note 1: Wood's Ath. III. 1207-1212, and 972.]

[Footnote 2: Wood's Ath. III. 805-806. In Davenant's works (pp.
341-359 of folio edition of 1673) will be found, by those who are
curious, a copy of _"The First Day's Entertainment at Rutland House
by Declamations and Musick: after the manner of the Ancients."_ It
strikes one as very proper and very heavy, but it may have been a
godsend to the Londoners after their long deprivation of theatrical
entertainments. The music was partly by Henry Lawes.]

[Footnote 3: _Cromwelliana_, 154; Wood's Fasti, I. 499; Godwin,
IV. 240-241. There is a MS. copy of Cleveland's letter among the
Thomason large quartos. It is dated "Oct. 1657;" but that, I imagine,
is an error.]

"Ah! that my author had been tied, like me,
To such a place and such a company,
Instead of several countries, several men,
And business which the Muses hate!"[1]

[Footnote 1: Wood's Fasti, II. 209-213; Johnson's Lives of the Poets,
with Cunningham's Notes (1854), I. 7-12. Cowley did receive the M.D.
degree at Oxford, Dec. 2, 1657, and did remain in England through the
rest of Cromwell's Protectorate; and, though the Royalists welcomed
him back after Cromwell's death, his compliance was to be remembered
against him.]

As the Muses were returning to England in full number, and ceasing to
be so Stuartist as they had been, it was natural that there should be
express celebrations of the Protectorate in their name. There had
been dedications of books to Cromwell, and applauses of him in prose
and verse, from the time of his first great successes as a
Parliamentary General; and such things had been increasing since,
till they defied enumeration. In the Protectorate they swarmed.
Matchless still among the tributes in verse was Milton's single
Sonnet of May 1652, "_Cromwell, our chief of men_," and Milton
had written no more to or about Cromwell in the metrical form since
the Protectorate had begun, but had contented himself with adding to
his former prose tributes in various pamphlets that most splendid and
subtle one of all which flames through several pages of his
_Defensio Secunda_. It is Milton now, almost alone, that we
remember as Cromwell's laureate; but among the sub-laureates there
were some by no means insignificant. Old George Wither, though his
marvellous metrical fluency had now lapsed into doggrel and senility,
had done his best by sending forth, in 1654-5, from some kind of
military superinten