and correcting it."[25] On the other hand, the following anecdote is told upon very respectable authority.  “Mr. St. John, afterwards Lord Bolingbroke, happening to pay a morning visit to Dryden, whom he always respected, found him in an unusual agitation of spirits, even to a trembling.  On inquiring the cause, ’I have been up all night,’ replied the old bard:  ’my musical friends made me promise to write them an Ode for their feast of St. Cecilia:  I have been so struck with the subject which occurred to me, that I could not leave it till I had completed it; here it is, finished at one sitting.’  And immediately he showed him this Ode, which places the British lyric poetry above that of any other nation."[26] These accounts are not, however, so contradictory as they may at first sight appear.  It is possible that Dryden may have completed, at one sitting, the whole Ode, and yet have employed a fortnight, or much more, in correction.  There is strong internal evidence to show that the poem was, speaking with reference to its general structure, wrought off at once.  A halt or pause, even of a day, would perhaps have injured that continuous flow of poetical language and description which argues the whole scene to have arisen at once upon the author’s imagination.  It seems possible, more especially in lyrical poetry, to discover where the author has paused for any length of time; for the union of the parts is rarely so perfect as not to show a different strain of thought and feeling.  There may be something fanciful, however, in this reasoning, which I therefore abandon to the reader’s mercy; only begging him to observe, that we have no mode of estimating the exertions of a quality so capricious as a poetic imagination; so that it is very possible, that the Ode to St. Cecilia may have been the work of twenty-four hours, whilst correction and emendations, perhaps of no very great consequence, occupied the author as many days.  Derrick, in his “Life of Dryden,” tells us, upon the authority of Walter Moyle, that the society paid Dryden L40 for this sublime Ode, which, from the passage in his letter above quoted, seems to have been more than the bard expected at commencing his labour.  The music for this celebrated poem was originally composed by Jeremiah Clarke,[27] one of the stewards of the festival, whose productions where more remarkable for deep pathos and delicacy than for fire and energy.  It is probable that, with such a turn of mind and taste, he may have failed in setting the sublime, lofty, and daring flights of the Ode to St. Cecilia.  Indeed his composition was not judged worthy of publication.  The Ode, after some impertinent alterations, made by Hughes, at the request of Sir Richard Steele, was set to music by Clayton, who, with Steele, managed a public concert in 1711; but neither was this a successful essay to connect the poem with the art it celebrated.  At length, in 1736, “Alexander’s Feast” was set by Handel, and performed in the Theatre-Royal,