It should have been but one continued song;
  Or, at the least, a dance of three hours long;

must refer to D’Avenant’s opera, called the “Siege of Rhodes,” acted in 1662; and that the expression, “in plays, he finds, you love mistakes,” alludes to the blunders of Teague, an Irish footman, in Sir Robert Howard’s play of the “Committee.”  The “Wild Gallant” was revived and published in 1669, with a new prologue and epilogue, and some other alterations, not of a nature, judging from the prologue, to improve the morality of the piece.  That the play had but indifferent success in the action, the poet himself has informed us, with the qualifying addition, that it more than once was the divertisement of Charles ii., by his own command.  This honourable distinction it probably acquired by the influence of the Countess of Castlemaine, then the royal favourite, to whom Dryden addresses some verses on her encouraging this play.—­See Vol.  XI p. 18.—­The plot is borrowed avowedly from the Spanish, and partakes of the unnatural incongruity, common to the dramatic pieces of that nation, as also of the bustle and intrigue, with which they are usually embroiled.  Few modern audiences would endure the absurd grossness of the deceit practised on Lord Nonsuch in the fourth act; nor is the plot of Lady Constance, to gain her lover, by marrying him in the disguise of a heathen divinity, more grotesque than unnatural.—­Yet, in the under characters, some liveliness of dialogue is maintained; and the reader may be amused with particular scenes, though, as a whole, the early fate of the play was justly merited.

These passages, in which the plot stands still, while the spectators are entertained with flippant dialogue and repartee, are ridiculed in the scene betwixt Prince Prettyman and Tom Thimble in the Rehearsal; the facetious Mr Bibber being the original of the latter personage.  The character of Trice, at least his whimsical humour of drinking, playing at dice by himself, and quarrelling as if engaged with a successful gamester, is imitated from the character of Carlo, in Jonson’s “Every Man out of his Humour,” who drinks with a supposed companion, quarrels about the pledge, and tosses about the cups and flasks in the imaginary brawl.  We have heard similar frolics related of a bon-vivant of the last generation, inventor of a game called solitaire, who used to complain of the hardship of drinking by himself, because the toast came too often about.

The whole piece seems to have been intended as a sacrifice to popular taste; and, perhaps, our poet only met a deserved fate, when he stooped to sooth the depraved appetite, which his talents enabled him to have corrected and purified.  Something like this feeling may be interred from the last lines of the second epilogue: 

Would you but change, for serious plot and verse,
This motley garniture of fool and farce;
Nor scorn a mode, because ’tis taught at home,
Which dues, like vests,[A] our gravity become;
Our poet yields you should this play refuse,
As tradesmen by the change of fashions lose,
With some content, their fripperies of France,
In hope it may their staple trade advance.