DRYDEN. 323 



seems to me, on the whole, to have been forbearing, which 

 is the more striking as he tells us repeatedly that he was 

 naturally vindictive. It was he who called revenge &quot; the 

 darling attribute of heaven.&quot; &quot; I complain not of their 

 lampoons and libels, though I have been the public mark 

 for many years. I am vindictive enough to have repelled 

 force by force, if I could imagine that any of them had ever 

 reached me.&quot; It was this feeling of easy superiority, I 

 suspect, that made him the mark for so much jealous 

 vituperation. Scott is wrong in attributing his onslaught 

 upon Settle to jealousy because one of the latter s plays had 

 been performed at Court, an honour never paid to any of 

 Dryden s.* I have found nothing like a trace of jealousy 

 in that large and benignant nature. In his vindication of 

 the &quot; Duke of Guise,&quot; he says, with honest confidence in 

 himself : &quot; Nay, I durst almost refer myself to some of the 

 angry poets on the other side, whether I have not rather 

 countenanced and assisted their beginnings than hindered 

 them from rising.&quot; He seems to have been really as 

 indifferent to the attacks on himself as Pope pretended 

 to be. In the same vindication he says of the &quot; Rehearsal,&quot; 

 the only one of them that had any wit in it, and it has a 

 great deal : &quot; Much less am I concerned at the noble name 

 of Bayes ; that s a brat so like his own father that he 

 cannot be mistaken for any other body. They might 

 as reasonably have called Tom Sternhold Virgil, and the 

 resemblance would have held as well.&quot; In his Essay on 

 Satire he says : &quot; And yet we know that in Christian 

 charity all offences are to be forgiven as we expect the like 

 pardon for those we daily commit against Almighty God. 



* Scott had never seen Pepys s Diary when he wrote this, or he 

 would have left it unwritten : &quot; Fell to discourse on the last night s 

 work at Court, where the ladies and Duke of Monmouth acted the 

 Indian Emperor, wherein they told me these things most remark 

 able that not any woman but the Duchess of Monmouth and Mrs. 

 Cornwallis did anything but like fools and stocks, but that these 

 two did do most extraordinary well ; that not any man did anything 

 well but Captain O Bryan, who spoke and did well, but above all 

 things did dance most incomparably.&quot; 14th January 1668. 



