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240 it, bought a dispensation at Rome, and married his brother's late wife, not out of love, but for the purpose of retaining in the family her great estates. He was then aged thirty-two, and she was in her fortieth year. She was haughty, vain of her beauty, which had made her famous at one time, and spent her time in trying to disguise the ravages of time on her face. She lived mainly in her room surrounded by dogs, "qui répandaient partout, jusque dans son lit, une saleté insupportable."

Very different was the life of Tom D'Urfey's father, and one of the touching incidents in his character was his devotion and tenderness towards his wife to her dying day.

Tom had been intended for the law, but, as he said, "My good or ill stars ordained me to be a knight errant in the fairy fields of poetry."

He wrote plays that were well received for the most part, but all were tainted with intolerable grossness. But at this period of revulsion from Puritanism, licentiousness of intrigue, indelicacy of wit, most strongly appealed to the popular taste, at least in London, and among the hangers-on of a profligate court. In 1676, he produced The Siege of Memphis and The Fond Husband; or, The Plotting Sisters. In 1677, Madame Pickle. In all, down to his death, thirty-two dramatic pieces. But that which obtained for D'Urfey his greatest reputation was a peculiarly happy knack that he possessed in writing satires and songs. In the latter style of composition he knew how to start with a telling line. There was in his composition a vein of genuine poetry, but the trail of the serpent was over it all: he could not leave his best pieces without something foul to spoil it. Many of his songs were set to music by his friends Henry Purcell, Thomas Farmer,