With beauty dazzled Numps was in the stocks;"
And ending:
"Him no soft thoughts, no gratitude could move;
To gold he fled, from beauty and from love," &c.
Could Mulgrave have so written of himself; or could he have allowed Dryden to interpolate the character. Earlier in the poem we meet with a description of Shaftesbury, which cannot fail to call to mind Dryden's character of him in Absalom and Achitophel; which, as we know, did not make its appearance, even in its first shape, until two years after Dryden was cudgelled in Rose Street as the author of the Essay upon Satire. Everybody bears in mind the triplet,
"A fiery soul, which working out its way,
Fretted his pigmy body to decay,
And o'er-inform'd the tenement of clay;"
And what does Dryden (for it must be he who writes) say of Shaftesbury in the Essay upon Satire?
"As by our little Machiavel we find,