rtile was his own invention, that he stood ready to furnish by
contract five plays a year,--a challenge fortunately declined by the
managers of the day. Thus, if the Laureate stipend were not punctually
paid, as was often the case, seeing the necessitous state of the royal
finances and the bevy of fair ladies, whose demands, extravagant as
they were, took precedence of all others, his revenues were adequate
to the maintenance of a family, the matron of which was a Howard,
educated, as a daughter of nobility, to the enjoyment of every
indulgence. These were the Laureate's brightest days. His popularity
was at its height, a fact evinced by the powerful coalitions deemed
necessary to diminish it. Indeed, the laurel had hardly rested upon
Dryden's temples before he experienced the assaults of an organized
literary opposition. The Duke of Buckingham, then the admitted leader
of fashionable prodigacy, borrowed the aid of Samuel Butler, at whose
"Hudibras" the world was still laughing,--of Thomas Sprat, then on the
high-road to those preferments which have given him an important place
in history,--of Martin Clifford, a familiar of the green-room and
coffee-house,--and concocted a farce ridiculing the person and office
of the Laureate. "The Rehearsal" was acted in 1671. The hero,
_Mr. Bayes_, imitated all the personal peculiarities of Dryden,
used his cant phrases, burlesqued his style, and exposed, while
pretending to defend, his ridiculous points, until the laugh of the
town was fairly turned upon the "premier-poet of the realm." The wit
was undoubtedly of the broadest, and the humor at the coffee-room
level; but it was so much the more effective. Dryden affected to be
indifferent to the satire. He jested at the time taken[20] and the
number of hands employed upon the composition. Twenty years later he
was at pains to declare his perfect freedom from rancor in consequence
of the attack.

There, is much reason to suspect, however, that "The Rehearsal" was
not forgotten, when the "Absalom and Achitophel" was written, and that
the character of _Zimri_ gathered much of its intense vigor and depth
of shadow from recollections of the ludicrous _Mr. Bayes_. The
portrait has the look of being designed as a quittance in full of old
scores. "The Rehearsal," though now and then recast and reenacted to
suit other times, is now no otherwise remembered than as the suggester
of Sheridan's "Critic."

Upon the heels of this onslaught others