where, joining industry to his great wit, he may soon get above the complaints of poverty, so common among these ingenious men, and lie under no necessity of prostituting his wit to any such vile purposes as are here censured.  This will-be a course of life more profitable and honourable to himself, and more useful to others.  And there are among these writers some, who think they might have risen to the highest dignities in other professions, had they employed their wit in those ways. It is a mighty dishonour and reproach to any man that is capable of being useful to the world in any liberal and virtuous profession, to lavish out his life and wit in propagating vice and corruption of manners, and in battering from the stage the strongest entrenchments and best works of religion and virtue.  Whoever makes this his choice, when the other was in his power, may he go off the stage unpitied, complaining of neglect and poverty, the just punishments of his irreligion and folly!”

[35] Mr. Malone conceives, that the Fables were published before the “Satire upon Wit;” but he had not this evidence of the contrary before him.  It is therefore clear, that Dryden endured a second attack from Blackmore, before making any reply.

[36] Since Scott wrote, the Collier-Congreve controversy has been the subject of well-known essays by Lamb, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Macaulay.  Very recently a fresh and excellent account of Collier’s book has appeared in M.A.  Beljame’s Le Public et les Hommes de Lettres en Angleterre au xviiieme siecle (Paris:  Hachette, 1881), a remarkable volume, to which, and to its author, I owe much.—­Ed.

[37] In his apology for “The Tale of a Tub,” he points out to the resentment of the clergy, “those heavy illiterate scribblers, prostitute in their reputations, vicious in their lives, and ruined in their fortunes, who, to the shame of good sense, as well as piety, are greedily read, merely upon the strength of bold, false, impious assertions, mixed with unmannerly reflections on the priesthood.”  And, after no great interval, he mentions the passage quoted, p. 375 “in which Dryden, L’Estrange, and some others I shall not name, are levelled at; who, having spent their lives in faction, and apostasies, and all manner of vice, pretended to be sufferers for loyalty and religion.  So Dryden tells us, in one of his prefaces, of his merits and sufferings, and thanks God that he possesses his soul in patience.  In other places he talks at the same rate.”

[38] Vol. xviii.

[39] Thus in a lampoon already quoted (footnote 29, Section VI)

  “Quitting my duller hopes, the poor renown
   Of Eton College, or a Dublin gown.”