1672

about the same age, the author of two comedies, pro-
duced between 1660 and 1670, which, for ease and
sprightly fluency, surpassed anything that Dryden had
done in the comic style. But "gentle George," as he
was called, was incorrigibly lazy; and it did not seem
as if the public would get anything more from him. In
his place had come another gentleman-writer, young
William Wycherley, whose first comedy had been written
before Dryden's laureateship, though it was not acted
till 1672, and who was already famous as a wit. Of
precisely the same age as Wycherley, and with a far
greater quantity of comic writing in him, whatever
might be thought of the quality, was Thomas Shadwell,
whose bulky body was a perpetual source of jest against
him, though he himself vaunted it as one of his many
resemblances to Ben Jonson. The contemporary opinion
of these two last-named comic poets, Wycherley and
Shadwell, after they came to be better known, is ex-
pressed in these lines from a poem of Rochester's :-

"Of all our modern wits none seem to me
Once to have touched upon true comedy
But hasty Shadwell and slow Wycherley.
Shadwell's unfinished works do yet impart
Great proofs of force of Nature, none of Art.
With just bold strokes he dashes here and there,
Showing great mastery with little care;
Scorning to varnish his good touches o'er,
To make the fools and women praise the more.

But Wycherley earns hard whate'er he gains ;
He wants no judgment, and he spares no pains ;
He frequently excels, and, at the least,
Makes fewer faults than any of the rest."

The author of these lines, the notorious Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was also one of Dryden's literary subjects. He was but twenty-two years of age when Dryden became laureate; but before ten years of that laureateship were over he had blazed out, in rapid debauchery, his wretchedly-spent life. Younger by three years than Rochester, and also destined to a short life, though more of misery than of crime, was Thomas Otway, of whose six tragedies and four comedies, all produced during the laureateship of Dryden, one at least has taken a place in our dramatic literature, and is read still for its power and pathos. Associated with Otway's name is that of Nat. Lee, more than Otway's match in fury, and who, after a brief career as a tragic dramatist and drunkard, became an inmate of Bedlam. Another writer of tragedy, whose career began with Dryden's laureateship, was John Crowne, "little starched Johnny Crowne," as Rochester calls him, but whom so good a judge as Charles Lamb has thought worthy of commemoration as having written some really fine things. Finally, the list includes a few Nahum Tates, Elkanah Settles, Tom D'Urfeys, and other small celebrities, in whose company we may place Aphra Behn, the poetess.

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Doing our best to fancy this cluster of wits and playwriters, in the midst of which, from his appointment to the laureateship in 1670, at the age of thirty-nine, to his deposition from that office in 1688, at the age of fiftyeight, Dryden is historically the principal figure, we can very well see that not one of them all could wrest the dictatorship from him. With an income from various sources, including his salary as laureate and historiographer and his receipts from his engagement with Killigrew's company, amounting in all to about 600l. a-year-which, according to Sir Walter Scott's computation, means about 1,800l. in our value-he had, during a portion of this time at least, all the means of external respectability in sufficient abundance. His reputation as the first dramatic author of the day was already made; and if, as yet, there were others who had done as well or better as poets out of the dramatic walk, he more than made up for this by the excellence of his prologues and epilogues, and by his readiness and power as a prose-critic of general literature. No one could deny that, though a rather heavy man in private society, and so slow and silent among the wits of the coffee-house that, but for the pleasure of seeing his placid face, the deeply indented leather chair on which he sat would have done as well to represent literature there as his own presence in it, John Dryden was, all in all, the first wit of the age. There was not a Buckingham, nor

an Etherege, nor a Shadwell, nor a starched Johnny Crowne, of them all, that singly would have dared to dispute his supremacy. And yet, as will happen, what his subjects could not dare to do singly, or ostensibly, some of them tried to compass by cabal and systematic depreciation on particular points. In fact, Dryden had to fight pretty hard to maintain his place, and had to make an example or two of a rebel subject before the rest were terrified into submission.

He was first attacked in the very field of his greatest triumphs, the drama. The attack was partly directed against himself personally, partly against that style of heroic or rhymed tragedy of which he was the advocate and representative. There had always been dissenters from this new fashion; and among these was the Duke of Buckingham, who had a natural genius for making fun rident of anything. Assisted, it is said, by his chaplain Sprat, and by Butler, who had already satirized this style of tragedy by writing a dialogue in which two cats are made to caterwaul to each other in heroics, the duke had amused his leisure by preparing a farce in which heroic joint plays were held up to ridicule. In the original draft of anti the farce Davenant was made the butt under the name of Bilboa; but, after Davenant's death, the farce was recast, and Dryden substituted under the name of Bayes. The plot of this famous farce, The Rehearsal, is much! the same as that of Sheridan's Critic. The poet Bayes C

invites two friends, Smith and Johnson, to be present at the rehearsal of a heroic play which he is on the point of bringing out, and the humour consists in the supposed representation of this heroic play, while Bayes alternately directs the actors, and expounds the drift of the play and its beauties to Smith and Johnson, who all the while are laughing at him, and thinking it monstrous rubbish. Conceive a farce like this, written with amazing cleverness, and full of absurdities, produced in the very theatre where the echoes of Dryden's last sonorous heroics were still lingering, and acted by the same actors; conceive it interspersed with parodies of well-known passages from Dryden's plays, and with allusions to characters in those plays; conceive the actor who played the part of Bayes dressed to look as like Dryden as possible, instructed by the duke to mimic Dryden's voice, and using phrases like "igad" and "i'fackins," which Dryden was in the habit of using in familiar conversation; and an idea may be formed of the sensation made by The Rehearsal in all theatrical circles on its first performance in the winter of 1671. Its effect, though not immediate, was decisive. From that time the heroic or rhymed tragedy was felt to be doomed. Dryden, indeed, did not at once recant his opinion in favour of rhymed tragedies; but he yielded so far to the sentence pronounced against them as to write only one more of the kind.