“The State of Innocence” was published in 1674, and “Aureng-Zebe,” Dryden’s next tragedy, appeared in 1675.  In the interval, he informs us, his ardour for rhyming plays had considerably abated.  The course of study which he imposed on himself doubtless led him to this conclusion.  But it is also possible, that he found the peculiar facilities of that drama had excited the emulation of very inferior poets, who, by dint of show, rant, and clamorous hexameters, were likely to divide with him the public favour.  Before proceeding, therefore, to state the gradual alteration in Dryden’s own taste, we must perform the task of detailing the literary quarrels in which he was at this period engaged.  The chief of his rivals was Elkanah Settle, a person afterwards utterly contemptible; but who, first by the strength of a party at court, and afterwards by a faction in the state, was, for a time, buoyed up in opposition to Dryden.  It is impossible to detail the progress of the contest for public favour between these two ill-matched rivals, without noticing at the same time Dryden’s quarrel with Rochester, who appears to have played off Settle in opposition to him, as absolutely, and nearly as successfully, as Settle ever played off the literary [literal?] puppets, for which, in the ebb of his fortune, he wrote dramas.

In the year 1673, Dryden and Rochester were on such friendly terms, that our poet inscribed to his lordship his favourite play of “Marriage a la Mode;” not without acknowledgment of the deepest gratitude for favours done to his fortune and reputation.  The dedication, we have seen, was so favourably accepted by Rochester, that the reception called forth a second tribute of thanks from the poet to the patron.  But at this point, the interchange of kindness and of civility received a sudden and irrecoverable check.  This was partly owing to Rochester’s fickle and jealous temper, which induced him alternately to raise and depress the men of parts whom he loved to patronise; so that no one should ever become independent of his favour, or so rooted in the public opinion as to be beyond the reach of his satire; but it may also in part be attributed to Dryden’s attachment to Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, afterwards Duke of Buckingham, then Rochester’s rival in wit and court-favour, and from whom he had sustained a deadly affront, on an occasion, which, as the remote cause of a curious incident in Dryden’s life, I have elsewhere detailed in the words of Sheffield himself.  Rochester, who was branded as a coward in consequence of this transaction, must be reasonably supposed to entertain a sincere hatred against Mulgrave; with whom he had once lived on such friendly terms as to inscribe to him an Epistle on their mutual poems.  But, as his nerves had proved unequal to a personal conflict with his brother peer, his malice prompted the discharge of his spleen upon those men of literature whom his antagonist cherished and patronised.  Among these