I shall say the less of Mr. Collier, because in many things he has tax’d me justly; and I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and expressions of mine which can be truly argued of obscenity, profaneness, of immorality; and retract them.  If he be my enemy, let him triumph; if he be my friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance.  It becomes me not to draw my pen in the defense of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it for a good one.  Yet it were not difficult to prove that in many places he has perverted my meaning by his glosses, and interpreted my words into blasphemy and bawdry, of which they were not guilty.  Besides that, he is too much given to horseplay in his raillery, and comes to battle like a dictator from the plow.  I will not say:  “The zeal of God’s house has eaten him up;” but I am sure it has devoured some part of his good manners and civility.  It might also be doubted whether it were altogether zeal which prompted him to this rough manner of proceeding:  perhaps it became not one of his function to rake into the rubbish of ancient and modern plays; a divine might have employ’d his pains to better purpose than in the nastiness of Plautus and Aristophanes; whose examples, as they excuse not me, so it might be possibly supposed that he read them not without some pleasure.  They who have written commentaries on those poets, or on Horace, Juvenal, and Martial, have explain’d some vices which, without their interpretation, had been unknown to modern times.  Neither has he judg’d impartially betwixt the former age and us.

There is more bawdry in one play of Fletcher’s, call’d The Custom of the Country, than in all ours together.  Yet this has been often acted on the stage in my remembrance.  Are the times so much more reform’d now than they were five and twenty years ago?  If they are, I congratulate the amendment of our morals.  But I am not to prejudice the cause of my fellow poets, tho’ I abandon my own defense:  they have some of them answer’d for themselves, and neither they nor I can think Mr. Collier so formidable an enemy that we should shun him.  He has lost ground at the latter end of the day, by pursuing his point too far, like the Prince of Conde at the battle of Seneffe:  from immoral plays to no plays, ab abusu ad usum, non valet consequentia[36].  But being a party, I am not to erect myself into a judge.  As for the rest of those who have written against me, they are such scoundrels that they deserve not the least notice to be taken of them, B——­ and M——­ are only distinguish’d from the crowd by being remember’d to their infamy: 

  —­Demetri, teque Tigelli[37]
  Discipulorum inter jubeo plorare cathedras.

[Footnote A:  John Dryden (1631-1700), the great dramatic and satirical poet of the later seventeenth century, whose translation of Virgil’s “AEneid” appears in another volume of the Harvard Classics, deserves hardly less distinction as a prose writer than as a poet.  The present essay, prefixed to a volume of narrative poems, is largely concerned with Chaucer, and in its genial and penetrating criticism, expressed with characteristic clearness and vigor, can be seen the ground for naming Dryden the first of English literary critics, and the founder of modern prose style.]