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Updated: May 14, 2025
The English were then at war with Denmark; and, as they entered the Baltic, a British cruiser sent an officer to examine their papers. The same day they were boarded by a Danish officer, who ordered the ship to Christiansand. The captain thought it prudent to refuse, and to seek shelter from an equinoctial gale in the harbor of Flecknoe. The papers of the ship and Mr.
Flecknoe, an obscure Irish poetaster, being about to retire from the throne of duncedom, resolved to settle the succession upon his son, Shadwell, whose claims to the inheritance are vigorously asserted. The rest to some faint meaning make pretense, But Shadwell never deviates into sense.... The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull With this prophetic blessing Be thou dull.
That is, in many respects, a noble play, and there are few finer scenes, whether in the conception or the carrying out, than that between Antony and Ventidius in the first act. As usual, Dryden's good sense was not blind to the extravagances of his dramatic style. In "Mac Flecknoe" he makes his own Maximin the type of childish rant, "And little Maximins the gods defy";
Flecknoe, again, in his character of a "Miserable old Gentlewoman," inserted among his "Enigmatical Characters," 1658, speaks of her letting her prayer-book fall into the dripping-pan, and the dog and the cat quarrelling over it, and at last agreeing to pray on it! But this is a branch of the subject I cannot afford further to penetrate.
Richard Flecknoe, a contemporary with Dryden, observes of the female sex, "I have always been conversant with the best and worthiest in all places where I came; and among the rest with ladies, in whose conversation, as in an academy of virtue, I learnt nothing but goodness, and saw nothing but nobleness."
It was to a quarrel for and a quarrel against this gentleman that we are indebted for the most trenchant satire in the language. Sir Robert had fallen out with Dryden about rhyming tragedies, of which he disapproved; and while it lasted, the contest was waged with prodigious acrimony. Among the partisans of the former was Richard Flecknoe, a Triton among the smaller scribbling fry.
We cannot be certain in what year Mr. Flecknoe died: Dryden's satire had perhaps rendered him so contemptible, that none gave themselves the trouble to record any particulars of his life, or to take any notice of his death. JOHN DRYDEN, Esq;
The Marriage of Oceanus and Britannia, a Masque. Our author's other works consist of Epigrams and Enigmas. There is a book of his writing, called the Diarium, or the Journal; divided into twelve jornadas, in burlesque verse. Dryden, in two lines in his Mac Flecknoe, gives the character of our author's works. In prose and verse was own'd without dispute, Thro' all the realms of nonsense absolute.
His claims to sonship were transferred from Jonson, then held the first of dramatic writers, to Flecknoe, the last and meanest; and to aggravate the insult, the "Mac" was inserted as an irritating allusion to the alleged Irish origin of both, an allusion, however harmless and senseless now, vastly significant at that era of Irish degradation.
Pope to write his Dunciad; and it must be owned the latter has been more happy in the execution of his design, as having more leisure for the performance; but in Dryden's Mac Flecknoe there are some lines so extremely pungent, that I am not quite certain if Pope has any where exceeded them. In the year wherein he was deprived of the laurel, he published the life of St.
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