Tell me, Apollo, for I can't divine,
Why wives he cursed, and praised the concubine;
Unless it were, that he had led his life
With a teeming matron, ere she was a wife;
Or that it best with his dear muse did suit,
Who was for hire a very prostitute.
He also stepped forward to break a lance with our author, on the subject of Shaftesbury's acquittal; and answered the "Medal" by a very stupid poem, called the "Medal Reversed." To all this scurrilous doggrel, Dryden only replied by the single couplet above quoted. He calls Mephibosheth "the wizard's son," because the Reverend John Pordage, vicar of Bradfield, in Berkshire, and father of the poet, Samuel, was ejected from his cure by the commissioners of Berkshire, for conversation with evil spirits, and for blasphemy, ignorance, scandalous behaviour, devilism, uncleanness, and heaven knows what. His case of insufficiency is among the State Trials, from which he seems to have been a crazy enthusiast, who believed in a correspondence with genii and dæmons.
Samuel Pordage was a member of the society of Lincoln's Inn. He wrote three plays, namely, the "Troades," translated from Seneca, "Herod and Mariamne," and "The Siege of Babylon." He also published a romance called "Eliana," and prepared a new edition of "God's Revenge against Murder," which was published after his death. Pordage was, moreover, author of "Heroic Stanzas on his Majesty's Coronation, 1661," and probably of other occasional pieces, deservedly doomed to oblivion.
Shun rotten Uzza as I would the pox.—P. [331.]