Thou hadst not been thus long neglected,
But we, thy four best friends, expected,
Ere this time, thou hadst stood corrected.
But since that planet governs still,
That rules thy tedious fustain quill
'Gainst nature and the Muses' will;
When, by thy friends' advice and care,
'Twas hoped, in time, thou wouldst despair
To give ten pounds to write it fair;
Lest thou to all the world would show it,
We thought it fit to let thee know it:
Thou art a damn'd insipid poet!
These literary satires contain a number of other "pasquils,"
burlesquing the characters, the incidents, and the stanza, of the
GONDIBERT: some not the least witty are the most gross, and must not
be quoted; thus the wits of that day were poetical suicides, who have
shortened their lives by their folly.
D'Avenant, like more than one epic poet, did not tune to his ear the
_names_ of his personages. They have added, to show that his writings
are adapted to an easy musical singer, the names of his heroes and
heroines, in these verses:--
Hurgonil, Astolpho, Borgia, Goltha, Tibalt,
Astragon, Hermogild, Ulfinor, Orgo, Thula.
And "epithets that will serve for any substantives, either in this
part or the next."
Such are the labours of the idlers of genius, envious of the nobler
industry of genius itself!--How the great author's spirit was
nourished by the restoratives of his other friends, after the bitter
decoctions prescribed by these "Four," I fear we may judge by the
unfinished state in which "Gondibert" has come down to us. D'Avenant
seems, however, to have guarded his dignity by his silence; but Hobbes
took an opportunity of delivering an exquisite opinion on this Club of
Wits, with perfect philosophical indifference. It is in a letter to
the Hon. EDWARD HOWARD, who requested to have his sentiments on
another heroic poem of his own, "The British Princes."
"My judgment in poetry hath, you know, been once already censured, by
very good wits, for commending 'Gondibert;' but yet they have not, I
think, disabled my testimony. For, _what authority is there in wit_?
A jester may have it; a man in drink may have it, and be fluent
over-night, and wise and dry in the morning. What is it? or who can
tell whether it be better to have it, or be without it, especially if
it be a pointed wit? I will take my liberty to praise what I like, as
well as they do to reprehend what they do not like."
The stately "Gondibert" was not likely to recover favour in the court
of Charles the Second, where man was never regarded in his true
greatness, but to be ridiculed; a court where the awful presence of
Clarendon became so irksome, that the worthless monarch exiled him; a
court where nothing was listened to but wit at the cost of sense, the
injury of truth, and the violation of decency; where a poem of
magnitude with new claims was a very business for those volatile
arbiters of taste; an epic poem that had been travestied and
epigrammed, was a national concern with them, which, next to some new
state-plot, that occurred oftener than a new epic, might engage the
monarch and his privy council. These were not the men to be touched by
the compressed reflections and the ideal virtues personified in this
poem. In the court of the laughing voluptuary the manners as well as
the morals of these satellites of pleasure were so little heroic, that
those of the highest rank, both in birth and wit, never mentioned each
other but with the vulgar familiarity of nicknames, or the coarse
appellatives of Dick, Will, and Jack! Such was the era when the
serious "Gondibert" was produced, and such were the judges who seem to
have decided its fate.