with Dudley Posthumus before mentioned, then a captain under him, were both committed prisoners to UPON MY NOBLE FRIEND RICHARD LOVELACE, ESQ., HIS BEING IN HOLLAND. AN INVITATION. COME, Adonis, come again; What distaste could drive thee hence, Sateing ev'n the soul of sense? Then, lov'd Adonis, come away, Wert thou sated with the spoil Of so many virgin hearts, Phillis, fed with thy delights, In thy absence pines away; And love, too, hath lost his rites, They have changed their mirth for cares, And do onely sigh thy airs. Then, lov'd Adonis, come away, Elpine, in whose sager looks Thou wert wont to take delight, Then, lov'd Adonis, come away, Peter House,1 in London, where he framed his poems for the press, entitled, Lucasta: Epodes, Odes, Sonnets, All the swains that once did use To converse with Love and thee, Then, lov'd Adonis, come away, For friendship brooks not thy delay. By thy sweet Althea's voice, We conjure thee to return; Or we'll rob thee of that choice, In whose flames each heart would burn; That inspir'd by her and sack, Such company we will not lack: That poets in the age to come, Shall write of our Elisium. 1 Peter, or rather Petre House, in Aldersgate Street, belonged at one time to the antient family by whose name it was known. The third Lord Petre, dying in 1638, left it, with other possessions in and about the city of London, to his son William. (Collins's Peerage, by Brydges, vii. 10, 11.) When Lovelace was committed to Peter House, and probably long before (Mercurius Rusticus, ed. 1685, pp. 76-79), this mansion was used as a house of detention for political prisoners; but in Ward's Diary (ed. Severn, p. 167), there is the following entry (like almost all Ward's entries, unluckily without date):-"My Lord Peters is an Essex man; hee hath a house in Aldersgate Street, wherein lives the Marquis of Dorchester:" implying that at that period (perhaps about 1660), the premises still belonged to the Petre family, though temporarily let to Lord Dorchester. Another celebrated house in the same street was London House, which continued for some time to be the town residence of the Bishops of London. When it had ceased to be an episcopal abode, it was adapted to the purposes of an ordinary dwelling, and, among the occupants, at a somewhat later period, was Tom Rawlinson, the great book-collector. See Stow, ed. 1720, ii. lib. iii. p. 121. Songs, &c., Lond. 1649, Oct. The reason why he gave that title was because, some time before, he had made his amours to a gentlewoman of great beauty and fortune, named Lucy Sacheverell, whom he usually called Lux casta; but she, upon a stray report that Lovelace was dead of his wound received at Dunkirk, soon after married.' He also wrote Aramantha [Amarantha], a Pastoral, printed with Lucasta. Afterwards a musical composition of two parts was set to part of it by Henry Lawes,3 sometimes servant to king Charles I., in his public and private music. 66 66 1 How different was the conduct, under similar circumstances, of the lady whom Charles Gerbier commemorates in his Elogium Heroinum, 1651, p. 127. 'Democion, the Athenian virgin," he tells us, "6 hearing that Leosthenes, to whom she was contracted, was slain in the wars, she killed herself; but before her death she thus reasoned with herself: Although my body is untoucht, yet should I fall into the imbraces of another, I should but deceive the second, since I am still married to the former in my heart."" 2 Wood's story about Lucasta having been a Lucy Sacheverell, 'a lady of great beauty and fortune," may reasonably be doubted. Lucasta, whoever she was, seems to have belonged to Kent; the Sacheverells were not a Kentish family. Besides, the corruption of Lucy Sacheverell into Lucasta is not very obvious, and rather violent; and the probability is that the author of the Athena was misled by his informant on this occasion. The plate etched by Lely and engraved by Faithorne, which is found in the second part of Lucasta, 1659, can scarcely be regarded as a portrait; it was, in all likelihood, a mere fancy sketch, and we are not perhaps far from the truth in our surmise that the artist was nearly, if not quite, as much in the dark as to who Lucasta was, as we are ourselves at the present day. 3 This is a mistake on the part of Wood, which (with many others) ought to be corrected in a new edition of the Athena. Lawes did not set to music Amarantha, a Pastoral, nor any portion of it; but he harmonized two stanzas of a little poem to "After the murther of king Charles I. Lovelace was set at liberty, and, having by that time consumed all his estate, grew very melancholy (which brought him at length into a consumption), became very poor in body and purse, was the object of charity, went in ragged cloaths (whereas when he was in his glory he wore cloth of gold and silver), and mostly lodged in obscure and dirty places, more befitting the worst of beggars and poorest of servants, &c. After his death his brother Dudley, before mentioned, made a collection of his poetical papers, fitted them for the press, and entitled them Lucasta: Posthume Poems, Lond. 1659,2 Oct., the second part, with his picture before them.3 These are all the things that he hath extant; those that were never published were his tragedy, called The Soldier or Soldiers, be found at p. 29 of the present volume, and called "To Amarantha; that she would dishevel her Hair." 1 Hasted states that soon after the death of Charles I. the manor of Lovelace-Bethersden passed by purchase to Richard Hulse, Esq. 2 On the title-page of this portion of Lucasta, as well as on that which had appeared in 1649, the author is expressly styled, Richard Lovelace, Esq.: yet in Berry's Kent Genealogies, p. 474, he is, curiously enough, called Sir Richard Lovelace, Knt. It is scarcely necessary to observe that the error is on Berry's side. 3 The most pleasing likeness of Lovelace, the only one, indeed, which conveys any just idea to us of the "handsomest man of his time," is the picture at Dulwich, which has been twice copied, in both instances with very indifferent success. One of these copies was made for Harding's Biographical Mirror. Bromley (Dictionary of Engraved British Portraits, 1793, p. 101) correctly names Francis] Lovelace, the writer's brother, as the designer of the portrait before the Posthume Poems. before mentioned; and his comedy, called The Scholar,1 which he composed at sixteen years of age, when he came first to Gloucester hall, acted with applause afterwards in Salisbury Court. He died in a very mean lodging in Gunpowder Alley, near Shoe Lane,3 and was Winstanley, perhaps, intended some allusion to these two lost dramas from the pen of Lovelace, when he thus characterizes him in his Lives of the Poets, 1687, p. 170:-"I can compare no man," he says, so like this Colonel Lovelace as Sir Philip Sidney, of which latter it is said by one in an epitaph made of him :'Nor is it fit that more I should acquaint, 66 Lest men adore in one A Scholar, Souldier, Lover, and a Saint.'" As to the comparison, Winstanley must be understood to signify a resemblance between Lovelace and Sidney as men, rather than as writers. Winstanley's extract is from Wits' Recreations, but the text, as he gives it, varies from that printed by the editor of the reprint of that work in 1817. 2 Gunpowder Alley still exists, but it is not the Gunpowder Alley which Lovelace knew, having been rebuilt more than once since 1658. It is now a tolerably wide and airy court, without any conspicuous appearance of squalor. There is no tradition, I am sorry to say, respecting Lovelace; all such recollections have long been swept away. When one of the old inhabitants told me (and there are one or two persons who have lived here all their life) that a great poet once resided thereabout, I naturally became eager to catch the name; but it turned out to be Dr. Johnson, not Lovelace, the latter of whom might have been contemporary with Homer for aught they knew to the contrary in Gunpowder Alley. It appears from Decker and Webster's play of Westward Hoe, 1607 (Webster's Works, ed. Hazlitt, i, 67), that there was another Gunpowder Alley, near Crutched Friars. 3 Hone (Every-Day Book, ii. 561, edit. 1827) states, under date of April 28, that " during this month in 1658 the accomplished Colonel Richard Lovelace died in the Gatehouse at Westminster, whither he had been committed," &c. No authority, |