ld excuse." It was,
in Fuller's fine old quaint language, "breaking one whom God had bowed
before." Our readers will find Butler's squib in our edition of that
poet, vol. ii. p. 200, under the title of "A Panegyrick on Sir John
Denham's Recovery from his Madness." It is a piece quite unworthy of
Butler's powers, and its sting lies principally in charging Denham with
plagiarising "Cooper's Hill" and "Sophy," with gambling, and with
overreaching the King as Surveyor of the Public Buildings, and with an
overbearing and quarrelsome temper--but it contains no allusion to his
domestic infelicity. Some have hinted that the cause of his insanity lay
in jealousy--that Denham suspected his wife to be too intimate with the
Duke of York--that he poisoned her, and maddened in remorse. Whatever
the cause, the distemper was not of long continuance. He recovered in
time to write some verses on the death of Cowley, which took place in
1667; but in the next year he himself expired, and was buried by the
side of his friend in Westminster Abbey, not very far from Chaucer and
Spencer. His funeral took place on the 19th of March 1668. He had
attained the age of fifty-three.

This is all we can definitely state of the history of Sir John Denham,
and certainly the light it casts on his character is neither very
plentiful nor very pleasing. A gambler in his early days, he became a
political intriguer, an unhappy husband, a maniac, and died in the prime
of life. It need only further be recorded of him, that, according to
some accounts, he first discovered the merits of Milton's "Paradise
Lost," and went about with the book new from the press in his hands,
shewing it to everybody, and exclaiming, "This beats us all, and the
ancients too!" If this story be true, it says as much for his heart as
his head for the generous disposition which made him praise a political
adversary, as for the critical taste which discerned at a glance the
value of the world's greatest poem. On the whole, however, Denham as a
man stands on the same general level with the Cavalier wits in the days
of Charles. If he did not rise so high as Cowley, he did not sink so low
as Rochester, or even as Butler.

We may now regret, both that he did not live better, and that he did not
write more. He had unquestionably in him greater powers than he ever
expressed in his works. These are few, fragmentary, and unequal; but,
nevertheless, must be reckoned productions of no ordinary mer