Sir Formal Trifle is a florid conceited orator in "The Virtuoso," whose character is drawn and brought out with no inconsiderable portion of humour. Dryden intimates, that his coxcomical inflated style attends Shadwell himself upon the most serious occasions, and particularly in his dedications to the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle, to whom he has inscribed several of his plays. Hence Dryden, in the "Vindication of the Duke of Guise," calls him the Northern Dedicator. The truth is, that Shadwell's prose was inflated and embarrassed; and his adulation comes aukwardly from him, as appears from the opening of the dedication of that very play, "The Virtuoso," to the Duke of Newcastle.
"So long as your grace persists in obliging, I must go on in acknowledging; nor can I let any opportunity pass of telling the world how much I am favoured by you, or any occasion slip of assuring your grace, that all the actions of my life shall be dedicated to your service; who, by your noble patronage, your generosity and kindness, and your continual bounty, have made me wholly your creature: nor can I forbear to declare, that I am more obliged to your grace than to all mankind. And my misfortune is, I can make no other return, but a declaration of my grateful attachment."
Nor let false friends seduce thy mind to fame,
By arrogating Jonson's hostile name.—P. [439].
Shadwell, as appears from many passages of his prologues and prefaces, and as we have had repeated occasion to notice, affected to consider Ben Jonson as the object of his emulation. There were indeed many points of resemblance between them, both as authors and men. In their habits, a life spent in taverns, and in their persons, huge corpulence, probably acquired by habits of sensual indulgence, much coarseness of manners, and an ungentlemanly vulgarity of dialect, seem to have distinguished both the original and the imitator. As a dramatist, although Shadwell falls short of the learned vigour and deep erudition of Ben Jonson, his dry hard comic painting entitles him to be considered as an inferior artist of the same school. Dryden more particularly resented Shadwell's reiterated and affected praises of Jonson, because he had himself censured that writer in the epilogue to the "Conquest of Granada," and in the critical defence of that poem.[449] Hence he considered Shadwell's ranking himself under Jonson's banners as a sort of personal defiance. But Dryden more particularly alludes to the following ebullition of admiration, which occurs in the epilogue to Shadwell's "Humorists:"
The mighty prince of poets, learned Ben,
Who alone dived into the minds of men;
Saw all their wanderings, all their follies knew,
And all their vain fantastic passions drew