"'Tell the dog,' said the poet to the messenger, 'that he who wrote these can write more.' But Tonson, perfectly satisfied with this single triplet, hastened to comply with the author's request, without requiring any further specimen of his poetical powers. It would seem, on the other hand, that when Dryden neglected his stipulated labour, Tonson possessed powers of animadversion, which, though exercised in plain prose, were not a little dreaded by the poet. Lord Bolingbroke, already a votary of the Muses, and admitted to visit their high-priest, was wont to relate, that one day he heard another person enter the house. 'This,' said Dryden, 'is Tonson; you will take care not to depart before he goes away, for I have not completed the sheet which I promised him; and if you leave me unprotected, I shall suffer all the rudeness to which his resentment can prompt his tongue.'"[278]
Fielding lived some time in Bow Street, probably during his magistracy.
We turn out of Bow Street into Russell Street, so called from the noble family of that name, who possess great property in this quarter. It is pleasant to think that the name is accordant with the reputation of the place, for we are more than ever in the thick of wits and men of letters, especially of a race which was long peculiar to this country, literary politicians. At the north-east corner of the two streets was the famous Will's coffee-house, formerly the Rose, where Dryden presided over the literature of the town; and on the other side of the way, on a part of the site of the present Hummums, stood Button's coffee-house, no less celebrated as the resort of the wits and poets of the time of Queen Anne.
Dryden is identified with the neighbourhood of Covent Garden. He presided in the chair at Russell Street; his plays came out in the theatre at the other end of it; he lived in Gerrard Street, which is not far off; and, alas! for the anti-climax! he was beaten by hired bravos in Rose Street, now called Rose Alley. Great men come down to posterity with their proper aspects of calmness and dignity; and we do not easily fancy that they received anything from their contemporaries but the grateful homage which is paid them by ourselves. "But the life of a wit," says Steele, "is a warfare upon earth." Sir Walter Scott, speaking of the beautiful description given by Dryden of the Attic nights he enjoyed with Sir Charles Sedley and others, observes, "He had not yet experienced the disadvantages attendant on such society, or learned how soon literary eminence becomes the object of detraction, of envy, of injury, even from those who can best feel its merit, if they are discouraged by dissipated habits from emulating its flight, or hardened by perverted feeling against loving its possessors."[279]
The outrage perpetrated upon the sacred shoulders of the poet was the work of Lord Rochester, and originated in a mistake not creditable to that would-be great man and dastardly debauchee. The following is Sir Walter's account of the matter.
"The 'Essay on Satire' (by Lord Mulgrave, afterwards Duke of Buckinghamshire), though written, as appears from the title-page of the last edition, in 1675, was not made public until 1679, with this observation:—I have sent you herewith a libel, in which my own share is not the least. The king having perused it, is no way dissatisfied with his. The author is apparently Mr. Dr[yden], his patron Lord M[ulgrave], having a panegyric in the midst. From hence it is evident that Dryden obtained the reputation of being the author; in consequence of which, Rochester meditated the base and cowardly revenge which he afterwards executed; and he thus coolly expressed his intention in another of his letters:—'You write me word that I am out of favour with a certain poet, whom I have admired for the disproportion of him and his attributes. He is a rarity which I cannot but be fond of, as one would be of a hog that could fiddle, or a singing owl. If he falls on me at the blunt, which is his very good weapon in wit, I will forgive him if you please, and leave the repartee to black Will with a cudgel.'
"In pursuance of this infamous resolution, upon the night of the 18th December, 1679, Dryden was waylaid by hired ruffians, and severely beaten, as he passed through Rose Street, Covent Garden, returning from Will's coffee-house to his own house in Gerrard Street. A reward of fifty pounds was in vain offered in the 'London Gazette' and other newspapers, for the discoverers of the perpetrators of this outrage. The town was, however, at no loss to pitch upon Rochester as the employer of the bravos, with whom the public suspicion joined the Duchess of Portsmouth, equally concerned in the supposed affront thus avenged. In our time, were a nobleman to have recourse to hired bravos to avenge his personal quarrels against any one, more especially a person holding the rank of a gentleman, he might lay his account with being hunted out of society. But in the age of Charles, the ancient high and chivalrous sense of honour was esteemed Quixotic, and the civil war had left traces of ferocity in the manners and sentiments of the people. Encounters, where the assailants took all advantages of number and weapons, were as frequent, and held as honourable, as regular duels. Some of these approached closely to assassination; as in the famous case of Sir John Coventry, who was waylaid and had his nose slit by some young men of rank, for a reflection upon the King's theatrical amours. This occasioned the famous statute against maiming and wounding, called the Coventry Act, an Act highly necessary, for so far did our ancestors' ideas of manly forbearance differ from ours, that Killegrew introduces the hero of one of his comedies, a cavalier, and the fine gentleman of the piece, lying in wait for, and slashing the face of a poor courtezan, who had cheated him.
"It will certainly be admitted, that a man, surprised in the dark, and beaten by ruffians, loses no honour by such a misfortune. But if Dryden had received the same discipline from Rochester's own hand, without resenting it, his drubbing could not have been more frequently made a matter of reproach to him: a sign, surely, of the penury of subjects for satire in his life and character, since an accident, which might have happened to the greatest hero that ever lived, was resorted to as an imputation on his honour. The Rose Alley ambuscade became almost proverbial; and even Mulgrave, the real author of the satire, and upon whose shoulders the blows ought in justice to have descended, mentions the circumstance in his 'Art of Poetry,' with a cold and self-sufficient sneer:—
'Though praised and punished for another's rhymes,
His own deserve as great applause sometimes.'