[29] See vol. xviii.

[30] “Thine be the laurel, then; thy blooming age
  Can best, if any can, support the stage,
  Which to declines, that shortly we may see
  Players and plays reduced to second infancy. 
  Sharp to the world, but thoughtless of renown,
  They plot not on the stage, but on the town;
  And in despair their empty pit to fill,
  Set up some foreign monster in a bill: 
  Thus they jog on, still tricking, never thriving,
  And murth’ring plays, which they miscall—­reviving. 
  Our sense is nonsense, through their pipes conveyed;
  Scarce can a poet know the play he made,
  ’Tis so disguised in death; nor thinks ’tis he
  That suffers in the mangled tragedy: 
  Thus Itys first was killed, and after dressed
  For his own sire, the chief invited guest.”

This gave great offence to the players; one of whom (Powell) made a petulant retort, which the reader will find in a note upon the Epistle itself, vol. xi.

[31] Milbourne, in a note on that passage in the dedication to the Aeneid—­“He who can write well in rhyme, may write better in blank verse,” says,—­“We shall know that, when we see how much better Dryden’s Homer will be than his Virgil.”

[32] “Much the same character he gave of it (i.e. Paradise Lost) to a north-country gentleman, to whom I mentioned the book, he being a great reader, but not in a right train, coming to town seldom, and keeping little company.  Dryden amazed him with speaking so loftily of it.  ’Why, Mr. Dryden, says he (Sir W.L. told me the thing himself), ’tis not in rhyme.’  ’No, [replied Dryden;] nor would I have done Virgil in rhyme, if I was to begin it again.’”—­This conversation is supposed by Mr. Malone to have been held with Sir Wilfrid Lawson, of Isell in Cumberland.

[33] See a letter to Mrs. Thomas, vol. xviii.

[34] “Some of these poets, to excuse their guilt, allege for themselves, that the degeneracy of the age makes their lewd way of writing necessary:  they pretend the auditors will not be pleased, unless they are thus entertained from the stage; and to please, they say, is the chief business of the poet.  But this is by no means a just apology:  it is not true, as was said before, that the poet’s chief business is to please.  His chief business is to instruct, to make mankind wiser and better; and in order to this, his care should be to please and entertain the audience with all the wit and art he is master of.  Aristotle and Horace, and all their critics and commentators all men of wit and sense agree, that this is the end of poetry.  But they say, it is their profession to write for the stage; and that poets must starve, if they will not in this way humour the audience:  the theatre will be as unfrequented as the churches, and the poet and the parson equally neglected.  Let the poet then abandon his profession, and take up some honest lawful calling,