Mr. Smith and Mr. Johnson, the main pillars of it, were two such languishing gentlemen in their conversation, that I could liken them to nothing but to their own relations, those noble characters of men of wit and pleasure about the town." Dean Lockier told Spence that " Dryden allowed 'The Rehearsal' to have a great many good strokes in it, though so severe (added he) upon myself; but I can't help saying, that Smith and Johnson are two of the coolest, most insignificant fellows I ever met with on the stage.”

When in 1681 Buckingham was in political opposition to Charles and his Ministry, and his influence and reputation had much declined, Dryden took an ample revenge on his old antagonist by his finished and admirable sketch of him as Zimri in “Absalom and Achitophel," Dryden could even sometimes stoically speak of Mr. Bayes as if he were not himself the original, as in his Epilogue of 1678 to "All for Love, or the World Well Lost:"

"For our poor wretch, he neither rails or prays,
Nor likes your wit just as you like his plays;
He has not yet so much of Mr. Bayes."

The King's Theatre in Drury Lane was burnt down in January 1672; and now Dryden's income from the profits was diminished by the expenses consequent on this calamity. The company moved to the house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, deserted shortly before by the Duke's Company, who had gone to a new house in Dorset Gardens. The representations were opened in Lincoln's Inn Fields on February 26, 1672, with a Prologue by Dryden, in which he foreshadowed a finer theatre arising from the fire, as London had sprung up more magnificent after the desolating fire of 1666:

"But as our new-built city rises higher,

So from old theatres may new aspire,
Since Fate contrives magnificence by fire."

As a mode of eking out money, several representations were given in the Lincoln's Inn Fields house by the actresses alone; and Dryden's aid was invoked for a Prologue for the first of these performances. He provided also a new Prologue and Epilogue for his play of "The Maiden Queen, or Secret Love," which was among the plays acted by the ladies. The fire had probably stirred Dryden to more exertion this year, 1672, two new plays of his were produced, both comedies,—“ Marriage à la Mode," which was very successful, and “The Assignation, or Love in a Nunnery," which was a failure. In 1673 he produced the tragedy of "Amboyna, or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants," a very inferior piece, hastily written for the occasion of the Dutch war, and designed to gratify and inflame the national animosity against the Dutch. There has been a general mistake among Dryden's editors and biographers of representing the Prologue and Epilogue to this play as principally made from a "Satire against the Dutch" alleged to have been composed by Dryden in 1662.

The fact is that the alleged Satire was made up from the Prologue and Epilogue
to this play of 1673, by the publisher of the "State Poems," and first published
by him in 1704, with the invention of its having been written in 1662.
The style
and tone of the Prologue and Epilogue are execrable. It is not to be forgotten
that the now fierce abettor of this Dutch war, begun and carried on by the so-
called Cabal Ministry, was a few years later as fierce a reviler of Shaftesbury for
his share in promoting this very war. Both in "Absalom and Achitophel" and
in "The Medal" is this war in alliance with France against Holland made a
chief count of indictment against Shaftesbury by Dryden, who now, while the war
was in progress, gloated over the French alliance against Holland, and prayed
for degradation and ruin of the Dutch republic. These are the concluding lines of
the Epilogue, chiming with Shaftesbury's "Delenda est Carthago" of the same
year:

"Yet is their empire no true growth, but humour,
And only two kings' touch can cure the tumour.
As Cato did his Afric fruits display,

So we before your eyes their Indies lay:
All loyal English will like him conclude,
Let Cæsar live, and Carthage be subdued."

The play of ". Amboyna" was published immediately with a dedication to Lord Clifford, Shaftesbury's colleague, who had, however, by this time resigned his office of Lord Treasurer on the passing of the Test Act, but who had been notoriously more concerned in the rupture of the Triple Alliance and in the treaty with France than Shaftesbury; and Dryden wrote, amid much fulsome flattery, that Clifford had, both at home and abroad, made the King's greatness and the true interest of his country the standard and measure of all his actions. "Marriage à la Mode" and "The Coronation,' ,"both published also in 1673, were dedicated respectively to Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and to Sir Charles Sedley; and in the latter dedication he took occasion to notice again, briefly and in general terms, but with biting contempt, those who had attacked him for his Epilogue to the Second Part of "The Conquest of Granada."

Dryden involved himself in 1573 in a literary controversy, to an account of which Dr. Johnson has given exaggerated importance and disproportionate space, with Elkanah Settle, an inferior poet and play-writer. Settle's play, "The Empress of Morocco" had had great success, and, patronized by the capricious Rochester, who had the car of the King, had been often acted at Court; and Settle published this play in 1673 with many signs of inflated vanity, and with a dedication in which Dryden was disrespectfully spoken of. This led to the publication of a severe and malignant criticism, the joint work of Crowne, Shadwell, and Dryden. Crowne claims to have written three-fourths of this pamphlet, which Johnson treats as if it were almost entirely Dryden's. But Dryden had a part in it, and Settle retorted sharply on him, criticising the “Conquest of Granada." Settle

had by no means the worst of it in the pamphleteering fray, and Dryden gained no increase of reputation by his part in this controversy. Time has decisively settled the question of the relative merits of Dryden and Settle; but the author of “The Emperor of Morocco" then divided not unequally public favour and sympathy with the Laureate. Dennis, who was sixteen years old in 1673 and went up to Cambridge as a freshman in 1676, wrote in 1717 that he remembered Settle at the time of this controversy as a formidable rival to Dryden, and that not only London, but also the University of Cambridge, was much divided in opinion as to which was superior, and that in both places Settle was the favourite among the younger

men.

A connexion of Dryden's literary life with Milton is more interesting. In 1674 Dryden published a piece which he called an Opera, but which, though doubtless intended for representation, was never brought on the stage, adapted from Milton's "Paradise Lost," and entitled "The State of Innocence." It is related by Aubrey that Dryden called on Milton to ask his permission to adapt his poem to a play in rhyme, and that Milton "received him civilly, and told him he would give him leave to tag his verses. "Paradise Lost" had been published in 1669. Milton died shortly after the publication of "The State of Innocence," on November 8, 1674. 'The State of Innocence" is said by Dryden to have been hastily written, and to have been finished in a month. It adds in itself nothing to Dryden's reputation; but it is gratifying to read his admiring language on Milton's poem, which he describes in the Preface as "being undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced." It is not unlikely that there should be some foundation of truth in a long collection of stories by Richardson about the early reception of the "Paradise Lost ;" and there is no reason why it should not be true that Dryden, not long after the publication of the "Paradise Lost," said to Lord Buckhurst, "This man cuts us all out and the ancients too."+ Dryden was able to judge Milton, and we may believe his praise in this instance to be sincere. Milton, it is said, spoke of Dryden as a great rhymer, but no poet. But Dryden's fame was now great and general, while Milton was appreciated only by the wise and few. In this very year in which Dryden "tagged his verses" on "Paradise Lost," and in which Milton died, Evelyn, who never names Milton and loathed him as a rebel, records as a fact of importance a visit from Dryden: "Mr. Dryden, the famous poet and new laureate, came to visit me.”‡ It may have arisen from a want of strength to resist flattery, however coarse, or it may have been the fault of the publisher, anxious to puff his verses and controlling Dryden, that some lines of fulsome praise by Lee, representing Dryden's

* Letters by Eminent Persons, &c. and Lives by John Aubrey, from the Bodleian Library, &c. (1813), vol. ii. p. 444.

Richardson's Explanatory, Notes and Remarks on Milton's "Paradise Lost," quoted by Malone in his Life, p. 113.

↑ Diary, June 27, 1674.

poem as an improvement on Milton, were prefixed to the publication. This is a specimen of Lee's eulogies:

"To the dead bard your fame a little owes,
For Milton did the wealthy mine disclose,
And rudely cast what you could well dispose.
He roughly drew on an old-fashioned ground
A chaos; for no perfect world was found
Till through the heap your mighty genius shined,
He was the golden ore which you refined."

Dryden dedicated "The State of Innocence" to the Duke of York's second wife, Mary of Modena, married to the Duke of York the year before. This Dedication carries flattery and adulation to the highest height. Malone has cited a saying of Burke in conversation with himself about Dryden, that the hyperbolical praise of his dedications was the vice of the time and not of the man; that there was rivalry among literary dedicators as to which should go farthest in the most graceful way ; and that Dryden sitting down to write a dedication might be compared to the archer described in "Hudibras" as drawing his arrow to the head, whether it be a swan or a goose that is levelled at.* But this is a lame excuse for Dryden's abject adulations and servile flatteries. His great powers of mind were ill-employed in these florid dedications, and that they brought him money made it worse. Lord Macaulay has justly argued that a high spirit cannot be predicated of one who long pursued a trade of mendicancy and adulation.

The new theatre to replace the old one burnt down two years before was opened in March 1674, and Dryden's pen furnished the Prologue and Epilogue for the occasion of the opening of the new house. It was not a magnificent new house, as he had foreshadowed, though it is said to have cost £4,000; and the present Prologue commended the modesty of “a' plain-built house" as contrasted with the fine and gaudy new theatre of the Duke's Company in Dorset Gardens. But the site, Dryden urged, was more convenient for city folks, and he promised good plays as contrasted with machines and operas and shows of the other house. Dryden vividly, and perhaps with a poet's licence, describes the inconveniences of bad roads in a winter night beyond Drury Lane to Dorset Gardens, which were by the Thames east of the Temple :

"Our house relieves the ladies from the frights
Of ill-paved streets, and long dark winter nights,
The Flanders horses from a cold bleak road,
Where bears in furs dare scarcely look abroad.”

In 1675 Dryden produced another tragedy, "Aurengzebe, or the Great Mogul." In the Prologue to this play he announced that he had "now another taste of wit, and was growing weary of his long-loved mistress, Rhyme." The dedication of the play when published, addressed to Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, explains

* Malone's Life, p. 245; and Prior's Life of Malone, p. 25

more clearly what Dryden meant by his Prologue. His mind was now set on the composition of an epic poem ; he had already, by Mulgrave's good offices, conversed with the King and with the Duke of York on the subject; and he now publicly asked Mulgrave to remind the King of his design. Dryden's desire of course was that the King should do something for improving his means, so as to relieve him from the necessity of play-writing, and enable him to devote himself to an epic poem. The subject which he had at this time in his mind was the conquest of Spain by Edward the Black Prince: here he only describes it vaguely; but many years afterwards, in 1693, in his “Discourse on Satire," he specifies this as one of two subjects which he had thought of for an epic poem; the other being King Arthur conquering the Saxons. Some sentences of the Dedication of “Aurengzebe” to Lord Mulgrave may be fitly quoted for their biographical interest:

"I desire to be no longer the Sisyphus of the stage; to roll up a stone with endless labour, which, to follow the proverb, gathers no moss, and which is perpetually falling down again. never thought myself. very fit for an employment where many of my predecessors have excelled me in all kinds; and some of my contemporaries, even in my own partial judgment, have outdone me in comedy. Some little hopes I have yet remaining, and these too, considering my abilities, may be vain, that I may make the world some part of amends for many ill plays by an heroic poem. Your lordship has been long acquainted with my design: the subject of which you know is great, the story English, and neither too far distant from the present age, nor too near approaching it. Such it is, in my opinion, that I could not have wished a nobler occasion to do honour by it to my king, my country, and my friends; most of our ancient nobility being concerned in the action. And your lordship has one particular reason to promote this undertaking; because you were the first who gave me the opportunity of discovering it to his Majesty and his Royal Highness. They were then pleased both to commend the design, and to encourage it by their commands. But the unsettledness of my condition has hitherto put a stop to my thoughts concerning it. As I am no successor to Homer in his wit, so neither do I desire to be in his poverty. I can make no one go a begging at the Grecian doors while I sing the praises of their ancestors. The times of Virgil please me better, because he had an Augustus for his patron: and to draw the allegory nearer you, I am sure I shall not want a Mecanas with him. It is for your lordship to stir up that remembrance in his Majesty, which his many avocations of business have caused him, I fear, to lay aside; and as himself and his royal brother are the heroes of the poem, to represent to them the images of their warlike predecessors: as Achilles is said to be roused to glory with the sight of the combat before the ships. For my own part, I am satisfied to have offered the design, and it may be to the advantage of my reputation to have it refused me."

This was the last of Dryden's rhymed heroic tragedies, for in his next play, a tragedy, "All for Love," which appeared after an interval of three years, he abandoned rhyme for blank verse. This last of Dryden's heroic plays is the best; and, like all his tragedies, it contains fine passages of poetry. The lines on human life, its vanities and disappointments, in one of Aurengzebe's speeches, were singled out by Johnson for admiration, and are well known. Not less beautiful is Aurengzebe's meditation on the trials and thanklessness of virtue on earth:

"How vain is virtue which directs our ways,
Through certain danger to uncertain praise!
Barren and airy name! thee Fortune flies,
With thy lean train, the pious and the wise.
Heaven takes thee at thy word without regard
And lets thee poorly be thy own reward.