et was at that time secretary to Cromwell, and he became his
assistant-secretary. He afterwards represented his native town
of Hull in Parliament.--ED.

[320] Vanus, pannosus, et famelicus poetaster oenopolis quovis
vapulans, fuste et calce indies petulantiae poenas tulit--are
the words in Parker's "_De Rebus sui Temporis Commentariorum_,"
p. 275.

D'AVENANT

AND A CLUB OF WITS.

CALAMITIES of Epic Poets--Character and Anecdotes of
D'AVENANT--attempts a new vein of invention--the Critics
marshalled against each other on the "Gondibert"--D'AVENANT'S
sublime feelings of Literary Fame--attacked by a Club of Wits in
two books of Verses--the strange misconception hitherto given
respecting the Second Part--various specimens of the Satires on
Gondibert, the Poet, and his Panegyrist HOBBES--the Poet's
silence; and his neglect of the unfinished Epic, while the
Philosopher keenly retorts on the Club, and will not allow of any
authority in WIT.

The memoirs of epic poets, in as far as they relate to the history of
their own epics, would be the most calamitous of all the suitors of
the Muses, whether their works have reached us, or scarcely the names
of the poets. An epic, which has sometimes been the labour of a life,
is the game of the wits and the critics. One ridicules what is
written; the other censures for what has not been written:--and it has
happened, in some eminent instances, that the rudest assailants of him
who "builds the lofty rhyme," have been his ungenerous contemporaries.
Men, whose names are now endeared to us, and who have left their
~KTEMA ES AEI~, which HOBBES so energetically translates "a possession
for everlasting," have bequeathed an inheritance to posterity, of
which they have never been in the receipt of the revenue. "The first
fruits" of genius have been too often gathered to place upon its tomb.
Can we believe that MILTON did not endure mortification from the
neglect of "evil days," as certainly as Tasso was goaded to madness by
the systematic frigidity of his critics? He who is now before us had a
mind not less exalted than Milton or Tasso; but was so effectually
ridiculed, that he has only sent us down the fragment of a great
work.

One of the curiosities in the history of our poetry, is the GONDIBERT
of D'AVENANT; and the fortunes and the fate of this epic are as
extraordinary as the poem itself. Never has an author deser