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A Little English Gallery. Louise Imogen Guiney
Читать онлайн.Название A Little English Gallery
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isbn 4064066183028
Автор произведения Louise Imogen Guiney
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Bookwire
Clarendon quietly indicts Sir John Danvers as a “proud, formal, weak man,” such as Cromwell “employed and contemned at once.” George Bate gives him a harder character, saying that he “proved his brother to be a delinquent in the Rump Parliament, whereby he might overthrow his will, and so compass the estate himself. He sided with the sectarian party, was one of the King’s judges, and lived afterwards some years in his sin, without repentance.” But the same accuser adds the saving fact that Dr. Thomas Fuller, like Aubrey, was Sir John’s friend, and, by his desire, preached many times at Chelsea, “where, I am sure, he was instructed to repent of his misguided and wicked consultations in having to do with the murther of that just man.” One half surmises that had the preliminaries of the great struggle occurred in her time Magdalen Herbert’s rather austere and advanced standards of right would have stood it out, despite her traditions, for the Commons against Carolus Agnus.[18] But that would have been a very different matter from sharing the feelings of the crude advocates of revolution and regicide. What a misconception of her spotless motives must she have borne, had others found her in agreement with her vagabond lord, who treated politics as he treated the sacrament of matrimony, purely as a makeshift and a speculation!
He was no raw-head-and-bloody-bones, this Roderigo-like Briton who won the approval of Lord Bacon, and whom George Wither thanks for “those pleasurable refreshments often vouchsafed”; and whom very different men, such as George Herbert and Walton[19] and peaceable Fuller loved. He was a comely creature of some parts, a luckless worldling anxious to feather his own nest, and driven by timidity and the desire of gain into treacheries against himself. His short, thin, and “fayre bodie,” common, as George Herbert would have us imply, to all who bore his name, his elegance, his hospitality, and his devotedness to his elderly wife, carried him off handsomely in the eyes of her jealous circle. His house in Chelsea, commemorated now by Danvers Street, adjoined that which had been Sir Thomas More’s, and was presumably a part of the same estate. All around it, and due to its master’s genuine enthusiasm, lay the first Italian garden planted in England; and there, rolling towards the Thames, were the long glowing flower-beds and green orchard-alleys, which were also the “horti deliciæ dominæ” recalled thrice in the music of filial sorrow. This home of Magdalen Danvers was pulled down, and built over, in 1716. Within its unfallen walls, where she spent her serene married life, and where she died, she had time to think, nevertheless, that she stood, towards evening, in the ways of folly, and that hers was one of those little incipient domestic tragedies which must always look amusing, even to a friend.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Walton confuses this Edward Herbert with a namesake entered at Queen’s College; and he follows the erring dates of the Autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury. The boy’s age is correctly given as fourteen in the college registers.
[2] Donne had been in residence at both Universities, but took no degree at either, as he had scruples against accepting the conditions imposed. He was at that time, and until about 1593, like his parents, a Catholic. His father was of Welsh descent: a fact which may have borne its share in attracting him towards the Herberts.
[3] Anne Donne, it may be remarked, was also the name of Cowper’s mother.
[4] Sir Richard Baker’s Chronicle, 1684, mentions Dr. Donne as one of his “heroic Grecians,” and adds, in the same breath, that he was “a great visitor of ladies.”
[5] Dr. Donne’s conceit about the ages of his friends is better handled in the young Cartwright’s
“Chloe, why wish you that your years,”
a little later. It is not impossible that Cartwright, an Oxonian and an observer, may have drawn upon Donne’s report of this very wedding for his charming and ingenious lyric.
[6] This august personage was one of the Spencers of Althorp. At this time she had been for six years the wife of her second husband, the Lord Keeper Egerton, although retaining the magnificent title of her widowhood. At their estate of Harefield in Middlesex, Milton’s Arcades was afterwards given, and it will be remembered what fine compliments to the then aged countess-dowager figure in its opening verses. Spenser’s Teares of the Muses had been dedicated to her, in her prime, and she was the Amaryllis “highest in degree” of his Colin Clout’s Come Home Again.
[7] Sir James Sandelyn, Sandalo, or Sandilands (who cuts his finest figure as Jacobus Sandilandius in The Muses’ Welcome) was appointed Maistre d’Hostel to the beloved and beautiful Princess Elizabeth on her marriage to Frederic, Count Palatine of the Rhine, afterwards King of Bohemia, in 1612. As Sir James’s name is down on the lists of the Exchequer for a gift in 1615, and as his little son Richard was baptized in Deptford Church two months after the date of Lady Danvers’s letter, we may conclude that he came back to England just when the “ambassatore” expected him.
[8] Edward Herbert served as a volunteer in the campaign of 1614–15 in the Netherlands, under the Prince of Orange. Richard Herbert, here mentioned, was his eldest son, a future Cavalier and captain of a troop of horse in the Civil Wars; Edward was the baby, and “Bettye” the child Beatrice, destined, like her sister, to a short life.
[9] This 1614–15 was an eccentric and un-English year throughout. The winter signalized itself by the Great Snow; “frigus intensum,” as Camden says, “et nix copiosissima.”
[10] Lord Bacon dedicated to Edward Herbert, “the father of English deists,” his very flat translation of the Psalms! George wrote three Latin poems in his honor, one being upon the occasion of his death.