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English poets have generally been educated for the church or the law. Rowe was called to the bar, but never
practised in the profession; for his success, as a dramatist, procured him noble
patrons, who bestowed upon him, or rather loaded him with places of
honour and emolument. Amongst the number of his occupations were, Under Secretary
of
State, Land Surveyor of the Customs, Secretary to the Lord Chancellor for the
Presentations, Clerk of the Council to the Prince of Wales, and Poet
Laureate.2
In every department he did honour to the choice of his employer; but in the province
of the theatre he alone acquired fame.
"Tamerlane" was the second play
he produced;3 and he always spoke of it as his favourite
production. This partiality probably arose from the enthusiastic rapture with which
it was received by an audience, who beheld—as the poet had designed they
should—their own beloved monarch in the person of the virtuous Tamerlane; and their old enemy, the King of France, in the reprobate
Bajazet.4
"The fashion of the times," says Johnson, "was to accumulate upon Lewis the Fourteenth, all that
could
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horror and detestation; and whatever good was withheld from him, that it might not
be
thrown away, was bestowed on King
William."5
It was the custom, till within a very few years, to perform this tragedy constantly
on the 5th of November, in honour of the landing of the Prince of Orange, afterwards
King William6 —but as that political fire, which once
gave brightness to its gloomy scenes, no longer blazes, it is now seldom acted, and
never with strong marks of approbation.
As Rowe was a good man; a religious man;
his chief delight the study of divinity, and ecclesiastical history: with such
propensities, and such a capacious mind to improve by them, it is to be deplored that
he should hope to compliment a christian king, and strictly pious as William was known to be, by a
calumnious representation of his declared enemy:—that title alone
should have made the character of his royal adversary sacred.
As the author's most religious and moral intentions are, in this respect, unwarily
blemished; so has he, as incautiously, preserved his wicked Bajazet from utter
detestation, by endowing him with one endearing quality—he has frankness. This
is a virtue so congenial to every Englishman, that, now all the party zeal which once
made this tyrant hated, has subsided, Bajazet is more favoured by the audience, and
every actor would sooner represent him, than the self-approving Tamerlane.
The sorrows of love, in this play, areinteresting [sic] to read, but childishly insipid in
the action. Arpasia7 [Page 5] excites admiration, but
neither pity, nor delight. The Arpasia of Mrs.
Siddons has, indeed, the power of inspiring a degree of horrible wonder in
the dying scene; when, dropping down dead at the Sultan's feet, she gives, by the
manner and disposition of her fall, such assurance of her having suddenly expired,
that an auditor of a lively imagination casts up his eyes to Heaven, as if to catch
a
view of her departed spirit.
Rowe, after sending many a hero and
heroine to their graves, by various untimely ends, died himself peaceably in his own
bed, in the year 1718, aged forty-five.8 The following lines, from this tragedy, seem exactly to describe that
joyful fortitude which he professed to experience in his dying moments; and which,
probably, he anticipated when he wrote them. ———Nor has my soulOne unrepented guilt upon remembrance,To make me dread the justice of hereafter;But standing now on the last verge of life,Boldly I view the vast abyss, eternity,Eager to plunge, and leave my cares behind. 9 space between stanzas
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