in 1672, and printed in the same year; the jargon of the songs, like similar nonsense of our own day, seems to have been well received on the stage.  Dryden, who was not always above feeling indignation at the bad taste and unjust preferences of the age, attacked Ravenscroft in the prologue to “The Assignation,” as he had before, though less directly, in that of “Marriage a-la-Mode.”  Hence the exuberant and unrepressed joy of that miserable scribbler broke forth upon the damnation of Dryden’s performance, in the following passage of a prologue to another of his pilfered performances, called “The Careless Lovers,” acted, according to Langbaine, in the vacation succeeding the fall of “The Assignation,” in 1673: 

An author did, to please you, let his wit run, Of late, much on a serving man and cittern; And yet, you would not like the serenade,—­ Nay, and you damned his nuns in masquerade:  You did his Spanish sing-song too abhor; Ah! que locura con tanto rigor! In fine, the whole by you so much was blamed, To act their parts, the players were ashamed[2].  Ah, how severe your malice was that day!  To damn, at once, the poet and his play[3]:  But why was your rage just at that time shown, When what the author writ was all his own?  Till then, he borrowed from romance, and did translate[4]; And those plays found a more indulgent fate.

Ravenscroft, however, seems to have given the first offence; for, in the prologue to “The Citizen turned Gentleman,” licensed 9th August 1672, we find the following lines, obviously levelled at “The Conquest of Granada,” and other heroic dramas of our author: 

  Then shall the knight, that had a knock in’s cradle,
  Such as Sir Martin and Sir Arthur Addle[5],
  Be flocked unto, as the great heroes now
  In plays of rhyme and noise, with wondrous show:—­
  Then shall the house, to see these Hectors kill and slay,
  That bravely fight out the whole plot of the play,
  Be for at least six months full every day.

Langbaine, who quotes the lines from the prologue to Ravenscroft’s “Careless Lovers,” is of opinion, that he paid Dryden too great a compliment in admitting the originality of “The Assignation,” and labours to shew, that the characters are imitated from the “Romance Comique” of Scarron, and other novels of the time.  But Langbaine seems to have been unable to comprehend, that originality consists in the mode of treating a subject, more than in the subject itself.

“The Assignation” was acted in 1672, and printed in 1673.

Footnotes: 

1.  In the prologue to this beautified edition, Ravenscroft modestly
   tells us: 

     Like other poets, he’ll not proudly scorn
     To own, that he but winnowed Shakespeare’s corn: 
     So far was he from robbing him of’s treasure,
     That he did add his own, to make full measure.