It will certainly be admitted, that a man, surprised in the dark and beaten by ruffians, loses no honour by such a misfortune.  But, if Dryden had received the same discipline from Rochester’s own hand without resenting it, his drubbing could not have been more frequently made a matter of reproach to him;—­a sign surely of the penury of subjects for satire in his life and character, since an accident, which might have happened to the greatest hero who ever lived, was resorted to as an imputation on his honour.  The Rose-alley ambuscade became almost proverbial;[22] and even Mulgrave, the real author of the satire, and upon whose shoulders the blows ought in justice to have descended, mentions the circumstance in his “Art of Poetry;” with a cold and self-sufficient complacent sneer: 

  “Though praised and punished for another’s rhymes,
  His own deserve as great applause sometimes.”

To which is added in a note, “A libel for which he was both applauded and wounded, though entirely ignorant of the whole matter.”  This flat and conceited couplet, and note, the noble author judged it proper to omit in the corrected edition of his poem.  Otway alone, no longer the friend of Rochester, and perhaps no longer the enemy of Dryden, has spoken of the author of this dastardly outrage with the contempt his cowardly malice deserved: 

“Poets in honour of the truth should write, With the same spirit brave men for it fight; And though against him causeless hatreds rise, And daily where he goes, of late, he spies The scowls of sullen and revengeful eyes; ’Tis what he knows with much contempt to bear, And serves a cause too good to let him fear:  He fears no poison from incensed drab, No ruffian’s five-foot sword, nor rascal’s stab; Nor any other snares of mischief laid, Not a Rose-alley cudgel ambuscade; From any private cause where malice reigns, Or general pique all blockheads have to brains.”

It does not appear that Dryden ever thought it worth his while to take revenge on Rochester; and the only allusion to him in his writings may be found in the Essay prefixed to the translation of Juvenal, where he is mentioned as a man of quality, whose ashes our author was unwilling to disturb, and who had paid Dorset, to whom that piece is inscribed, the highest compliment which his self-sufficiency could afford to any one.  Perhaps Dryden remembered Rochester among others, when, in the same piece, he takes credit for resisting opportunities and temptation to take revenge, even upon those by whom he had been notoriously and wantonly provoked.[23]

The detail of these quarrels has interrupted our account of Dryden’s writings, which we are now to resume.