Be pleased, therefore, since the family of the Attici is and ought to be above the common forms of concluding letters, that I may take my leave in the words of Cicero to the first of them:  Me, O Pomponi, valde paenitet vivere:  tantum te oro, ut quoniam me ipse semper amasti, ut eodem amore sis; ego nimirum idem sum.  Inimici mei mea mihi non meipsum ademerunt.  Cura, Attice, ut valeas.

  Dabam.  Cal. 
  Jan. 1690.

Footnotes: 
1.  In order to escape as far as possible the odium, which after the
   Revolution was attached to Dryden’s politics and religion, he seems
   occasionally to have sought for patrons amongst those Nobles of
   opposite principles, whom moderation, or love of literature,
   rendered superior to the suggestions of party rancour; or, as he
   himself has expressed it in the Dedication of “Amphitryon,” who,
   though of a contrary opinion themselves, blamed him not for
   adhering to a lost cause, and judging for himself what he could not
   chuse but judge.  Philip Sidney, the third earl of Leicester, had
   taken an active part against the king in the civil wars, had been
   named one of his judges, though he never look his seat among the
   regicides, and had been one of Cromwell’s Council of State.  He was
   brother of the famous Algernon Sidney, and although retired from
   party strife, during the violent contests betwixt the Whigs and
   Tories in 1682-3, there can be no doubt which way his inclinations
   leaned.  He died 6th March, 1696-7, aged more than eighty years.  Mr
   Malone has strongly censured the strain of this Dedication, because
   it represents Leicester as abstracted from parties and public
   affairs, notwithstanding his active share in the civil wars.  Yet
   Dryden was not obliged to draw the portrait of his patron from his
   conduct thirty years before; and if Leicester’s character was to be
   taken from the latter part of his life, surely the praise of
   moderation is due to him, who, during the factious contests of
   Charles II’s. reign, in which his own brother made so conspicuous a
   figure, maintained the neutrality of Pomponius Atticus.

2.  When Henrietta Maria, widow of Charles I. and queen-dowager of
   England, visited her son after the Restoration, she chose
   Somerset-House for her residence, and added all the buildings
   fronting the river.  Cowley, whom she had long patronised, composed
   a poem on the “Queen’s repairing Somerset-House,” to which our
   author refers.  Mr Malone’s accuracy has detected a slight
   alteration in the verses, as quoted by Dryden, and as written by
   Cowley: 

     If any prouder virtuoso’s sense
     At that part of my prospect take offence,
     By which the meaner cabanes are descried
     Of my imperial river’s humbler side;
     If they call that a blemish, let them know,
     God and my godlike mistress think not so;
     For the distressed and the afflicted lie
     Most in their care, and always in their eye.