and young Donne have no right to be laughing at Davenant, for that they and he, and Waller and Cowley as well, are all tarred with the same brush,* and together form a group of pestilent writers who are seeking to overthrow the tradition of the national poetry. To such a spreading plant the seed that Waller sowed had grown by the year 1655.

We must, however, return to Gondibert. To give any account of the story is beyond my power, for though I have read it through with more care than I can recommend to any of my own readers, the tenour of the plot has escaped me. I believe that there is a consecutive story, but it has not been vouchsafed to me to unravel its mystery. There is an incomparable Lombard hero, Gondibert; an old king, Aribert; and his renowned daughter, Rhodolind. The virtuous Prince Gondibert meets in combat a Prince Oswald, no less virtuous than he. A certain Laura, when she sees Oswald slain, finds that her blood flies back into her liver, and she dies. The renowned Rhodolind would love Gondibert, and yet would not, and is so long making up her mind that he loves Bertha. There are also "busy Goltho and "wise Astragon," and "distempered Ulfinere," to discover whose relation to the pre-named char

*"You think they feign, that is, they lie

That spake of Gondibert so high;

If that their verses were much taller,
Waller hath since out-Gonded Waller,"

that is to say, no doubt, in the pompous rhetoric of his "Panegyric on Oliver Cromwell," in 1653.

acters would puzzle a professional interpreter of conundrums. The poem, in short, is a fiasco, as a narrative poem or epic; its only merit consists in its episodes, and in the sententious vigour of single lines. One of the most graceful episodes, and one which does most credit to Davenant's versification, is that of the hunted stag who takes to the water :

"This frail relief was like short gales of breath

Which oft at sea a long dead calm prepare ;
Or like our curtains drawn at point of death,
When all our lungs are spent, to give us air.

For on the shore the Hunters him attend;
And whilst the chace grew warm as is the day
(Which now from the hot Zenith does descend)
He is imbos'd, and weary'd to a Bay.

The jewel, Life, he must surrender here;

Which the world's mistress, Nature, does not give,
But like dropp'd favours suffers us to wear,
Such as by which pleas'd Lovers think they live.

Yet life he so esteems, that he allows

It all defence his force and rage can make;
And to the Regian Race such fury shows
As their last blood some unreveng'd forsake,

But now the Monarch Murderer comes in,
Destructive man! whom Nature would not arm,

As when in madness mischief is foreseen
We leave it weaponless for fear of harm.

For she defenceless made him that he might
Less readily offend; but Art arms all,
For single strife makes us in numbers fight;
And by such art this royal Stag did fall.

Now weeps till grief does even his Murd’rers pierce,—
Grief which so nobly through his anger strove,

That it deserv'd the dignity of verse,

And had it words as humanly would move.

Thrice from the ground his vanquished head he rear'd,
And with last looks his forest-walks did view;
Where sixty summers he had ruled the herd,
And where sharp Dittany now vainly grew ;

Whose hoary leaves no more his wounds shall heal ;
For with a sigh (a blast of all his breath)
That viewless thing call'd Life, did from him steal ;

And with their bugle horns they wind his death.

His

It will be noticed that the stanza in which Gondibert is composed is the four-line heroic stanza with alternate rhymes which Gray made so popular by his Elegy in a Country Churchyard. The history of this stanza is somewhat interesting. It was first used for a poem of considerable length by Sir John Davies, an Elizabethan who possessed more than any of his fellows the instinct of the classical school. Nosce Teipsum, a long didactic poem full of thought and dignified rhetoric, was admired by reading men all through the eighteenth century. When I had to examine the commonplace-books of Gray, preserved at Pembroke College, Cambridge, I found that he had been a minute student of the Nosce Teipsum, and that he had copied many of its sections. Gondibert was the next lengthy essay in the same style;*

* Davenant's attention may possibly have been called to the metre from the fact that Robert Ellice had used it in his prefatory verses to Albovine in 1629.

Hobbes immediately adopted it for his translation of Homer,* and this was followed a dozen years later by Dryden's Annus Mirabilis. It was not again employed, so far as I remember, all through the Restoration of the Augustan age, nor again until, in 1743, the Earl of Chesterfield brought out the posthumous Love Elegies of his young cousin Hammond, which were almost entirely couched in these solemn quatrains. It is believed that the printing of Hammond's verses incited Gray to begin his Churchyard Elegy, and to make the four-line stanza the basis of most of his harmonies. But it has not been much used since the end of last century, in spite of Gray's success. The fact is that, while it undoubtedly is the most sonorous and dignified measure in English verse, its incapacity for passion, even for the passion of grief, narrows the ground within which. it can be employed. Of the three long seventeenthcentury poems which I have mentioned as written in it, there is not one that is not too copious and longwinded for a modern reader. Still it is a curious thing that so noble a stanza should be abandoned altogether, and a young poet who should now employ it to embody a series of grave and philosophical ideas would be rewarded by conveying a sense of novelty in form.

Gondibert, which, to the monotony of this

* This is how Hobbes opens his Iliad :

"O Goddess, sing what woe the discontent

Of Thetis' son brought to the Greeks, what souls

Of heroes down to Erebus it sent,

Leaving their bodies unto dogs and fowls."

four-line stanza, adds a turgid weight, a plethora of thought and allusion, copied from Lord Brooke, belongs without doubt to the one class of literature which Voltaire said had no right to exist, the tiresome class. And yet there were hundreds of readers in its own age who did not find it dull.*

Davenant's life was crowded with incidents during the months that succeeded the publication of his epic. He was not hanged at Cowes Castle, as he feared that he should be, but he was removed to the Tower of London, which gave him very little solace in his terrors. He was, in fact, delivered over to be tried by a court of high commission, which was almost tantamount to sending him straight to the scaffold. We learn, however, from his friend Aubrey, that two aldermen of York, to whom he had been very kind when they were prisoners, applied on his behalf to a person of influence with Cromwell, and that his life was saved in this way. What makes this legend extremely pleasant and interesting is that tradition confidently declares that the person through whose final interposition Davenant's life was

* It even superseded, for the moment, the French romances which were the darling reading of the ladies. A contemporary ballad says, addressing Gondibert :

"Thou art the public Icon morum,

The ladies lay the book before 'em,
And Polexander's not o' the quorum.

Before they treat a Lord, a part
Of thee is read, or got by heart
They're catechised in Gondibert."