s with many men of culture,
often recalled with pride for their benefit that "Mr William
Shakespeare" had given him as a child "a hundred kisses" in his
father's tavern-parlour.

The third son, William, was more expansive in his reminiscences. It
was generally understood at Oxford in the early years of the
seventeenth century that he was the poet's godson, as his Christian
name would allow, but some gossips had it that the poet's paternity
was of a less spiritual character. According to a genuine anecdote of
contemporary origin, when the boy, William D'Avenant, in Shakespeare's
lifetime, informed a doctor of the university that he was on his way
to ask a blessing of his godfather who had just arrived in the town,
the child was warned by his interlocutor against taking the name of
God in vain. It is proof of the estimation in which D'Avenant held
Shakespeare that when he came to man's estate he was "content enough
to have" the insinuation "thought to be true." He would talk freely
with his friends over a glass of wine of Shakespeare's visits to his
father's house, and would say "that it seemed to him that he wrote
with Shakespeare's very spirit." Of his reverence for Shakespeare he
gave less questionable proof in a youthful elegy in which he
represented the flowers and trees on the banks of the Avon mourning
for Shakespeare's death and the river weeping itself away. He was
credited, too, with having adopted the new spelling of his name
D'_Aven_ant (for Davenant), so as to read into it a reference to the
river Avon.

In maturer age D'Avenant sought out the old actors Taylor and Lowin,
and mastered their information respecting Shakespeare, their early
colleague on the stage. With a curious perversity he mainly devoted
his undoubted genius in his later years to rewriting in accordance
with the debased taste of Charles the Second's reign the chief works
of his idol; but until D'Avenant's death in 1668 the unique character
of Shakespeare's greatness had no stouter champion than he, and in the
circle of men of wit and fashion, of which he was the centre, none
kept the cult alive with greater enthusiasm. His early friend Sir John
Suckling, the Cavalier poet, who was only seven years old when
Shakespeare died, he infected so thoroughly with his own affectionate
admiration that Suckling wrote of the dramatist in familiar letters as
"my friend Mr William Shakespeare," and had his portrait painted by
Vandyck with an open volume