otentates, and
was gathered to the laurelled of Elysium. The fatality occurred in
1637. When his remains were deposited in the Poet's Corner, with the
eloquent laconism above them, "O Rare Ben Jonson!" all the wits of the
day stood by the graveside, and cast in their tribute of bays. The
rite over, all the wits of the day hurried from the aisles of
Westminster to the galleries of Whitehall to urge their several claims
to the successorship. There were, of the elder time, Massinger,
drawing to the close of a successful career,--Ford, with his growing
fame,--Marmion, Heywood, Carlell, Wither. There was Sandys, especially
endeared to the king by his orthodox piety, so becoming the son of an
archbishop, and by his versions of the "Divine Poems," which were next
year given to the press, and which found a place among the half-dozen
volumes which a decade later solaced the last hours of his royal
master. There were the names, in the junior class, of Tom Carew, noted
for his amatory songs and his one brilliant masque,--Tom Killigrew, of
pleasant humor, and no mean writer of tragedy,--Suckling, the wittiest
of courtiers, and the most courtly of wits,--Cartwright, Crashaw,
Davenant, and May. But of all these, the contest soon narrowed down to
the two latter. William Davenant was in all likelihood the son of an
innkeeper at Oxford; he was certainly the son of the innkeeper's
wife. A rumor, which Davenant always countenanced, alleged that
William Shakspeare, a poet of some considerable repute in those times,
being in the habit of passing between Stratford-on-the-Avon and
London, was wont to bait and often lodge at this Oxford hostelry. At
one of these calls the landlady had proved more than ordinarily frail
or the poet more than ordinarily seductive,--who can wonder at even
virtue stooping to folly when the wooer was the Swan of Avon, beside
whom the bird that captivated Leda was as a featherless gosling?--and
the consequence had been Will Davenant, born in the year of our Lord
1605, Shakspeare standing as godfather at the baptism. A boy of lively
parts was Will, and good-fortune brought those parts to the notice of
the grave and philosophic Greville, Lord Brooke, whose dearest boast
was the friendship in early life of Sir Philip Sidney. The result of
this notice was a highly creditable education at school and
university, and an ultimate introduction into the foremost society of
the capital. Davenant, finding the drama supreme in fas