pies was made for Harding's BIOGRAPHICAL MIRROR. Bromley
(DICTIONARY OF ENGRAVED BRITISH PORTRAITS, 1793, p. 101) correctly
names F[rancis] Lovelace, the writer's brother, as the designer
of the portrait before the POSTHUME POEMS.
<2.16> Winstanley, perhaps, intended some allusion to these two
lost dramas from the pen of Lovelace, when he thus characterizes
him in his LIVES OF THE POETS, 1687, p. 170:--"I can compare no
man," he says, "so like this Colonel LOVELACE as SIR PHILIP SIDNEY,
of which latter it is said by one in an epitaph made of him:--
'Nor is it fit that more I should acquaint,
Lest men adore in one
A Scholar, SOULDIER, Lover, and a Saint.'"
As to the comparison, Winstanley must be understood to signify
a resemblance between Lovelace and Sydney as men, rather than
as writers. Winstanley's extract is from WITS' RECREATIONS,
but the text, as he gives it, varies from that printed by
the editor of the reprint of that work in 1817.
<2.17> Gunpowder Alley still exists, but it is not the Gunpowder
Alley which Lovelace knew, having been rebuilt more than once
since 1658, It is now a tolerably wide and airy court, without
any conspicuous appearance of squalor. There is no tradition,
I am sorry to say, respecting Lovelace; all such recollections
have long been swept away. When one of the old inhabitants
told me (and there are one or two persons who have lived here
all their life) that a great poet once resided thereabout,
I naturally became eager to catch the name; but it turned out
to be Dr. Johnson, not Lovelace, the latter of whom might have
been contemporary with Homer for aught they knew to the contrary
in Gunpowder Alley. It appears from Decker and Webster's play
of WESTWARD HOE, 1607 (Webster's Works, ed. Hazlitt, i. 67),
that there was another Gunpowder Alley, near Crutched Friars.
<2.18> Hone (EVERY-DAY BOOK, ii. 561, edit. 1827), states,
under date of April 28, that "during this month in 1658
the accomplished Colonel Richard Lovelace died IN THE GATEHOUSE
AT WESTMINSTER, whither he had been committed," &c. No authority,
however, is given for in assertion so wholly at variance with
the received view on the subject, and I am afraid that Hone has
here fallen into a mistake.
<2.19> Aubrey, in what are called his LIVES OF EMINENT MEN,
but which are, in fact, merely rough biographical memoranda,
states under the head of Lovelace:--"Obiit in a cellar in
Long acre, a little be
|