In the dedication of his plays, Dryden twice approaches royalty,—legitimate royalty,—in the persons of James, Duke of York, and Mary of Modena, his Duchess. To the former, he dedicates his Conquest of Granada; and the poet runs mad in praising the Prince's valour. To the Duchess, he dedicates his State of Innocence; and the bard runs wild in lauding the Princess's beauty!
The Almanzor of the play is a faint image of James himself! whose youth of bright deeds left his manhood nothing to perform, but to outdo himself! He was an honour to England, when England was a reproach to itself!—"and when the fortunate usurper sent his arms to Flanders, many of that adverse party were vanquished by your fame, ere they tried your valour. The report of it drew over to your ensigns whole troops and companies of converted rebels, and made them forsake successful wickedness to follow an oppressed and exiled virtue!" Armies, beaten by the Duke, learned from him to conquer! When he was not present, the guardian angel of the nation was careless as to how inferior generals got bruised! If James and Charles were concerned more with one thing than with another, it was in watching over the honour of England! In the former, the poet had found his model for the extraordinarily heroic Almanzor. He adds, with a spice of satire, which is to be found in most of Dryden's dedications, that there is, to be sure, in Almanzor, "a roughness of character, impatience of injuries, and a confidence of himself, almost approaching to an arrogance!" "But these errors," says the crafty bard, "are incident only to great spirits!"
There is more of insanity and insolence in the adulation with which Dryden deluges the Duchess. Her beauty is a deity, her grandeur a guardian angel! Of her beauty, he will rave. "I would not, without extreme reluctance, resign the theme to any other hand!" He is proud that he cannot flatter, and then pelts her with flattery as with missiles. The Creator had placed her near the crown that her beauty might give lustre to it! There would have been no contest for the apple, had she been alive when the prize was to be awarded! As it is, he cannot describe her wondrous excellence. "Like those who have surveyed the moon by glasses, I can only talk of a new and shining world above us, but not relate the riches and the glories of the place!" So resplendent is she, that she makes men false to other ladies, and then scorns the homage of the traitors. And, having libelled the men, he defames the women, by saying: "Your conjugal virtues have deserved to be set as an example to a less degenerate, less tainted age. They approach so near to singularity in ours, that I can scarcely make a panegyric to your royal highness, without a Satyr on many others!" Finally, having outraged all propriety, he can still go further, by the addition of a little blasphemy; and her royal highness is informed by her most obedient, most humble, and most devoted servant, John Dryden, that her "person is so admirable, it can scarce receive addition when it shall be glorified!" Therefore, the Duchess is to dwell for ever in Elysium, in her mundane body, unchanged, "for your soul, which shines through it," says the vile adulator, "finds it of a substance so near her own, that she will be pleased to pass an age within it, and to be confined to such a palace." Such was the incense which the greatest living poet of his day expected even a shrewd princess like Mary of Modena to inhale!
Otway crawls at the feet of the King's concubine, the rapacious Duchess of Portsmouth, in his dedication of "Venice Preserved," and almost invites her to void her rheum upon his head. However generous the woman may have been to him, the man is abject. The play he presents is but as the poor apple offered by a clown to an emperor! "Next to Heaven," all his gratitude is due to her Grace! It was she who dragged him from the mire, and set him to bask in "those royal beams whose warmth is all I have, or hope, to live by." Then, after asserting his loyalty and his scorn of republicanism, the poet thus tumbles for the amusement of, or by way of homage to, this handsome and painted Jezebel!—"Nature and fortune were certainly in league when you were born, and as the first took care to give you beauty enough to enslave the hearts of all the world, so the other resolved to do its merit justice that none but a monarch fit to rule that world should e'er possess it; and in it he had an empire. The young prince you have given him, by his blooming virtues early declared the mighty stock he came from;" and so forth. That this prince, the first Duke of Richmond of the present line, will always aid the cause of the Stuarts and smite all rebels, is part prayer, part prophecy, on the side of the poet, who in this case was no Vates, for the Duke served as aide-de-camp to William in Flanders, and died a Lord of the Bedchamber to King George I.
In course of time, as the little Duke grows to manhood, the poets keep him in view, and in their dedications oppress him with praise of his parents' qualities and his own. Southern is among the foremost and the most flattering of these eulogists. He dedicates his first venture, the "Loyal Brother" (1682), to the Duke. "Could my vanity," says the author, when dedications were paid for at a rate varying from five to twenty guineas, "carry me to the hopes of succeeding in things of this kind, I am confident my surest way would be to draw my characters from you, in whom the fairest images in nature are shown in little. Your royal father's Greatness, Majestic Awfulness, Wit, and Goodness, are promised all in you. Your mother's conquering beauty triumphs again in you. Nothing is wanting to crown our hopes, but time, to make you in England what Titus was in Rome,—the Delight of Mankind." The Russian Admiral, Livsoski, claims that title now for the Czar,—the holy master of the Mouravieffs and De Bergs,—whose shedding of human blood is gratefully acknowledged by the new Titus,—athirst for vengeance.
Etherege, ordinarily so impudent, pretends, in dedicating his "Man of Mode" to the Duchess of York, that his patroness's virtues and perfections are things not to be treated of in humble prose, and that he will address himself to the sublime subject some day in poetry! Wycherley presents his "Love in a Wood" (1672), to the Duchess of Cleveland, who had gone two successive nights to see it acted. It is his first attempt, he says, at dedication; and he cannot lie, like other dramatists, who wreathe garlands for their patron's brow only to enjoy the perfume of them, themselves! And then he sings a long song of praise for his guineas, or in whatever other way his guerdon may have come, in which he tells the lady, among other fine things, that she has that perfection of beauty which others of her sex only think they have; "that generosity in your actions which others of your quality have only in their promises, with a spirit, wit, and judgment which fit heroes for command, and which fail to make her proud." It is not to be supposed that Wycherley believed this, for when he dedicated his "Plain Dealer" (1674) "to my Lady B——," or Mother Bennet, the most infamous woman in London, he especially praises her for her modesty, in keeping away from the representation of his play, even on the first day,—a play which he pretends to believe ought not to be witnessed by modest people!
Congreve sometimes insinuates praise, at others he flings it. In the dedication of his "Old Batchelor," to Lord Clifford (Lanesborough), afterwards Earl of Burlington, he says, "I cannot give your Lordship your due, without tacking a bill of my own privileges." His "Double Dealer" goes to Charles, Lord Montague, with an assurance that poetry is my Lord's mistress, and the mother by him of a "most beautiful issue." He addresses his "Love for Love" to the Earl of Dorset, and hails him as the undisputed monarch of poetry! Dorset, whose best claim to being considered a poet, rests on the song, "To all ye ladies now on land," of his being the author of which there is no positive assurance!
In the eighteenth century a man was killed in the streets of Morpeth, for maintaining that the blood of the Dacres was as good as that of the Ogles. Of the excellence of the latter, Shadwell entertained very exalted ideas. In 1680 there was living, and in the same year died, the Earl of Ogle, to whom was contracted in her infancy the famous Lady Elizabeth, sole heiress of the last of the Earls of Northumberland. Her subsequent contract with Tom Thynne led to the murder of the latter by Count Königsmark. In the year above-mentioned, Shadwell produced at Dorset Gardens, and published, his "Woman Captain," in dedicating which to the Earl of Ogle, the Marquis of Newcastle's son, Shadwell says, "one virtue of your Lordship's I am too much pleased with not to mention, which is, that in this age, when learning is grown contemptible to those who ought most to advance it, and Greek and Latin sense is despised, and French and English nonsense applauded, when the ancient nobility and gentry of England, who not long since were famous for their learning, have now sent into the world a certain kind of spurious brood of illiterate and degenerate youth, your Lordship dares love books, and labours to have learning."
This is fine testimony and not flattery to one of the most promising young gentlemen of the day. His child-wife subsequently married the proudest of dukes, and Swift has immortalised the red-haired beauty as "the d——d Duchess of Somerset!"
In one of the greatest of moral writers,—the Rev. Dr. Young, we meet with one of the most fulsome of adulators. This divine dedicated his "Revenge" to his friend Philip, Duke of Wharton, the most profligate and unprincipled, but one of the most accomplished men of his age. Young assures us that his Grace leads a virtuous pastoral life, such as your town rakes know nothing of; that his is given to study, and that he is a perfect master of all history, as well as of many languages; that he is as well skilled in men as in books, and that he "can carry from his studies such a life into conversation, that wine seems only an interruption to wit." The Duke has, we are told, "so sweet a disposition that no one ever wished his abilities less, but such as flattered themselves with the hope of shining when near him." The poet even makes the peer his collaborateur in the piece, and acknowledges that he not only "suggested the most beautiful incident, but made all possible provision for the success of the whole."