flowing from a height, like birds so high that use no balancing wings,
but only with an easy care preserve a steadiness in motion. But this
particular happiness among those multitudes which that excellent person
is an owner of, does not convince my reason but employ my wonder; yet I
am glad that such verse has been written for the stage, since it has so
happily exceeded those whom we seemed to imitate. But while I give these
arguments against verse, I may seem faulty that I have not only written
ill ones, but written any; but since it was the fashion, I was resolved,
as in all indifferent things, not to appear singular--the danger of the
vanity being greater than the error; and therefore I followed it as a
fashion, though very far off." Sir Robert appears to have been in the
sulks, for some cause not now known, with his great brother-in-law; and
was pleased to punish him by thus publicly pretending ignorance of his
existence as an heroic play-wright. Yet the "Annus Mirabilis" was about
this time dedicated to Sir Robert; and only about a year before, John
had had a helping hand with the "Indian Queen." My Lord of Orrery must
have been a proud man to have his gouty too so fervently kissed by the
jealous rivals. "The muses," Dryden had said in his dedication to that
nobleman, "have seldom employed your thoughts but when some violent fit
of the gout has snatched you from affairs of state; and, like the
priestess of Apollo, you never come to deliver your oracles but
unwillingly and in torments. So we are obliged to your lordship's misery
for our delight. You treat us with the cruel pleasure of a Turkish
triumph, where those who cut and wound their bodies, sing songs of
victory as they pass, and divert others with their own sufferings. Other
men endure their diseases--your lordship only can enjoy them." Dryden,
however, was not disposed to stomach Sir Robert's supercilious silence,
and took a noble revenge in his "Essay on Dramatic Poesy."

This celebrated Essay was first published at the close of 1668; and the
writing of it, Dryden tells us, in a dedication, many years afterwards,
to the Earl of Dorset, "served as an amusement to me in the country,
when the violence of the last plague had driven me from the town.
Seeing, then, our theatres shut up, I was engaged in these kind of
thoughts with the same delight with which men think upon their absent
mistresses." It is in the form of dialogue; under the feigned
appellations of