Born, at Aylesford, Kent, 1639. Matric., Wadham Coll., Oxford, 22 March 1656. Succeeded to Baronetcy, 1656. M.P. for New Romney, 1668–81, 1690–95, 1696–1701. Married. Died, 20 Aug. 1701. Works: “The Earle of Pembroke’s Speech in the House of Peeres” (anon.), 1648; “The Last Will and Testament of the Earl of Pembroke” [1650]; “The Mulberry Garden,” 1668; “Antony and Cleopatra,” 1677; “Bellamira,” 1687. Posthumous: “Beauty the Conqueror,” 1702; “The Grumbler” (anon.), 1702; “The Tyrant King of Crete,” 1702; “The Happy Pair,” 1702. Collected Works: 1707.
Personal
Pierce do tell me, among other news, the late frolick and debauchery of Sir Charles Sidley and Buckhurst, running up and down all the night, almost naked through the streets; and at last fighting and being beat by the watch and clapped up all night, and how the king takes their parts; and my Lord Chief Justice Keeling hath laid the constable by the heels to answer it next Session, which is a horrid shame.
Think, if you please, that this dedication is only an occasion I have taken, to do myself the greatest honour imaginable with posterity; that is, to be recorded in the number of those men whom you have favoured with your friendship and esteem. For I am well assured, that, besides the present satisfaction I have, it will gain me the greatest part of my reputation with after ages, when they shall find me valuing myself on your kindness to me; I may have reason to suspect my own credit with them, but I have none to doubt of yours. And they who, perhaps, would forget me in my poems, would remember me in this epistle.
I am glad the town has so good a taste as to give the same just applause to Sr. Charles Sidley’s writing which his friends have always done to his conversation. Few of our plays can boast of more wit than I have heard him speak at a supper. Some barren sparks have found fault with what he has formerly done, only because the fairness of the soil has produced so big a crop. I daily drink his health my Lord Dorset’s, your own, and all our friends’.
Sedley had a more sudden and copious wit, which furnished a perpetual run of discourse; but he was not so correct as Lord Dorset, nor so sparkling as Lord Rochester.
When his comedy of “Bellamira” was played, the roof fell in, and he was one of the very few that were hurt by the accident. A flatterer told him that the fire of the play had blown up the poet, house, and all. “No,” he replied, “the play was so heavy that it broke down the house, and buried the poet in his own rubbish.”
Profligate and debauched Sedley certainly was. His disgraceful frolic at the Cock Tavern, in Bow Street, Covent Garden, on which his genius has conferred an unfortunate notoriety, is not only too indecent to bear repetition, but was an insult even to the age in which he lived.
One of the most brilliant and profligate wits of the Restoration. The licentiousness of his writings is not redeemed by much grace or vivacity, but the charms of his conversation were acknowledged even by sober men who had no esteem for his character. To sit near him at the theatre, and to hear his criticisms on a new play, was regarded as a privilege. Dryden had done him the honour to make him a principal interlocutor in the dialogue on dramatic poesy. The morals of Sedley were such as, even in that age, gave great scandal.
Sir Charles Sedley was a fashionable wit, and the foulness of his words made even the porters of Covent Garden pelt him from the balcony when he ventured to address them.
General
| Sedley has that prevailing, gentle art | |
| That can with a resistless charm impart | |
| The loosest wishes to the chastest heart. |
Heard him speak more Wit at a Supper, than all his Adversaries, with their Heads joyn’d together, could write in a Year. That his Writings are not unequal to any Man’s of this Age, (not to speak of Abundance of Excellent Copies of Verses). That he has in the “Mulberry Garden,” shown the true Wit, Humour, and Satyr of a Comedy; and in “Anthony and Cleopatra,” the true Spirit of a Tragedy.
A Gentleman whose Name speaks a greater Panegyrick, than I am able to express; and whose Wit is so well known to this Age, that I should but tarnish its Lustre, by my Endeavouring to deliver it over to the next: His Wit is too Noble a Subject to need any Herald to proclaim its Titles and Pedigree; or if it did, my Voice and Skill are too weak, to sound out his Praises in their due measures. I shall therefore only content my self, as the Vallys, that have no Voice of their own, to eccho out his Merits at the Second-hand.
Sedley is a very insipid writer; except in some few of his little love-verses.
Sedley’s poems, however amorously tender and delicate, yet have not much strength; nor do they afford great marks of genius. The softness of his verses is denominated by the Duke of Buckingham, Sedley’s Witchcraft. It was an art too successful in those days to propagate the immoralities of the times, but it must be owned that in point of chastity he excels Dorset, and Rochester; who as they conceived lewdly, wrote in plain English, and did not give themselves any trouble to wrap up their ribbaldry in a dress tollerably decent. But if Sedley was the more chaste, I know not if he was the less pernicious writer: for that pill which is gilded will be swallowed more readily, and with less reluctance, than if tendered in its own disgustful colours. Sedley insinuates gently into the heart, without giving any alarm, but is no less fraught with poison, than are those whose deformity bespeaks their mischief.
Sir Charles Sedley was distinguished for writing poems of considerable impurity of idea and considerable purity of language. His biographer therefore is careful to inform us that though the sentiments of Sir Charles were as foul as those of Rochester, they were not so immodest, because they were arrayed in clean linen.
As a lyrical writer Sedley’s merit was his demerit. There was poison in his love poems; but it was a poison that enchanted the wits of the day, and Buckingham called it Sedley’s “Witchcraft.”
Sir Charles Sedley ruins and pollutes himself, but Charles II. calls him “the viceroy of Apollo.” Buckingham extols “the magic of his style.” He is the most charming, the most sought after of talkers; he makes puns and verses, always agreeable, sometimes refined; he handles dexterously the pretty jargon of mythology; he insinuates into his airy, flowing verses all the dainty and somewhat affected prettinesses of the drawing-room…. There is no love whatever in these pretty things; they are received as they are presented, with a smile; they form part of the conventional language, the polite attentions due from gentlemen to ladies. I suppose they would send them in the morning with a nosegay, or a box of preserved fruits.
Sedley, as it is needless to adduce evidence to prove, was commonly accounted one of the most notorious profligates of the most dissolute period of Charles II’s reign; but he was a capable politician of moderate views, and gained distinction in more than one branch of literature. His lyrics contain occasional turns of a felicitous and engaging simplicity, such as is not generally observable in his plays; and he wrote a facile and clear style as a prose pamphleteer.
Sedley was one of the most graceful and refined of the mob of Restoration noblemen who wrote in prose and verse. For nearly forty years he was recognised as a patron of the art of poetry, and as an amateur of more than usual skill. Three times, at intervals of ten years, he produced a play in the taste of the age, and when his clever comedy of “Bellamira” was refused at the Duke’s Theatre, on account of its intolerable indelicacy, he sulked for the remainder of his life, and left to his executors three more plays in manuscript. His songs are bright and lively, but inferior to those of Rochester in lyrical force. A certain sweetness of diction in his verse delighted his contemporaries, who praised his “witchcraft” and his “gentle prevailing art.” In his plays he seems to be successively inspired by Etheredge, Shadwell and Crowne. Two lines in his most famous song have preserved his reputation from complete decay.
A genuine but inferior humourist and poet, only not quite so deeply tainted by the “fat pollutions” of their time.
A still smaller gleaning comes to us from Sir Charles Sedley, who, for two hundred years, has been preserved from oblivion by a little wanton verse about Phillis, full of such good-natured contentment and disbelief that we grow young and cheerful again in contemplating it. Should any long-suffering reader desire to taste the sweets of sudden contrast and of sharp reaction, let him turn from the strenuous, analytic, half-caustic, and wholly discomforting love-poem of the nineteenth century—Mr. Browning’s word-picture of “A Pretty Woman,” for example—back to those swinging and jocund lines where Phillis,
| “Faithless as the winds or seas,” |
| “She deceiving, | |
| I believing, | |
| What need lovers wish for more?” |
From Sir Charles Sedley I have drawn very freely. In his own sphere Sedley is unapproachable; such songs as “Love still has something of the sea” or “Phillis is my only joy” easily out-distance all rivals. He does not occupy an exalted place in English literature; but his seat is secure.
