Lives of the English poets

Is abridged in

Original publication date

1779

People/Characters

Samuel Butler; Charles II, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland; Abraham Cowley; Oliver Cromwell; Sir John Denham; Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon (show all 17); John Dryden; John Milton; Thomas Otway; John Philips; John Pomfret; Alexander Pope; Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset; George Stepney; Jonathan Swift; Edmund Waller; John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester

First words

The life of Cowley, notwithstanding the penury of English biography, has been written by Dr. Sprat, an author whose pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language have deservedly set him high in the ranks of literature ...

Quotations

[The Earl of Rochester] had very early an inclination to intemperance ... when he became a courtier, he unhappily addicted himself to dissolute and vitious [sic] company, by which his principles were corrupted, and his man... (show all)ners depraved. He lost all sense of religious restraint; and, finding it not convenient to admit the authority of laws which he was resolved not to obey, sheltered his wickedness behind infidelity.... As he excelled in that noisy and licentious merriment which wine incites, his company eagerly encouraged him in excess, and he willingly indulged it; till, as he confessed to Dr. Burnet, he was for five years together continually drunk, or so much inflamed by frequent ebriety [sic], as in no interval to be master of himself.... In this state he played many frolicks, which it is not for his honour that we should remember ... He often pursued low amours in mean disguises, and always acted with great exactness and dexterity the characters which he assumed. ... Thus in a course of drunken gaiety, and gross sensuality, with intervals of study perhaps yet more criminal, with an avowed contempt of all decency and order, total disregard to every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious obligation, he lived worthless and useless and blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness; till, at the age of one and thirty, he had exhausted the fund of life, and reduced himself to a state of weakness and decay.

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In 1668 Dryden succeeded Sir William Davenant as poet-laureate. The salary of the laureate had been raised in favour of Ben Jonson, by Charles the First, from an hundred marks to one hundred pounds a year, and a tierce of win... (show all)e.