to hand, but they remained in MS. until 1645. Denham's Sophy was published in 1642, and his Cooper's Hill later in the same year.

John Denham was ten years younger than Edmund Waller, towards whom in spite of all his literary successes he remained till the end of his life in the position of a pupil. His father, also John Denham, and a knight, was an English lawyer, who became Chief Baron of the Exchequer in Ireland, and who married the daughter of an Irish peer, Lord Mellisfont. The poet was born at Dublin in 1615 into a flourishing and luxurious condition, and he remained through his whole life a man of high social position and recognized quality. When the poet was two years old, his father was recalled to England, as one of the Barons of the home Exchequer, and Denham's early education was acquired in London. At the age of sixteen he was entered a gentleman-commoner in Trinity College, Oxford, and remained there until 1634. Anthony à Wood has preserved this quaint picture of Denham as an undergraduate: "He was looked upon as a slow, dreaming young man, and more addicted to gaming than study; they could never imagine that he could ever enrich the world with the issue of his brain, as he afterwards did."

There are no youthful verses of Denham's éxisting, nor any record that he wrote at Oxford. His first cousin, George Morley, the son of his father's sister, was living all this time in retirement with Waller at Beaconsfield, and we cannot doubt that it was through this relative that he became interested in the new school of poetry. The lyrics to Sacharissa were being handed about, and possibly Denham saw these; but it is Waller's exercises in the heroic couplet which have left a trace on his own work, and to which he actually refers with praise. In 1634 the young Denham was entered at Lincoln's Inn, it being proposed that he should follow his father's profession, the law. It would seem that he worked pretty closely under the paternal eye, and even apparently lived during these years, when he was not in London, in his father's house at Egham on the Thames, close to the gentle acclivity of that Cooper's Hill which he was to make so famous. Young Denham was bitten with the rage for gambling which infected so many clever youths in the seventeenth century, and references to which swell the jeremiads of the satirists. He was constantly stripped of all his allowance, and on his father's chiding him, and threatening to cut him off with a shilling unless he amended, he wrote a little Essay against Gaming,

in which he eloquently declared that the very notion of gambling filled him with detestation. This was the more ingenious of him, because he was all the time as mad after cards as ever; his father, however, seems to have been pacified,

In 1636, at the age of twenty-one, Denham wrote the earliest copy of his verses which has been preserved. It is called The Destruction of Troy, and it is a paraphrase of the second book of the Æneid. He kept this piece in MS. for twenty years, and then published it, at last, with an elegant and pleasing essay on the art of translating', which is much more mature than the poem itself, and is probably of a much later date. The Destruction of Troy is one of those poems which baffle criticism. There is really nothing to say about it, and even if it were an excellent piece of writing, it would lie outside the range of our present inquiry, for it is written in the old, slipshod verse, against which Waller had already rebelled. The preface, about the mode 1 Appendix II.

2 Even here, in occasional passages, the new prosody asserts itself. The last lines, however, I feel convinced, were added in 1656 :

"Thus fell the King, who yet surviv'd the State,

With such a signal and peculiar fate;

Under so vast a ruin not a grave,

Nor in such flames a funeral fire to have;

:

of translating, is much more valuable, and if a collection be ever made of the first breathings of poetical criticism in England, this should certainly be included in it. The main point which Denham brings forward is the importance of securing the spirit, grace, and movement of the original writer, even at the risk of losing some of his exact expressions.

In January, 1638, the elder Denham died, and was buried at Egham. The poet, thanks to that smart little Essay against Gaming, inherited a fortune, and spent the next two or three years in squandering several thousand pounds. It is much to be regretted that we possess no record of these years, for we lack the link that should bind the author of the limping paraphrase of Virgil with the stately buskined writer of The Sophy and of Cooper's Hill. It is quite plain that he had by this time become acquainted, probably through the good offices of his cousin Morley, with the MS. poems of Waller. The Sophy, however, which was published in 1642, is not in the style of any particular work of Waller's. It is a tragedy in

He, whom such titles swelled, such power made proud,

To whom the sceptres of all Asia bowed,

On the cold earth lies th' unregarded King,

A headless carcase and a nameless thing."

This is in the mature style of Denham.

five acts, in blank verse, and although it is far from interesting or invigorating, we must conquer our repugnance, and allow our attention to rest upon it.

The Sophy is a very curious experiment, an attempt to enchain English drama as French drama is enchained, to relinquish all those privileges, those capacities for licence, which had made. English tragedy the beautiful and bewildering thing we know. When it was published, the great dramatic school was just closing. Ford and Massinger were resigning the art which they had received from Webster and Fletcher into the hands of Shirley. There is no means of discovering now where Denham got the idea of the style of his play1. It is very brief and brisk; delayed by no

1 The plot is borrowed from Sir W. Herbert's Travels. The same story was dramatised shortly after by Robert Baron, in his Mirza, published, without a date, apparently in 1647. Baron thus refers to Denham:

"I am not ignorant that there is a Tragedy abroad of this subject, intitled The Sophy; but it may be said of me as Terence makes his Prologue to his Eunuchus speak of him (though in a cause somewhat different)

'sed eas fabulas factas prius

Latinas scisse sese, id vero pernegat.'

I had finished three complete acts of this tragedy before I saw that, nor was I then discouraged from proceeding, seeing the most ingenious Author of that has made his seem quite another story from this."

Mirza, which has never enjoyed the attention its cleverness