[15]
    “As when a swarm of gnats at eventide
    Out of the fennes of Allan doe arise,
  Their murmuring small trompetts sownden wide,
    Whiles in the aire their clustring army flies,
    That as a cloud doth seeme to dim the skies;
  No man nor beast may rest or take repast
    For their sharp wounds and noyous injuries,
  Till the fierce northern wind with blustring blast
  Doth blow them quite away, and in the ocean cast.”

[16]
  “How finely would the sparks be caught to-day,
  Should a Whig poet write a Tory play,
  And you, possessed with rage before, should send
  Your random shot abroad and maul a friend? 
  For you, we find, too often hiss and clap,
  Just as you live, speak, think, and fight—­by hap. 
  And poets, we all know, can change, like you,
  And are alone to their own interest true;
  Can write against all sense, nay even their own: 
  The vehicle called pension makes it down.
  No fear of cudgels, where there’s hope of bread;
  A well-filled paunch forgets a broken head.”

[17] I quote the passage at length, as evincing the difference between Dryden’s taste in comedy and that of Shadwell:—­

“I have endeavoured to represent variety of humours (most of the persons of the play differing in their characters from one another), which was the practice of Ben Jonson, whom I think all drammatick poets ought to imitate, though none are like to come near; he being the onely person that appears to me to have made perfect representation of human life:  most other authors that I ever read, either have wilde romantick tales, wherein they strein love and honour to that ridiculous height, that it becomes burlesque; or in their lower comedies content themselves with one or two humours at most, and those not near so perfect characters as the admirable Jonson; always made, who never wrote comedy without seven or eight considerable humours.  I never saw one, except that of Falstaffe, that was, in my judgment, comparable to any of Jonson’s considerable humours.  You will pardon this digression when I tell you, he is the man, of all the world, I most passionately admire for his excellency in drammatick poetry.

“Though I have known some of late so insolent to say, that Ben Jonson wrote his best playes without wit, imagining, that all the wit playes consisted in bringing two persons upon the stage to break jest, and to bob one another, which they call repartie, not considering, that there is more wit and invention required in the finding out good humour and matter proper for it, then in all their smart reparties; for, in the writing of a humour, a man is confined not to swerve from the character, and obliged to say nothing but what is proper to it; but in the playes which have been wrote of late, there is no such thing as perfect character, but the two chief persons are most commonly a swearing, drinking, whoring ruffian for