the Restoration, Charles, more mindful of him than of many of his friends and the partners of his exile, bestowed on Denham the Surveyorship of the King’s Buildings and the Order of the Bath.  The situation of Surveyor, even in his careless and improvident hands, turned out a lucrative one; for it is said that he cleared by it no less than L7000.  Of his first wife, we hear little or nothing; but about this time, flushed as he was with prosperity, and the popularity of the writings he continued to produce, he contracted a second marriage, which was so far from happy that its consequences led to a fit of temporary derangement.  Butler, then a disappointed and exacerbated man, was malignant enough to lampoon him for lunacy—­an act which, Dr. Johnson well remarks, “no provocation could excuse.”  It was, in Fuller’s fine old quaint language, “breaking one whom God had bowed before.”  Our readers will find Butler’s squib in our edition of that poet, vol. ii. p. 200, under the title of “A Panegyrick on Sir John Denham’s Recovery from his Madness.”  It is a piece quite unworthy of Butler’s powers, and its sting lies principally in charging Denham with plagiarising “Cooper’s Hill” and “Sophy,” with gambling, and with overreaching the King as Surveyor of the Public Buildings, and with an overbearing and quarrelsome temper—­but it contains no allusion to his domestic infelicity.  Some have hinted that the cause of his insanity lay in jealousy—­that Denham suspected his wife to be too intimate with the Duke of York—­that he poisoned her, and maddened in remorse.  Whatever the cause, the distemper was not of long continuance.  He recovered in time to write some verses on the death of Cowley, which took place in 1667; but in the next year he himself expired, and was buried by the side of his friend in Westminster Abbey, not very far from Chaucer and Spencer.  His funeral took place on the 19th of March 1668.  He had attained the age of fifty-three.

This is all we can definitely state of the history of Sir John Denham, and certainly the light it casts on his character is neither very plentiful nor very pleasing.  A gambler in his early days, he became a political intriguer, an unhappy husband, a maniac, and died in the prime of life.  It need only further be recorded of him, that, according to some accounts, he first discovered the merits of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and went about with the book new from the press in his hands, shewing it to everybody, and exclaiming, “This beats us all, and the ancients too!” If this story be true, it says as much for his heart as his head for the generous disposition which made him praise a political adversary, as for the critical taste which discerned at a glance the value of the world’s greatest poem.  On the whole, however, Denham as a man stands on the same general level with the Cavalier wits in the days of Charles.  If he did not rise so high as Cowley, he did not sink so low as Rochester, or even as Butler.