Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 6.djvu/45

 *2 S. VI FEB., 1920.J

NOTES AND QUERIES.

33

or pseudonymous ? (I write away from libraries.) If so, the passage is no longer ^obscure.

Sheppard goes on :

And after him a swain arose Jin whom sweet Ovids Spirit chose For to reside : he sang of Love, How Cupid Ladies hearts can move;

(A reader pricks up his ears ; for this is exactly the way in which people long ago were wont to talk of Shakespeare ! But the sequence takes a new turn) :

And each [eke] how large the Continent Of Arcadie is in extent. He prais'd his Maker in his Layes, And from a King receiv'd th,e Bayes.

Apparently, we have stumbled upon a poet laureate. This at once cuts out Chap- .towards his ' Ovids Banquet of Sence,' and the " hymnes " with which he began and nded his long career. The amatory yet pious subject of Sheppard' s reference is this time, I think, really Drayton. Hardly could this ill-expressed stanza fit that other laurelled head, Father Ben's, whose secretary Shep- pard was at one time, unless his many ' Masques ' justify the mention of Arcady, and Drayton' s ' Nimphidia ' does not. For sacred verse the latter author's sup- pressed ' Harmonie of the Church ' will pass muster ; while the two ' Idea ' groups of poems may perhaps justify the bringing in of " sweet Ovid's Spirit " by the ears.
 * man, and the wandering of one's mind

Daniel, Harington, Drayton, make an oddly assorted trio. If Sheppard intends, as we suspect, to commemorate these, he is honouring the bookish heroes of his earliest youth, and of the generation just before him. He proceeds to laudation of contemporaries and co-Royalists. " Suck- ilin," according to this bard, rivals Beaumont and Fletcher. We all think well nowa- days of Suckling's happy and delicately slap-dash genius, but would hardly seat liim among the divinities as a writer of plays. Davenant is, to Sheppard, worth all his forerunners rolled into -one : he is the " first-prefer'd of Apollo." .Surely

a Shepheard cag'd in stone

Destin'd unto destruction,

<jan be none other than Sir William Davenant, whom the Roundheads had this very moment (1651) in prison, where he was rpluekily finishing his admired ' Gondibert.' Next in merit to Davenant, Sheppard . places Shirley, as he does again on p. 39

of the ' Epigrams.' The critical acumen displayed in our citations is no worse than that dear century's average. The ex- asperating defect of the little book is its lack of psychology, the inability to conceive and pass on a sharp impression, a portrait- sketch which, as the French say, leaps to the eye, and compels recognition.

L. I. GUINEY.

RELICS OF WANSTEAD PARK.

THE markings on the stone entablature to which MB. LEONARD C. PRICE refers in his question at 12 S. v. 293 suggest that he has alighted upon one of the many job -lots which were ruthlessly dispersed in the great sale that marked the downfall of the ambition of Child, the sometime autocrat of the East India Company (Sir Henry Yule says Child was " christened " Josia, not Josias, or Josiah) who was once dubbed " the Satrap of the Indies." In his un- finished History of England Lord Macaulay bestowed a great deal of trouble and he evidently intended much more upon this remarkable personage, who, as he says, " attained such ascendancy in the East India House that soon many of the most important posts, both in Leadenhall Street and in the factories of Bombay and Bengal were filled by his kinsmen and creatures." Beginning as a merchant's apprentice and office -sweeper, Child had peddled obscurely in marine stores, when, about 1655, he is seen engaged at Portsmouth in furnishing stores for the Navy. Macaulay leaves " Josia " fighting with unbroken spirit for the maintenance of the seriously threatened monopoly of the East India Company against all " interlopers," and very frankly expressing for a troublesome House of Commons the bitterest contempt. " Be guided by my instructions," writes Child to the Agents of the Company, " and not by the nonsense of a few ignorant country gentlemen who have hardly wit enough to manage their own private affairs, and who know nothing at all about questions of trade." The laws of England were, in the Satrap's opinion, " a heap of nonsense," compiled by these rural per- sons " who hardly know how to make laws for the good government of their own families, much less for the regula- tion of companies and foreign commerce " a notion which sounds strangely modern !