being made an English Baron of Exchequer, returned to his native country, and educated young John in London.  Thence, at the age of sixteen, he went to study at Oxford, where he became celebrated rather for dissipation than diligence.  He was, although a youth of imaginative temperament, excessively fond of gambling; and it was said of him, that he was more given to “dreams and dice than to study.”  His future eminence might be foreseen by some of his friends; but, in general, men looked on him rather as an idle and misled youth of fortune, than as a genius.  Three years after, he removed to Lincoln’s Inn, where he continued occasionally to gamble, and was sometimes punished for his pains, being plundered by more skilful or unscrupulous gamesters, but did not forget his studies.  His conscience, on one occasion, aroused by a rebuke from a friend, awoke; and, to confirm the resolutions which it forced upon him, he wrote and published an “Essay on Gaming.”  In this respect he resembles Sir Richard Steele when a young soldier, who, in order to cure himself of his dissipations, wrote and published “The Christian Hero”—­his object being, by drawing the picture of a character exactly opposite to his own, to commit himself irrevocably to virtue, and to break down all the bridges between him and a return to vice.  It is, alas! notorious, that Steele’s holiness turned out only to be a FIT, of not much longer duration than a morning headache, and that the “Christian Hero” remains not as a model to which its author’s conduct was ever conformed, but as a severe, self-written satire on his whole career.  And so with Denham.  For some time he forsook the gambling-table, and applied his attention partly to law, and partly to poetry, translating, in 1636, the “Second Book of the Aeneid;” but when his father died, two years afterwards, and left him some thousands, he rushed again to the dice-box, and melted them as rapidly as the wind melts the snow of spring.

“In 1642 he broke out,” as Waller remarks of him, “like the Irish Rebellion, threescore thousand strong, when nobody was aware, or in the least suspected it,” in the play of “Sophy;” and, sooth to say, like that rebellion, his outbreak is lawless and irregular, as well as strong; as in that rebellion, too, there is a rather needless expenditure of blood.  What Byron says of Dr. Polidori’s tragedy, is nearly true of “Sophy”—­

  “All stab, and everybody dies.”

Nothing can be more horrible and disgusting than many of the incidents.  A father suspecting and plotting against a dear and noble son; a son deprived of sight by the command of a father, and meditating in his rage and revenge the murder of his own favourite daughter, because she is beloved by his father; and the deaths of both son and father by poison, administered through means of a courtier who has betrayed both.  Such are the main hinges on which the plot of the piece turns.  The versification, too, is exceedingly