e before." He then describes the success of
Southerne's _Fatal Marriage, or the Innocent Adultery_, and
concludes, "This kind usage will encourage desponding minor poets,
and _vex huffing Dryden and Congreve to madness_."

I have quoted thus much of this letter, that we may have before us
a true image of those feelings which contemporaries entertain of the
greater geniuses of their age; how they seek to level them; and in
what manner men of genius are doomed to be treated--slighted,
starved, and abused. Dryden and Congreve! the one the finest genius,
the other the most exquisite wit of our nation, are to be _vexed to
madness_!--their failures are not to excite sympathy, but contempt
or ridicule! How the feelings and the language of contemporaries
differ from that of posterity! And yet let _us_ not exult in our purer
and more dignified feelings--_we_ are, indeed, the _posterity_ of
Dryden and Congreve; but we are the _contemporaries_ of others who
must patiently hope for better treatment from our sons than they
have received from the fathers.

Dryden was no master of the pathetic, yet never were compositions more
pathetic than the Prefaces this great man has transmitted to
posterity! Opening all the feelings of his heart, we live among his
domestic sorrows. Johnson censures Dryden for saying _he has few
thanks to pay his stars that he was born among Englishmen_.[134] We
have just seen that Hume went farther, and sighed to fly to a retreat
beyond that country which knew not to reward genius.--What, if Dryden
felt the dignity of that character he supported, dare we blame his
frankness? If the age be ungenerous, shall contemporaries escape the
scourge of the great author, who feels he is addressing another age
more favourable to him?

Johnson, too, notices his "Self-commendation; his diligence in
reminding the world of his merits, and expressing, with very little
scruple, his high opinion of his own powers." Dryden shall answer in
his own words; with all the simplicity of Montaigne, he expresses
himself with the dignity that would have become Milton or Gray:--

"It is a vanity common to all writers to overvalue their own
productions; and it is better for me to own this failing in myself,
than the world to do it for me. _For what other reason have I spent
my life in such an unprofitable study? Why am I grown old in seeking
so barren a reward as fame?_ The same parts and application which have
made me a poet, might have