R.G.

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DRYDEN’S “ESSAY UPON SATIRE.”

On what evidence does the statement rest, that the Earl of Mulgrave was the author of the Essay upon Satire, and that Dryden merely corrected and polished it?  As at present advised, I have considerable doubt upon the point:  and although, in modern editions of Dryden’s Works, I find it headed An Essay upon Satire, written by Mr. Dryden and the Earl of Mulgrave, yet in the State Poems, vol. i. p. 179., originally printed in the lifetime of Dryden, it is attributed solely to him—­“An Essay upon Satyr. By J. Dryden, Esq.”  This gets rid of the assertion in the note of “D.,” in the Aldine edition of Dryden (i. 105.), that “the Earl of Mulgrave’s name has been always joined with Dryden’s, as concerned in the composition.”  Was it not first published without notice that any other person was concerned in it but Dryden?

The internal evidence, too, is strong that Dryden was the author of it.  I do not here refer to the {423} free, flexible, and idiomatic character of the versification, so exactly like that of Dryden; but principally to the description the Essay upon Satire contains of the Earl of Mulgrave himself, beginning,

  “Mulgrave had much ado to scape the snare,
  Though learn’d in those ill arts that cheat the fair;
  For, after all, his vulgar marriage mocks,
  With beauty dazzled Numps was in the stocks;”

And ending: 

  “Him no soft thoughts, no gratitude could move;
  To gold he fled, from beauty and from love,” &c.

Could Mulgrave have so written of himself; or could he have allowed Dryden to interpolate the character.  Earlier in the poem we meet with a description of Shaftesbury, which cannot fail to call to mind Dryden’s character of him in Absalom and Achitophel; which, as we know, did not make its appearance, even in its first shape, until two years after Dryden was cudgelled in Rose Street as the author of the Essay upon Satire.  Everybody bears in mind the triplet,

  “A fiery soul, which working out its way,
  Fretted his pigmy body to decay,
  And o’er-inform’d the tenement of clay;”

And what does Dryden (for it must be he who writes) say of Shaftesbury in the Essay upon Satire?

  “As by our little Machiavel we find,
  That nimblest creature of the busy kind: 
  His limbs are crippled, and his body shakes,
  Yet his hard mind, which all this bustle makes,
  No pity on its poor companion takes.”

If Mulgrave wrote these lines, and Dryden only corrected them, Dryden was at all events indebted to Mulgrave for the thought of the inequality, and disproportion between the mind and body of Shaftesbury.  Moreover, we know that Pope expunged the assertion subsequently made, that Dryden had been “punished” (not beaten, as “D.” quotes the passage) “for another’s rhimes,” when he was bastinadoed, in 1679, at the instigation of Rochester, for the character of him in the Essay upon Satire.