Atlantic Monthly | Page 8

Milton owed impunity from the vengeance otherwise destined for the apologist of regicide, and so owed the life and leisure requisite to the composition of "Paradise Lost." Davenant, grateful for the old kindness of the ex-secretary, used his influence successfully with Charles to let the offender escape.[18] This is certainly the greenest of Davenant's laurels. Without it, the world might not have heard one of the sublimest expressions of human genius.
Davenant died in 1668. The laurel was hung up unclaimed until 1670, when John Dryden received it, with patent dated back to the summer succeeding Davenant's death. Dryden assures us that it was Sir Thomas Clifford, whose name a year later lent the initial letter to the "Cabal," who presented him to the king, and procured his appointment.[19] Masques had now ceased to be the mode. What the dramatist could do to amuse the _blas��_ court of Charles II. he was obliged to do within the limits of legitimate dramatic representation, due care being taken to follow French models, and substitute the idiom of Corneille and Moli��re for that of Shakspeare. Dryden, whose plays are now read only by the curious, was, in 1670, the greatest of living dramatists. He had expiated his Cromwellian backslidings by the "Astraea Redux," and the "Annus Mirabilis." He had risen to high favor with the king. His tragedies in rhyming couplets were all the vogue. Already his fellow-playwrights deemed their success as fearfully uncertain, unless they had secured, price three guineas, a prologue or epilogue from the Laureate. So fertile was his own invention, that he stood ready to furnish by contract five plays a year,--a challenge fortunately declined by the managers of the day. Thus, if the Laureate stipend were not punctually paid, as was often the case, seeing the necessitous state of the royal finances and the bevy of fair ladies, whose demands, extravagant as they were, took precedence of all others, his revenues were adequate to the maintenance of a family, the matron of which was a Howard, educated, as a daughter of nobility, to the enjoyment of every indulgence. These were the Laureate's brightest days. His popularity was at its height, a fact evinced by the powerful coalitions deemed necessary to diminish it. Indeed, the laurel had hardly rested upon Dryden's temples before he experienced the assaults of an organized literary opposition. The Duke of Buckingham, then the admitted leader of fashionable prodigacy, borrowed the aid of Samuel Butler, at whose "Hudibras" the world was still laughing,--of Thomas Sprat, then on the high-road to those preferments which have given him an important place in history,--of Martin Clifford, a familiar of the green-room and coffee-house,--and concocted a farce ridiculing the person and office of the Laureate. "The Rehearsal" was acted in 1671. The hero, _Mr. Bayes_, imitated all the personal peculiarities of Dryden, used his cant phrases, burlesqued his style, and exposed, while pretending to defend, his ridiculous points, until the laugh of the town was fairly turned upon the "premier-poet of the realm." The wit was undoubtedly of the broadest, and the humor at the coffee-room level; but it was so much the more effective. Dryden affected to be indifferent to the satire. He jested at the time taken[20] and the number of hands employed upon the composition. Twenty years later he was at pains to declare his perfect freedom from rancor in consequence of the attack.
There, is much reason to suspect, however, that "The Rehearsal" was not forgotten, when the "Absalom and Achitophel" was written, and that the character of Zimri gathered much of its intense vigor and depth of shadow from recollections of the ludicrous _Mr. Bayes_. The portrait has the look of being designed as a quittance in full of old scores. "The Rehearsal," though now and then recast and re?nacted to suit other times, is now no otherwise remembered than as the suggester of Sheridan's "Critic."
Upon the heels of this onslaught others followed rapidly. Rochester, disposed to singularity of opinion, set up Elkanah Settle, a young author of some talent, as a rival to the Laureate. Anonymous bardings lampooned him. _Mr. Bayes_ was a broad target for every shaft, so that the complaint so feelingly uttered in his latter days, that "no man living had ever been so severely libelled" as he, had a wide foundation of fact. Sometimes, it must be owned, the thrusts were the natural result of controversies into which the Laureate indiscreetly precipitated himself; sometimes they came of generous partisanship in behalf of friends, such friends, for example, as Sir Robert Howard, his brother-in-law, an interminable spinner of intolerable verse, who afflicted the world in his day with plays worse than plagues, and poems as worthless as his plays. It was to a quarrel for and a quarrel against this gentleman that