tected, I must fuffer all the rudeness to whichr " his resentment can prompt his tongue." What rewards he obtained for his poems, befides the payment of the bookfeller, cannot be known: Mr. Derrick, who confulted some of his relations, was informed that his Fables obtained five hundred pounds from the dutcliefs of Ormond; a present not unfuitable to the magnificence of that splendid family; and he quotes Moyle, as relating that forty pounds were paid by a musical fociety for the use of Alexander's Feast. In those days the economy of government was yet unfettled, and the payments of the Exchequer were dilatory and uncertain; of this disorder there is reason to believe that the Laureat sometimes felt the effects; for in one of his prefaces he complains of those, who, being intrusted with the distribution of the prince's bounty, fuffer those that depend upon it to languish in penury. Of his petty habits or flight amusements, tradition has retained little. Of the only two men whom I have found to whom he was personally known, one told me, that at the house which he frequented, called Will's Coffee-house, the appeal upon any literary difpute was made to him: and the other related, that his armed chair, which in the winter had a fettled and prescriptive place by the fire, was in the summer placed in the balcony, and that he called the two places his winter and his summer feat. This is all the intelligence which his two furvivors afforded me. One of his opinions will do him no honour in the present age, though in his own time, at leaft in the beginning of it, he was far from having it confined confined to himself. He put great confidence in the prognoftications of judicial astrology. In the Appendix to the Life of Congreve is a narrative of fome of his predictions wonderfully fulfilled; but I know not the writer's means of information, or character of veracity. That he had the configurations of the horoscope in his mind, and confidered them as influencing the affairs of men, he does not forbear to hint. The utmost malice of the stars is paft.- He has elsewhere shewn his attention to the planetary powers; and in the preface to his Fables has endeavoured obliquely to justify his superstition, by attributing the fame to some of the Ancients. The latter, added to this narrative, leaves no doubt of his notions or practice. So flight and so scanty is the knowledge which I have been able to collect concerning the private life and domestick manners of a man, whom every English generation must mention with reverence as a critick and a poet. DRYDEN may be properly confidered as the father of English criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine upon principles the merit of composition. Of our former poets, the greatest dramatist wrote without rules, conducted through life and nature by a genius that rarely misled, and rarely deferted him. Of the rest, those who knew the laws of propriety had neglected to teach them. Two Two Arts of English Poetry were written in the days of Elizabeth by Webb and Puttenham, from which something might be learned, and a few hints had been given by Jonson and Cowley; but Dryden's Effay on Dramatick Poetry was the first regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing. He who, having formed his opinions in the prefent age of English literature, turns back to peruse this dialogue, will not perhaps find much increase of knowledge, or much novelty of instruction; but he is to remember that critical principles were then in the hands of a few, who had gathered them partly from the Ancients, and partly from the Italians and French. The structure of dramatick poems was then not generally understood. Audiences applauded by instinct; and poets perhaps often pleased by chance. A writer who obtains his full purpose loses himself in his own luftre. Of an opinion which is no longer doubted, the evidence ceases to be examined. Of an art universally practised, the first teacher is forgotten. Learning, once made popular, is no longer learning; it has the appearance of something which we have bestowed upon ourselves, as the dew appears to rise from the field which it refreshes. To judge rightly of the author, we must tranfport ourselves to his time, and examine what were the wants of his contemporaries, and what were his means of fupplying them. That which is easy at one time was difficult at another. Dryden at least imported his science, and gave his country what it wanted before; or, rather, he imported only the materials, and manufactured them by his own skill. The : The dialogue on the Drama was one of his first essays of criticifm, written when he was yet a timorous candidate for reputation, and therefore laboured with that diligence which he might allow himself somewhat to remit, when his name gave sanction to his positions, and his awe of the publick was abated, partly by custom, and partly by success. It will not be easy to find, in all the opulence of our language, a treatise so artfully variegated with successive representations of opposite probabilities, so enlivened with imagery, so brightened with illustration. His portraits of the English dramatists are wrought with great spirit and diligence. The account of Shakspeare may stand as a perpetual model of encomiastic criticism; exact without minuteness, and lofty without exaggeration. The praise lavished by Longinus, on the attestation of the heroes of Marathon, by Demosthenes, fades away before it. In a few lines is exhibited a character, so extensive in its comprehenfion, and fo curious in its limitations, that nothing can be added, diminished, or reformed; nor can the editors and admirers of Shakspeare, in all their emulation of reverence, boast of much more than of having diffused and paraphrased this epitome of excellence, of having changed Dryden's gold for baser metal, of lower value, though of greater bulk. In this, and in all his other essays on the same subject, the criticism of Dryden is the criticism of a poet; not a dull collection of theorems, nor a rude detection of faults, which perhaps the cenfor was not able to have committed; but a gay and vigorous differtation, where delight is mingled with instruction, inftruction, and where the author prove of judgement by his power of performanc The different manner and effect wi critical knowledge may be conveyed, wa never more clearly exemplified than in formances of Rymer and Dryden. It wa dispute between two mathematicians, "cum Scaligero errare, quam cum Cla "sapere;" that " it was more eligible to "with one than right with the other." dency of the same kind every mind must perusal of Dryden's prefaces and Rymer's With Dryden we are wandering in quest whom we find, if we find her at all, graces of elegance; and, if we miss he bour of the pursuit rewards itself; we a through fragrance and flowers. Rymer taking a nearer, takes a rougher way; is to be made through thorns and bram Truth, if we meet her, appears repulfi mien, and ungraceful by her habit. Dr ticism has the majesty of a queen; Ry the ferocity of a tyrant. As he had studied with great diligence Poetry, and enlarged or rectified his n experience perpetually increasing, he ha stored with principles and observations: out his knowledge with little labour; bour, notwithstanding the multiplicity ductions, there is sufficient reason to f he was not a lover. To write on an fondness for the employment, with touches and retouches, with unwillingne leave of his own idea, and an unweari |