sir Kenelm’s wife, who was the daughter of Sir Edward Stanley, and, it is supposed, the mistress of the Earl of Dorset. Randolph, Habington, and Feltham also wrote elegies on this beautiful woman, who was found dead in her bed, accidentally poisoned, it is supposed, by viper wine, or some philtre or cosmetic given her by her experimentalising husband in order to heighten her beauty.[444] In one of Ben Jonson’s poems there are the following incomparable verses about Lady Venetia:—