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poet laureate, was due to, and probably obtained by, his literary character; nor did he ever receive any boon suitable to his rank, as son-in-law to an earl. But, what was worst of all, the parties did not find mutual happiness in the engagement they had formed. It is difficult for a woman of a violent temper and weak intellects, and such the lady seems to have been, to endure the apparently causeless fluctuation of spirits incident to one doomed to labour incessantly in the feverish exercise of the imagination. Unintentional neglect, and the inevitable relaxation, or rather sinking of spirit, which follows violent mental exertion, are easily misconstrued into capricious rudeness, or intentional offence; and life is embittered by mutual accusation, not the less intolerable because reciprocally just. The wife of one who is to gain his livelihood by poetry, or by any labour (if any there be) equally exhausting, must either have taste enough to relish her husband's performances, or good-nature sufficient to pardon his infirmities. It was Dryden's misfortune, that Lady Elizabeth had neither the one nor the other; and I dismiss the disagreeable subject by observing, that on no one occasion, when a sarcasm against matrimony could be introduced, has our author failed to season it with such bitterness as spoke an inward consciousness of domestic misery.[18] During the period when the theatres were closed, Dryden seems to have written and published the "_Annus Mirabilis_" of which we spoke at the close of the last Section. But he was also then labouring upon his "Essay of Dramatic Poesy." It was a singular trait in the character of our author, that by whatever motive he was directed in his choice of a subject, and his manner of treating it, he was upon all occasions, alike anxious to persuade the public, that both the one and the other were the object of his free choice, founded upon the most rational grounds of preference. He had, therefore, no sooner seriously bent his thoughts to the stage, and distinguished himself as a composer of heroic plays, than he wrote his "Essay of Dramatic Poesy," in which he assumes, that the drama was the highest department of poetry; and endeavours to prove, that rhyming or heroic tragedies are the most legitimate offspring of the drama. The subject is agitated in a dialogue between Lord Buckhurst, Sir Charles Sedley, Sir Robert Howard, and the author himself, under the feigned names of Eugeni
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