having just made public profession of the Roman faith, any reflections upon it were doubtless watched with a jealous eye.  But, though guiltless in this respect, the “Assignation” had worse faults.  The plot is but indifferently conducted and was neither enlivened with gay dialogue, nor with striking character:  the play, accordingly, proved unsuccessful in the representation.  Yet although, upon reading the “Assignation,” we cannot greatly wonder at this failure, still, considering the plays which succeeded about the same time, we may be disposed to admit that the weight of a party was thrown into the scale against its reception.  Buckingham, who shortly afterwards published a revised edition of the “Rehearsal,” failed not to ridicule the absurd and coarse trick, by which the enamoured prince prevents his father from discovering the domino of his mistress, which had been left in his apartment.[18] And Dryden’s rivals and enemies, now a numerous body, hailed with malicious glee an event which seemed to foretell the decay of his popularity.

The “Assignation” was published in 1673, and inscribed, by Dryden, to his much honoured friend Sir Charles Sedley.  There are some acrimonious passages in this dedication, referring to the controversies in which the author had been engaged; and, obscure as these have become, it is the biographer’s duty to detail and illustrate them.

It cannot be supposed that the authors of the time saw with indifference Dryden’s rapid success, and the measures which he had taken, by his critical essays, to guide the public attention and to fix it upon himself and the heroic plays, in which he felt his full superiority.  But no writer of the time could hope to be listened to by the public, if he entered a claim of personal competition against a poet so celebrated.  The defence of the ancient poets afforded a less presumptuous and more favourable pretext for taking the field, and for assailing Dryden’s writings, and avenging the slight notice he had afforded to his contemporaries, under the colour of defending the ancients against his criticism.  The “Essay of Dramatic Poesy” afforded a pretence for commencing this sort of warfare.  In that piece, Dryden had pointed out the faults of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher, with less ceremony than the height of their established reputation appeared to demand from a young author.  But the precedence which he undauntedly claimed for the heroic drama, and, more generally, the superiority of the plays of Dryden’s own age, whether tragic or comic, over those of the earlier part of the seventeenth century, was asserted, not only distinctly, but irreverently, in the Epilogue to the “Conquest of Granada:” 

  “They who have best succeeded on the stage,
  Have still conformed their genius to their age. 
  Thus Jonson did mechanic humour show
  When men were dull, and conversation low. 
  Then comedy was faultless, but ’twas coarse: 
  Cobb’s tankard was a jest, and Otter’s