Tatler
as Divito, who
'has a perfect art in being unintelligible in discourse and uncomeatable in business. But he, having no understanding in his polite way, brought in upon us, to get in his money, ladder-dancers, rope-dancers, jugglers, and mountebanks, to strut in the place of Shakespeare's heroes and Jonson's humorists.'
Thomas Clayton (see note on p. 72) had set Dryden's
Alexander's Feast
to music at the request of Steele and John Hughes; but its performance at his house in York Buildings was a failure. Clayton had adapted English words to Italian airs in the drama written for him by Motteux, of
Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus
, and called it his own opera. Steele and Addison were taken by his desire to nationalize the opera, and put native music to words that were English and had literature in them. After