304 DRY DEN, 



burned.&quot; Congreve was less patient, and even Dryden, in 

 the last epilogue he ever wrote, attempts an excuse : 



&quot; Perhaps the Parson stretched a point too far, 

 &quot;When with our Theatres he waged a war ; 

 He tells you that this very moral age 

 Received the first infection from the Stage, 

 But sure a banished Court, with lewdness fraught, 

 The seeds of open vice returning brought. 



Whitehall the naked Venus first revealed, 

 Who, standing, as at Cyprus, in her shrine, 

 The strumpet was adored with rites divine. 



The poets, who must live by courts or starve, 

 Were proud so good a Government to serve, 

 And, mixing with buffoons and pimps profane, 

 Tainted the Stage for some small snip of gain.&quot; 



Dryden least of all men should have stooped to this 

 palliation, for he had, not without justice, said of himself : 

 &quot; The same parts and application which have made me a 

 poet might have raised me to any honours of the gown.&quot; 

 Milton and Marvell neither lived by the Court, nor starved. 

 Charles Lamb most ingeniously defends the Comedy of the 

 Restoration as &quot;the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted 

 casuistry,&quot; where there was no pretence of representing a 

 real world.* But this was certainly not so. Dryden again 

 and again boasts of the superior advantage which his age 

 had over that of the elder dramatists, in painting polite life, 

 and attributes it to a greater freedom of intercourse 

 between the poets and the frequenters of the Court.f We 

 shall be less surprised at the kind of refinement upon which 

 Dryden congratulated himself, when we learn (from the 

 dedication of &quot; Marriage a la Mode &quot;) that the Earl of 

 Rochester was its exemplar : &quot; The best comic writers of 



* I interpret some otherwise ambiguous passages in this charming 

 and acute essay by its title: &quot;On the artificial comedy of the last 

 century.&quot; 



t See especially his defence of the epilogue to the Second Part of the 

 Conquest of Granada &quot; (1672). 



