that he had read more books than his
   lordship; a repartee which exhibits more effrontery than wit.  The
   culprits employed Killigrew and another courtier to solicit a
   mitigation of the fine; but, in the true spirit of court
   friendship, they begged it for themselves, and extorted every
   farthing.

6.  Our author here shortly repeats what he has said at more length in
   his Defence of the Epilogue to the second part of the Conquest of
   Granada.

7.  The pedant Mr Malone conjectures to be Matthew Clifford, Master of
   the Charter-house, one of the Duke of Buckingham’s colleagues in
   writing “The Rehearsal.”  But the pedant is obviously the same
   with the Fastidious Brisk of Oxford, mentioned in the following
   sentence, which can hardly apply to Clifford, who was educated at
   Cambridge.  One Leigh is said by Wood to have written the Censure of
   the Rota; and as he was educated at Oxford and the book printed
   there, he may be “the contemptible pedant,” though his profession
   was that of a player in the duke’s company.

8.  Fungoso and Sir Fastidious Brisk are two characters in “Every Man
   Out of his Humour;” the former of whom is represented as copying
   the dress and manners of the latter.  Dryden seems only to mean,
   that one of those pamphleteers was the servile imitator of the
   other.

PROLOGUE.

  Prologues, like bells to churches, toll you in
  With chiming verse, till the dull plays begin;
  With this sad difference though, of pit and pew,
  You damn the poet, but the priest damns you: 
  But priests can treat you at your own expence,
  And gravely call you fools without offence. 
  Poets, poor devils, have ne’er your folly shown,
  But, to their cost, you proved it was their own: 
  For, when a fop’s presented on the stage,
  Straight all the coxcombs in the town engage;
  For his deliverance and revenge they join,
  And grunt, like hogs, about their captive swine. 
  Your poets daily split upon this shelf,—­
  You must have fools, yet none will have himself. 
  Or if, in kindness, you that leave would give,
  No man could write you at that rate you live: 
  For some of you grow fops with so much haste,
  Riot in nonsense, and commit such waste,
  ’Twould ruin poets should they spend so fast. 
  He, who made this, observed what farces hit,
  And durst not disoblige you now with wit. 
  But, gentlemen, you over-do the mode;
  You must have fools out of the common road. 
  Th’ unnatural strained buffoon is only taking;
  No fop can please you now of God’s own making. 
  Pardon our poet, if he speaks his mind;
  You come to plays with your own follies lined: 
  Small fools fall on you, like small showers, in vain;
  Your own oiled coats keep out all common rain.