DRYDEN. 303 



means squeamish (for he found &quot; Sir Martin Marall &quot; &quot; the 

 most entire piece of mirth .... that certainly ever was 

 writ .... very good wit therein, not fooling &quot;), writes in his 

 diary of the 17th June 1668: &quot;My wife and Deb to the 

 king s playhouse to-day, thinking to spy me there, and saw 

 the new play, * Evening Love, of Dryden s, which, though 

 the world commends, she likes not.&quot; The next day he saw 

 it himself, &quot; and do not like it, it being very smutty, and 

 nothing so good as the Maiden Queen or the * Indian 

 Emperor of Dry den s making. / was troubled at it.&quot; On 

 the 22nd he adds : &quot; Calling this day at Herringman s,* ho 

 tells me Dryden do himself call it but a fifth-rate play.&quot; 

 This was no doubt true, and yet, though Dryden in his 

 preface to the play says, &quot; I confess I have given [yielded] 

 too much to the people in it, and am ashamed for them as 

 well as for myself, that I have pleased them at so cheap a 

 rate,&quot; he takes care to add, &quot; not that there is anything 

 here that I would not defend to an ill-natured judge.&quot; The 

 plot was from Calderon, and the author, rebutting the charge 

 of plagiarism, tell us that the king ( 4&amp;lt; without whose command 

 they should no longer be troubled with anything of mine &quot;) 

 had already answered for him by saying, &quot;that he only 

 desired that those who accused me of theft would always 

 steal him plays like mine.&quot; Of the morals of the play he 

 has not a word, nor do I believe that he was conscious of 

 any harm in them till he was attacked by Collier, and then 

 (with some protest against what he considers the undue 

 severity of his censor) he had the manliness to confess that 

 he had done wrong. &quot; It becomes me not to draw my pen 

 in the defence of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it 

 for a good one.&quot;t And in a letter to his correspondent, Mrs. 

 Thomas, written only a few weeks before his death, warning 

 her against Mrs. Belm, he says, with remorseful sincerity : 

 &quot; I confess I am the last man in the world who ought in 

 justice to arraign her, who have been myself too much a 

 libertine in most of my poems, which I should be well 

 contented 1 had time either to purge or to see them fairly 

 * Dryden s publisher. t Preface to the Fabler. 



