of mind, was born in Dublin in 1615. His father, whose name
also was Sir John (of Little Horseley, in Essex), was, at the time of
our poet's birth, the Chief Baron of Exchequer in Ireland. His mother
was Eleanor More, daughter of Sir Garret More, Baron of Mellefont. Two
years after the son's birth, the father, being made an English Baron of
Exchequer, returned to his native country, and educated young John in
London. Thence, at the age of sixteen, he went to study at Oxford, where
he became celebrated rather for dissipation than diligence. He was,
although a youth of imaginative temperament, excessively fond of
gambling; and it was said of him, that he was more given to "dreams and
dice than to study." His future eminence might be foreseen by some of
his friends; but, in general, men looked on him rather as an idle and
misled youth of fortune, than as a genius. Three years after, he removed
to Lincoln's Inn, where he continued occasionally to gamble, and was
sometimes punished for his pains, being plundered by more skilful or
unscrupulous gamesters, but did not forget his studies. His conscience,
on one occasion, aroused by a rebuke from a friend, awoke; and, to
confirm the resolutions which it forced upon him, he wrote and published
an "Essay on Gaming." In this respect he resembles Sir Richard Steele
when a young soldier, who, in order to cure himself of his dissipations,
wrote and published "The Christian Hero"--his object being, by drawing
the picture of a character exactly opposite to his own, to commit
himself irrevocably to virtue, and to break down all the bridges between
him and a return to vice. It is, alas! notorious, that Steele's holiness
turned out only to be a FIT, of not much longer duration than a morning
headache, and that the "Christian Hero" remains not as a model to which
its author's conduct was ever conformed, but as a severe, self-written
satire on his whole career. And so with Denham. For some time he forsook
the gambling-table, and applied his attention partly to law, and partly
to poetry, translating, in 1636, the "Second Book of the Aeneid;" but
when his father died, two years afterwards, and left him some thousands,
he rushed again to the dice-box, and melted them as rapidly as the wind
melts the snow of spring.

"In 1642 he broke out," as Waller remarks of him, "like the Irish
Rebellion, threescore thousand strong, when nobody was aware, or in the
least suspected it," in the play of "Sophy;