express; that he who can excite passion, should exhibit with great readiness its external modes: but, since experience has fully proved that of those powers, whatever be their affinity, one may be possessed in a great degree by him who has very little of the other, it must be allowed that they depend upon different faculties, or on different use of the same faculty; that the actor must have a pliancy of mien, a flexibility of countenance, and a variety of tones, which the poet may be easily supposed to want; or that the attention of the poet and the player have been differently employed; the one has been considering thought, and the other action-one has watched the heart, and the other contemplated the face.

Though he could not gain much notice as a player, he felt in himself such powers as might qualify for a dramatic author; and in 1675, his twenty-fifth year, produced Alcibiades,' a tragedy; whether from the Alcibiade' of Palaprat, I have not means to inquire. Langbaine, the great detector of plagiarism,

is silent.

In 1677 he published Titus and Berenice' [a tragedy], translated from Rapin, with the Cheats of Scapin' [a farce], from Molière; and in 1678 Friendship in Fashion,' a comedy, which, whatever might be its first reception, was, upon its revival at Drury Lane in 1749,6 hissed off the stage for immorality and obscenity.

5

Want of morals or of decency did not in those days exclude any man from the company of the wealthy and the gay, if he brought with him any powers of entertainment; and Otway is said to have been at this time a favourite companion of the dissolute wits. But as he who desires no virtue in his companion has no virtue in himself, those whom Otway frequented had no purpose of doing more for him than to pay his reckoning. They

6

3 Palaprat wrote no play of this name. The Alcibiade' of Campistron was not brought upon the French stage till Dec. 1685.

This play [Titus and Berenice], with the farce, being perfectly well acted, had good success.-DOWNES: Roscius Anglicanus, 12mo., 1708.

This [Friendship in Fashion] is a very diverting play, and was acted with general applause.—Langbaine, ed. 1691, p. 398.

22nd January, 1749-50.

1651-1685.

'DON CARLOS.'

213

desired only to drink and laugh; their fondness was without benevolence, and their familiarity without friendship. Men of wit, says one of Otway's biographers, received at that time no favour from the great but to share their riots, from which they were dismissed again to their own narrow circumstances. Thus they languished in poverty without the support of innocence.

Some exception, however, must be made. The Earl of Plymouth, one of King Charles's natural sons, procured for him a cornet's commission in some troops then sent into Flanders. But Otway did not prosper in his military character, for he soon left his commission behind him, whatever was the reason, and came back to London in extreme indigence, which Rochester mentions with merciless insolence in the Session of the Poets:'

"Tom Otway came next, Tom Shadwell's dear zany,
And swears for heroics he writes best of any;

Don Carlos his pockets so amply had fill'd,

That his mange was quite cured, and his lice were all kill'd.
But Apollo had seen his face on the stage,

And prudently did not think fit to engage

The scum of a play-house, for the prop of an age."

}

'Don Carlos,' from which he is represented as having received so much benefit, was played in 1676. It appears by the lampoon to have had great success, and is said to have been played thirty nights together. This, however, it is reasonable to doubt, as so long a continuance of one play upon the stage is a very wide deviation from the practice of that time, when the ardour for theatrical entertainments was not yet diffused through the whole people, and the audience, consisting nearly of the same persons, could be drawn together only by variety.

7 Johnson copies the writer in Cibber's Lives,' ii. 335. 'Don Carlos' was Otway's "Second Play." "All the parts," says Downes, the prompter at the Duke's theatre when it was brought out, "being admirably acted, it lasted successively ten days:"-he adds, that "it got more money than any preceding modern tragedy."

Mr. Betterton observed to me many years ago that 'Don Carlos' succeeded much better than either Venice Preserved' or 'The Orphan,' and was infinitely more applauded and followed for many years.-Barton Booth to Aaron Hill, June 19, 1732.

The Orphan' was exhibited in 1680. This is one of the few plays that keep possession of the stage, and has pleased for almost a century, through all the vicissitudes of dramatic fashion. Of this play nothing new can easily be said. It is a domestic tragedy drawn from middle life. Its whole power is upon the affections; for it is not written with much comprehension of thought or elegance of expression. But, if the heart is interested, many other beauties may be wanting, yet not be missed. The same year [1680] produced the History and Fall of Caius Marius;' much of which is borrowed from the Romeo and Juliet' of Shakespeare.

9 6

6

In 1683 [1681] was published the first, and next year [1684] the second, parts of The Soldier's Fortune,' two comedies now forgotten; and in 1685 [Feb. 1680-1] his last and greatest dramatic work, Venice Preserved,' a tragedy which still continues to be one of the favourites of the public, notwithstanding the want of morality in the original design, and the despicable scenes of vile comedy with which he has diversified his tragic action. By comparing this with his 'Orphan,' it will appear that his images were by time become stronger, and his language more energetic. The striking passages are in every mouth; and the public seems to judge rightly of the faults and excellences of this play-that it is the work of a man not attentive to decency, nor zealous for virtue, but of one who conceived forcibly, and drew originally, by consulting nature in his own breast.10

Together with those plays he wrote the poems which are in

8 Malone's Life of Dryden,' p. 168.

9 Venice Preserved' was not Otway's last dramatic work. The last was 'The Atheist, or the Second Part of the Soldier's Fortune.' The Soldier's Fortune,' says Downes, "took extraordinarily well."

10 Tom Davies says (Dram. Misc. iii. 253) that old Jacob Tonson purchased the copyright of Venice Preserved' for fifteen pounds.

"He left an unfinished tragedy, referred to in an advertisement in L'Estrange's Observator of the 27th Nov., 1686 :

"Whereas Mr. Thomas Otway, some time before his death, made four acts of a play; whoever can give notice in whose hands the copy lies, either to Mr. Thomas Betterton or to Mr. William Smith at the Theatre Royal, shall be well rewarded for his pains." "Some pretend," says Giles Jacob, "that he [Otway] left a finished tragedy behind him; but that piece is a poor perform

1651-1685.

HIS POVERTY AND DEATH.

215

the present collection,12 and translated from the French the 'History of the Triumvirate.' 13

All this was performed before he was thirty-four years old; for he died April 14, 1685, in a manner which I am unwilling to mention. Having been compelled by his necessities to contract debts, and hunted, as is supposed, by the tarriers of the law, he retired to a public-house on Tower-hill,' where he is said to have died of want; or, as it is related by one of his biographers, by swallowing, after a long fast, a piece of bread which charity had supplied. He went out, as is reported, almost naked in the rage of hunger, and, finding a gentleman in a neighbouring coffee-house, asked him for a shilling: the gentleman gave him a guinea; and Otway going away bought a roll, and was choked with the first mouthful. All this I hope is not true; and there is this ground of better hope, that Pope,15 who lived near enough to be well informed, relates in Spence's Memorials that he died of a fever caught by violent pursuit of a thief that had robbed one of his friends. 16 But that indigence, and its concomitants, sorrow and despondency, pressed hard upon him, has never been denied, whatever immediate cause might bring him to the grave.17

ance, not in Mr. Otway's hand, and very unworthy of him."-JACOB: Lives, 8vo., 1723, vol. i. p. 194.

12 Known as 'Johnson's British Poets."

13 Printed after his death, 8vo., 1686.

Jacob's Lives of the Poets,' 8vo., 1723, vol. i. p. 194; Gent's. Mag. for 1745, p. 99.

15 Johnson has written Pope for Dennis. See next note.

16 Otway had an intimate friend (one Blackstone) who was shot; the murderer fled toward Dover, and Otway pursued him. In his return he drank water when violently heated, and so got a fever, which was the death of him.— DENNIS: Spence by Singer, p. 44.

Dennis, in his Observations on Pope's translation of Homer, 8vo., 1717, says [p. 5] that Otway died "in an alehouse." This, however, is not inconsistent with this account.-MALONE: Spence by Malone, p. 100.

17 He died unmarried, and was buried on the 16th April, 1685, in the churchyard of St. Clement's Danes. "His person was of the middle size, about five feet seven inches in height, inclinable to fatness. He had a thoughtful, speaking eye, and that was all."-W. G. in Gent. Mag.' for 1745, p. 99.

There is a large mezzotinto of Otway, P. Lely pinxit [W. Faithorne, junr., sc.], which I take to be genuine. The Houbraken head is said to have been painted by Mrs. Beale, and when Houbraken engraved it was in the possession of Gilbert West the poet.

Of the poems which the present collection admits, the longest is the Poet's Complaint of his Muse,'s part of which I do not understand; and in that which is less obscure I find little to commend. The language is often gross, and the numbers are harsh. Otway had not much cultivated versification, nor much replenished his mind with general knowledge. His principal power was in moving the passions; to which Dryden in his latter years left an illustrious testimony.19 He appears, by some of his verses, to have been a zealous royalist, and had what was in those times the common reward of loyalty—he lived and died neglected. 20

18 The Poet's Complaint of his Muse, or a Satire against Libels. A Poem. By Thomas Otway. London: printed for Thomas Norman, 1680,' 4to. His only other separate publication (his plays excepted) was 'Windsor Castle, a monument to our late sovereign K. Charles II. of ever blessed memory, &c. London: printed for Charles Brome, 1685,' 4to.

19 I will not defend everything in his 'Venice Preserved,' but I must bear this testimony to his memory, that the passions are truly touched in it, though perhaps there is somewhat to be desired, both in the grounds of them and in the height and elegance of expression; but nature is there, which is the greatest beauty.-DRYDEN: Pref. to Fresnoy's Art of Painting, 1695.

The talents of Otway, in his scenes of passionate affection, rival at least, and sometimes excel, those of Shakespeare. More tears have been shed, probably, for the sorrows of Belvidera and Monimia than for those of Juliet and Desdemona.-SIR WALTER SCOTT: Misc. Prose Works, vol. vi. p. 356.

20 The parts of Monimia in The Orphan,' and Belvidera in Venice Preserved,' were originally played by Mrs. Barry. All Otway's plays but the last ('The Atheist') were produced for the first time at the Duke's Theatre, in Dorset Gardens.

The best edition of Otway's works is that by Thornton, 3 vols. Svo., 1813.