cedent of such a thing, says Suckling, in
"The Sessions of the Poets"--

In all their records, in verse or in prose,
There was none of a Laureat who wanted a nose.

Besides, he was now doomed--

Nor could old Hobbes
Defend him from dry bobbs.

The preface of "Gondibert," the critical epistle of Hobbes, and the
poems of the two greatest poets in England, were first to be got rid
of. The attack is brisk and airy.

UPON THE PREFACE.

Room for the best of poets heroic,
If you'll believe two wits and a Stoic.
Down go the _Iliads_, down go the _AEneidos_:
All must give place to the _Gondiberteidos_.
For to _Homer_ and _Virgil_ he has a just pique,
Because one's writ in Latin, the other in Greek;
Besides an old grudge (our critics they say so)
With _Ovid_, because his sirname was _Naso_.
If fiction the fame of a poet thus raises,
What poets are you that have writ his praises?
But we justly quarrel at this our defeat;
You give us a stomach, he gives us no meat.
A preface to no book, a porch to no house;
Here is the mountain, but where is the mouse?

This stroke, in the mock defence, is thus warded off, with a slight
confession of the existence of "the mouse."

Why do you bite, you men of fangs
(That is, of teeth that forward hangs),
And charge my dear Ephestion
With want of meat? you want digestion.
We poets use not so to do,
To find men meat and stomach too.
You have the book, you have the house,
And mum, good Jack, and catch the mouse.

Among the personal foibles of D'Avenant appears a desire to disguise
his humble origin; and to give it an air of lineal descent, he
probably did not write his name as his father had done. It is said he
affected, at the cost of his mother's honour, to insinuate that he was
the son of Shakspeare, who used to bait at his father's inn.[327]
These humorists first reduce D'Avenant to "Old Daph."

Denham, come help me to laugh,
At old Daph,
Whose fancies are higher than chaff.

Daph swells afterwards into "Daphne;" a change of sex inflicted on the
poet for making one of his heroines a man; and this new alliance to
Apollo becomes a source of perpetual allusion to the bays--

Cheer up, small wits, now _you_ shall crowned be,--
Daphne himself is turn'd into a tree.

One of the club inquires about the situation of _Avenant_--

----where now it lies,
Whether in Lombard,[328] or the