another; and his efforts were now
stimulated by a domestic feeling, the expected return of his son in
ill-health from Rome. In a letter to his bookseller he pathetically
writes--"If it please God that _I must die of over-study_, I cannot
spend my life better than in preserving his." It was on this occasion,
on the verge of his seventieth year, as he describes himself in the
dedication of his Virgil, that, "worn out with study, and oppressed
with fortune," he contracted to supply the bookseller with 10,000
verses at sixpence a line!

What was his entire dramatic life but a series of vexation and
hostility, from his first play to his last? On those very boards
whence Dryden was to have derived the means of his existence and his
fame, he saw his foibles aggravated, and his morals aspersed.
Overwhelmed by the keen ridicule of Buckingham, and maliciously
mortified by the triumph which Settle, his meanest rival, was allowed
to obtain over him, and doomed still to encounter the cool malignant
eye of Langbaine, who read poetry only to detect plagiarism.
Contemporary genius is inspected with too much familiarity to be felt
with reverence; and the angry prefaces of Dryden only excited the
little revenge of the wits. How could such sympathise with injured,
but with lofty feelings? They spread two reports of him, which may not
be true, but which hurt him with the public. It was said that, being
jealous of the success of Creech, for his version of Lucretius, he
advised him to attempt Horace, in which Dryden knew he would fail--and
a contemporary haunter of the theatre, in a curious letter[133] on
_The Winter Diversions_, says of Congreve's angry preface to the
_Double Dealer_, that--

"The critics were severe upon this play, which gave the author
occasion to lash them in his epistle dedicatory--so that 'tis
generally thought _he has done his business and lost himself_; a thing
he owes to Mr. Dryden's _treacherous friendship_, who being _jealous
of the applause_ he had got by his _Old Bachelor deluded him_ into a
foolish imitation of his own way of writing angry prefaces."

This lively critic is still more vivacious on the great Dryden, who
had then produced his _Love Triumphant_, which, the critic says,

"Was damned by the universal cry of the town, _nemine contradicente_
but the _conceited poet_. He says in his prologue that 'this is the
last the town must expect from him;' he had done himself a kindness
had he taken his leav