A young lady of Thessaly, celebrated for her beauty and modesty, was admired by a dissolute young gentleman, a native of the erratic isle of Delos. This roving blade was of high birth and consummate address, yet the nymph was more than coy; she turned from him with aversion, and when he would have pressed his suit, she took to her heels along the banks of the Peneus. The audacious lover darted after her, as a greyhound in pursuit of a hare; and the fugitive, perceiving that she must lose the race, implored the gods to screen her. The breath of the pursuer was fanning her "back hair;" his hands stretched forth to stop her; but as he closed them, instead of the prize that he expected to secure, he embraced an armful of green leaves. The hunter had lost his game in a thicket of bay or female laurel. Inconsolable, he shed some natural tears; but having a conceit in his misery, he twined a branch of the laurel into a wreath, and placed it on his head in memorial of his misadventure. A glance at himself in the nearest pool of the river told him that the glossy ornament was becoming to his fine complexion; and the youth, being a poet and pretty considerably a coxcomb, wore one ever after; and it has been the custom ever since to adorn the brows of all great poets, and of some small ones, with sprigs of laurel.

So sings our living laureate; and this authentic anecdote, familiar to every schoolboy who studies ancient history in Ovid, shows that the coronation of poets was customary long before the age of Homer; and coeval, as it were, with poetry itself. The disappointed lover of Daphne, the first poet, was also the first laureat, and placed the crown on his head with his own hands, as many poets have done since, with a frank Napoleon-like self-appreciation. Having afterwards quarrelled with his father, and been expelled from home for sundry extravagancies, he returned with his lyre and laurel into Thessaly, the land of his first love—primus amor Phoebi, Daphne Peneia—and for nine years served a prince of that country in the double capacity of poet and shepherd. Thus, though the exact date is not ascertained, the original tenure of the honourable office of poet-royal is pretty clearly traced to Apollo himself.

But if we proceed from Apollo, our chapter on laureates will be longer than the tail of a comet. We must apply our wise saws to comparatively modern instances, hardly glancing for a moment even as far back as the age of Augustus, to observe that, of his two laurelled favourites, Virgil and Horace, the latter loftily maintains the dignity of the poet's position, when, in his Ode to Lollius, he shows that the alliance between poetic and regal or heroic power, was mutually important from the earliest ages. Kings, wise and great, flourished before Agamemnon, but are utterly forgotten:

Petrarch is, perhaps, the first eminent poet, among Christians, whose genius is indisputably associated with the laurel crown, which was conferred on him with all form, at Rome, by authority of the king, senate, and people, in especial token of his quality of poet. But the laurel was conspicuously the type of his fame in that character. His mistress was a laurel in name, and a Daphne in nature, if we give credence to his melodious complaints of her coldness. Many persons have doubted the very existence of Laura as any thing but an Apollonic laurel, or poetical abstraction of glory, almost too subtle for analysis by metaphysics. We have no such doubt of her materiality; for, over and above all other evidence, there are many passages in those songs and sonnets, that tell of a love, in the poet at least, which, though ever refined, was not all spiritual. In the same way, Dante's Beatrice has been pronounced an incorporeal creation,—a vision of theology, though in his Vita Nuova he expressly declares who she was, where and when she was born, her age and his own, when he first met her, and the year and the day, and the very hour, when she died. Milton read them both truly, and recognised in their writings the language of the human heart, and the truth of human passion undebased by a particle of grossness. Speaking of the laureate fraternity of poets, and of his own early partiality for the elegiac writers, he nobly says: "Above them all, I preferred the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never write but in honour of them to whom they devote their verse, displaying sublime and pure thoughts without transgression." After that lofty encomium from such authority, may we venture to observe that among the laureates of Italy there is one still greater poet than the Recluse of Avignon? We do not say a greater man, for the popular reputation of Petrarch, resting as it does on his accomplishment of verse, is not perhaps founded on the strongest of his claims to admiration. But Tasso, too, was a formally laureated bard. And his chaplet was unwithered in the dungeon, to which the cruellest Turk among the desecrators of Jerusalem would hardly have condemned him, for merely presumptuous aspirations after a bright ornament of his harem. Tasso's eulogium, in his grand epic, of the Christian prince who afterwards became his jailer, is an immortal reprobation of the unfeeling tyrant. The wrongs of genius are avenged even by its praise, which, when thus proved to have been undeserved, is satire undisguised. Petrarch and Tasso appear to be the only distinguished laureates of Italy. The rest were mere versifiers, for the most part fluent and insipid. But some Italian poets were complimented with the laurel in Germany, where the poetical college, founded at Vienna by Maximilian I., produced few native laureates worthy of the honour. Yet "the Emperors of Germany," says D'Israeli, who condemned the AbbÉ Resnel's memoir on the subject, "retained the laureateship in all its splendour. The selected bard was called Il Poeta Cesareo. Apostolo Zeno, as celebrated for his erudition as for his poetic powers, was succeeded by that most enchanting poet Metastasio,"—of whom, by-the-by, Sir James Mackintosh has also written in enthusiastic commendation; not, however, for his felicity as a poet, but for the deep and well-digested critical learning displayed in his prose treatise on Aristotle's Art of Poetry. "The French," continues Mr D'Israeli,—and we quote what he borrows from Resnel, because, though they do not tell us much, scarcely any other persons have hitherto told us any thing to the purpose on this matter,—"the French never had a poet-laureate, though they had royal poets, for none were ever solemnly crowned. The Spanish nation, always desirous of titles of honour, seem to have known that of the laureate; but little information concerning it can be gathered from their authors." We fear there must have been something suggestive of the hard, dry, see-saw of the turpis asella in the tone of the Spanish laureates; for Sancho Panza, in his tender consolation to his ass Dapple, when they had both tumbled into the quarry, says, "Yo prometo de ponerte una corona de laurel en la cabeza que no parezcas sino un laureado poeta, y de darte los piensos dobados." "I promise to give thee double feeds, and to place a crown of laurel on thy head, that thou mayest look like a poet-laureate."

But our main business is with the laureates of England; and the origin of their office is sufficiently obscure, and not the less worthy of consideration for the antiquity that such obscurity implies. It has certainly been associated with our monarchical institutions from very early times; and, for that reason alone, if for no other, we should be disposed, in this antimonarchical fever of the day, to respect the loyalty of the office, however little respect may have been due to some who have held it, and however higher than the office is every true poet, "whose mind to him a kingdom is," and who possesses a royalty of his own, wider than that of Charlemagne. We do not know that the poets cited in the Saxon Chronicle were rhymers more inspired by the mead of the court than of the cloister; but the supposition is not improbable,—for we do know the fondness of Alfred for the gleeman's craft, and that he, "lord of the harp and liberating spear," was himself a gleeman; nor are we unmindful that King Canute honoured verse-men, and that he could even improvise an accordant rhyme, still extant, to the holy chant of the monks of Ely, as his bargemen rowed him down the Ouse, under the chapel wall. It is not apparent that trouvÈres followed William of Normandy to Sussex officially, or celebrated his triumph over Harold,—for the story of Taliefer is hardly a case in point, and we do not hear much about the northern trouvÈres till somewhat later, though some writers will have it that they are of older standing than the troubadours of the south of France. We do not imagine that William Rufus patronised harmony more intellectual than the blast of the hunting-horn. But so early at least as the twelfth century, in the reign of Richard, "the heart of courage leonine," as Wordsworth calls him, we have a king's versifier in the person of Gulielmus, of whom little is known, except that he produced a poem on the crusade of this romantic, poetical, bones-breaking Richard,—a prince whose Gothic blood (for it must be remembered that he was of the restored Saxon line) might seem to have been tinged with orientalism by some unaccountable process; for, even before his embarkation on his adventure with his red-cross knights, his character exhibited a strange combination of the stout and somewhat obtuse doggedness of the bandog, and the lordliness of the lion—a mixture of Saxon homeliness and Saracenic magnificence. The strength of thews and sinews, and the prowess of mere animal courage, (vulgar glories, for the most part, looked at with civilised eyes,) wear an aspect of redeeming generosity in Richard, that still recommends him to us as a hero of romance, worthy of minstrel praise, in spite of his ferocious temper, his demerits as a son, and his indomitable wrong-headedness as a prince. The poem of Gulielmus is not extant, but it must have been interesting if he possessed any genius. Richard's rough warfare with the Soldan, his marriage with Berengaria, and his delivery from the dungeon of the base Duke of Austria, were subjects as pregnant as any of the adventures of Hercules, an idol of hero-worship whom he in some respects resembles. In King John's reign, the poets seem to have been against the king, and in favour of the opposing barons. Whether he consoled himself with the stipendiary services of a court poet, we do not discover. Throughout his long and troubled reign he seems to have been pelted with lampoons.

In the year 1251, reign of Henry III., the King's versifier was requited by an annual pension of 100 shillings—not such a very niggardly stipend as it now sounds, if we compare the value of money in those times with the price of commodities. In the two following reigns we find a poet-royal of some repute in Robert Baston. He was a Carmelite monk, and attained the dignity of prior of the convent of that order at Scarborough. Bishop Bale (in his IllustrÛm Majoris BritanniÆ Scriptorum Summarium) says that Baston was a laureated poet and public orator at Oxford, which Wood denies. But Bale might have had access to information which could no longer be authenticated in Anthony's time; for Bale, though he lived to be Edward the Sixth's Bishop of Assory, and a prebendary of the Cathedral of Canterbury, where he died and was buried, had himself been a Carmelite friar. "Great confusion," observes Warton, "has entered into the subject of the institution of poets-laureate, on account of the degrees in grammar, which included rhetoric and versification, anciently taken in our universities, particularly at Oxford, on which occasion a wreath of laurel was presented to the new graduate, who was afterwards usually styled Poeta Laureatus. These scholastic laureations, however, seem to have given rise to the appellation in question. With regard to the poet-laureate of the Kings of England, he is undoubtedly the same that is styled the king's versifier in the thirteenth century. But when or how that title commenced, and whether this officer was ever formally crowned with laurel at his first investiture, I will not pretend to determine, after the researches of the learned Seldon have proved unsuccessful. It seems probable that at length those only were in general invited to this appointment who had received academical sanction, and had merited a crown of laurel in the universities for their abilities in Latin composition, particularly Latin versification. Thus the king's laureate was nothing more than a graduated rhetorician, employed in the king's service." Warton adds an opinion, which seems well founded, "that it was not customary for the royal laureate to write in English till the Reformation had begun to diminish the veneration for the Latin tongue, or rather till the love of novelty, and a better sense of things, had banished the pedantry of monastic erudition, and taught us to cultivate our native language." It is true, that neither before nor after the Conquest was there any lack of rhymers in the vulgar tongue, whether Saxon or Norman, or mixed; and they would be the popular poets, but not exactly the poets in fashion at court. At all events, the fashion of writing court poems in low Latin began early and continued long; and we suspect that the Anglo-Saxon gleemen, whom the monkish historians call joculatores regis, were for the most part mere merrymen, as their monkish sobriquet implies—jugglers, dancers, fiddlers, tumblers. Berdic, the king's fool, is styled Joculator Regis in Doomsday Book. Some of these retainers, no doubt, could both compose ballads and sing them, suiting the action to the word, and they might occasionally amuse the court with their songs; but the authentic poet for state occasions was the Latin verse-maker. We say this with all due love and regard for our ballad-singers, old and modern, from King Alfred to Alfred Tennyson; and remembering, too, that we have two good sets-offs against Harry Hotspur's sneer at "metre ballad-mongers,"—one in Sir Philip Sidney's declaration that the ballad of the Percy hunt in Cheviotdale stirred his heart like the sound of a trumpet; and another, in the fact that one of the most illustrious of modern Percys, the Bishop of Dromore, owes his well-deserved popular reputation to nothing else than his industry, talent, and good taste in editing the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and Old Heroic Ballads.

Robert Baston, from whom we have digressed, was not a ballad-monger, but a Latin versifier ex officio. Edward I., in his expedition to Scotland in 1304, took Baston with him, that he might be an eye-witness of his triumph over this country, and celebrate it in Latin verse. Hollinshed comments on this fact as a strong proof of Edward's presumption and overweening confidence in himself; but the censure is not strikingly pertinent, for at this period a poet was a stated officer in the royal retinue, when the monarch went to war. The haughty old king's discomfiture, after all his successes in this favourite enterprise, was as mortifying, but not so comical as the disastrous issue of the campaign to his poet. The jolly prior had not done chanting one of his heroics in honour of Edward's siege of Stirling, when he was pounced on by a foray of Scots, and carried away into durance; nor was this the worst of the misadventure, for, with a shrewdly balancing humour, they obliged him to pay his ransom in verse, and only released him when he had recorded the praises of his captors and their cause. He does not appear to have been much inspired by the subject; for Hector Boece says that he made, "rusty verses" in praise of the Scots; and rusty enough they were, if they all resembled the initial line as it is quoted—

"De planta cudo metrum cum carmine nudo."

The poem must have stood in more awkward antagonism with "De Strivilniensi Obsidione," which is extant in Fordun, than Waller's panegyric on Cromwell does face to face with his eulogium on Charles II. We doubt whether the monk had so witty an apology for his double tongue as the courtier; but he had a better excuse, for he said, "Actus me invito, factus, non est meus actus." There is both rhyme and reason in that. The stubbornness of the Scots, which was at last a choke-pear to Edward, seems to have stimulated the poet almost as much as it exasperated the king. For, besides the siege of Stirling, we find on the list of Baston's productions one entitled "De Altero Scotorum Bello," and another "De ScotiÆ guerris Variis." Baston survived his master, the broken Malleus Scotorum, only three years. It is uncertain whether he retained his office after the accession of Edward the Second; but, if so, death had released him from duty before that prince's invasion of this country in 1314. Otherwise he would probably have had to pay another visit to the ominous neighbourhood of Stirling Castle, at a risk, if he escaped a deadlier chance, of being captured by the Bruce himself, and of having a caged poet's leisure to meditate a threnodia for Bannockburn. Boece, in Bellenden's version, asserts that this was actually the case,—that it was "Edward the Second, who, by vain arrogance, as if the Scotch had been sicker in his hands, brought with him ane Carmelite monk to put his victory in versis; that the poet was taken in this field of Bannockburn, and commandit by King Robert the Bruce to write as he saw, in sithement of his ransom." There is also among the political songs published by the Camden Society, a wretched transcript (from the Cotton. MSS.) of a wretched piece of raving on this very battle, also attributed to Baston,—(and announced, we suppose by an error of the press, as written in the reign of Edward the Third.) But we are inclined to believe that Baston died about four years before that great day for Scotland. We do not, however, undertake to settle the point. We have no certain accounts of Baston's successor.

It is asserted by writers not incautious, that Gower and Chaucer were laureates; and we are unwilling to doubt it, though the authority is far from conclusive. Chaucer, born about 1328, the second year of Edward the Third's reign, died in 1400. It is certain that he was liberally patronised, and gratified with lucrative appointments by Edward. It is recorded, too, that he was employed on foreign missions of trust; that on one occasion he was an envoy to Genoa, and that he then visited Petrarch at Padua; and as the arguments for and against the probability of this interview are pretty nearly balanced, we are not bound to deny ourselves the pleasure of believing it. Froissart, as well as Hollinshed and Barnes, bears testimony to Chaucer's having been one of a mission to the court of France, in the last year of Edward's reign; but it is not clear, nor even at all deducible from the nature of the public employments, and the character of Edward, that it was his poetical merit which promoted him to the royal confidence in matters of business.

Gower, born, it is supposed, somewhat earlier than Chaucer, died two years later, in 1402, and had been blind for the last two or three years of his life. Bale makes Gower equitem auratum et poetam laureatum; but Winstansley says he was neither laureated nor hederated, but only rosated, having a chaplet of four roses about his head on his monumental stone in St Mary Overy's Church, Southwark. His "Confessio Amantis" is said to have been prompted by the command of Richard the Second, who, chancing to meet him on the Thames, invited him into his gilded barge,—

enjoined him to "book something new." In the three next reigns of the line of Lancaster, Henry the Fourth, Henry the Fifth, and Henry the Sixth, a period of sixty-two years, we hardly know what became of the court poets, or whether there were any. Musicians were liberally privileged as palace servants by Henry the Fourth, but his reign was unfavourable to the minstrel art. Henry the Fifth was partial to minstrelsy, and rewarded it generously; but we find no report of a laureat poet. In Henry the Sixth's time, boys were pressed into the minstrel service of the court; but it is not recorded that any one was made a poet by virtue of royal kidnapping. They were instructed in music for the solace of his majesty.

To Edward the Fourth, the first king of the line of York, John Kay, as "his Majesty's humble Laureate," dedicated a History of Rhodes.

The wars of the Roses seem almost to have silenced the nightingales. But no sooner was contention terminated by the union of Henry of Lancaster with the heiress of York, than a rivalry sprang up for the office of king's poet. In the year 1486, the next after the coronation of Henry the Seventh, and shortly after his marriage, that king, by an instrument Pro Poeta Laureato, of which a copy is preserved in Rymer's Foedera, granted to Andrew Bernard, poet-laureate, a salary of fifteen marks, until he should obtain some equivalent appointment. This was no very munificent grant. But Henry the Seventh was not addicted to liberality out of his own exchequer. He afterwards found means to reward him with ecclesiastical preferments; and his prodigal, but still more selfish successor, gratified him in the same way. Bernard, who was a native of Toulouse, and an Augustine monk, obtained many preferments in England; and was besides not only poet-laureate, but historiographer to the king, and preceptor in grammar to Prince Arthur. The preceptorship, however honourable, was perhaps not worth much on the score of emolument. All the pieces now to be found in his character of laureate are in Latin. Among these are, "An Address to Henry the Eighth, for the most Auspicious Beginning of the Tenth Year of his Reign;" "A New-Year's Offering for the Year 1515;" and "Verses wishing Prosperity to his Majesty's Thirteenth Year, 1522." He left many prose pieces, written in his quality of historiographer to both monarchs, particularly a Chronicle of the Life and Achievements of Henry the Seventh to the taking of Perkin Warbeck. And here occurs a little difficulty in the reconcilement of dates, when we are told that Skelton also was poet-laureate to Henry the Seventh and his son: for it has been shown that Bernard was alive in 1522, if not later. Skelton was laureated at Oxford about 1489, three years after the date of the recorded grant to the poet-laureate, Andrew Bernard. We more than half suspect that Skelton, though a graduated university laureate, was never poet-laureate to either king at all, except as a sort of volunteer, licensed by his own saucy consent. Puttenham expressly says, that "Skelton usurped the name of poet-laureate, being indeed but a rude railing rimer, and all his doings ridiculous." It is stated that Skelton, having, a few years subsequent to his laureation at Oxford, been permitted to wear his laurel publicly at Cambridge also, was further privileged by Henry the Seventh to wear some particular dress, or additional ornament to his dress. Henry the Seventh was not much given to jesting, or we should infer that it was a badge appropriate to the king's fool; for Skelton, though an able man, was, like Leo the Tenth's arch-poet Querno, who was crowned laureate for the joke's sake, ambitious of the fool's honours. He was a buffoon even in the pulpit.

Skelton directed his ribaldry especially against the mendicant friars and the formidable Wolsey. We can easily imagine how these audacities were not intolerable to the "Defender of the Faith," even in the plenitude of the cardinal's power; and how he might have tolerated his assumption of the character of court-poet, so long as the spurious laureate's sallies did not trench on the sovereign's personal dignity. Skelton, like his quondam royal pupil, was already a reformer in his way, and not long before his death, which occurred June 21, 1529, just before the downfall of Wolsey, he used a strange argument against the celibacy of the priesthood; he excused himself for having openly lived with a concubine, because he considered her as his wife! Erasmus, the caustic censor of the vices of the clergy, praised Skelton's learning and wit, probably from sympathy with his application of them, bolder, though far less dignified than his own, to the same objects of satire; but "the glory of the priesthood and the shame," could hardly have admitted the validity of such an apology from the Vicar of Dallyng, a vowed celibate priest.

We must return for a moment to Bernard. This poet-laureate had a notable subject to begin with in the union of the Two Roses. How he treated it we have no means of judging, as the performance is not in existence; and though it has perished, it would be unfair, perhaps, to assume that his freshest effort on an event that might have quickened the slowest fancy, was not superior to his later exercises, on occasions of weaker interest, such as are preserved in the Cottonian Library, and that of New College, Oxford. Of all the events in the history of the British monarchy, there is one subject, and probably one only, of those that could come within the range of a court-poet's province, of equal national importance, and equally poetical quality with the marriage of Henry the Seventh—that is, the marriage of his daughter, Margaret, to James the Fourth of Scotland; and even those of our "constant readers" who, to their loss, may know nothing of William Dunbar but what they have read in former pages of this magazine, must know that the court of Scotland, at the time of the celebration of these nuptials, possessed a poet worthy of the subject, for they cannot have forgotten his inspired vision on the Thistle and the Rose. In the one case the wounds of England were closed after long wars of disputed succession, as desolating as any intestine wars on record: in the other, two nations, jealous neighbours, and till then implacable enemies, formed an alliance that promised to be lasting, and which finally effected more than it had promised, by the consolidation of the two thrones into one. On the head of the Scottish great-grandson of the English Margaret, the double crown was secure from the casuistry of jurists. Neither Elizabeth of York, nor her daughter, was a happy wife. Henry the Seventh proved cold and ungrateful as a husband; James the Fourth faithless; but we have nothing to do here with the domestic infelicity of those ill-used princesses, except as it shows that the court-poets, who predicted so much happiness for them, were not infallible Vates. Poets, on such occasions, are prophets of hope only. And as to the struggles and disasters that followed, the glowing vision of Dunbar was luckily as impassive to the shadows of coming events (Flodden Field, and Fotheringay, and the scaffold at Whitehall, and the rout on the Boyne water) as were the quondam visions and religious meditations of Lamartine in the days of Charles Dix to the shadows of the barricades, and the prestige of the Hotel de Ville.

We do not find that the young successor of England's royal Blue-beard had a poet-laureate. Queen Mary, though a learned and accomplished lady, had no such an appendage to her state. Heywood was her favourite poet; he had consoled her with honest praise in the days when it was the fashion of courtiers to neglect her. On his presenting himself at her levee, after her accession, "Mary asked him," says the chronicler of queens, "what wind has blown you hither?" He answered, "Two special ones—one of them to see your Majesty." "Our thanks for that," said Mary; "but the other?" "That your Majesty might see me." He used to stand by her side at supper, and amuse her with his jests—not a very dignified employment for a poet—but he was a player, and being accustomed to play many parts, did not decline that of Double to Mary's female Fool, Jane. He appears, however, to have been her life-long solace. He had ministered to her diversion in her childhood, with a company of child-players, whom Shakspeare calls "little eye-asses"—(callow hawks)—and in her long illness he was frequently sent for, and, when she was able to listen to recitation, he repeated his verses, or superintended performances for her amusement.

Malone insists that Queen Elizabeth, too, had no poet-laureate; yet Spenser is by other writers as confidently preferred to that post, and Daniel is said to have officially succeeded him. Spenser's "Gloriana" and "Dearest Dread," though abundantly shrewd and sagacious, and though somewhat of a scholar and a wit, and sufficiently vain of her own poor rhymes, had no true perception or appreciation of the art divine of poesy. The most eminent dramatic genius the world ever saw was as moderately encouraged as any inferior playhouse droll might have been. She could laugh at Falstaff and Dame Quickly, and stimulate that humour in the author: and, to use her sister's words to Heywood, "our thanks for that." Edmund Spenser, also, was less indebted to her own taste, or even to her enormous appetite for flattery, than to Sir Philip Sidney's enlightened friendship, and to his introduction to her by Sir Walter Raleigh, for such favours as he received. These, however, were not small; and neither the Fairy Queen herself, (gigantic fairy!) nor her sage counsellor Cecil, is justly responsible for the unhappiness of Spenser. His pension of £50 a-year was but a portion of the emoluments he derived from court interest. That pension, which he received till his death in 1598, was no doubt an annuity assigned him as Queen's poet, though the title of laureate is not given in his patent, nor in that of his two immediate successors, Daniel and Ben Jonson. So far Malone is accurate.

Daniel's laudatory verse, whether he volunteered it or not, was acceptable to King James, and rewarded by a palace appointment. He was Gentleman Extraordinary, and one of the grooms to Queen Anne of Denmark. He was on terms of social intimacy with Shakspeare, Marlow, and Chapman, as well as with persons of higher social rank; and he had the honour to be tutor to the famous Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, who caused a cenotaph to be erected to his memory at Beckington, near Frome, in his native county. He died in 1619.

The masques and pageants of his successor, Ben Jonson, prove that he held no sinecure from either of his royal masters; but in Charles the First he at least served a prince who could respect genius, and remember that the labourer is worthy of his hire. Jonson received, "in consideration of services of wit and pen already done to us and our father, and which we expect from him," £100 a-year and a tierce of Spanish canary, his best-beloved Hippocrene, out of the royal cellars at Whitehall.

On his decease, 1637, William Davenant was appointed poet-laureate, by patent, through the influence of Henrietta Maria, though her husband had intended the reversion for Thomas May. This man was so disgusted that, forgetting many former obligations to Charles, who had a high and just opinion of his talents, he soon after turned traitor, and attached himself to the Roundheads. Davenant proved himself worthy of the preference, not only by his poetry, but by his steadfast gallant loyalty. He was son of an innkeeper at Oxford, but is said to have rather sanctioned a vague rumour that attributed his paternity to Shakspeare. At ten years of age he produced his first poem, a little ode in three sextains, "In remembrance of Master William Shakspeare." The first stanza has some feeling in it, the other two are puerile conceits, clever enough for so young a boy. When his sovereign was in trouble, he volunteered into the army, and was soon found eligible to no mean promotion. He was raised to the rank of lieutenant-general of ordnance, under the Duke of Newcastle, and was knighted for his services at the siege of Gloucester. His "Gondibert," begun in exile at Paris, was continued in prison at Cowes Castle, though he daily expected his death-warrant. But he was removed to the Tower of London to be tried by a high commission; and it is believed that his life was saved by the generous intervention of Milton, whom he subsequently repaid in kind, by softening the resentment of the restored government against him. Davenant, though perhaps a man of irregular life, and though, as a dramatist and playhouse manager, he proved any thing but allegiant to Shakspeare, and was active in communicating a depraved taste, was yet a man of brave, honest, and independent mind. It is curious that he should not only have disappointed May of the laurel when living, but that it should have been his chance to take his place in Poet's Corner when dead. The Puritans had erected a pompous tomb to May, which was savagely enough removed by the returned royalists. Near the same spot, in Westminster Abbey, is the monument to Davenant.

The Usurpation was not without its poets of far loftier reach than May, though he, too, was no dwarf. It would have been ridiculous in Cromwell to appoint a poet-laureate. The thing was impossible, though the flatteries of his kinsman, Waller, show that it was not the want of a subservient royalist gentleman of station, as well of talent, that made it so. Andrew Marvel, though he wrote such vigorous verse on Cromwell's victories in Ireland, would hardly have accepted the office, and what other Puritan would? But without the form, the Protector of the commonwealth had the reality in his Latin secretary, to whom Marvel was assistant. The lineal heir of the most ancient race of kings might have been proud of such a poet. The greatness of Milton might be a pledge to all ages of the greatness of Cromwell, unchallenged even by those who most detest grim Oliver of Hungtindon for "Darwent stream with blood of Scots imbrued," and "Worcester's laureate wreath." Here it is the poet who confers on the conqueror a laurel crown, of which the imperishable leaves, green as ever bard or victor wore, mitigate, though they do not hide, the evil expression on the casque-worn brow of the senex armis impiger, and give it a dignity that might abate the stoutest loyalist's abhorrence, but for one fatal remembrance, which forbids him to exclaim,

"Nec sunt hi vultus regibus usque truces."

Sir William Davenant, who recovered the laureateship at the Restoration, and retained it till his death in 1668, was succeeded by Dryden. Glorious John, although he had hastily flattered Richard Cromwell's brief authority by an epicede on Oliver, was not rejected by the merry monarch, who could laugh at poets' perjuries as lightly as at those of lovers. During that disgraceful reign, the poet made it no part of his vocation and privilege to check the profligate humours brought into fashion by the court.

At the revolution of 1688, the laureate was discrowned, as well as King James; and he condescended to revenge himself by Macflecnoe on his substitute Shadwell, as if he had not beforehand administered sufficient chastisement to that miserable Og, in the bitter satire with which he supplied Tate for the second part of Absolom and Achitophel. One might pity Shadwell under the lash of such an enemy as Dryden, if his writings either in verse or prose entitled him to a grain of respect. Charles, sixth Earl of Dorset—himself an elegant wit and indifferent versifier, but the descendant and representative of a very illustrious poet, Sackville, the first Earl, author of the noble "Induction to a Mirror for Magistrates"—vindicated his recommendation of Shadwell to the poet-laureateship, "not because he was a poet, but an honest man." We suppose he meant that he had not oscillated between Popery and Reformation like Dryden, and that he was more honest, also, in a political sense, and less liable to suspicion as an adherent of the expelled monarch's heartless daughter, and her Dutch husband, the hero of the Boyne and Glencoe. But, in another and not unimportant sense, Shadwell was far from honest; for he was notorious for the ribaldry of his conversation. It has been asserted, while that fact was admitted, that, as an author before the public, he was a promoter of morality and virtue. Nothing can be more untrue. Of his many comedies, there is none which is not as rife in pollution as any of the grossest plays of the time. But their boasted humour is physic for the bane; for it is distilled "from the dull weeds that grow by Lethe's side." His comedies are five-act farces of wearisome vulgarity, and, though suffered in their day, were destined, as Pope leniently expresses it in the Dunciad,

In "The Royal Shepherdess," however, a play in blank verse, altered by Shadwell from Fountain of Devonshire, there are some fine lines, so far above any thing known to be Shadwell's that we readily take him at his word in his preface, where, modest for once, he invites the reader, if he finds any thing good in the play, to set it down to Mr Fountain. The following lines are a favourable specimen, notwithstanding the breeding barrenness:—

Still better, where a king, in a vicious attempt upon an innocent girl, has compelled her consent to a meeting at night. The queen, apprised of the design, personates the intended victim, and appeals to his conscience with an effect that he thus describes:—

The songs in this piece are all by Shadwell, except, as he declares, the last but one, which is Fountain's, and the only one not below mediocrity. Shadwell had also the impudence to alter and corrupt "Timon of Athens," and to produce the farrago on the stage as an improvement on the original. In the dedication he says, "It has the inimitable hand of Shakspeare in it; yet I can truly say, I have made it into a play." This "tun of man and kilderkin of wit" was admitted to a tomb in Westminster Abbey, an honour (?) said to have been denied to the remains of a noble poet, the author of "Don Juan." Yet Shadwell had also produced a "Don Juan." His tragedy of "The Libertine," the same hero, is ten times more indecent than the most objectionable parts of Byron's poem. But it is, indeed, also less noxious, for it has not a single attractive grace of fancy or feeling. A print of Shadwell, prefixed to Tonson's edition of his works, ludicrously bears out Dryden's description of the outer man. He looks like an alehouse Bacchus, or rather like one of those carnal cherubs whom the French call anges bouffis—his cheeks bulging out as if they were stuffed with apples from the forbidden tree. He died in December 1692, and was succeeded by

Nahum Tate, the psalmodist. Every one knows what sort of poet he was, and how the harp of Israel is but a Jew's harp in the hands of Tate and Brady. Yet some passages in his second part of "Absolom and Achitophel" are not such feeble mimicries of the tone of his friend, Dryden, as might have been expected from so poor a performer. The praise of Asaph, glorious John himself, is pleasing. It concludes with these lines:—

At his death in 1715, a year after the accession of George the First, the withering laurel recovered a little lustre on the brow of Nicholas Rowe, the translator of Lucan, and the pathetic dramatist of "The Fair Penitent," and "Jane Shore." His occasional verses were, of course, very respectable; and his only signal failure was when he attempted comedy. After the banter he incurred for his play of "The Biter," he was so sensible that he was the biter bit, that he excluded it from his works, and made no second venture of the kind. Yet the man who could move an audience to tears, and who had so little command of their sympathies when he tried his powers of wit on them, was any thing but a lachrymist by temperament. When Spence observed that he should have thought "the tragic Rowe too grave to write such things." Pope answered, "He! why, he would laugh all the day long! He would do nothing but laugh!" He survived the acquisition of the laurel only three years, dying at the age of forty-five.

Laurence Eusden, "a parson much bemused in beer," stumbled into his place, just in time to elaborate, singultu laborare, the Coronation Ode for George the Second. A specimen or two of his loyal suspirations may be as welcome as a hundred.

Lord Hervey's "Memoirs of the Court of George the Second," recently made public, are an edifying exposition of the "peculiarly nice" virtues here extolled.

The conjuror who can make out the meaning of the last line may be able to answer the question. In his joy for a George the Second, the inspired bard dries up his tears for George the First:—

He ends with a kick at the Stuarts:

If Charles Edward had known that, he might have saved himself a good deal of trouble.

Eusden died at his rectory in Lincolnshire in 1730. Colley Cibber wore the laurel with unblushing front for twenty-seven years from that date. His annual birth-day and new-year odes for all that time are treasured in the Gentleman's Magazine. They are all so bad, that his friends pretended that he made them so on purpose. Dr Johnson, however, often asserted, from his personal knowledge of the man, that he took great pains with his lyrics, and thought them far superior to Pindar's. The Doctor was especially merry with one ultra-Pindaric flight which occurs in the Cibberian "Ode for the New-Year 1750."

So proud was Cibber of that marvellous image of the linnet and eagle, that he repeated it in the "Natal Ode for 1753." In his last "New-year Ode," too, 1757, he again scolds Pindar for his sluggishness—

Those effusions are truly incomparable. Not only are they all bad, but not one of them in twenty-seven years contains a good line. Yet he was, happily for himself, more impenetrable to the gibes of the wits than a buffalo to the stings of mosquitoes. Of the numerous epigrams twanged at him, here is one from the London Magazine for 1737.

"ON SEEING TOBACCO-PIPES LIT WITH ONE OF THE LAUREATE'S ODES.

Dr Johnson honoured him with another, equally complimentary to Cibber and his CÆsar.

Yet Cibber, the hero of the Dunciad, was not a dunce, except in his attempts at verse; even Pope, who calls him "a pert and lively dunce," epithets rather incongruous, admits the merit of his "Careless Husband." His Apology for his own Life, too, is no mean performance; some passages in it are both judicious and eloquent, particularly his criticisms on Nokes and Betterton, and on acting in general. Though the most wretched of poetasters, he was an abler prose writer than half of his critics.

At his death, the laureateship was offered to Gray, with an exemption from the duty of furnishing annual odes, but he refused the office, as having been degraded by Cibber. It was then given, on the usual terms, to William Whitehead, who won even the approbation of Gray for the felicity with which he occasionally performed his task. What now appears most noticeable in Whitehead's odes is his prolonged and ludicrous perplexity about the American war. At the first outbreak he is the indignant and scornful patriot, confident in the power of the mother country, and threatening the rebels with condign punishment. As they grow more and more obstinate, he becomes the pathetic remonstrant with those unnatural children, and coaxes them to be good boys. When any news of success to the British arms has arrived, he mounts the high horse again, and gives the Yankees hard words, but not without magnanimous hints that the gates of mercy are not quite closed to repentance. Reverses come, and he consoles the king. Matters grow worse, and he is at his wit's-end. At last the struggle is over; he accommodates himself to the unpleasant necessity of the case, and sings the blessings of peace and concord.

Laureate odes, good or bad, are always fair game for squibs. Whitehead had his share of ridicule, but he had more courage than Gray, who was so painfully afflicted by the parodies of Lloyd and Coleman, that he almost resolved to forswear poetry. Whitehead retorted on his assailants with easy good-humour, in "An Apology for all Laureates, past, present, and to come," beginning,

and ending,

The next laureate, Thomas Warton, the historian of English poetry, is too well known and appreciated to require any lengthened notice here. In 1747 and 1748 he held the appointment of laureated poet, to which he was inaugurated, according to the ancient custom, in the common-room of Trinity College, Oxford. His duty was to celebrate a lady chosen as lady patroness, and Warton performed his task crowned with a wreath of laurel. In 1757, he was elected professor of poetry, as his father had formerly been in the same university. On the demise of Whitehead in 1785, the laureateship was conferred on him by command of George the Third. He was quizzed as his predecessor had been, and, like him, laughed at the jesters; and he gradually turned their scoffs to approbation by his equanimity and the merit of his performances. Warton had not only the wit to be diverted by probationary odes in mockery of his own, which he valued at less than they were worth, but he had temper to endure the malignant scurrility of Ritson, in reference to more important labours, with no severer remark than that he was a black-lettered dog. A portion of his later days was devoted to a labour of love—an edition of the juvenile poems of Milton, with copious notes. Though of sedentary college habits, and a free liver, he enjoyed vigorous health to the age of 62: he then broke down. He went to Bath with the gout, and returned, as he thought, in an improved condition. The evening of May 20, 1790, he passed cheerfully in the common-room, but, before midnight, he was stricken with paralysis, and the next day he was a corpse.

Henry James Pye, who was of a family of which the founder is stated to have come to England with the Conqueror, was likewise representative, by the female line, of the patriot Hampden. In 1784, he was returned to parliament as member for Berkshire. But the expense of the contest ruined him, and he was obliged to sell his estate; and even the slender salary of a laureate was not unacceptable when it fell in his way. Besides his official odes, he produced numerous works, epic, dramatic, and lyric, and also published several translations, and a corrected edition of Francis's Horace. The reader will be content if we pass all these with the remark that he was a respectable writer, a good London police-magistrate, and an honourable gentleman in a less equivocal sense than the parliamentary style. As factor of annual odes for the court, he was, of course, scurvily used by the wags. The joke on "Pindar, Pye, et parvus Pybus," was once in every body's mouth. He died in 1813, and was succeeded by

Robert Southey, who held the office for thirty years; and this prolonged tenure of it, still longer than Cibber's, by a man of unimpeachable worth and distinguished genius, is a happy set-off against the disgrace which frightened Gray, and made him refuse it. The concession proposed to Gray, that he should write only when and what he chose, was also virtually, though not formally, yielded to Southey. "The performance of the annual odes," he says, "had been suspended from the time of George the Third's illness in 1810, and fell completely into disuse. Thus terminated a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance." How is it that we have yet no biography of Southey? It is rumoured that his only surviving son, the Reverend Cuthbert Southey, has one in preparation. We hope that the report is true, and that it will contain abundance of his father's delightful letters, and be published soon. Bis dat qui cito dat,—that is, not that a book should be got up in a hurry, but that, after a delay of five years, the reasonable expectation of Robert Southey's admirers and regretters should be now promptly gratified.

We began with the earliest of laureates and the latest,—Apollo and the venerable Wordsworth,—and with them we will conclude. In a snug nook, sheltered from the north and east winds by Helvellyn, and Fairfield, Wordsworth has for many years cultivated his own laurels with success, till he is absolutely imbowered in them. The original slip, from which all this throng of greenery has sprung, is said to have been a cutting from a scion of the bay-tree planted by Petrarch at the tomb of Virgil, which tree was unquestionably derived from the undying root of that which supplied leaves for the garland of Apollo, and assuaged the divinity of his brow, when, as we reminded the reader at our outset on this ramble, he hired himself as poet-laureate to King Admetus, on a daily stipend of a hornful of milk.