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Who, for the wretched remnants of a fire,
Must toil all day in ashes and in mire.
So lewdly dull his idle works appear,

The wretched text deserves no comments here; Where one poor thought sometimes, left all alone, For a whole page of dulness must atone.

How vain a thing is man, and how unwise! E'en he, who would himself the most despise! I, who so wise and humble seem to be, Now my own vanity and pride can't see. While the world's nonsense is so sharply shown, We pull down others but to raise our own; That we may angels seem, we paint them elves, And are but satires to set up ourselves. I, who have all this while been finding fault, E'en with my master, who first satire taught; And did by that describe the task so hard, It seems stupendous and above reward; Now labour with unequal force to climb That lofty hill, unreach'd by former time,'Tis just that I should to the bottom fall, Learn to write well, or not to write at all.

A

FAMILIAR EPISTLE

TO

MR JULIAN,

SECRETARY OF THE MUSES.

THE extremity of license in manners, necessarily leads to equal license in personal satire; and there never was an age in which both were carried to such excess as in that of Charles II. These personal and scandalous libels acquired the name of lampoons, from the established burden formerly sung to them:

Lampone, lampone, camerada lampone.

Dryden suffered under these violent and invisible assaults, as much as any one of his age; to which his own words, in several places of his writings, and also the existence of many of the pas quils themselves in the Luttrel Collection, bear ample witness. In many of his prologues and epilogues he alludes to this rage for personal satire, and to the employment which it found for the half and three quarter wits and courtiers of the time!

Yet these are pearls to your lampooning rhymes;
Ye abuse yourselves more dully than the times.

Scandal, the glory of the English nation,
Is worn to rags, and scribbled out of fashion:

Such harmless thrusts, as if, like fencers wise,
They had agreed their play before their prize.
Faith they may hang their harp upon the willows;
'Tis just like children when they box with pillows.
See Vol. X. p. 365.

Upon the general practice of writing lampoons, and the necessity of finding some mode of dispersing them, which should diffuse the scandal widely, while the authors remained concealed, was founded the self-erected office of Julian, secretary, as he called himself, to the Muses. This person attended Will's, the Wits' Coffeehouse, as it was called; and dispersed, among the crowds who frequented that place of gay resort, copies of the lampoons which had been privately communicated to him by their authors. "He is described," says Mr Malone, " as a very drunken fellow, and at one time was confined for a libel." Several satires were written, in the form of addresses, to him, as well as the following. There is one among the State Poems, beginning,

Julian, in verse, to ease thy wants I write,

Not moved by envy, malice, or by spite,

Or pleased with the empty names of wit and sense,
But merely to supply thy want of pence:

This did inspire my muse, when, out at eel,
She saw her needy secretary reel.
Grieved that a man, so useful to the age,
Should foot it in so mean an equipage;
A crying scandal, that the fees of sense
Should not be able to support the expense
Of a poor scribe, who never thought of wants
When able to procure a cup of Nantz.

Another, called, "A Consoling Epistle to Julian," is said to have been written by the Duke of Buckingham.

From a passage in one of the "Letters from the Dead to the Living," we learn, that, after Julian's death, and the madness of his successor, called Summerton, lampoon felt a sensible decay; and there was no more that "brisk spirit of verse, that used to watch the follies and vices of the men and women of figure, that they could not start new ones faster than lampoons exposed them." In another epistle of the same collection, supposed to be written by Julian from the shades, to Will Pierre, a low comedian, he is made thus to boast of the extent of the dominion which he exercised when on earth.

"The conscious Tub Tavern can witness, and my Berry Street apartment testify, the solicitations I have had, for the first copy of a new lampoon, from the greatest lords of the court, though their own folly and their wives' vices were the subjects. My person was so sacred, that the terrible scan-man had no terrors for

me, whose business was so public and so useful, as conveying about the faults of the great and the fair; for in my books the lord was shewn a knave or fool, though his power defended the former, and his pride would not see the latter. The antiquated coquet was told of her age and ugliness, though her vanity placed her in the first row in the king's box at the play-house; and in the view of the congregation at St James's church. The precise countess, that would be scandalized at double entendre, was shewn betwixt a pair of sheets with a well-made footman, in spite of her quality and conjugal vow. The formal statesman, that set up for wisdom and honesty, was exposed as a dull tool, and yet a knavé, losing at play his own revenue, and the bribes incident to his post, besides enjoying the infamy of a poor and fruitless knavery, with out any concern. The demure lady, that would scarce sip off the glass in company, was shewn carousing her bottles in private, of cool Nantz too, sometimes, to correct the crudities of her last night's debauch. In short, in my books were seen men and women as they were, not as they would seem,-stript of their hypocrisy, spoiled of the fig-leaves of their quality. A knave was called a knave, a fool a fool, a jilt a jilt, and a whore a whore. And the love of scandal and native malice, that men and women have to one another, made me in such request when alive, that I was admitted to the lord's closet, when a man of letters and merit would be thrust out of doors. And I was as familiar with the ladies as their lap-dogs; for to them I did often good services: under pretence of a lampoon, I conveyed a billet-dour; and so, whilst I exposed their vast vices in the present, I prompted matter for the next lampoon."

The following lampoon, in which it is highly improbable that Dryden had any share, is chiefly levelled against Sir Car Scrope, son of Sir Adrian Scrope of Cockington, in Lincolnshire, a courtier of considerable poetical talents, of whom Anthony Wood says, "that, as divers satirical copies of verses were made upon him by other persons, so he hath divers made by himself upon them, which are handed about to this day." We have seen that he is mentioned with contempt in the "Essay on Satire;" and, in the " Advice to Apollo," in the State Poems, Vol. I. his studies are thus commemorated:

Sir Car, that knight of wither'd face,
Who, for the reversion of a poet's place,
Waits on Melpomene, and sooths her grace;
That angry miss alone he strives to please,
For fear the rest should teach him wit and ease,
And make him quit his loved laborious walks,
Where, sad or silent, o'er the room he stalks,
And strives to write as wisely as he talks.

He is also mentioned in many other libels of the day, and some of his answers are still extant. Rochester assailed him in his "Allusion to the Tenth Satire of Horace's first Book." Sir Car Scrope replied, and published a poem in Defence of Satire, to which the earl retorted by a very coarse set of verses, addressed to the knight by name. Sir Car Scrope was a tolerable translator from the classics; and his version of the "Epistle from Sappho to Phaon" is inserted in the translation of Ovid's Epistles by several hands, edited by our author. Dryden mentions, in one of his prefaces, Sir Car Scrope's efforts with approbation. But it is not from this circumstance alone I conclude that this epistle has been erroneously attributed to our author; for the whole internal evidence speaks loudly against its authenticity. Indeed, it only rests on Dryden's name being placed to it in the 6th volume of the Miscellanies published after his death.

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