To this gathering-place at Covent Garden Etherege and Wycherley found their way—all writing men, in fact; even the great Buckingham perhaps—before his quarrel; and Dorset, fellow-member with Dryden, of the Royal Society; maybe Butler too, when he found himself in London; and poor Otway,[91] hoping to meet some one generous enough to pay his score for him; and the young Congreve, proud in his earlier days to get a nod from the great Dryden; and, prouder yet, when, at a later time, he was honored by that tender and pathetic epistle from the Laureate:
“Already I am worn with cares and age,
And just abandoning the ungrateful stage;
But you, whom every muse and grace adorn,
Whom I foresee to better fortune born,
Be kind to my remains; and O defend,
Against your judgment, your departed friend!”
I said that he wrote plays; wrote them by the couple—by the dozen—by the score possibly.
You do not know them; and I hope you never will know them to love them. They have fallen away from literature—never acted, and rarely read. He could not plot a story, and he had not the dramatic gift. One wonders how a theatreful could have listened to their pomposity and inflation and exaggerations. But they did, and they filled Dryden’s pockets. There were scenic splendors, indeed, about many of them which delighted the pit, and which the poet loved as accompaniments to the roll of his sonorous verse; there were, too, fragments here and there, with epithet and characterization that showed his mastership; and sometimes the most graceful of lyrics budded out from the coarse groundwork of the play, as fair in sound as they were foul in thought.
In private intercourse Dryden is represented to have been a man of courteous speech, never low and ribald—as were many of the royal favorites; and when he undertook playwriting to order, to meet the profligate tastes of the court, he could not, like some lesser playwrights, disguise double-meanings and vulgarities under a flimsy veil of courtliness; but by his very sincerity he made all his lewdness rank, and all his indelicacies brutal. This will, and should, I think, keep his plays away from our reading-desks.