forthwith bailed upon GOOD security." This
"good security," surely, did not reach the sum mentioned by Wood,
namely, <pounds>40,000; but it is likely that the author of the
ATHENAE is ONLY wrong by a cypher, and that the amount fixed was
<pounds>4000, as it has been already suggested. Thus Lovelace's
confinement did not exceed seven weeks in duration, and the
probability, is that the sole inconvenience, which he subsequently
experienced, was the loss of the bail.

The description left by Wood and Aubrey of the end of Lovelace
can only be reconciled with the fact, that his daughter and heiress
conveyed Kingsdown, Hever,<2.24> and a moiety of Chipsted,
to the Cokes by marriage with Mr. Henry Coke, by presuming that
those manors were entailed; while Lovelace Place, as well perhaps
as Bayford and Goodneston, not being similarly secured, were sold
to defray the owner's incumbrances. At any rate it is not,
upon the whole, very probable that he died in a hovel, in a state
of absolute poverty;<2.25> that he received a pound a week
(equal to about <pounds>4 of our money) from two friends,
Cotton and another, Aubrey himself admits; and we may rest
satisfied that, however painful the contrast may have been between
the opening and close of that career, the deplorable account given
in the ATHENAE, and in the so-called LIVES OF EMINENT MEN, is much
exaggerated and overdrawn.

It has not hitherto been remarked, that among the Kentish gentry
who, from time to time, elected to change the nature of their
tenure from gavelkind to primogeniture, were the Lovelaces
themselves, in the person of Thomas Lovelace,<2.26> who, by Act of
Parliament 2 and 3 Edw. VI. obtained, concurrently with several
other families, the power of conversion. This Thomas Lovelace was
not improbably the same, who was admitted a student of Gray's Inn
in 1541; and that he was of the Kentish Lovelaces there is not much
reason to doubt; although, at the same time, I am unable to fix the
precise degree of consanguinity between him and Serjeant William
Lovelace of Gray's Inn, who died in 1576, and who was great-grandfather
to the author of LUCASTA. The circumstance that the real property
of Thomas Lovelace aforesaid, situated in Kent, was released by Act
of Parliament, 2 and 3 Edw. VI. from the operations of gavelkind tenure
(assuming, as is most likely to have been the case, that he was of the
same stock as the poet, though not an immediate ancestor,) seems to
ex