Of this address the reputed author was Eustace Budgell, of the Inner Temple, whose name is usually found printed in connection with it—­“the worthless Budgell,” as Johnson calls him—­“the man who calls me cousin,” as Addison used contemptuously to describe him.  In Johnson’s Life of Ambrose Philips, however, it is stated that Addison was himself the real author of the epilogue, but that “when it had been at first printed with his name he came early in the morning, before the copies were distributed, and ordered it to be given to Budgell, that it might add weight to the solicitation which he was then making for a place.”  It is probable, moreover, that Addison was not particularly anxious to own a production which, after all, was but a following of an example so questionable as Prior’s epilogue to “Phaedra,” above mentioned.  The controversy in “The Spectator” was, without doubt, a matter of pre-arrangement between Addison and Steele, for the entertainment of the public and the increase of the fame of Philips; and the letter of “Philomedes,” which with the epilogue in question has been often ascribed to Budgell, was probably also the work of Addison.  For all the rather unaccountable zeal of Addison and Steele on behalf of their friend, however, the reputation of Philips has not thriven; he is chiefly remembered now by the nickname of Namby-Pamby, bestowed on him by Pope, who had always vehemently contested his claims to distinction.  As Johnson states the case:  “Men sometimes suffer by injudicious kindness; Philips became ridiculous, without his own fault, by the absurd admiration of his friends, who decorated him with honorary garlands which the first breath of contradiction blasted.”  Johnson, by-the-way, had at the age of nineteen written a new epilogue to “The Distressed Mother,” for some young ladies who designed an amateur performance of that still-admired tragedy.  The epilogue was intended to be delivered by “a lady who was to personate the ghost of Hermione.”

But although protests were now and then, as in the case of “The Distressed Mother,” raised against the absurdity of the custom, comic epilogues to tragic plays long remained in favour with the patrons of the stage.  Pointed reference to this fact is contained in the epilogue spoken by the beautiful Mrs. Hartley to Murphy’s tragedy of “Alzuma,” produced at Covent Garden in 1773: 

    Our play is o’er; now swells each throbbing breast
    With expectation of the coming jest. 
    By Fashion’s law, whene’er the Tragic Muse
    With sympathetic tears each eye bedews;
    When some bright Virtue at her call appears. 
    Waked from the dead repose of rolling years;
    When sacred worthies she bids breathe anew,
    That men may be what she displays to view;
    By fashion’s law with light fantastic mien
    The Comic Sister trips it o’er the scene;
    Armed at all points with wit and wanton wiles,
    Plays off her airs, and calls forth all her smiles;
    Till each fine feeling of the heart be o’er,
    And the gay wonder how they wept before!