“Lame Mephibosheth, the wizard’s[13] son.”

There also appeared “The Loyal Medal Vindicated,” and a piece entitled “Dryden’s Satire to his Muse,” imputed to Lord Somers, but which, in conversation with Pope, he positively disavowed.  All these, and many other pieces, the fruits of incensed and almost frantic party fury, are marked by the most coarse and virulent abuse.  The events in our author’s life were few, and his morals, generally speaking, irreproachable; so that the topics for the malevolence of his antagonists were both scanty and strained.  But they ceased not, with the true pertinacity of angry dulness, to repeat, in prose and verse, in couplet, ballad, and madrigal, the same unvaried accusations, amounting in substance to the following:  That Dryden had been bred a puritan and republican; that he had written an elegy on Cromwell (which one wily adversary actually reprinted); that he had been in poverty at the Restoration; that Lady Elizabeth Dryden’s character was tarnished by the circumstances attending their nuptials; that Dryden had written the “Essay on Satire,” in which the king was libelled; that he had been beaten by three men in Rose-alley; finally, that he was a Tory, and a tool of arbitrary power.  This cuckoo song, garnished with the burden of Bayes and Poet Squab,[14] was rung in the ear of the public again and again, and with an obstinacy which may convince us how little there was to be said, when that little was so often repeated.  Feeble as these attacks were, their number, like that of the gnats described by Spenser,[15] seems to have irritated Dryden to exert the power of his satire, and, like the blast of the northern wind, to sweep away at once these clamorous and busy, though ineffectual assailants.  Two, in particular, claimed distinction from the nameless crowd; Settle, Dryden’s ancient foe, and Shadwell, who had been originally a dubious friend.

Of Dryden’s controversy with Settle we have already spoken fully; but we may here add, that, in addition to former offences of a public and private nature, Elkanah, in the Prologue to the “Emperor of Morocco,” acted in March 1681-2, had treated Dryden with great irreverence.[16] Shadwell had been for some time in good habits with Dryden; yet an early difference of taste and practice in comedy, not only existed between them, but was the subject of reciprocal debate, and something approaching to rivalry.

Dryden, as we have seen, had avowed his preference of lively dialogue in comedy to delineation of character, or, in other words, of wit and repartee to what was then called humour.  On this subject Shadwell early differed from the laureate.  Conscious of considerable powers in observing nature, while he was deficient in that liveliness of fancy which is necessary to produce vivacity of dialogue, Shadwell affected, or perhaps entertained, a profound veneration for the memory of Ben Jonson, and proposed him as his model in the representation of such characters as were to