Contents - BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD - INDEX TO CHAPTERS - INDEX TO BIBLIOGRAPHIES - INDEX TO AUTHORS

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume VII. Cavalier and Puritan.

IV. Lesser Caroline Poets

§ 16. Edward Benlowes

Benlowes, the elder and by much the longer lived, was born c. 1603, probably at the paternal seat of Brent hall, Essex, which he inherited. He entered St. John’s college, Cambridge, in 1620, afterwards making the grand tour. At one time of his life, he was a Roman Catholic, but died an English churchman: and it is not certain whether his Romanism was merely an episode or not. So, also, we have only Butler’s indirect testimony to the fact of Benlowes’s having actually served in the civil war: but he was certainly a strong royalist. It is also certain that he lost his fortune, the main cause assigned being overlavishness to friends and flatterers. Latterly, he lived at Oxford and died there (it is said from privation) in 1676. Butler had already selected him as the subject for his character A Small poet, which is full of the bitterest ridicule. Long afterwards, Pope wrote, but did not finally print, in the prologue to his Satires, the couplet

How pleased I see some patron to each scrub,

Quarles had his Benlowes, Tibbald has his Bubb,

with the note “A gentleman of Oxford who patronised all bad poets of that reign.” He left these lines out, but, in the Dunciad (III, 21), he returned to the subject in the line

Benlowes, propitious still to blockheads, bows,

with an enlarged note on Benlowes’s own bad poetry which Warburton amplified with ridicule of his titles.