only appeased (according to Grammont) by a sumptuous funeral (9 Jan.) at St. Margaret's, Westminster, and by a very liberal distribution of burnt wine. According to Henry Newcome, the Duchess of York was soon afterwards ‘troubled with the apparition of the Lady Denham, and through anxiety bit off a piece of her tongue.’ Marvell, in 1667, on the death of the Duke of York's infant son, the Duke of Kendal, and the apparently mortal sickness of another infant son, the Duke of Cambridge, published the epigram—
Kendal is dead and Cambridge riding post—
What fitter sacrifice for Denham's ghost?
In other satires Marvell constantly associates Lady Denham's name with ‘mortal chocolate,’ but shifts the responsibility for its employment from Denham's shoulders to those of the Duke and Duchess of York. The scandalous accusation seems to have been quite unjustified on all hands, for a post-mortem examination showed no trace of poison (Orrery State Papers, 1742, p. 219).
Denham survived this crisis for two years. He had made money by his official duties and lived at ease, but he was disliked at court (Grammont), and many contemporary writers made him their butt. The author of ‘Hudibras’ penned in 1667 a cruel ‘panegyric on Sir John Denham's recovery from his madness,’ in which the poet was charged with the most shamefaced literary plagiarism, with fraudulent practices in his office, and with all the vices of a confirmed gamester and debauchee. Lord Lisle, writing to Temple (26 Sept. 1667), says: ‘Poor Sir John Denham is fallen to the ladies also, and is extremely pleased with those that seem willing to hear him, and for that obligation exceedingly praises the Duchess of Monmouth and my Lady Cavendish. If he had not the name of being mad, he would be thought better than ever’ (Temple, Works, i. 484). On Cowley's death (28 July 1667) Denham wrote an elegy which showed no sign of failing powers. He himself died in the middle of March 1668–9, and was buried near Chaucer's monument in Westminster Abbey on the 23rd. An epigram in his honour appeared in William Speed's ‘Epigrammata’ (1669), p. 82. Aubrey describes Denham as very tall, but slightly bent at the shoulders, of slow and stalking gait, with piercing eyes that ‘looked into your very thoughts.’
Denham's unmarried daughter, Elizabeth, was sole executrix of his will (dated 13 March 1668–9, and proved 9 May 1670). His friends, Sir John Birkenhead [q. v.] and William Ashburnham [q. v.], were overseers. Elizabeth received the poet's lease of Scotland Yard with a moiety of a Bedfordshire lease. To his grandchildren, John, William, and Mary, children of the poet's second daughter, Anne, and her husband, Sir William Morley, K.B., other landed property was left, and liberal provision was made for John's education. John and William Morley both died young, the former in 1683 and the latter, who was by the will to have assumed the name of Denham, in 1693. Mary Morley, who married James, tenth earl of Derby, thus became sole heiress. She died without surviving issue in 1782 (Wills from Doctors' Commons, Camd. Soc. pp. 120–3).
‘Cooper's Hill’ and the musical elegy on Cowley are the poems by which Denham best deserves to be remembered. The former was much altered after its first publication in 1642, and received its final form in 1655. The title-page of the 1655 edition describes the poem as ‘written in the yeare 1640; now printed from a perfect copy and a corrected impression.’ The editor, who calls himself J. B., states that there had been no less than five earlier editions, all of which were ‘meer repetitions of the same false transcript which stole into print by the author's long absence from this great town.’ The famous apostrophe to the Thames (‘O could I flow like thee and make thy stream,’ &c.) was one of the passages that first appeared in 1655, and the many other changes were all made, as Pope says, ‘with admirable judgment.’ The alterations are fully noted in Spence's ‘Anecdotes,’ p. 282, note. In the ‘Session of the Poets’ (Poems on State Affairs, 1697) Denham is charged with having bought the poem of a vicar for 40l., and Butler repeats the accusation in his ‘Panegyric,’ but the charge seems baseless. Later critics have exhumed, in one of Ascham's Latin letters and in William Cartwright's verses on Ben Jonson (1637), similar turns of expression to those employed by Denham in his well-known lines on the ‘Thames’ (‘Though deep yet clear,’ &c.), but Denham's originality cannot be seriously impugned. Herrick was the first to write in praise of ‘Cooper's Hill’ (Hesperides, ed. Grosart, ii. 220), and he was followed by Dryden and Pope. Dryden, when dedicating his ‘Rival Ladies’ to Roger, earl of Orrery, in 1664, said that in ‘Cooper's Hill’ Denham transferred the sweetness of Waller's lyrics to the epic, and that the poem ‘for the majesty of its style is and ever will be the standard of exact writing.’ In the dedication of his translation of the ‘Æneid,’ 1697, Dryden draws attention to the ‘sweetness’ of the lines about the Thames. Pope
