Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 30.djvu/204

 restoration, which recorded that he died on 2 June 1685, in the eighty-second year of his age (, Hist. Antiq. of Hertfordshire, p. 312 b). His portrait, by Sir Peter Lely (, 18 April 1666), is in the Painted Hall at Greenwich. 

JORDAN, THOMAS (1612?–1685), poet, born in London about 1612, was bred a player at the Red Bull Theatre, Clerkenwell, where, when still a boy, he played in his majesty's revels company, and in 1640 performed the part of Lepida in Richards's play, ‘Messalina.’ In 1637 he published his earliest known work, ‘Poeticall Varieties, or Variety of Fancies,’ 4to, dedicated to Mr. John Ford of Gray's Inn, cousin to Ford the dramatist, and prefaced with commendatory verses by Thomas Heywood, Richard Brome, Thomas Nabbes, Edward May, and one J. B. In 1639 ‘he had the honour of reciting before Charles I a poem of his own at the Dedication of Mr. Thos. Bushel's Rock at Enston in Oxon’ (, Select Collection of Poems, vii. 61, 62). After the suppression of stage-plays in 1642 Jordan probably supported himself for some time by penning dedications, commendatory verses, and panegyrics, which are remarkable for their unblushing plagiarisms. His plan seems to have been to print a book with the dedication in blank, and to fill in the name afterwards by means of a small press worked by himself. Following the example of the ‘felowes’ described in Dekker's ‘Lanthorne and Candlelight,’ 1640, he constantly reissued both his own and other persons' already published works with nothing new except the title-page. Between 1643 and 1659—the period to which many of Jordan's undated verse-books are assigned—he tried varied means of getting a living. At the Restoration he wrote broadsides in support of General Monck and several pamphlets. Between 1660 and 1670 he was mainly occupied with the drama. He also tried his fortune as an actor, playing the part of Captain Penniless in his own play ‘Money is an Ass,’ produced in 1668. Among numerous prologues and epilogues by him was ‘A Prologue to introduce the first Woman that came to Act on the Stage in the Tragedy called the “Moor of Venice”’ (, Hist. Account, p. 128), which was probably first spoken by Mrs. Saunderson [see ], at the Red Bull Theatre in 1660, and was printed in ‘The Royal Arbour of Loyall Poesie’ (1662). Mrs. Saunderson, however, cannot be accepted as the first ‘woman-actor’ upon the English stage (see, Le Public et les Hommes de Lettres en Angleterre, p. 32 n., and , Histrio-Mastix, p. 215).

Full scope was given to Jordan's talents for the first time in 1671, when, after an interregnum of five years consequent on the plague and the great fire, he was chosen successor to John Tatham [q. v.] as poet of the corporation of London. The chief duties of the city laureates were to invent pageants for the successive lord mayor's shows, and to compose a yearly panegyric upon the lord mayor elect (see, London, vi. 155). Jordan conducted the civic ceremonies for fourteen years annually, and maintained their splendour with conspicuous success. He was succeeded by Matthew Taubman in the early part of 1685, and this has been generally assumed to be the date of his death.

Several of his contemporaries wrote disdainfully of Jordan. Winstanley ranks him with Tatham as ‘indulging his Muse more to vulgar fancies than the high-flying wits of those times’ (Lives of Famous Poets, p. 191). Oldham throws a passing sneer at him, and Wesley in his ‘Maggots’ (1685) invokes the muse of Jordan as the inspirer of dulness. Modern critics, however, have been more lenient. Knight describes him as the ‘most facetious of city poets;’ Hazlitt says he really seems to have possessed a greater share of poetical merit than usually fell to the lot of his profession; while both Collier and Corser attribute his plagiarisms rather to reckless idleness than to lack of fertility.

Jordan's chief works are: 1. ‘Poeticall Varieties or Variety of Fancies,’ 4to, 1637; reissued in 1646 under the new title of ‘Love's Dialect, or Poeticall Varieties digested into a Miscellanie of various Fancies,’ 4to. 2. ‘A Pill to Purge Melancholy, or a Discourse between Tell-Tale and Heare-All, by T. Jourdan,’ 1637. 3. ‘A Medicine for the Times, or an Antidote against Faction,’ 1641, 4to. This is a royalist pamphlet containing, among other things, ‘A Cure for him that is troubled with an Ovall-pate.’ 4. ‘A Diurnal of Danger, wherein are manifested and brought to light many great and unheard-of Diseases,’ 1642. 5. ‘Rules to know a Royall King from a Disloyall Subject,’ 4to, 1642. Another edition, with an account of the jewels of the crown of England and a ‘Sonet to a tune by W. L. [William Lawes],’ 1647. 6. ‘London's Joyful Gratulation and Thankful Remembrance for their Safeties,’ 1644 (verse). 7. ‘Divine Raptures, or Pietie in Poesie digested into a queint Diversity of Sacred Fancies,’ 4to, 1646. 8. ‘The Walks of Islington and Hogsden with the Humours