The Works of John Dryden, Volume 6 | Page 3

it last[3]. I might enlarge upon
the subject with my author, and assure you, that I have served as long
for you, as one of the patriarchs did for his Old-Testament mistress; but
I leave those flourishes, when occasion shall serve, for a greater orator
to use, and dare only tell you, that I never passed any part of my life
with greater satisfaction or improvement to myself, than those years
which I have lived in the honour of your lordship's acquaintance; if I
may have only the time abated when the public service called you to
another part of the world, which, in imitation of our florid speakers, I
might (if I durst presume upon the expression) call the parenthesis of
my life.

That I have always honoured you, I suppose I need not tell you at this
time of day; for you know I staid not to date my respects to you from
that title which now you have, and to which you bring a greater
addition by your merit, than you receive from it by the name; but I am
proud to let others know, how long it is that I have been made happy by
my knowledge of you; because I am sure it will give me a reputation
with the present age, and with posterity. And now, my lord, I know you
are afraid, lest I should take this occasion, which lies so fair for me, to
acquaint the world with some of those excellencies which I have
admired in you; but I have reasonably considered, that to acquaint the
world, is a phrase of a malicious meaning; for it would imply, that the
world were not already acquainted with them. You are so generally
known to be above the meanness of my praises, that you have spared
my evidence, and spoiled my compliment: Should I take for my
common places, your knowledge both of the old and the new
philosophy; should I add to these your skill in mathematics and history;
and yet farther, your being conversant with all the ancient authors of
the Greek and Latin tongues, as well as with the modern--I should tell
nothing new to mankind; for when I have once but named you, the
world will anticipate all my commendations, and go faster before me
than I can follow. Be therefore secure, my lord, that your own fame has
freed itself from the danger of a panegyric; and only give me leave to
tell you, that I value the candour of your nature, and that one character
of friendliness, and, if I may have leave to call it, kindness in you,
before all those other which make you considerable in the nation[4].
Some few of our nobility are learned, and therefore I will not conclude
an absolute contradiction in the terms of nobleman and scholar; but as
the world goes now, 'tis very hard to predicate one upon the other; and
'tis yet more difficult to prove, that a nobleman can be a friend to
poetry. Were it not for two or three instances in Whitehall, and in the
town, the poets of this age would find so little encouragement for their
labours, and so few understanders, that they might have leisure to turn
pamphleteers, and augment the number of those abominable scribblers,
who, in this time of licence, abuse the press, almost every day, with
nonsense, and railing against the government.

It remains, my lord, that I should give you some account of this
comedy, which you have never seen; because it was written and acted
in your absence, at your government of Jamaica. It was intended for an
honest satire against our crying sin of _keeping_; how it would have
succeeded, I can but guess, for it was permitted to be acted only thrice.
The crime, for which it suffered, was that which is objected against the
satires of Juvenal, and the epigrams of Catullus, that it expressed too
much of the vice which it decried. Your lordship knows what answer
was returned by the elder of those poets, whom I last mentioned, to his
accusers:
_--castum esse decet pium poetam Ipsum. Versiculos nihil necesse est:
Qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem Si sint molliculi et parum
pudici._
But I dare not make that apology for myself; and therefore have taken a
becoming care, that those things which offended on the stage, might be
either altered, or omitted in the press; for their authority is, and shall be,
ever sacred to me, as much absent as present, and in all alterations of
their fortune, who for those reasons have stopped its farther appearance
on the theatre. And whatsoever hindrance it has been to me in point of
profit, many of my friends can bear me witness, that I