then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland.[119] She appears to have attended the high-spirited and capable Duchess, or other ladies of the Butler family, at the Castle in Dublin, or the family seat in Kilkenny, as companion.
Under the protection of that loyal cavalier and Christian statesman, James, Duke of Ormonde, whose prayer was ever "for the relieving and delivering the poor, the innocent, and the oppressed,"[120] she must have known happiness, for at any rate a few years. She was retired by the Duke, apparently after the death of the Duchess, in 1684, on a pension of one hundred pounds a year; and this competence we learn that she still enjoyed in 1700, when at the age of eighty-four she was living in Leicestershire,--let us hope in her father's old home of Grace-Dieu.
She may have survived to see the accession of Queen Anne. We know merely that she died before 1711. Her life bridges the space from the day of her father, Shakespeare's younger contemporary, to that of her father's encomiast, Dryden, and further still to that of Congreve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, and Addison; and we are thus helped to realize that in the arithmetic of generations Beaumont's times and thought are after all not so far removed from our own. Two more such spans of human existence would link his day with that of Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne.
FOOTNOTES:
[109] _Works of B. and F._, I, ii-iii.
[110] Hasted's _History of Kent_ (1797), II, 433; III, 146, 154, 186.
[111] For Sundridge and the Isleys, see Hasted's _Kent_, II, 513-521; III, 128-132, 143-145; and _Cal, S. P._ (_Dom._) Jan. 23, Feb. 24, 1554.
[112] Jonson's statement to Drummond "ere he was thirty years of age"
is incorrect, or was misreported.
[113] _Introduction to The Works of B. and F._, ed. 1866, I, xviii.
[114] According to the Register of burials in Westminster Abbey, 1627; but some authorities say 1628. See Dyce, I, xxi; Chalmer's _English Poets_, VI, 3, and Grosart's edition of his poems.
[115] This is certainly not the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, as Grosart opines,--for the simple reason that the Master died thirteen years before Sir John.
[116] Nichols, _Coll. Hist., Leic.,-Bibl. Top. Britt._, VIII, 1329, 1341.
[117] A. B. Grosart, in _D. N. B._, art. _Francis Beaumont_.
[118] Preface to _B. and F.'s Works_, ed. 1711, p. 1.
[119] Dyce, Vol. I, p. 211, from _MS., Vincent's Leicester_, 1683.
[120] James Wills, _Lives of Illustrious and Distinguished Irishmen_, 1841, Vol. III, Pt. ii, p. 244.
CHAPTER XIII
THE PERSONALITY, AND THE CONTEMPORARY REPUTATION OF BEAUMONT
Our poet's contemporaries saw him, not as one of my scholarly friends, Professor Herford, judging apparently from the crude engraving of 1711,[121] or from that of 1812, sees him, "of heavy and uninteresting features," but as Swinburne saw him, probably in Robinson's engraving of 1840, "handsome and significant in feature and expression alike ... with clear thoughtful eyes, full arched brows, and strong aquiline nose with a little cleft at the tip; a grave and beautiful mouth, with full and finely-curved lips; the form of face a long pure oval, and the imperial head, with its 'fair large front' and clustering hair, set firm and carried high with an aspect at once of quiet command and kingly observation";[122] as we see him to-day in the soft and speaking photogravure[123] recently made from the portrait at Knole Park or in the reproduction of 1911[124] of the portrait which belongs to the Rt.
Hon. Lewis Harcourt at Nuneham,--a courtly gentleman of noble mien, of countenance dignified, beautiful, and mobile, and of dreamy eyes somewhat saddened as by physical suffering, or by sympathetic pondering on the mystery of life. The original at Knole was already there, in the time of Lionel, seventh Earl of Dorset, 1711, and in default of information to the contrary we may conclude that it has always been in the possession of the Sackville family, and was painted for Beaumont's contemporary, and I have ventured to surmise friend as well as neighbour, Richard, third Earl of Dorset,--who had succeeded to the earldom in 1609--about the year of _Philaster_. I have already shown that the Sackvilles were connected with the Fletchers by marriage. They were also patrons of Beaumont's friends, Jonson and Drayton. While the third Earl was still living, poor old Ben writes to son, Edward Sackville, a grateful epistle for succouring his necessities. And to the same Edward, as fourth Earl,[125] Drayton dedicated, 1630, the _Nimphalls_ of his _Muses Elizium_, and to his Countess, Mary, the _Divine Poems_, published therewith. If, as others have conjectured, the Earl is himself the Dorilus of the _Nimphalls_, the exquisite _Description of Elizium_ which precedes, may be, after the fashion of the poets and painters of the Renaissance, an idealized picture of Knole Park, where Drayton probably had been received:
A Paradice on earth is found, Though farre from vulgar sight, Which, with those pleasures doth abound, That it Elizium hight,--
of its groves of stately trees, its merle and mavis, its daisies damasking the green, its spreading vines upon the "cleeves," its ripening fruits:
The Poets Paradice this is, To which but few can come; The Muses onely bower of blisse, Their Deare Elizium.
It was the widow of the third Earl, Anne (Clifford), Countess of Dorset and, afterwards, of Pembroke and Montgomery,[126] who erected the monument to Drayton in the Poets' Corner. That Beaumont was acquainted with this family of poets and patrons of art is, therefore, in every way more than probable; and there is a poetic pleasure in the reflection that the family still retains, in the house which Beaumont probably often visited, this noble presentment of the dramatist.
The portrait at Nuneham, which I have mentioned above, is not so life-like as that at Knole: it lacks the shading. But it is for us most expressive: it is that of an older man, spade-bearded, of broader brow, higher cheek-bones, and face falling away toward the chin; of the same magnanimity and grace, but with eyes more almond-shaped and sensitive, and eloquent of illness. It is the likeness of Beaumont approaching the portals of death.
[Illustration: By permission of Mr. Lewis Harcourt.
THE BEAUMONT OF THE NUNEHAM PORTRAIT]
Of the personality of Beaumont we have already had glimpses through the window of his non-dramatic poems. His letter to Ben Jonson has revealed him chafing in enforced exile from London, amusedly tolerant of the "standing family-jests" of country gentlemen, tired of "water mixed with claret-lees," "with one draught" of which "man's invention fades," and yearning for the Mermaid wine of poetic converse, "nimble, and full of subtle flame." Other verses to Jonson and to Fletcher express his scorn of "the wild applause of common people," his confidence in sympathetic genius and Time as the only arbiters of literary worth. In still other poems, lyric, epistolary, and elegiac, we have savoured the tang of his humour,--unsophisticated, somewhat ammoniac; and from them have caught his habit of emotional utterance, frank and sincere, whether in admiration, love, or indignation. We have grown acquainted with his reverence for womanly purity; with his religion of suffering, his recognition of mortal pathos, irony, futility, and yet of inscrutable purpose and control, and of the countervailing serenity that awaits us in the grave. An amusing side-light is thrown upon his character by Jonson who told Drummond of Hawthornden, that "Francis Beaumont loved too much himself and his own verses." We are glad to know that a man of Jonson's well-attested self-esteem encountered in Beaumont an arrogance and a consciousness of poetic superiority; that even this "great lover and praiser of himself, contemner and scorner of others," for whom Spenser's stanzas were not pleasing, nor his matter, and "Shakespeare wanted art,"--that even this great brow-beater of his contemporaries in literature, recognized in our poet a self-esteem which even he could not bully out of him. But we must not be harsh in our judgment of Drummond's Ben Jonson, for though he "was given rather to lose a friend than a jest and was jealous of every word and action of those about him," this is not the Ben who some seven years earlier had written "How I do love thee, Beaumont, and thy Muse"; this is Ben as Drummond saw him in 1619--Ben talking "especially after drink which is one of the elements in which he liveth." That Beaumont's affection and geniality of intercourse were reciprocated not only by Jonson, but by others, we learn from lines written to, or of, him by men of worth.
His judgment as a critic was recognized by his contemporaries, as well as the poetic brilliance of the dramas which he was creating under their eyes. His language, too, was praised for its distinction while he was yet living. In the manuscript outline of the _Hypercritica_, which appears to have been filled in at various times between 1602 and 1616, Bolton says: "the books out of which wee gather the most warrantable English are not many to my remembrance.... But among the cheife, or rather the cheife, are in my opinion these: Sir Thomas Moore's works; ... George Chapman's first seaven books of Iliades; Samuell Danyell; Michael Drayton his Heroicall Epistles of England; Marlowe his excellent fragment of Hero and Leander; Shakespeare, Mr.
Francis Beamont, and innumerable other writers for the stage,--and [they] presse tenderly to be used in this Argument; Southwell, Parsons, and some few other of that sort." In the final version of the _Hypercritica_, prepared between 1616 and 1618,[127] Bolton omits the later dramatists altogether;[128] but that is not to be construed by way of discrimination against Shakespeare and Beaumont. There is no doubt that Bolton knew the Beaumonts personally, and appreciated their worth, and as early as 1610;--for to his _Elements of Armories_ of that year, he prefixes a "Letter to the Author, from the learned young gentleman, I. B., of Grace-Dieu in the County of Leicestershire, Esquier,"[129] who highly compliments the invention, judicial method, and taste displayed in the _Elements_, and returns the manuscript with promise of his patronage.
Further information of the esteem in which Francis was held, is afforded by the eulogies, direct or indirect, written soon after his death by those who were near enough to him in years to have known him, or to assess his worth untrammeled by the critical consensus of a generation that knew him not. The tender tributes of his brother and of his contemporary, Dr. Corbet, successively Bishop of Oxford, and of Norwich, have already been quoted. A so-called "sonnet," signed I. F., included in an Harleian manuscript between two poems undoubtedly by Fletcher, may not have been intended for the dead poet; but I agree with Dyce, who first printed it,[130] that it seems "very like Fletcher's epicede on his beloved associate":--
Come, sorrow, come! bring all thy cries, All thy laments, and all thy weeping eyes!
Burn out, you living monuments of woe!
Sad sullen griefs, now rise and overflow!
Virtue is dead; O cruel fate!
All youth is fled; All our laments too late.
Oh, noble youth, to thy ne'er-dying name, Oh, happy youth, to thy still-growing fame, To thy long peace in earth, this sacred knell Our last loves ring--farewell, farewell, farewell!
Go, happy soul, to thy eternal birth!
And press his body lightly, gentle Earth!
What the young readers of contemporary poetry at the universities thought of him is nowhere better expressed than in the lines written immediately after the poet's death by the fifteen- or sixteen-year-old John Earle;--he who was later Fellow of Merton; and in turn Bishop of Worcester, and of Salisbury. The ardent lad is gazing in person or imagination on the new-filled tomb in the Poets' Corner, when he writes:
Beaumont lyes here; and where now shall we have A Muse like his, to sigh upon his grave?
Ah, none to weepe this with a worthy teare, But he that cannot, Beaumont that lies here.
Who now shall pay thy Tombe with such a Verse As thou that Ladies didst, faire Rutlands Herse?
A Monument that will then lasting be, When all her Marble is more dust than she.
In thee all's lost: a sudden dearth and want Hath seiz'd on Wit, good Epitaphs are scant; We dare not write thy Elegie, whilst each feares He nere shall match that coppy of thy teares.
Scarce in an Age a Poet,--and yet he Scarce lives the third part of his age to see, But quickly taken off, and only known, Is in a minute shut as soone as showne....
Why should Nature take such pains to perfect that which ere perfected she shall destroy?--
Beaumont dies young, so Sidney died before; There was not Poetry he could live to, more: He could not grow up higher; I scarce know If th' art it self unto that pitch could grow, Were 't not in thee that hadst arriv'd the hight Of all that wit could reach, or Nature might....
The elegist likens Beaumont to Menander,
Whose few sententious fragments show more worth Than all the Poets Athens ere brought forth; And I am sorry I have lost those houres On them, whose quicknesse comes far short of ours, And dwelt not more on thee, whose every Page May be a patterne to their Scene and Stage.
I will not yeeld thy Workes so mean a Prayse-- More pure, more chaste, more sainted than are Playes, Nor with that dull supinenesse to be read, To passe a fire, or laugh an houre in bed....
Why should not Beaumont in the Morning please, As well as Plautus, Aristophanes?
Who, if my Pen may as my thoughts be free, Were scurrill Wits and Buffons both to Thee....
Yet these are Wits, because they'r old, and now Being Greeke and Latine, they are Learning too: But those their owne Times were content t' allow A thriftier fame, and thine is lowest now.
But thou shall live, and, when thy Name is growne Six Ages older, shall be better knowne; When thou'rt of Chaucers standing in the Tombe, Thou shall not share, but take up all his roome.[131]
A panegyric liberal in the superlatives of youth but, in view of passages to be quoted elsewhere, one of the sanest as well as earliest appreciations of Beaumont's distinctive quality as a dramatist; an appreciation such as the historian might expect from a collegian who, a dozen years later, was not only one of the most genial and refined scholars of his generation but, perhaps, the most accurate observer and epitomist of the familiar types and minor morals of his day,--a writer who in 1628 is still championing the cause of contemporary poetry. In his characterization of the Vulgar-Spirited Man "that is taken only with broad and obscene wit, and hisses anything too deep for him; that cries, Chaucer for his money above all our English poets, because the voice has gone so, and he has read none," the Earle of the _Microcosmographie_ is but repeating the censure of his elegy on Beaumont in 1616.
About 1620, we find a contemporary of altogether different class from that of the university student acknowledging the fame of Beaumont, the Thames waterman, John Taylor. This self-advertising tramp and rollicking scribbler mentions him in _The Praise of Hemp-seed_ with Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, and others, as of those who, "in paper-immortality, Doe live in spight of death, and cannot die." And not far separated from Taylor's testimonial in point of time is William Basse's prediction of a prouder immortality. Basse who was but two years older than Beaumont, and, as we have seen, was one of the pastoral group with which Beaumont's career was associated, is writing of "Mr. William Shakespeare" who had died six weeks after Beaumont,--and he thus apostrophizes the Westminster poets of the Corner: